Although the article belowis a fictional satire (at least for now), the U.S. Supreme Court’s far right majority consistently makes political rulings based on their personal preferences rather than quaint concepts like law, precedent, or constitutional language, never mind how a decision might affect actual human beings. The U.S. Constitution, even when read reasonably, is a badly out of date, flawed document but even the conservative justices of the past had some limits, some of the time. The current majority extremists seem to have no limits. The structures that many United Statesians believe will maintain the U.S. brand of formal bourgeois democracy, including federal courts, are failing.
In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the Constitution is unconstitutional. Fully abandoning his concept that incremental taking away of rights is the better strategy, Chief Justice John Roberts joined his five conservative colleagues in completely dismissing constitutional protections and safeguards, writing that the Trump administration’s need for urgency should override legal considerations. The majority decision drew upon earlier decisions granting the White House unprecedented power since Donald Trump assumed the presidency.
“The role of a judge is like an umpire in baseball who calls balls and strikes,” Roberts wrote for the court majority. “Nonetheless, the court has to take an expansive view of our institutional duties, such as when an umpire has to throw a player or manager out of the game for their conduct. With that power of umpires as precedent (and you thought we didn’t like precedents), the court believes that opponents of the president, Donald Trump, should be sidelined for their conduct. Although the United States does not have kings, it does have a leader who should be allowed to rule without interference. The role of the courts is to defer to the executive, when the executive is someone who meets our approval, and the legislative branch should also defer.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said he would have gone further. “Presidential constraints must fall,” Alito wrote in his concurrence, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. Rules governing presidents, including those restricting his ability to institute mass firings of congressionally mandated government departments, are “egregiously wrong” and “we hold the Constitution does not confer a right to question our dear leader.”
Drawing upon Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England, Alito wrote that “It is therefore extremely necessary that the crown should be empowered to regulate the duration of the Congress.” Alito also drew upon King Henry VIII, who declared his right to rule by royal proclamation in 1539, which arrogated to himself the right to change or delete any act of parliament. To draw out this argument, Alito first cited his misleadingly quoted and cherry-picked citation from a 12th century legal treatise that referenced a religious penalty for abortion (“Even before Bracton’s time, English law imposed punishment for the killing of a fetus”) in his Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, then wrote, “If the 12th century is good enough for abortion jurisprudence, then the 16th century is more than good enough for government jurisprudence.” Based on these precedents, Trump is free to ignore Congress as he wishes, Alito wrote.
In his concurring opinion, Alito said he would not have ruled that criticism of Trump should automatically be penalized by the federal government but that he would leave the question of punishment to the states.
An hour after the Supreme Court decision ruling the Constitution unconstitutional, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that, effectively immediately, criticism of Trump would be illegal in Florida and would be punishable by immediate incarceration in the state concentration camp known as “Alligator Alley.” The governor said the Everglades facility would be expanded.
“You want to mock our president? If you do, we have a hot cement room waiting for you and plenty of alligators to keep you there,” DeSantis said in a hastily called press conference. “Florida already was where woke comes to die, and deviation from our glorious leader will also die here.”
Texas Governor Jim Abbott said he will call a new emergency session of the state Legislature to enact new laws reflecting the Supreme Court decision. “The legislature will approve laws safeguarding the sanctity of our glorious leader,” Abbott said. “Belonging to any party other than the Republican Party will be illegal. Until our new laws are passed, Democrats are legal and expected to be present in the legislature to vote. If they are not present, we will have them arrested and confined to the legislature until the vote is passed.”
In his majority opinion, Roberts wrote that it was too time-consuming to rule that the Constitution does not apply to Trump after each district court or appellate court ruling. Rather, he wrote, the court majority believed it was better to just go ahead and do what they wanted to do anyway. “All parts of government are asked to be more efficient and waste fewer resources,” Roberts wrote. “Our courts should not be an exception. We therefore decline to rule on individual cases and instead rule for all current and future cases that may be brought against the president as long as he reigns.” Because the court had already ruled Trump to be above the law while he was out of office, it would be “inconsistent to not place Mr. Trump above the law while he executes the duties of the presidency.”
The majority opinion said that it is not the duty of courts to interfere with the president’s execution of his duties and that if the public does not like the policies that the president and the executive is carrying out, then they can vote in a new president “should Mr. Trump so desire that another election be held.”
The opinion of the minority, Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, was not immediately available. The majority opinion written by Roberts and the concurring opinion by Alito were posted on the Supreme Court website, but the minority position was not posted. A query made to court officials asking when the minority opinion would be published was not returned. Asked about this discrepancy, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, at today’s daily press briefing, said, “The Supreme Court decision was clear. The president has determined that opposing opinions are contrary to the national interest. We will not allow it to be published. And all of you had better watch your step.”
On Capitol Hill, reaction to the Supreme Court decision split along party lines. House Speaker Johnson could not immediately be reached for comment, as he was seen barking like a dog on the House floor. A Republican congressional member, speaking under a grant of anonymity, said Trump had ordered Johnson to bark, and as Johnson was unsure if he should ask Trump how long he should bark or if he should just go ahead and start barking without delay, thought it better to bark immediately. “When Trump gives an order, we carry it out,” the congress member said.
The Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, expressed disapproval of the Supreme Court decision. “I am in conversation with our party leadership, in both houses of Congress, and we will have a firm letter of disapproval ready before the end of the week. We may also make some speeches on the Senate floor. That will show the Republicans that we mean business.”
Another Democratic senator, who asked to remain anonymous so he could speak freely, said the letter of disapproval being discussed will be carefully calibrated. “We know Fox News and Newsmax will attack our patriotism if we go too far, so we will express our ‘profound disappointment’ with the ruling and call on Americans to give generously to our corporate candidates” the senator said. Asked what the party leadership will do when progressive officeholders and candidates condemn the ruling, and Trump, in strong terms, the senator said that will be handled quietly. “Our Wall Street funders will give us our talking points and we’ll let those nasty progressives know that all support will be cut off if they go beyond those talking points.” he said. “This is the Democratic Party. We don’t tolerate people who give people what they want or who speak to the concerns of voters without prior approval of our funders. What kind of party would we be if we started listening to our base?”
With the Constitution now declared to be unconstitutional, Trump is expected to issue a series of decrees eliminating most federal government departments, prohibiting any institution from adopting policies contrary to his expectations and banning any criticism. A coalition of grassroots organizations [rest of article redacted].
Given that the 20th century showed that socialism in one country is essentially impossible, we surely will not have socialism in one city. There will be serious blocks on Zohran Mamdani’s ability to govern should he go on to win the general election for New York City mayor.
Nonetheless, Assemblyman Mamdani’s nearly certain victory in the city’s Democratic Party primary on June 24 is worth celebrating. It is a victory for people and for progressive ideals. That he is not offering actual socialism shouldn’t trigger any ideologically motivated cynical responses. At best, let us be realistic, Assemblyman Mamdani will be able to implement a fraction of his program. That fraction will make a difference in many people’s lives, something nobody should minimize. And, importantly, a victory in November and the implementation of some progressive programs can represent a large step forward.
We should not forget United Statesians are currently in a difficult, uphill battle to fend off the specter of fascism. Any step forward right now is welcome. And the defeat (perhaps permanently) of Andrew Cuomo, to whom the Democratic Party leadership desperately clung, is a positive in itself and, to be perhaps overly optimistic for a moment, might provide the first inkling for party bosses that their strategy of continually moving further right to chase Republican voters doesn’t, and hasn’t, worked.
We shouldn’t fall out of our chairs in shock that Democratic Party leaders, who relish nothing more than insulting their own base as they proudly “stand up” to them, would meet the challenge of a dynamic candidate promising to ease people’s lives with common-sense ideas that fall well short of pie in the sky by coalescing around a widely reviled corporate centrist who is the choice of the real estate barons and Wall Street speculators who ultimately run New York. A corporate candidate who is credibly accused of sexual harassment by 11 women, whose Covid-19 policies resulted in thousands of senior deaths and who as governor engineered a breakaway faction of Democrats to bloc with the Republican minority so that Republicans would control the state Senate and thereby block any attempt at progressive reform. And who, like Donald Trump, is extremely vengeful.
A campaign rally for Zohran Mamdani, who came from 30 points down in the polls.
This embrace of former Governor Cuomo is just one more product of U.S.-style liberalism (using the North American definition of the word) reaching an intellectual dead end. Democrats mostly understand that the economy is a failure for most people but can only conceive of minor reforms and tinkering around the edges because they remain as firmly in thrall of capitalism as Republicans and conservatives everywhere. Caught in a contradiction between knowing a system doesn’t work and being afraid of challenging that system, Democrats are unable to offer alternatives or articulate serious reforms. Instead, they simply say “Vote for us, the Republicans are worse.” Sometimes that works; sometimes it doesn’t. Increasingly, it doesn’t.
In contrast to the Right, who unfortunately know what they want and have the energy to obtain it, those who are conflicted between their belief in something and their acknowledgment that the something needs reform, and are unable to articulate a reform, won’t and can’t stand for anything concrete, and ultimately will capitulate. When that something can’t be fundamentally changed through reforms, what reforms are made are ultimately taken back, and society’s dominant ideas are of those who can promote the hardest line thanks to the power their wealth gives them, it is no surprise that liberal office holders are unable to articulate any alternative. With no clear ideas to fall back on, they meekly bleat “me, too” when the world’s industrialists and financiers, acting through their corporations, think tanks and the “market,” pronounce their verdict on what is to be done.
The market, let us not forget, is not a dispassionate entity sitting loftily in the clouds as propagandists would have us believe; it is nothing more than the aggregate interests of the most powerful industrialists and financiers.
Party leaders seem in a state of shock
If at least some Democratic establishment leaders intend to draw any lessons from the June 24 primary vote, they won’t be doing so quickly. The public announcements of New York party leaders has been comically tepid.
Governor Kathy Hochul, a corporate centrist who governs little different than Andrew Cuomo but does so with a human face rather than her predecessor’s glower and open disgust for working people, tweeted, “I look forward to speaking with him in the days ahead about his ideas on how to ensure a safe, affordable, and livable New York City.” U.S. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said he is “looking forward to getting together soon” with Assemblyman Mamdani. U.S. House of Representatives minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said he “plan[s] to meet in Central Brooklyn shortly.”
