*The Great Fear in the face of a Historic Opportunity* The 2024 elections are another missed opportunity for the left in the United States
Anthony Boynton *Part 1* Every day we receive new confirmation that the two party political regime of US imperialism is crumbling. Donald Trump, his minions, their Project 2025 and their Supreme Court herald the end of times, and this causes most progressives and leftists in the USA to tremble in fear. If this regime crashes, a MAGA authoritarian regime , and even worse will surely follow. Oh, thank God! Or at least thank Joe Biden! We now have a potential savior for the wonderful two party system: Kamala Harris, the great protector of democracy and imperialism. Harris has done what Biden and Bernie Sanders could not do: she has rallied the Democrats, breathed new life into the crestfallen and raised the dead Democratic Party from the grave it was marching into. Instead, it is now marching onward towards victory in November. Nevertheless, Harris cannot heal the ruptured political system. It is on its last legs and will be replaced. There are two candidates waiting in the wings: an authoritarian one party system – of either the Democratic or the Republican Party - or a crisis ridden multiparty system. Neither of these will be able to solve the deeper problems of capitalist society so they will only be way stations to even greater crises. What happens as this unfolds will determine the future, and so far, most of the left in the United States is mostly acting out of fear rather than recognizing the historic opportunity that is presented in this crisis. *Why not dump lesser-evilism?* ** In moral terms, lesser-evilism means supporting evil. To get around this uncomfortable truth, DSA and others who support the Democratic Party talk about the catastrophic consequences of a Trump presidency, just as their grandparents talked about the catastrophic consequences of a Goldwater or Nixon victory. In 1964, the Students for a Democratic Society supported Lyndon Baines Johnson for President. Johnson’s slogan was “All of the way with LBJ”. The SDS came up with the even more memorable, “Half of the way with LBJ.” They meant they supported Johnson’s domestic agenda and opposed his immoral, barbaric, colonial war against Vietnam. Following LBJ’s election, the antiwar movement became massive, SDS splintered, and a left third party movement rose that resulted in the Peace and Freedom Party. “Half of the way with LBJ” was morally bankrupt. Today, support for Kamala Harris is just as morally bankrupt. What the left in the United States needs, more than anything else, is to take a firm and morally principled stand on the side of the working class and oppressed everywhere. If we are to become the leadership of millions of people, if we are going to unite all of the struggles of the oppressed, they must understand that we are different from the cynical politics of the ruling class, that we are not bartering the interests of one group to get something for another group, that we are not involved in politics just to make an organization bigger, or to get this or that individual elected to public office. The vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people around the world who are oppressed and exploited by capitalism have not read Marx, Mao or Martin Luther, but they have a keen sense of whose side are you on. Most people in struggle are fighting for life and death issues, and they see things in times of morality. Today, that means we must be unequivocally on the side of Ukraine, and unequivocally on the side of Palestine. These are the Vietnam Wars of our time. A working class party, independent of the Democrats and committed on principle to the struggles of the exploited and oppressed could offer something the Democrats cannot: using elections to boost the struggle in the streets rather than to demobilize them. The Political Regime of the United States The USA’s political regime, the institutional form of its state, was the result of three great events in human history: the Glorious Revolution of England in 1688, the American Revolution in 1776, and the American Civil War in the 1860’s. The US Constitution is a distillation of the first two events. The United States scrapped the established church and substituted an elected President for a hereditary monarch and an indirectly elected Senate for the House of Lords. It changed the name of the House of Commons to the House of Representatives, and kept English Common Law and the colonial court system more or less intact. It is well known that the “Founding Fathers”, including those from northern states, were patriarchal slave owners, buyers, and sellers: 34 of the 47 founding fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. With malice aforethought, they mostly or completely excluded five groups from democratic rights and participation in the state: indigenous people, enslaved people, all women, all children, and white men without property. These exclusions were essential to the new state and were an extension of those of the mother country. [1] ( #_ftn1 ) These exclusions were “natural” to the founding fathers who based their political, social and economic power on the principle of divide and rule. First, keep women divided from each other through the boundaries of patriarchal nuclear families; second keep the indigenous polities divided and fighting among themselves through treaties, war, and commerce; third, keep the enslaved divided from the indigenous polities; fourth keep the white “rabble” divided from the enslaved and the indigenous. The famous Constitutional “balance of powers” between the states and the Federal government, and among and within the three branches of government, was predicated on these principles of divide and conquer and political exclusions and on the peculiar social regime which had emerged in Great Britain’s North American colonies. Their corollary was an unwritten social contract established in the 17 th century that promised “free” white men a share of the land expropriated from Native Americans in return for service in the colonial, later state, militias which were the main armed forces fighting the permanent military offense