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*The 2016 Elections from Afar* The Republican debates remind me of food fights in the cafeteria of my junior high school, but, entertainment aside, this year’s elections have all the earmarks of an unprecedented political crisis in the United States. The results of the civil rights movement and the upheaval of the 1960’s are coming home to roost in a way that nobody anticipated. When John Kennedy cynically calculated that he could put his presidential bid over the top with black votes, he was right. But he must not have expected that he would be assassinated not so long after, or that the southern democratic Party would split, and end up in the Republican Party after a brief fling as an independent party. From the long view of history, the Republican party has been in terminal decline ever since the close of the western frontier of the United States in 1890. It was the party of the North that won the civil war: to be more accurate the party of the northern capitalists, small businessmen and farmers that won the civil war. Its electoral base was always the northern farmers and petty bourgeoisie. That base began to shrink as a percentage of the electorate as the great wave of immigrant workers that built the railroads and factories in the United States after the civil war. That base begin to shrink absolutely when the number of small farms began to decrease with the close of the frontier and the inevitable series of shake-outs and agricultural crisis that eventually created modern agro-business. On the other hand, the hybrid monster of the Democratic Party began to grow as soon as the immigrants became citizens and began to vote (and they began to vote even sooner in some places!) The new voters were not exactly fresh off the boat or fresh off the farm, but they were divided into dozens of nationalities and language groups. Against all odds they began to organize themselves, but by the First World War were still divided, mostly not organized into unions, and mostly dominated by the Democratic party’s big city political machines. Those machines tied the immigrant working class to the Jim Crow Democratic Party and the Ku Klux Klan of the south. The decline was masked temporarily by two events: the passage of the 19th Amendment to the constitution of the USA which gave women the right to vote, and the cold war. The first improbably helped the Republicans recover their electoral power when they opportunistically stole the platform of the temperance movement and advocated the insane social experiment of prohibition. Women’s enthusiasm for the Republicans wore off in a dozen years or so, no doubt because prohibition was such as disasters, but also because the Republicans were such a disaster in other ways and ended up being universally blamed for causing the great depression. FDR’s landslide victory in the 1932 elections showed the real shape of the American electorate. Whether or not the failure of the New Deal to overcome the agony of the great depression might have led to the demise of the northern Democratic Party and the formation of a mass working class party will never be known. Certainly the support Roosevelt received from the Communist Party and the Socialist Party helped prevent such a development. But what really saved the northern Democrats was the Second World War. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was ready to become the great patriotic savoir of the United States. Cold War anticommunism allowed the Republicans to once again portray themselves as patriots, even as the best patriots. The flirtation of the whole party with Nazism in the 1930’s, and the open relations of important parts of US business with the Nazi and Fascist regimes had badly damaged the GOP’s patriotic credentials during World War II. When they were able to nominate Dwight Eisenhower, the general who people credited with winning the war in Europe, as their presidential candidate in 1952, the Republicans were back in business. In 1960 the cold war still dominated the thinking and the politics of the United States. Kennedy’s cynical pragmatism fit right in. Eight years later, it led to the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon. By the time Nixon fell from power, the Southern Democrats had shifted almost entirely into the Republican Party. Still, this only bought the Republicans time because of the great change created in the social consciousness of the United States by the 1960’s cultural revolution. Racism was mortally wounded and beginning to die. The invention of the Moral Majority, an offshoot of the Southern Strategy by some Republican geniuses, was a sign that, at least in terms of practical electoral mathematics, the Republicans realized that the Southern Strategy was not going to cure their long term decline. Their voter base was still in decline because racism, like small family farms, was in decline. Now they invented a new political issue, abortion. The aim was to amplify the mass base of backward workers and petty bourgeois by adding religion to racism. The newly energized evangelical protestant churches and a sector of the Catholic church came on board the Republican ship. Loosely speaking, a lot of these people were what has been called “Reagan Democrats.” The third leg of the late 20th century Republican voter base was a natural: gun nuts. The NRA’s appeal to backwoods hunters, paranoid survivalists, and wannebe lynch mobs is undeniable. The three intertwined monstrosities: racists, crazy Christians, and gun nuts turned out to be a dying and difficult to control electorate. Barack Obama’s election, and the enthusiastic support he received from young people of all races was a sure sign that the race card was not likely to win any more national elections in the United States. The support of youth for Bernie Sanders this year is another. But, the hatred and anger that the three monsters are directing at the zookeepers of the Republican Party leadership by way of voting for Trump, Cruz and Carson, is a sure sign that the whole ship is breaking up on the rocks. Who will put the Republican party back together again after this fall? Will Ted Cruz shake hands with Donald Trump and make up? Not likely? Will Marco Rubio? A little more likely, but not very likely. Watching Trump treat Chris Christie like a trained monkey on stage must make the rest of the Republican politicos wretch with what’s in store for them if Trump becomes party leader. The Republican Party has no saviors in sight. Whether it will survive as a single organization is now in question. And this brings up the possibilities for the general election. What are the odds that Trump will win? Pretty close to zero IMHO. He has the support of 35% of the GOP, give or take a few acorns and almonds. The GOP has the support of maybe 35% of the whole electorate. In other words, Trump has the support of 10% of the electorate. Will the other Republicans campaign for him to win the general election? Not too many, and not with any enthusiasm. Will the people who voted for Cruz, Rubio and the rest vote for Trump in November? Not too many, and not with any enthusiasm. Will the Koch brothers pay for it? Who knows, but it probably doesn’t matter in this case anyway. If Trump wins the nomination, and he may not, Republican Senators may campaign against him. If he doesn’t win the nomination, will the people who voted for Trump vote for the liar Ted Cruz? Or the choke artist Marco Rubio? Not too many, and not with any enthusiasm. In other words, the Democrats will really have to fuck up in an unimaginable way for them to lose this one. So, let’s imagine Hillary wins in November, and the Democrats regain control of the Senate, and maybe even the House. And Hillary appoints Barack Obama to the Supreme Court. That would mean the Democrats could control all three branches of government. They would no longer be able to blame their failures to come through for the working class on the Republicans. And, also IMHO, the economy looks set to tank again sometime in the first or second quarter of 2017. What an opportunity for the rise of a new left in the USA. I think I will move back. Anthony _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