Note that not one of the three endorsed their party’s presumptive nominee for the mayoralty.
Particularly amusing has been the pronouncement by commentator Chris Matthews, paragon of Democratic corporate centrism, who declared that if “socialists” win, there will be “executions in Central Park.” I confess I am unaware of Assemblyman Mamdani’s position on the death penalty, but I would imagine, in contrast to the hysterical rantings of Mr. Matthews, that he would be opposed. Regardless, city mayors do not have any role in the judicial process.
Brooklyn Bridge (photo by AngMoKio)
What is it that is so frightening about socialism? There is no one textbook definition of socialism and as any veteran of Left activism can tell you, there is wide disagreement about what it is, or should be. So all I can offer is my own ideas of what socialism would look like. To highlight a few points:
Political decision-making is done through democratic structures that enable people to make the decisions that affect their lives, neighborhoods, cities and environments.
In the workplace, everybody who contributes to production earns a share of the proceeds — in wages and whatever other form is appropriate — and everybody is entitled to have a say in what is produced, how it is produced and how it is distributed, and that these collective decisions are made in the context of the broader community and in quantities sufficient to meet needs, and that pricing and other decisions are not made outside the community or without input from suppliers, distributors and buyers.
Nobody is entitled to take disproportionately large shares off the top because they are in a power position.
Every person who reaches retirement age is entitled to a pension that can be lived on in dignity. Disabled people who are unable to work are treated with dignity and supported with state assistance; disabled people who are able to work can do so.
Quality health care, food, shelter and education are human rights.
Artistic expression and all other human endeavors are encouraged, and — because nobody will have to work excessive hours except those who freely volunteer for the extra pay — everybody will have sufficient time and rest to pursue their interests and hobbies.
Walking before we can run
Bernie Sanders, as the most well-known democratic socialist in the United States, has not offered anything like the above list, and Assemblyman Mamdani hasn’t, either. I don’t think that means we should either mechanically rebuke the two or turn up our nose at what would be, if implemented, real reforms should either of them be in a position to implement them. The large and enthusiastic crowds that Senator Sanders draws and the excitement that Assemblyman Mamdani has created demonstrate clearly there is a large constituency for their reforms, which do go far beyond the usual tepid crumbs Democratic candidates typically offer.
Yes, these are still reforms and not the real system change that the United States, and the world, desperately need. Yes, even those reforms will be watered down and only some will come to any fruition. Yes, the millionaires, power brokers and corporate interests who backed Andrew Cuomo will do everything they can to thwart Assemblyman Mamdani should he win in November. And, yes, we can only assume that the Democratic Party establishment itself will attempt to water down, and possibly outright obstruct, his program.
How should we approach these inevitabilities? Should we take an ultra-left phrase-mongering, more-revolutionary-than-thou position and say we’ll wait until the revolution comes before we’ll act, nicely snug in our ideological cocoon, or should we take material reality as it is currently constituted and devise strategies and actions to build on what has the potential to be a step (in a very long journey) toward building a movement that eventually can trigger real change. Not to mention that, if people see improvement in their daily lives, and this improvement can be articulated widely, there would be a viable alternative to the neoliberalism, austerity and repression that has been on offer for decades, not to mention the fascist movement that is attempting to eviscerate what remains of bourgeois formal democracy in the United States. Any implementation of a real system change, toward a full program of socialism, is beyond the capacity of any officeholder, even a president. That requires a movement of movements.
A Mayor Mamdani will have to make compromises, will have to contend with a political system that will attempt to thwart him at every opportunity and will certainly be subjected to savage attacks by the Right-wing corporate press and more subtle attacks by the more moderate corporate press. We as activists can continue to make maximum demands and don’t have to compromise; pressure from the streets will be necessary if anything beyond the most minimal implementation is to be accomplished. But whatever critiques we will one day make of a Mayor Mamdani, we should be realistic about the constraints on him. There won’t be socialism in one city. Socialism in any city depends on a large enough bloc of socialist countries, strong enough to withstand the capitalist assault on them, but that is a matter for another day.
For today, we should allow ourselves the luxury of feeling good. A self-proclaimed democratic socialist, in the teeth of millions of dollars worth of attacks distorting who he is, won an election. Let us allow ourselves some optimism. We surely can use it.
A crucial requirement for a dictatorship to take hold is widespread acquiescence. That is being put to test as the United States slides toward right-wing dictatorship with a real possibility of going beyond ordinary dictatorship to outright fascism. With grassroots activists still gaining their bearings after two months of relentless, unprecedented attacks by the Trump régime and Democratic Party leaders not only unable to mount a coherent opposition but, with Chuck Schumer’s capitulation, handing Donald Trump and Elon Musk a blank check, all the more important is that large institutions with the ability to fight back do so.
Yes, bringing a halt to the Trump régime’s plans and ultimately reversing the slide into right-wing despotism is the work of working people on the ground, organizing across lines and linking the many movements and causes into a mass movement of movements. Social movements are what bring about positive change. That has always been so. But it would be helpful if institutions that can resist would stop capitulating. Once one institution capitulates, bullies with a goal of fascism, now emboldened, will go after others. One example is the giant Paul Weiss law firm, one of the country’s largest, a $2 billion operation with lawyers who surely could make winning constitutional arguments while there are still courts to hear cases. But, no, a huge institution that would have the law on its side has chosen craven surrender, going so far as to donate $40 million of pro bono work to the Trump régime. But the example I’d like to discuss is Columbia University.
Paul Weiss is a business concern, one intimately connected to corporate boardrooms across the United States and in other countries. Perhaps it is to be expected that a business that needs connections would choose to humiliate itself as the price to keep business moving. Columbia University, on the other hand, is theoretically something different. But only “theoretically” — in reality, Columbia is a big business, too, which does much to explain its cowardice. Explain, but of course in no way excuse.
Forced displacement of Gaza Strip residents during the Israeli bombardments. (photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan)
Columbia handing control of its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department to an overseer under demand by the U.S. government is beyond disgraceful, a self-humiliation. The so-called senior provost installed as an overseer is in reality intended to be a censor. How will the content of courses be changed? What courses will be eliminated? Will whitewashing of Israeli atrocities now be packaged as neutral scholarship?
This is the act of a business seeking to curry favor with powerful officials. Acts that have a long history at Columbia. For Columbia has long been a big business with an accompanying toadying to power.
For example, during the 1920s, Columbia University “was concerned with repelling the ‘invasion of the Jewish student,’ and whatever devices were used, they obviously had the desired effect,” according to the book The High Status Track. The proportion of Jewish students at the university declined from 40 percent to 20 percent.
Protesting Nazi Germany got you banished from Columbia
A true profile in cowardice is Nicholas Murray Butler, who spent 43 years as president of Columbia University. His silence during the Nazi atrocities against Jews in Germany under the Nazi régime — and his de facto approval of fascist anti-Semitism — speaks volumes. Butler was silent when, in May 1933, the Nazis “burned tens of thousands books at universities across Germany”; among those whose books were burned was Franz Boas, a Columbia anthropologist known for his sharp criticisms of the Nazi government.
A December 2021 report by Matthew Wills, published on the JSTOR Daily newsletter, notes that “When the Nazis expelled Jewish faculty members and students from universities, Butler stayed silent, continued sending Columbia students to Germany and welcomed Nazi-approved students in exchange.” But Butler went beyond mere silence. “Butler’s actions spoke volumes when he welcomed the Nazi ambassador to the United States to Columbia, months after the book-burnings; when he refused to appear with a notable German dissident when the latter spoke at the university; and when he repeatedly violated a boycott of German shipping,” Mr. Wills wrote.
And, in moves that echo Columbia’s harsh crackdowns on students, Jewish students included, who oppose the Israeli genocide in Gaza, it was those who opposed Nazi Germany who were punished in the 1930s. Mr. Wills wrote, “[S]tudents on campus who protested Nazi barbarism were met with a heavy hand. Faculty members who recognized the necessity of public protest against Nazis were punished as well—Butler ended the careers of two of them. Columbia’s student newspaper noted that the school’s reputation suffered because of ‘the remarkable silence of its president’ about the ‘Hitler government.’ ”
Butler was a long-time admirer of Benito Mussolini, the originator of fascism. The Columbia president’s attitude toward democratic institutions was made clear when he declared that “totalitarian systems” produced “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage than the system of elections.”
A demonstration supporting the Palestinian people on Columbia’s east lawn in April 2024. (photo by Wm3214)
Butler’s welcoming of that Nazi ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, came only seven months after the Nazi book burning that destroyed tens of thousands of works they deemed “un-German.” That welcome came also after Columbia’s Jewish Students Society “collected over 500 signatures on a petition denouncing these outrages [the book burnings],” wrote historian Stephen H. Norwood in a 31-page article published in the Oxford University journal Modern Judaism. Moreover, “Columbia’s advisors to Protestant and Catholic students both signed the petition, which demanded ‘concerted action,’ against Nazi antisemitism.” In response to criticism, Butler replied that he held Luther in “high esteem,” declaring him “intelligent, honest, and well-mannered.”
Dr. Norwood noted in his article that Butler refused to make an appearance at a rally featuring an escapee from a Nazi concentration camp, former Social Democratic parliamentary delegate Gerhart Seger, who was on a tour publicizing the barbarity of the Nazi régime. As to Mussolini, Dr. Norwood wrote that Butler, a “longtime admirer of Benito Mussolini,” sought to deepen ties between Columbia and Fascist Italy. “He aggressively defended the university’s Casa Italiana, which housed the Italian department, when charges by liberals and anti-Mussolini Italian exiles that it constituted a principal center for the dissemination of Fascist propaganda in the United States received national attention in late 1934 and 1935.”
Butler’s anti-Semitism was nothing new; during the 1910s he introduced methods to “to screen out academically qualified Jewish students.” Nor was Butler less reactionary in other matters, according to Dr. Norwood. “President Butler’s distaste for campus anti-Nazi protestors, and the extremely harsh punishment he inflicted on some of them, was reinforced by his disdain for the labor movement, which conservatives associated with picketing and public protest. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell stated that Nicholas Murray Butler ‘loved the rich with a passion.’ ” Nor was Butler alone — a Columbia dean, Thomas Alexander, was a defender of Hitler, declared “unqualified approval” of the Nazi sterilization program and tried to publish a translation of Hitler’s speeches.
