Let me note that one of the authors cited in this piece, Malik Miah, is
a former member of the SWP.
http://themilitant.com/2017/8113/811304.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 13 April 3, 2017
(front page)
Trump hysteria masks rulers’ growing fear of
working class
Covers of new issues of New Republic and The Nation, prominent
left-liberal magazines, highlight hysteria against Donald Trump. US
rulers fear working class today as discussion deepens on need to find
road to fight against carnage from crisis of capitalist system.
BY SETH GALINSKY
The Bernie Sanders wing of the broken Democratic Party, the owners and
editors of the Washington Post, New York Times and other liberal organs,
and the middle-class left are united in a hysterical frenzy against the
presidency of Donald Trump. But there’s really nothing qualitatively new
or different about his administration — he’s trying to defend the
interests of the wealthy capitalist rulers, seeking to shore up their
crisis-battered profit rates and their weakened position in the world.
That’s what every U.S. president does.
What is different is the depth of the economic, political and moral
crisis of the capitalist system he is seeking to defend. And the deep
discussion and debate taking place among working people on how to combat
the effects of the slow-burning capitalist economic depression and the
carnage it is causing. In these conditions, the Socialist Workers Party
finds openings to do politics in the working class that it hasn’t seen
for decades — including among workers who voted for Trump, looking for a
change from business as usual.
Workers today are less racist, less sexist and less prejudiced against
their immigrant co-workers than ever before.
But most liberals and leftists are convinced Trump got elected because
working people, especially workers who are Caucasian, are becoming more
rightwing and bigoted. They think they’re the enemy.
The April issue of the New Republic magazine, which prides itself as a
champion of “progressive ideas,” is a good example. It features a
drawing of Trump as Julius Caesar on the cover with the title,
“All-American Tyrant: What sets Trump Apart From History’s Worst
Dictators.”
One article in particular stands out. Titled “Blueexit: A Modest
Proposal for Separating Blue States from Red,” the article by Kevin
Baker takes the form of a letter to workers.
“Dear Red-State Trump voter,” it begins. “For more than 80 years now, we
— the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but which
I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way —
have shelled out far more in federal tax monies than we took in. We have
funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties,
subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes,
sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most
destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white
and black alike.
“All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter, white, and
alt-right than ever.”
The benighted editors at New Republic believe the smarter, more cultured
class of people on the East and West coasts create all value, while “you
people” in between — he means “white trash” — get by “sucking at the
federal teat,” making up “Food Stamp Red America.”
“Cities now generate the vast majority of America’s wealth,” Baker
writes, as if cities aren’t class divided, “the cities, that is, where
blue folks live.”
His solution: the Blue states should secede in everything but name from
the United States, writing off the working class. Good luck with that!
Against the Current, the magazine of Solidarity, which describes itself
as “an independent socialist organization dedicated to forming a broad
regrouping of the U.S. Left,” shares Baker’s view.
A feature article by Malik Miah, “Making Trump’s America Ungovernable”
in its March/April issue takes aim at all workers who voted for Trump.
Miah quotes liberal Times columnist Charles Blow, who says “Trump’s
America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. … It is a
vast expanse of darkness and desolation.”
Miah says of these workers that “power, especially white power, is
behind what they agree will ‘make America Great Again.’ African
Americans, Mexicans and Muslims especially, Trump says, make America
weak. Many white working people accept this dark vision of reality
prompted by Trump.”
“White nativism is again on the rise and more blatant under the Trump
regime,” Miah says.
What can be done? Convince the capitalists to get rid of Trump. “Trump
is the bombastic figurehead for the superrich who rule this country,” he
says. Overwhelm them with protests and civil disobedience targeting
Trump and the workers who back him. “If the rhetoric and politics begin
to hurt their interests,” the rulers themselves will do him in.
What’s the bottom line? Get the Democrats back in office.
The Nation magazine, which boasts that it is the “‘flagship’ of the
political left,” made its March 27 issue a “Field Guide to the Resistance.”
The focus of most of the groups it features is to take over the
Democratic Party and rebuild it in the image of Bernie Sanders.
“Swing Left”’s goal the Nation says, is to sign up “progressive
activists in safe congressional districts” and “ultimately flip the
House to Democratic control in 2018.”
The “Run for Something” group says they’ve signed up “almost 3,000 young
candidates to run for local office.”
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