Nor was Butler’s kneeling before power an isolated series of events. Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia, has noted that the university was an eager participant in McCarthyism. “In 1953 its president signed a letter pronouncing communists unfit to teach,” Dr. Khalidi wrote. “Columbia trustees fired two faculty members for opposing the first world war on pacifist grounds, while student conscientious objectors were arrested and jailed.” Columbia, as an institution, “is a place where trustees, donors and powerful professional schools dictate its policy, not the rest of its faculty.”
Is it necessary to spell out what appeasement leads to?
Fast forward to today. Not only has Columbia University acted toward pro-Palestinian students in the same manner that the university acted toward anti-Nazi students in the 1930s, it has gone further, capitulating so thoroughly to the Trump régime’s reactionary thugs that it has ceded control of its curriculum. Despite repeated capitulations to, first, Republican Party no-nothings in Congress and then to the Trump administration, more demands are made. What should Columbia administrators have expected? Appease a bully, and the bully will only demand more. Worse, not only has Columbia disgraced itself, meekly allowing the Trump régime to dictate the content of academic courses, but now that the White House has succeeded in humiliating one of the wealthiest universities in the United States, it will only be emboldened to make similar demands of other universities. We can be certain that Columbia will not be the last target.
The university agreed to create a force of three dozen “special officers” empowered to arrest protestors, ban the wearing of face masks, adopt the right-wing definition of anti-Semitism under which criticism of the Israeli government is declared to be anti-Semitic and appoint an overseer over its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department, what the Trump administration calls “academic receivership.” This last item can only mean censorship. In response to this extraordinary appeasement, the Trump administration’s secretary of education, the spectacularly unqualified Linda McMahon, called them a “positive first step” but said these actions were only the beginning of negotiations to restore the $400 million in federal research grants that had been cut off. How many more hoops will Columbia have to jump through? What more academic censorship will be asked? Columbia’s cowardice will undoubtedly lead to more demands, more surrendering of academic freedom to Trump no-nothings who have only contempt for knowledge and scholarship.
The damage has only begun. Not only is there the saga of Mahmoud Khalil, kidnapped and thrown into a Louisiana prison without due process on the mere whim of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, there is Yunseo Chung. Ms. Chung wasn’t even a leader or spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus; she merely participated in a sit-in. For the “crime” of participating in a demonstration, the Trump régime is attempting to deport her despite her being a legal resident with green-card status. Ms. Chung is currently in hiding after ICE agents attempted to arrest her; we will see if a judicial order prohibiting her arrest is honored. She has been a resident of the United States since age seven, when her family immigrated to the country; ICE agents told her lawyer her status as a permanent resident is “revoked,” something that Secretary Rubio can not legally do unilaterally. Legal statutes have hardly been a barrier for Trump and his minions in these first months of his second term.
Raleigh-Durham IWW stands with clergy at the stairs to Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia (photo by Anthony Crider)
Reaction to the capitulation has been swift, even if voices for academic freedom are likely to be met with indifference by Columbia Interim President Katrina Armstrong, who in an outrageously gaslighting statement had the nerve to say she is “putting academic freedom … at the fore of every decision we make.” Faculty and students, however, would beg to differ.
Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed, “This is not the outcome we wanted to see. We wanted to see Columbia stand up for their rights for academic freedom and freedom of speech on their campus and we did not expect for them to not only capitulate to the demands of the federal government but actually go beyond the initial demands as far as we can tell.”
The program director for campus free speech at PEN, Kristen Shahverdian, said, “Columbia’s concessions today strike at core principles of academic freedom and self-governance in the higher education sector. This is hardly business as usual. The Trump administration’s demands go far beyond the typical requests the federal government might make to address issues of discrimination and harassment. And the cancellation of $400 million in federal contracts and grants to Columbia was a clear attempt to intimidate the university into complying—which it now has.” A Columbia history professor, Karl Jacoby, noted that “Trump et al. are only getting started.”
As in the 1930s, one-sidedness prevails at Columbia
In an echo of Columbia’s shameful 1930s expulsion of anti-Nazi students and firing of anti-Nazi professors, the same upside-down one-sidedness has prevailed since the unrestrained Israeli assault on Gaza began following the Hamas attacks of October 2023. The full range of this one-sidedness was compiled by Amba Guerguerian, writing for the Indypendent, a community newspaper in New York City that had its origins in the Indymedia movement of the first years of the 21st century.
Several Columbia students demanding Columbia divest from investments that support Israel’s imposition of apartheid that has morphed into ethnic cleansing and genocide have been expelled and the campus remains on lockdown. More punishments are on the way — even an announcement that degrees will be rescinded! (It remains unclear how a university could declare someone to no longer be a degree holder. Do they intend to send police to the homes of graduates to confiscate their paperwork?) Mere participation, even passive actions like sit-ins on the central plaza, is enough for suspensions and expulsions. In contrast, pro-Israel students have carte blanche to carry out violence against pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
Ms. Guerguerian reports on an attack by pro-Israel students who unleashed a chemical attack on pro-Palestinian students that resulted in a horrid stench that couldn’t be removed. She wrote, in the February issue of the Indypendent, “Protesters say the smell clung on to their bodies, clothes and even the sheets they slept in after multiple washes. ‘I tried vinegar, bleach, Dawn dish soap, plain laundry detergent, and I just could not get rid of the smell,’ said Layla Saliba, another student who was at the protest. ‘I was in the shower just scrubbing myself for hours and could not get rid of it.’ ”
Video footage showed “two students, both former Israeli soldiers disguised in keffiyehs, spraying a substance out of a small bottle among the pro-Palestine protesters,” Ms. Guerguerian wrote. “At least ten of the protesters ended up seeking medical care, with symptoms such as burning eyes, breathing problems, nausea, extreme fatigue and long-term vaginal bleeding.” At least one person had to be hospitalized with what was diagnosed as “chemical exposure.” A weapon used by the Israeli military, called Skunk, is believed to have been the agent used, Ms. Guerguerian reported. Skunk is routinely used against Palestinians, who have to throw out all their furniture after coming under Israeli attack because the stench is so intense and not removable with any amount of washing.
Amazingly, one of those two, who was initially suspended for the attack, not only had all charges dropped but Columbia gave him $400,000 as part of a legal settlement! A law professor who denounced the attack was fired. A farce of an “investigation” by the Republican Party-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce concluded that a chemical agent wasn’t used but rather was a harmless “fart spray,” although none of the Columbia students on which the agent was used were contacted. Columbia University officials, responding to a request for comment from the Indypendent, agreed with the Republican “investigation” that the substance was a harmless “legal, novelty item,” without providing any evidence for its conclusion.
Meanwhile, the student who had to go to the hospital after being attacked with the spray has been suspended for two years and had her scholarship revoked, which she called an “effective expulsion.”
Declaring a “thought crime” easier than dialogue
All this has been done in the name of “combatting anti-Semitism,” which, in the right-wing and Israel-apologist conception, means criticizing Israel, now apparently a thought crime. A group of Jewish Columbia faculty members sharply challenged the second report of the university “Antisemitism Task Force,” writing in an open letter:
“The report is marked by conspicuous neglectful omissions of context and climate that cast the real challenges it discusses in a political vacuum. A research method that conflates feelings with facts and uses conveniently slippery definitions of important central concepts – not just antisemitism, but also Zionism and anti-Zionism – also fails to represent with any nuance the complex motives and commitments of many parties on campus. In some cases, outright factual misrepresentations of specific incidents or speech call into question not only the report’s central narrative but its seriousness in confronting the problem of prejudice and bias. Finally, its policy recommendations in some cases threaten to damage the fabric of our community further, and seem unlikely to address the real needs of all parts of our campus affected by the conflict in Israel-Palestine. Nuance and precision matter as we seek to restore trust, openness, and free speech in a climate of open inquiry. Intellectual honesty and respect for all parties affected matter if we are to protect community members in a time of armed conflict. We cannot achieve these crucial goals with the blunt instrument of the Task Force’s report.”
Mural paintings in honor of Jecar Neghme of Chile’s MIR in the place where he was killed by the Pinochet government. (photo by Ciberprofe)
We should instead be at a point where terming Israeli actions toward the Palestinian people genocide is an accepted part of serious discussion, given how common the terminology has become in reports by human rights organizations.
Amnesty International, a throughly mainstream organization and perhaps the world’s best known mass human rights group, has stated that “Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip” and that “Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.” Human Rights Watch, an organization that has subtle biases toward U.S. foreign policy, nonetheless said, “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide,” pointing to the intentional destruction of water and infrastructure supplies and concluding that “Israeli authorities have intentionally created conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza in whole or in part.” Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontières has also declared Israeli destruction of Gaza as a genocide, pointing out the blockade of food, water and medical supplies and of humanitarian assistance.
Finally, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem said that “mass killings” and “ethnic cleansing”are being perpetrated in Gaza and that “All international bodies and institutions must act now to compel Israel to stop the war and end the carnage.” Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaretz, has published an article stating that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is “precisely what genocide looks like.” Is B’Tselem anti-Semitic? Is Haaretz? Is Jewish Voice for Peace?
What ultimately is behind the furious campaign to silence criticism of Israel? A forceful attempt to silence dissent, of course, and to criminalize not simply criticism of the Israeli government but to criminalize opposition to U.S. foreign policy and imperialism, without which Israeli’s sustained human rights abuses would not be possible. The two are intimately connected, and right-wingers, with the full force of the U.S. government now behind them, have decided this is their chance to eliminate dissent once and for all. But the situation at Columbia is emblematic of larger issues, not only the opening Columbia has given to the Trump régime and the enemies of education.
Sharpening the attacks on education and what education does
What corporate leaders of the United States have long wanted, and even industrialists and financiers who feel squeamish at the more extreme antics of Trump but nonetheless salivate at the giveaways he will shower on them, is to create a world of drones. Their desire is to mold children to be proficient in narrow technical skills without the ability to think originally. Thus the never-ending attacks on liberal arts education, and higher education in general, and the mania for standardized testing. If courses that teach philosophical concepts and creative, independent thinking are eliminated, and students are simply given only a series of technical courses as if university is nothing more than a training program for corporate jobs, then the ability of newer generations to comprehend their world and act upon it is reduced. That is the point. Such a world might be fine for corporate elites wishing for a compliant future workforce, but is no benefit to the students themselves.
This dovetails with not only the Trump régime’s intention to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education — that a government department can only be eliminated by congressional vote and not White House diktat seems to be of little concern in the White House — but also with the corporate push for charter schools. That push in turn dovetails with the drive to destroy public education. A powerful lesson in how to fight back was provided by the public school teachers in Chicago in 2012. As part of the “war against teachers,” then Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (the infamous “Mayor 1%”) and the hedge-fund managers funding him and the privatization of schools via charters apparently believed that the teachers, primarily African-American women, believed they would be easy targets. But the teachers had worked hard at organizing community support.
The successful 2012 strike demonstrated that democracy and community involvement are indispensable. Chicago teachers and their union worked with the community ahead of time to explain the stakes, and to prepare parents for the possibility that they would be forced to go on strike. When the inevitable attacks came in the predictable form — “the teachers are greedy,” “the teachers only care about getting more of your tax money” — they did not have the usual impact. Mayor Emanuel had clearly expected the community to be on his side; instead the people were with the teachers.
Women’s March of January 21, 2017, in Chicago (photo by Jonathan Eyler-Werve)
The Trump régime has launched an all-out war on the working people of the United States and begun an intensified renewal of U.S. imperialism; no diplomatic niceties now. Yes, of course the U.S. has imposed a highly exploitative imperialism on the world regardless of what party is in power and has long imposed a particularly vicious brand of capitalism at home and abroad. But the Trump régime has drastically upped the stakes. Its coalition of far-Right ideologues, White supremacists, misogynists and Christian fundamentalists seemed determined to undermine what few safeguards ordinary bourgeois formal democracy remain with an ultimate goal of imposing a fascist dictatorship. The first Trump administration did not succeed in going beyond those formal democratic bounds but is more organized and determined for this second term.
Once again, it is necessary to ask when does a bourgeois formal democracy tip over into a fascist dictatorship? This question is not necessarily separable from asking if the current phase of capitalism, known as neoliberalism to most of the world, is coming to an end. Fascism, or some somewhat less severe right-wing dictatorship on behalf of capital, would be one way for industrialists and financiers to keep their party going, at our expense. Any social base for such a movement would, in the U.S., prominently include the Christian fundamentalists, White supremacists and misogynists already emboldened by the rise of Trump’s “MAGA” movement. The hostility of this noxious coalition is unavoidable, and the attacks on Columbia University, and its administration’s capitulation to those attacks, are but one manifestation of an all-out assault on what democracy remains in the plutocratic United States. The pushback against this needs to be much stronger and more systematic, connecting and linking movements, or we will see worse.
Demonizing opponents to the point of calling those who participate in pickets against Tesla dealerships “terrorists” is dangerous language that has begun to, and will, have consequences. Dehumanizing people for their ethnic, racial or immigration status, or for disliking their politics, has consequences. History is clear about this slippery slope, as noted by Henry Giroux, who has been sounding the alarm bells:
“Under Trump, the treatment of dissenters does not mirror exactly what we saw under Hitler, Pinochet, or the Argentine dictatorship, but it bears what Martin Wolf has called ‘authoritarianism with fascist characteristics.’ As history teaches, repression begins with language before it becomes law, and law before it becomes violence. The Nazis labeled dissenters as terrorists, with Heinrich Himmler making clear that students who defied the Reich had no place in its vision, likening them to pests that needed to be eradicated. Pinochet branded universities as breeding grounds for terrorists, justifying mass arrests, torture, and executions. Argentina’s military regime abducted students, hurled them from planes and murdered over 30,000. Trump’s administration has not committed such atrocities, but the rhetoric and policies are in place. The machinery is being built, and history warns us: once the conditions are set, the horrors we thought belonged to the past can return in forms we failed to imagine.”
Let’s have no more pretending we can’t tell the difference between bourgeois formal democracy, deeply constricted and repressive as it is, and actual fascism. We are not having this conversation in a concentration camp. Yet.
The failures of the neoliberal brand of capitalism — and capitalism as a system itself — were once again on display in the February 23 German elections. In a political vacuum, with mainstream parties unable to offer anything other than the austerity that has been imposed for decades, the extreme right gains adherents. The 21 percent vote total and second-place finish of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is another unmistakable klaxon.
Although the political “firewall” against the fascist-tinged AfD appears that it will hold, with yet another “Grand Coalition” of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats almost certainly to be the outcome of negotiations, the doubling of the AfD vote stands out. That was by far the biggest improvement of any party’s increase, dwarfing the four percent increases enjoyed by the Christian Democrats and the Left Party (Die Linke).
A glance at the German electoral map is sobering: Districts in the five states of the former East Germany almost uniformly put the AfD first, with only Berlin and a couple of other constituencies excepted; the eastern part of Berlin put the Left Party first. By contrast, the states of the former West Germany are nearly uniformly black for the Christian Democrats, with one exception being the Social Democratic vote in urban centers including Hamburg and Bremen. The Christian Democrats and the AfD earned nearly half the vote between them, and add in the vote for the business party, the Free Democrats, and the right won a majority. Celebrations of the late surge of the Left, gaining nine percent, a strong increase from the previous election, don’t seem that much to celebrate given the surge for the right. And the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, combining Left economics with conservative calls to halt immigration, fell flat; the BSW failed to reach the five percent needed to enter the Bundestag, the German parliament.
Stocksberg Castle with its vineyards in the autumn (photo by Roman Eisele)
The disastrous result of the Social Democrats (SPD), finishing with their worst result since the revival of German formal democracy after World War II, is the culmination of years of imposing austerity and not merely a referendum on the outgoing administration of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a point to which we will return below.
Of interest is the pattern of voting when broken down by age, education and sex. German women voted noticeably to the left of German men, those with higher education voted to the left of those with less education, and the Left Party received the most votes from those ages 18 to 24 and placed second for those ages 25 to 34. These results, particularly the women/men breakdown and the education split, mirror what has become routine in the United States over recent national elections. The German results also mirror the voting patterns of the 2024 British election, although the female/male split there was not as pronounced.
So what conclusions might we draw from all this? Given that the Labour landslide in Britain was more a reaction to the disastrous years of Conservative rule, a rout magnified by the single-seat, winner-take-all format of its Parliamentary elections, and not a mandate for Keir Starmer’s Conservative-lite (and barely “lite”) policies, the pattern seen across the advanced capitalist countries is clear. With a wholesale abandonment of anything progressive or pro-working people by mainstream “center-left” parties and austerity enforced no matter who is in office, the siren songs of the far right are reaching more ears. Even the incoming Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, sounded this alarm. “This is really the last warning to the political parties of the democratic centre in Germany to come to common solutions,” he said the night of the Christian Democratic victory.
That is not simply a coded message to the SPD to join in a coalition — given the results, that coalition seems a foregone conclusion — but a warning that the AfD can’t be held off indefinitely. And although Chancellor Merz is coming from a perspective of political survival, it is a warning with content even if somewhat hypocritical given his party’s increasing adaptation of AfD talking points. The disastrous showing of the SPD, should it wish to heed it, certainly is a ringing alarm. That same alarm is ringing for the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Liberal Party in Canada and other “center-left” parties.
Leave voters behind and they’ll eventually look elsewhere
The continual moves to the right, tailing the “center-right” parties that move rightward themselves, go beyond the personal failings of this or that political leader. When Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jean Chrétien, Justin Trudeau, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Keir Starmer, François Hollande, Gerhard Schröder, Olaf Scholz, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Romano Prodi all fall to their knees in front of industrialists and financiers, when each speedily implements neoliberal austerity policies despite leading the supposed “center-left” opposition to the conservative parties that openly stand for corporate domination, there is something other than personal weakness at work. That something is structural — a political system wholly captured by the most powerful possessors of economic power in a system of massive inequality.
When voting for traditional parties doesn’t change conditions, some people will begin to look at something different. With the collapse of Left alternatives, the “something different” on offer comes from the far right — the AfD in Germany, the neofascists in Italy, Trump in the U.S. and the anti-democratic governments that have held, or still hold, office in Poland, Hungary, Argentina and elsewhere. Germany serves as an exemplar here.
The strong German economy of the first two decades of the 21st century (strong in terms of exports, gross domestic product (GDP) and corporate revenue) was built on the backs of German workers. The “secret” to Germany’s economic dominance within the European Union was cuts to German wages. Germany undercut other countries that use the euro as their currency by suppressing wages, a process that took form under a Social Democratic government. In 2012, at the height of German economic performance, German wage increases to that point from 2001 averaged half of one percent per year, consistently below the German inflation rate, according to the International Labour Office. To put it another way, the ILO calculated that German productivity had remained virtually unchanged in relation to the productivity of all countries that use the euro, while German wages declined by more than ten percent relative to the composite wages of all other euro-zone countries.
Because every space is a canvas for advertising (photo by Michael F. Mehnert)
The prosperity of German manufacturers had come at the price of a decade of wage cuts (adjusted for inflation) suffered by German workers. Sound familiar? Reduced income leads to reduced consumption, so exports accounted for a steadily rising portion of German GDP. In relative terms, it became more difficult for other European Union countries to compete with German products, particularly in other countries using the euro, because German manufacturers increasingly could undercut them. Manufacturing capacity elsewhere is shuttered, reinforcing German dominance and increasing unemployment in the countries on the receiving end of the exports.
A 2011 paper written by a British economist, Engelbert Stockhammer, described this phenomenon bluntly: “Germany has pursued a policy of aggressive wage restraint resulting in large current account surpluses. German gains in competitiveness (since the introduction of the Euro) have not been founded on superior technological performance, but on more effective wage suppression. … Simply put, German wage suppression rather than fiscal profligacy is at root of the crisis of the Euro system. … Europe needs a set of economic institutions and policy rules that addresses such imbalances and their underlying mechanisms.”
It was none other than the SPD that brought about this wage suppression. In 2003, Schröder, then the Social Democratic chancellor, pushed through his “Agenda 2010” legislation. Schröder said at the time, “We must not get trapped in defending our past achievements, but instead must work to our future.” Since those “past achievements” included old-fashioned concepts such as good wages and pensions, Schröder said, “The core challenges before us are accepting the reality of globalization, the ‘digitalization’ of our economy and an aging society.” Classic Right-wing code words. “Accepting” this “reality,” Agenda 2010 cut business taxes while reducing unemployment pay and pensions.
The structures of corporate domination
The European Union, for all that some Germans might gain from it, is nonetheless a purveyor of austerity itself; it is designed to benefit large capital, in particular finance capital, and suppress conditions for working people. European capital can’t compete with U.S. capital without a similarly large political economic unit behind it; the EU serves as a vehicle to elevate European competitiveness in global capitalism at the same time EU governments keep themselves subordinate to the United States.
The EU is a supra-national institution to impose corporate domination on a reluctant population. National governments are not insulated from popular opinion, but a supra-national structure can impose dictates on those governments, which can then tell citizens that it has “no choice” but to adhere to them so that the country can remain “part of Europe.” European capitalists’ need for the combined clout of a united continent underlies the anti-democratic push to steadily tighten the EU, including mandatory national budget benchmarks that require cutting social safety nets and policies that are designed to break down solidarity among wage earners across borders by imposing harsher competition through imposed austerity. The EU, in its current capitalist form, is a logical step for business leaders who desire greater commercial power on a global basis: It creates a “free trade” zone complete with suppression of social accountability while giving muscle to one of two currencies that has any potential (albeit small) of challenging the U.S. dollar as the world’s pre-eminent currency.
Having become dependent on exports, what happens when demand in other countries declines? Trouble, as Germany is currently undergoing. Throw in higher energy costs because the cost of U.S. liquified natural gas is higher than the natural gas previously piped in from Russia, and it is no surprise that many Germans are struggling, and looking for anyone who addresses their struggles. And, it could be added, the costs of housing are skyrocketing, further cutting into German living standards. The shortage of affordable housing units is calculated to be in the millions. Neither renters or homeowners can afford to stay where they are.
Demonstration for a basic income in Berlin, November 2010 (photo by “PD”)
It is only natural that more people seek different solutions, and the siren songs of the far right, even those with fascist elements, such as the AfD, and those who aspire to install themselves as a fascist dictator, such as Trump, begin to sound appealing to the politically naïve because their problems appear to be addressed where others fail to do so. But the “solutions” the far right puts forth are the usual scapegoating — immigrants are taking your jobs, elites look down on you, diversity and inclusion are poisons to a pure national people, etc., as they play on people’s emotions. Anything to deflect attention from the socioeconomic system and its inherent inequality and harshness that is the actual root cause. When U.S. Democrats, Canadian Liberals, German Social Democrats, French “Socialists,” British Labourites and other European center-left parties join their center-right rivals in imposing austerity, then there isn’t much reason to vote for them other than to keep Republicans, Conservatives and their equivalents out of office. Voting becomes a sterile exercise in voting for the lesser evil to keep something even worse out of office, and after enough rounds of this, more voters will decide to just sit it out, as just happened with millions of liberals in the U.S. election.
Interestingly, Germany bucked this pattern, with the turnout of 84 percent the highest since reunification. Perhaps fear of the AfD had something to do with that turnout; perhaps more so those who previously felt they had nobody to vote for decided they had something at stake this time. The AfD gained 2 million votes from those who didn’t vote in the previous federal election, by far the highest of any party, and picked up another 1 million from those who had voted for the Christian Democrats.
However you wish to parse the numbers, the rise of parties flirting with fascism is an ominous development, one now years in the making across the Global North. The Europe of the 1930s and the Latin America of the 1970s gives us grim history lessons in what happens when fascists are able to gain and exploit power. Germany’s formal democratic structures are holding but that cannot be said to the case everywhere, especially given the dangerous stress the Trump gang is placing on U.S. institutions at the moment, compounded by the willingness of many heads of government to pander to the Orange One-Man Crime Wave and illustrated by the willingness of Trump’s de facto co-president, Elon Musk, to blatantly interfere in the German election and other government matters.
If we want a better world to be our future, there is an enormous amount of work to be done. The fascist takeovers of the past, while by no means destined to be repeated, nonetheless give a warning of the shape of the future if we don’t fight back.
The “shock and awe” tactics of the new Trump administration, as opponents have dubbed them, leave no doubt that the Trump coalition of far-Right ideologues, White supremacists, misogynists and Christian fundamentalists intend to impose as much of their agenda as quickly as possible before an organized opposition can coalesce.
That the corporate media is treating the most reactionary and/or imperialistic fantasy harbored by Donald Trump, even the apparently serious intentions to annex Greenland, Panama and Canada, as normal and routine, and that Democratic Party office holders began bending the knee even before the inauguration and demonstrated their acquiescence by unanimously approving Marco Rubio as secretary of state illustrate all the more clearly that the opposition to the second Trump administration must, and can only, come from the grassroots. That the Trump administration plans will very likely end in disaster for working people (including many Trump voters) and that most of the administration’s officials are incompetent ideologues not capable of a coherent effort does not mean there won’t be immense damage done in the meantime. There will be, and there should be no further illusions about that.
Beyond the reactionary policies themselves, and that the Orange One-Man Crime Wave has gotten away with a self-coup after a lifetime of evading responsibility for his actions, we need to think about what this unfortunate moment means. Are we on the brink of a new phase of capitalism, as we were in 1980? And, if so, how can we recognize it? As the 1970s drew to a close, the Keynesian consensus that had held since the conclusion of World War II, was breaking down and began being replaced with what most of the world would come to call “neoliberalism.” (A term that can be confusing for North Americans; “neoliberalism” refers to a renewed and more intense stage of “liberalism” in the meaning that the rest of the world uses for that word, meaning a belief in allowing markets to operate with little governmental oversight and to allow market outcomes to decide social issues.)
The Great Hall in Union Station, Washington (photo by Frank Schulenburg)
Perhaps the first step toward beginning to attempt to answer the questions of the preceding paragraph is to analyze politically the new administration. Two contradictions immediately leap to mind here. One, that Trump clearly desires to rule as a fascist dictator but his first administration was not fascist, but rather remained in the bounds of ordinary bourgeois formal democracy, albeit one that was particularly extreme and virulent, continuing a pattern of each Republican Party administration being worse than the previous one. Two, that a fascist movement has arisen despite the conditions for a fascist takeover not existing and that this movement persists despite the natural bankrollers of a fascist movement, industrialists and bankers, not interested in such a movement, nor having any need for one.
Trump can be thought of as the Republican Party’s Frankenstein monster: Decades of racist dog whistles, frantic lies endlessly repeated and a steady march rightward, the last of these ably assisted by the Democratic Party continually moving right in an ever-futile effort to peel off Republican voters, culminated in the Trump phenomenon. There is a straight line from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, whom the Republican establishment venerated through a rather creepy personality cult until the Reagan cult was displaced by the Trump cult, to the new administration. Nixon attempted to provide federal money for segregated schools as he ushered in the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy”; Reagan famously opened his 1980 presidential run close to the site where three Civil Rights Movement workers were murdered in Mississippi with calls for “states’ rights,” well understood code words for supporting racially biased policies; George H.W. Bush exploited racial stereotypes with his Willie Horton campaign ads; George W. Bush’s presidency will be remembered for his callous ignoring of New Orleans and its African-American population in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and the roster of Republicans hostile to civil rights is too long to list.
The decay of neoliberalism
With a supine Republican majority in Congress and a Democratic Party determined to stick its tried-and-true tactic of cringing and cowering, along with stacking the federal court system with ideologues masquerading as judges ready and willing to rule in favor of ideological preferences, the first Trump administration could stay within the bounds of formal democracy to get much of its agenda put into practice. Certainly not all but there was plenty of damage done in those four years. That should not deflect us from recognizing Trump’s desire to establish a dictatorship even when enough institutions of formal democracy held to prevent him from seriously challenging them in his first term. Nor should we not take Trump’s attempt at a self-coup in January 2021 seriously, even if it didn’t have a realistic chance of success. Hitler’s beer-hall putsch had no chance of success, and we know how German history would turn out.
Given the lawlessness, even unconstitutionality, of Trump’s decrees and firings along with his first-day mass pardoning of the participants in the storming of the Capitol building, the underlying message intended by the intense flurry of executive directives is likely intended to signal that Trump is more serious about seizing dictatorial powers this time, a threat undergirded by the complete submission of the Republican Party. Again, this does not mean that he will succeed in destroying the remaining formal democratic structures of the United States, badly inadequate and antiquated as they are. The possibility may still be, even today, low but it is not zero and not simply because the potentiality of fascism exists in all capitalist countries.
Stepping back from the particularities of the second Trump administration, we return more directly to the first question above: Are we on the brink of a new phase of capitalism, as we were in 1980? Keynesianism was an outlier in capitalism; the long decades of laissez-faire preceding it and the decades of neoliberal austerity that followed are the norm. Keynesianism, simply put, is the belief that capitalism is unstable and requires government intervention in the economy when private enterprise is unable or unwilling to spend enough to lift it out of a slump. Keynes developed his theories during the 1930s, when the Great Depression had discredited the “laissez-faire” economics that had plunged the world into crisis.
An anti-fascism march in St. Louis (photo by Paul Sableman)
What could replace neoliberalism? It could be fascism. Far-Right parties and personalities have been gaining ground since the 2008 economic collapse — Brazil, Hungary, Poland and Argentina have seen the rise to power of the extreme Right, and it is a threat to take office in France and Germany, so far slowed by the willingness of mainstream conservatives to unite with parties to their left to keep the National Front and Alternative for Germany out of office. But for how long? Mainstream parties of the Right have been adopting the language of the extreme Right, and in the U.S. the Republicans have completely adopted such language.
One more economic collapse, or simply a continued downward drift of living standards, could be enough to create the conditions for a fascist seizure of power, or, perhaps more likely, fascists being handed unchecked power under the guise of an “emergency.” None of the fascist governments of Europe in the 1930s or Latin America in the 1970s were elected; some were handed power by a king or a president, others came to power in a military coup. And although Trump’s hardcore “MAGA” fan base would prefer dictatorship to democracy, the rest of his voters — those who vote Republican no matter who and those beaten down by economic difficulties who sadly believed Trump’s siren songs — did not vote for dictatorship. Another recession is inevitable; a system as unstable as capitalism will always have them (the “business cycle” to use the common euphemism) and it can’t be excluded that the next recession won’t be as drastic (or worse?) than the 2008 collapse.
With the Trump gang’s all-out assault on working people intended to accelerate the flow of money upward through slashing of social programs and tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, the next downturn might be sooner and worse than it would have been otherwise; even if the next recession is a ways off working people in the United States are going to be squeezed harder. If a mass movement arises from a population that can’t take any more seriously threatens to upend corporate business as usual, could there be a fascist reaction? That is always a possibility. For now, today, industrialists and financiers — the corporate “ruling class” — have no need for any fascist movement. They already are in control of the country’s political institutions; there are no grassroots movements with any ability to challenge power at this time nor are profits seriously threatened.
Capitalists prefer the giveaways without too much turbulence
Industrialists and financiers certainly welcomed the tax cuts, regulation slashing and other goodies the Trump administration showered on them last time and will again in the second term but that doesn’t mean they want the instability that an attempt at ending formal democratic institutions would bring. The system already works wonderfully for them. Why would they want to change it? There will always be a few billionaires interested in dictatorship with fascist politics — Elon Musk comes readily to mind — but as a class capitalists show no sign of supporting, much less bankrolling, a fascist movement. We are living in unprecedented times. A fascist movement (“MAGA”) has arisen in the U.S., and there are fascist movements in France and Germany, each without being bankrolled and subsidized by capitalists as a class. German industrialists were heavy supporters of the Nazis; Italian industrialists were heavy backers of Mussolini and his fascists. The brownshirts and blackshirts could not have existed in anywhere such huge numbers without a lot of cash behind them.
How the difficulties of the coming year will ultimately play out is of course impossible to predict. None of us has a crystal ball. The second Trump administration could lead to such disastrous results that the movement is permanently discredited. Trump’s MAGA base will remain dedicated to its nihilist vision as no amount of reality can possibly penetrate it, but that base alone is much too small to win elections on a national scale by itself. Wishing for the Trump phenomenon to go away will not likely succeed; a determined mass movement, linking causes and reaching across borders and with other communities, is the only route to seeing off Trump’s followers and beginning a long, hard process of bringing about a better world. Trump is a symptom of a capitalism that works for ever fewer people and a political system incapable of delivering positive reforms.
Cherry Blossoms in Washington during March (photo by Sarah H.)
If we don’t manage to bring about a better world, what will the future hold? Specifically, to return to the question of what might replace neoliberalism, it could be a still worse version of capitalism than the neoliberalism we have endured for more than four decades. Not necessarily fascism, either, but perhaps something approaching that with similar economic policies while some remnants of formal democracy remain. As living standards continue to be pushed down with the costs of food, housing and healthcare continuing to rise much faster than wages, either there is an explosion of protest against this or corporate profits begin to decline sharply because people don’t have the money to buy what they used to be able to afford. Personal consumption — everything from a toothbrush to an automobile that we buy as consumers — constitutes 60 to 70 percent of a typical advanced-capitalist economy; it is above 70 percent in the United States. A significant drop in consumer spending leads to economic turmoil and dwindling profits.
The solution to this conundrum, an inevitability in capitalism as the unrelenting competition that fuels it can only lead to more inequality, would be a change to a new economic system, one that is geared toward meeting human need rather than the profits of a few and where production and distribution decisions are made democratically with an eye for everybody having basic needs met rather than the top-down enterprises of today. Industrialists, financiers and the politicians that cater to them are not likely to like this option. Their desire will be to keep the party going, to keep the profits rolling in and themselves in control of the levers of political and economic power. That can mean only one thing: More repression, harsher laws, and worse conditions and lower wages at your job. Without a strong social movement, this is what will likely be imposed on us because that is the only way the system as currently constructed can endure in present form while continuing the upward flow of money.
It was not obvious in 1979 or 1980, when Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the U.S. took power, that a new era of capitalism was dawning. The term “neoliberalism” had not been coined; we then spoke of “Thatcherism” and “Reaganism.” But, in retrospect, signs were there, such as the end of the Bretton Woods system, the institution of speculators using foreign-exchange markets to determine the value of currencies and the wielding of loans attached to “structural adjustment” diktats that imposed massive debts on the countries of the Global South (the Third World as they were termed then). All this was accompanied by financialization — the tendency of industrialists, bankers and their institutions and enterprises to put capital into financial markets for speculation rather than invest in production, because speculation became more profitable than production and because they accumulated more capital than could possibly be invested or sunk in business expansion or luxury consumption. It took years for these developments to be understood as a coherent organized change in the functioning of capitalism.
In these first weeks of 2025, we remain embedded in neoliberalism. But the increasing instability of capitalist economies, the ever more desperate attempts by central banks to “cure” economic problems by throwing towering sums of money at the financial institutions that are the source of the instability and inequality, and the increasing inability of working people to be able to eat, keep a roof over their head and afford the expenses of maintaining health demonstrate the limitations of neoliberalism. Beyond that, capitalism requires endless growth and there can’t be infinite growth on a finite planet. How much longer can it endure? The answer to such a question lies in all of us.
People in Global South countries have agency. They can and do understand the realities of their material conditions. Apparently it is necessary to write the preceding two sentences.
You, dear reader, may be wondering why I have written such obvious statements. Don’t people everywhere possess agency, the ability to understand and act upon the political, cultural and social conditions of their community, nation and country? Yes of course they do. So why write the obvious? Because it appears that there are those, sadly partisans of the Left, that don’t believe the peoples of the Global South have agency.
The complex and still unfolding situation in post-Assad Syria brings this discussion to the fore because of a position espoused from more than one source. Specifically, that Syrians are manipulated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the Islamic fundamentalists led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are puppets of the United States (or maybe jointly of the U.S. and Israel) and that Syrians never had it better than under the rule of the Assad family, and that all the reports of the torture, disappearances and killings committed by the Assad régime are lies concocted by U.S. intelligence agencies and blindly propagated by the corporate media. Anyone who doubts these assertions is a dupe of the CIA and/or a willing accomplice of U.S. imperialism.
The Damascus Hejaz railway station (photo by Dosseman)
Were the beliefs in the preceding paragraph held by very few it would not be noteworthy. But although it would hardly be fair to say most on the Left hold such absolute beliefs — such is not the case — enough do that it merits some response. I’ll be naming no names here because thoughtful discussion is what is needed, not pointing figures or sectarianism. There is of course much room to disagree and it is indisputably true that we outside Syria have much less than a full picture of what is happening there; likely there are few in Syria who do.
Let’s start with a basic proposition that shouldn’t be controversial: The U.S. government could seek to destabilize a government and the people of that targeted country could wish to be rid of an oppressive régime. Holding two thoughts at the same time in our heads should not be hard. And just because the U.S. government has sought for years to overthrow a particular government, that of the Assad family régime, it does not automatically follow that, therefore, the U.S. government must be responsible for that government’s removal.
Is it possible that the U.S. had a role in unseating Bashir al-Assad? It certainly is possible; the long list of U.S. interventions stretching back to the 19th century are ample proof of capability. But at this time there is, so far, no evidence for direct intervention. What evidence exists for external interference clearly indicates that Turkey was the animating force behind the lightning offensive that took over a succession of cities culminating in Damascus. The reports that the Islamists themselves were surprised at the swiftness and ease of their victory is quite plausible. The conscripts of the Syrian army did not want to fight; the Syrian army has a long history of brutality against the Syrian people but incompetence against fighting other militaries; and Iran and Russia, seeing the inability of the Syrian army to mount a defense decided not to intervene this time on President Assad’s behalf. Supposedly, Vladimir Putin is said to have decided that if the Syrians weren’t going to defend themselves, why should Russians? Whatever we think of Putin, this story, if true, makes sense.
Falling back on ideology is a tempting shortcut
Rather than attempting to analyze a difficult situation, one still in flux, it is much easier to fall back on ideology. If not a leaf moves anywhere in the world without the CIA being behind it, then the task is quite simple and easy. The CIA manipulated everybody in Syria, including the Islamists, and because the Syrian government was a consistent target of the U.S. government, therefore that government is good and worthy of uncritical support. Let us clap our hands at our cleverness and declare ourselves done. Could it be possible that the Assad régime, despite the hostility directed toward it from Washington, might not merit rapture? Could it be possible that the enemy of our enemy is not our friend? And if the Syrian events of the past several weeks were nothing more than the machinations of CIA agents and their lackeys, then Syrians have no agency — they are simply puppets on a string manipulated by outside forces. If they have no agency, then they can’t understand their society or their own lives.
That is the logical conclusion of those who insist U.S. interference must be the sole cause of the Syrian overthrow. In turn, the logic of this belief system is that there could be no reason for the removal of the Assad government and thus the huge numbers of Syrians celebrating in the streets after the overthrow and the many Syrians who frantically searched for their arrested family members in Assad’s dungeons are delusional. Or maybe they are manipulated by the CIA as well. Or the demonstrations were staged? On this basis, Leftist ideologues in the United States must know better than Syrians themselves the fate of their relatives taken into custody. Perhaps they were really given long vacations instead of being tortured and jailed? This is the logical conclusion of the belief that U.S. government manipulation is behind all the events of recent weeks in Syria. Such is what happens when ideology is allowed to trump analysis. It is easier to fall back on ideology than attempt the work of careful analysis. And, in this case, we have an added layer of irony because the government of Bashir al-Assad ruthlessly imposed neoliberalism on Syrians and his base was a narrow coterie of Syria’s bourgeoisie.
Syria after the Islamic militia takeover (map by Ecrusized)
That we can hold more than one thought in our head at the same time was encapsulated well by long-time activist Steve Bloom in a recent email correspondence:
“What is needed in Syria, as in every other instance of this kind, is an orientation that understands the role of the USA, yes, but puts this in the proper context of all the internal contradictions that create the openings for US imperialism to intervene in the first place. Those who harp on the role of the US, as if this is a sufficient explanation for events of this nature, do a disservice to our effort to build a movement that can properly oppose US imperialism, because to build such a movement we have to remain vigilant with regard to any and all questions related to democracy and human rights wherever democracy and human rights are challenged in the world.”
One problem with the “CIA is responsible for everything” belief is that the Islamic forces who spilled out of Syria’s northwest and swept to Damascus is that they have been supported and armed by Turkey for years and there is bitter opposition between the Turkey-backed Islamic militias and the Kurds in Syria’s northeast, who have carved out their Rojava autonomous region and enjoy U.S. support that waxes and wanes depending on U.S. interests at a given point in time. There has been fighting between the two (we cannot help but note the irony of the combatants being backed by separate NATO militaries) and the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. That does not mean it is not possible there could be some tacit support under the table but it is clear that Turkey is the government behind the takeover as Ankara has been a consistent supporter of them for years and fully backed and supported the Islamic takeover of the northwest province of Afrin that had been part of the Kurds’ Rojava territory. This does not exclude some U.S. participation, even if passive, such as giving Israel a green light to bombard Syria and giving a tacit okay to Turkey to move forward with its activities.
The geopolitical complications of assessing Kurdish motivations
There are further geopolitical complications when it comes to the Kurds and the Rojava region (known formally as the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria in deference to the minority groups in the Kurdish areas and the Arab population in the more southerly portions of Rojava). The leading political force in Rojava is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which in turn is closely affiliated with the Kurds’ leading organization in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Turkey has waged a decades-long war on its Kurdish minority and as part of that war declares the PKK to be a “terrorist” organization. Unfortunately, in its ongoing cozying up to the most authoritarian governments in Ankara, the U.S. government also classifies the PKK as a “terrorist” organization and assisted Turkish agents who kidnapped and jailed the PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan. Turkey, and especially the repressive government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, considers the Syrian PYD to be indistinguishable from the Turkish PKK. Yet the U.S. government, wanting an ally in its fight against the nihilistic Islamic State, has supported the PYD, albeit inconsistently. Turkey, at the same time, arms the Islamic militias, some of whom are Islamic State fighters themselves and, as has been widely reported, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham grew out of Islamic State although its leadership claims to now have no affiliation.
Many on the Left dismiss the PYD and the Rojava project because of its U.S. support. But the society the Kurds are attempting to build (with some support from other ethnic groups) is an interesting experiment in socialist democracy, one strongly influenced by Murray Bookchin and his concept of a federation of independent communities known as “libertarian municipalism” or “communalism” rather than any commitment to any orthodoxy espoused by Marxist groups. Perhaps that is part of the issue here. Regardless, the Kurds are surrounded by enemies, have suffered waves of brutal repression by Turkey, Iraq and other governments and, having outlasted the Assad régime now face attacks by the newly installed government in Damascus, which has sent hints that it does not have friendly intentions toward Rojava. Should the Kurds simply allow themselves to be overrun?
Given their geographic and geopolitical situation, it is understandable that the Kurds of Syria take a “realpolitik” approach. Given the relentless repression of their compatriots in Turkey, repression consistently supported by the U.S. government, it is hardly reasonable to see the Syrian Kurds as “naïve” or “puppets” of the U.S. as if they are incapable of understanding their own experiences. If the alternative for Kurds is to be overrun and slaughtered, it is pointless phrase-mongering to refuse solidarity or ritually condemn them. By all indications, Rojava accepts aid with eyes open, and that Turkey was allowed to crush Afrin with tacit U.S. approval makes all the clearer the mercenary nature of an alliance of convenience, one that soon weakened on the mere whim of a U.S. president, Donald Trump, in his first term, who had his ignorance exploited by Turkish President Erdoğan when he told Trump he would take over the job of fighting “terrorists,” which meant an invasion of further portions of Rojava, territory occupied to this day by Turkey and its local allies.
Kurds, Assyrians, and Arabs demonstrate against the Assad government in the city of Qamişlo (photo via KurdWatch.org)
Can it really be possible that the Kurds are not fully aware of all this? Should we be so inflexible as to consider the Kurds as puppets or tools of the U.S.? The “realpolitik” approach became still clearer when the response by the Kurds to the Turkish invasion was to invite in the Syrian army. Rojava was born when the Kurds, in a well-prepared uprising, took over Syrian army posts in their region, disarmed the Syrian soldiers and sent them home. And that invitation was done with the knowledge that the Assad government wanted to crush them. So it would seem that the Kurds, like other Syrians, are quite capable of agency, of understanding their own reality and of acting on them while making difficult decisions in complex situations.
The political system developed by the Kurds is called “democratic confederalism,” a vision of a society that is intended to be without a state, in which society is organized on the basis of communes that build into larger coordinating units, and in which business enterprises are cooperative. This is a revolution in which the liberation of women is central, which is determinedly multi-cultural, local-based and democratic in its orientation, and is based on political self-administration and direct democracy in which social problems can be freely discussed. The Kurdish project is not without its contradictions, not least of which is that it is surrounded by hostile enemies that wish to destroy it and thus Rojava is forced to organize large militias and sometimes conscript young people. Rojava’s democratic confederalism is a project basing itself on sustained democratic participation in the widest possible numbers, yet is inspired by a top-down centralized party (PKK) with a leader (Abdullah Öcalan) who is the center of a cult of personality. And Rojava’s economy is based on agriculture in a world that is industrial and post-industrial. Although that economy is one that is inherited and a problem well noted internally, doubts as to whether it is possible for a cooperative economy to sustain itself on such a basis in the long term are reasonable. Nonetheless, the project continues despite the difficulties of importing needed products due to the hostility of its neighbors.
Syrian Leftists move to organize in a fluid situation
Let us turn again to the rest of Syria. There are Leftists there who are struggling to organize. Two articles just published in the Australian socialist publication Red Flag provide us with useful information and a glimpse at what is already a difficult situation. A January 3 dispatch reports that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is already trying to force sectarianism into Syrian textbooks. The report says:
“Everyone agrees that the pro-Assad propaganda that saturates the textbooks needs to be removed. But the proposed reforms go further: eliminating lessons on evolution and the Big Bang theory, abolishing all negative references to the Ottoman Empire, and removing all mention of the various polytheistic communities in Syria’s history. The changes would also teach students in primary school that Christians and Jews are ‘those who have lost their way’ from Islam. The decree was immediately rejected loudly by many, many Syrians. So much so that the government was forced to walk back the changes even before the demonstration today, which meant it was fairly small. But it was an important gathering nonetheless. For one thing, there were lots of media present, giving left-wing activists a rare opportunity to make their voices heard to the Syrian people about their vision of an inclusive and just society for all.”
Meetings and actions are being organized by socialists, feminists, liberal NGOs, artists and relatives of those who disappeared into the Assad prison system, Red Flag reports, but the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is trying to undermine this organizing by calling these groupings “remnants” of the Assad régime. The above dispatch reports that “leading figures from Assad’s economic team, known for privatising everything and cutting as many subsidies as possible, are being tapped to play important roles. [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham] is doing this to signal its commitment to playing by the rules of the capitalist system.”
A January 5 article in Red Flag reports that “Field executions and random killings” are daily occurrences and that people in Homs “have been subjected to door-to-door searches by armed [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham] militants.” There are also reports of “harassment of some women found not wearing the hijab, arrests conducted without explanation or chance for appeal, and the deployment of tanks in civilian areas.” The article quotes a Damascus activist, identified as “Nour, a young comrade from the Syrian Revolutionary Left Current,” combatting the idea that the Assad family régime was simply sectarian. “ ‘People talk as if the Assad regime was defined by its sectarianism, but that’s wrong; its only religious commitment was to wealth’. This is an important point,” the article states. “Assad’s most consistent supporters were the largely Sunni bourgeoisie of Damascus. There are huge economic, social and political divisions within the Alawi community, as with all others.”
Separately, political scientists Raymond Hinnebusch and Tina Zinti have written in their book Syria from Reform to Revolt, Volume 1: Political Economy and International Relations that, over the course of the 1990s, widespread privatization drastically shrank Syria’s state sector, which earned Hafez al-Assad the support of Syria’s bourgeoisie. Bashar al-Assad sought to continue opening Syria’s economy to foreign capital. In order to accomplish that, he needed to sideline his father’s old guard and consolidate his power. He did, the two authors write, but by doing so he weakened the régime and its connections to its base. He also altered the régime’s social base, basing his rule on technocrats and businessmen who supported his economic reforms and concomitant disciplining of the working class. Syria’s public sector was run down, social services reduced, an already weak labor law further weakened and taxation became regressive, enabling new private banks and businesses to reap big incomes.
Obviously, there are plenty of reasons to be wary of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham takeover and skeptical of its initial claims of non-sectarianism. Some level of interference by the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies can’t be ruled out, given both the long history of U.S. imperialism around the world and that it has little or no hesitation in aligning with Islamic fundamentalists when convenient; we need only think of the U.S. (during the Carter administration) arming the Islamic militants aroused by the Afghan government allowing women freedom to be educated. Those militants would go on to found al-Qaeda and the Taliban and beget the Islamic State. Nonetheless, that history does not negate that Syrians are as capable of understanding their own reality as anybody else and have good reason to celebrate the fall of the Assad régime no matter whether some Leftists, secure in their cocoons, approve.
One of the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States has allowed an decades-long ethnic cleansing to morph into a genocide, a horror that could be stopped with one phone call; has escalated the drilling of oil and gas despite the existential threat of global warming; forced railroad workers to swallow a bad contract by breaking their strike; and spent his Senate career as an errand boy for banks. And that’s the lesser evil!
Joe Biden really is the lesser evil in this dismal race for the White House, and that such an office holder is easily not the worst candidate is surely sufficient to illustrate the decline of the world’s still extraordinarily dangerous superpower. Out of more than 300 million people, this is the best the country can do? Given the quite understandable reluctance (to put it mildly) for the types of folks who are reading these words to contemplate voting either for President Biden or Donald Trump, what do we do when the lesser evil is so evil that he has the sobriquet “Genocide” attached to his name?
At the top of the list is recognizing the limitations of voting and concentrating on organizing. There is no vote that is going to fix a hopelessly archaic voting system, a system that simply reflects the state of U.S. politics. The Democratic Party is not going to save us, no matter how fervently liberals wish to believe. Even if President Biden could somehow be magically replaced by a true progressive dedicated to putting an end to corporate control of U.S. society and all the many social, political and environmental ills that flow from that, not much would change. One person can’t be a savior and if one person could at least do something tangible to ameliorate our conditions, the Democratic Party apparatus itself would stop it. Remember the 2016 campaign — the mere presence of Bernie Sanders and his social democratic prescriptions that posed no threat to capitalism as it is practiced in the United States sent Democratic leaders into fits of frothing panic as they did everything they could to tip the scales in favor of their corporate candidate despite that candidate’s unpopularity. That candidate, Hillary Clinton, Wall Street’s choice, even intimated that she might prefer Trump in the White House than Senator Sanders.
But simply waiving off the Democrats as a party of capitalists (although true) doesn’t explain anything. We need to be more concrete. Beyond the obvious observation (again, quite true) that money talks and those with a lot of money get to do the talking, why is the Biden campaign — and Democratic Party political office candidates in general — unable to conceive of any campaign strategy other than chasing dissident Republicans and those centrists not already committed to the party? Why are even the modest goals of their own liberal base too “radical” for them? Three factors immediately come to mind: 1) A fear of the party’s progressive wing and even more those to the left of the party; 2) a lack of imagination due to being imprisoned by ideology; and 3) the internal logic of a winner-take-all political system designed by 18th century aristocrats to keep themselves in power.
We’ve been here before: Protesting the Democratic National Convention in 2012 (photo by Debra Sweet)
Let’s take them in turn, starting with the first item. Is there any party on Earth that is more dedicated to “standing up to its base”? Is there any other party that even contemplates doing that? The Republican Party, to seek the nearest counter-example, panders to its base at all times and has even become frightened of its own base, thus the pathetic groveling at the feet of Trump that has become a standard operating procedure. Independent thinking? Even setting aside that independent thinking is verboten in conservative circles, doing so would draw the wrath of Trump or his followers. If you don’t believe that lockstep “thinking” is the default in right-wing milieus, ask yourself why talk radio skews so heavily to the hard right. Talk radio is about an authority who tells you what to think; recall the sad spectacle of Rush Limbaugh followers who called themselves “ditto heads” because agreeing with Limbaugh’s ignorant bloviating was the only permissible response by his reality-challenged fans.
And so it is now, with an ignorant barstool ranter, a total narcissist who sees other human beings as only tools for his service, a charlatan whose goal is to be a fascist dictator (and doesn’t bother to hide that), whose every mangled word, no matter how incoherent or free of reality, is received as a message from Olympus by his fans. The steady stream of reports that make their way into the news media noting that many Republican members of Congress have a diametrically opposed opinion of the Orange One-Man Crime Wave than the unquestioning fealty they express in public demonstrate merely that, although showering corporate benefactors with largesse is the only conceivable outcome of political activity in their limited minds, lockstep echoing of whatever line the leader decrees and making sure to never say anything that would anger or confuse the base is what is expected.
Money is what matters, not voters
In contrast, Democrats have no trouble at all not simply “challenging” their base but regularly launching outright attacks on their base. Both of the first two items above come into play here. In large part Democratic officials’ disdain for their voters derives from their need to raise gigantic sums of money to run campaigns, money at such a scale that it can only be raised by begging the wealthiest capitalists and the biggest corporations. Passing legislation that the party’s base would actually like to see, however tepid and failing to get at root causes, would anger their corporate benefactors. That much is obvious and as the piles of money poured into congressional and presidential campaigns reaches absurd heights, Democratic needs to placate their donors’ wishes only grows more acute.
That money talks, however, isn’t the full picture. The surrender of Democrats to neoliberal austerity, corporate control of the levers of political power and the endless erosion of working peoples’ ability to defend themselves and our working conditions, can’t be grasped without understanding the intellectual dead end of liberalism. (To be fair, this is hardly unique to U.S. Democrats; Canadian Liberals, British Labourites and European social democrats all travel the same road.) In parallel with European social democracy, North American liberalism is trapped by a fervent desire to stabilize an unstable capitalist system. The political and intellectual leaders of liberalism believe they can discover the magic reforms that will make it all work again. They do have criticisms, even if they are afraid of saying them too loud, but are hamstrung by their belief in the capitalist system, which means, today, a belief in neoliberalism and austerity, no matter what nice speeches they may make.
Those who are conflicted between their belief in something and their acknowledgment that the something needs reform, and are unable to articulate a reform, won’t and can’t stand for anything concrete, and ultimately will capitulate. When that something can’t be fundamentally changed through reforms, what reforms are made are ultimately taken back, and society’s dominant ideas are of those who can promote the hardest line thanks to the power their wealth gives them, it is no surprise that the so-called reformers are unable to articulate any alternative. With no clear ideas to fall back on, they meekly bleat “me, too” when the world’s industrialists and financiers, acting through their corporations, think tanks and the “market,” pronounce their verdict on what is to be done. As always, the capitalist “market” is nothing more than the aggregate interests of the biggest industrialists and financiers.
Cherry Blossoms in Washington during March (photo by Sarah H.)
There is nowhere for Democrats to go other than in circles, hoping fruitlessly that some tepid reform that does nothing other than tweak a system that works against the overwhelming majority will be enough to induce another round of votes for them while not angering their corporate benefactors. The party has descended from the “graveyard of social movements” to more actively opposing movements rather than merely coopting them. Lesser evilism tends to head in a single direction. And what of the third factor from above, the internal logic of a winner-take-all political system? Simply put, a system as closed as that of the U.S. has no room for more than two parties.
The reason for such a constricted choice in the U.S. does not lie in its constitution (which makes no mention of parties), nor even in the iron-gripped dominance of its large corporations (although the Republican/Democratic split tends to replicate the industrialist/financier rivalry among capitalists). Unlike parliamentary systems that use either proportional representation to better reflect the spectrum of political opinion or use multiple-seat districts where more than one party can be seated, a legislature based on districts each with one representative is a closed system. (This includes the U.S. Senate, which, because of its staggered terms, is effectively a single-seat system in which the district is an entire state.) That these districts are heavily gerrymandered does exacerbate this closed system, but is more a symptom than a cause. When there are two entrenched parties contesting for a single seat, there is no space for a third party to emerge. The two parties are necessarily unwieldy coalitions; they must be so because they will have to contain room for people and ideas across long portions of the political spectrum. (That does not mean that all factions’ desires are incorporated into the party’s positions or are even heard).
Heads, corporate power wins; tails, you lose
Voting for a party or an individual becomes a sterile exercise in ensuring the other side doesn’t win. From the point of view of the candidates and parties, the safest strategy is one of peeling away voters from the only other viable candidate, thereby encouraging platforms to be close to that of the other viable candidate, promoting a tendency to lessen differences between the two dominant parties. If the more extreme party moves further right, this tendency means that the relatively more moderate party will also move right, keeping the gap as small as reasonably possible.
With little to distinguish the two parties, the importance of personality becomes more important, further blurring political ideas, and yet third choices are excluded because of the factors that continue to compel a vote for one of the two major-party candidates. In turn, such a system sends people to representative bodies on the basis of their personalities, encouraging those personalities to grandstand and act in an egocentric manner once they are seated. Yet even with the grandstanding, the unavoidable need to beg for dollars to be a viable candidate means keeping corporate benefactors happy. All the more do party leaders do what they can to see to it that only those already disposed to fulfill corporate wish lists get to be candidates. And in an era where wealthy industrialists and financiers are more frequently running for office themselves rather than backing someone to do their bidding, they naturally seek office through one of the two dominant parties, thereby transmitting corporate ideology back into them, while also bolstering them by linking their personal “credibility” to the parties.
The two parties do compete fiercely to win elections — they represent different groupings within the capitalist class who have a great deal of money at stake. This is a closed competition, however: They act as a cartel to keep corporate money rolling in and other parties out. Although real choice is blocked, the illusion of competition is maintained and there is enough room to allow safety valves to work when needed, such as the removal from office of an unpopular office-holder. All this makes for a remarkably stable system: One U.S. government has fallen in 230 years and on that one occasion, Richard Nixon’s vice president was seamlessly sworn in as president.
So is there any point to voting? That ultimately is a personal decision. But why not vote? It is what else we do that matters. If you spend one hour on one day a year voting and spend the rest of your year organizing, agitating and doing what you can to bring about a better world, then you have allocated your time well. That is true whether you vote for socialist or Green candidates, or whether you vote for Democrats as the lesser evil out of strategic reasons because getting a Democrat in office provides more maneuvering room for activist work than when a Republican is in office. We should be intellectually honest enough to recognize this; acknowledging that a Republican administration is worse than a Democratic one while having no illusions about Democrats should be no cause for condemnation as long as we remember that a lesser evil is still evil and social movements in the street, linking causes and aligning with people who don’t look like us or live where we do, is the only route to a better world. (I write this as someone who votes for socialists and Greens but I decline to condemn or mock others who vote otherwise for strategic reasons.)
Bring into being a better world — whether we choose to call that better world socialism or economic democracy — means putting an end to the capitalist economic system before capitalism puts an end to Earth’s ability to remain a fully habitable biosphere and completes the job of immiserating the world’s working people, the overwhelming majority of humanity. That will never be done in a voting booth. History could not be clearer on this. The hard work of organizing and building movements is the only thing that has ever made the world better and is the only thing that ever will make the world better. It will be a happy day when we can vote as we wish by voting for what we want. For now, voting for a greater evil or a somewhat lesser evil is what we are presented with, and although not voting for a lesser evil is understandable, sometimes a lesser evil means a difference between life and death; the women who will die because they can’t get an abortion and their families would surely see a difference. We ought to be able to tell the difference between a bourgeois formal democracy and the threat of outright fascism.
Even with possessing that basic knowledge, better we oppose such a miserable choice with whatever means we have at our disposal rather than offering “more revolutionary than thou” platitudes.
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Systemic Disorder 