against Native America. The ability to mobilize the common citizenry for war is at the heart of all bourgeois politics. Modern warfare based on masses of rifle bearing foot soldiers, even when the armies have drones that use AI, is the raison d’etre of what is called “bourgeois democracy”. One unintended consequence that the founding fathers feared, but failed to prevent, was the rise of a system of political parties. Such a system emerged practically before the ink was dry on the Constitution, but the first struggles for democratic and social rights that developed after the War of 1812 produced the early “mass” political parties. In order to promote settler occupation of land west of the Appalachians, the right to vote was extended to propertyless white men during the 1820's. So-called “Jacksonian Democracy”, the very unstable first attempt at a two-party system, was simply an extension of the white patriarchal system, but it nevertheless presaged additional struggles to expand the franchise in ways that challenged the whole system. The original Jacksonian system, founded by Democrats Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, collapsed in the Civil War. It was restored as today’s two party system in the compromise of 1877. Many people call the American Civil War the Second American Revolution because it destroyed the system of slavery. Many of these same people say that it was an unfinished revolution because it failed to destroy the system of racism and apartheid which was the framework of slavery in the United States. The retrenchment of racism and apartheid was done largely through the imposition of the modern two party political system of the Democrats and Republicans in the unwritten compromise of 1877 which ended reconstruction and instituted the rule of Jim Crow. Railroads and other large employers had reacted to the great economic crisis that began in 1873 with layoffs and wage cuts which in turn produced a wave of strikes. This especially alarmed the railroad corporations which were the backbone of the Republican party. Most alarming for them was the support the strikes received from communities, local sheriffs, and state militias. By November 1876, they were planning new rounds of wage cuts and needed to rely on the Federal government to suppress the response of the working class. Southern white Democratic Party vigilantes under names like the Redeemers, Red Shirts and the White League took advantage of the distress of the northern capitalists to overturn reconstruction in the South. They used widespread terror first in the 1874 Congressional elections and then in 1876 Presidential election to suppress the votes of black freedmen in southern states. They first drove black Republicans out of local government offices and Congress, and then tilted the 1876 presidential elections towards Tilden, the Democratic Party candidate. With the Electoral College unable to come a decision, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. This later became the model for Trump’s attempted coup in 2020, a model that is likely to be used again this year. The compromise of 1877 ended the political crisis by terminating reconstruction and restoring the system of apartheid in the south, minus legal chattel slavery, in return for allowing the Republican candidate (a guy named Rutherford B. Hayes) to occupy the White House. When the Great Railroad strike of 1877 shut down most of the country’s rail system, it had overwhelming support of other workers, and led to a general strike in St. Louis, Missouri. Hayes, predictably and reliably, called out the army to break the strike. The two parties had worked together to restore stability and together beat back the rise of the freed formerly enslaved black population of the south and of the mostly white working class in the north and the west. In other words, the current two party system was established through Jim Crow in the South and the suppression of unions in the north and the West. From the beginning it precluded the very notion of the formation of any sort of mass working class party. The struggle for the right to vote Nevertheless, the exclusionary bases of the political regime have been steadily undermined by struggles for democratic and social rights. Although “Jacksonian Democracy” was an extension of the white patriarchal system, it presaged additional struggles to expand the franchise in ways that have challenged the whole system. Women finally gained the right to vote nationwide with the passage of the 19 th Amendment after the First World War and following a struggle that had begun before the American Revolution. Black voting rights, guaranteed in word by the Reconstruction era 13 th , 14 th , and 15 th Amendments to the Constitution, were not realized until the ghetto rebellions of the 1960’s caused LBJ and the Democratic Party Congress to pass the civil rights laws of the 1960s. In fact, they have since been continuously attacked by the Republican Party’s lawyers, politicians and vigilantes. Much of Jim Crow was destroyed by the great mass movement of the 1960’s, but one of most essential features of the country’s political regime– the two party political system - survived almost unscathed. Still, around 45 million people are excluded partially or completely from voting in the United States: approximately 6 million Americans with felony and misdemeanor convictions; the 3.5 million US citizens who live in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and other US colonies, the approximately 23 million documented and undocumented immigrants in the country, and the politically active population of the country under the age of 18 years. [2] ( #_ftn2 ) Hard won voting rights gains have deep social consequences. Most importantly they have contributed to the breakdown of racial and gender barriers within the working class. In other words, they have deeply undermined two of the original premises of the political regime of the United States of America: divide and rule, and political exclusion of the oppressed. The extra-constitutional edifice The extra-constitutional addition of the two party system to the political edifice of the United States functions through state and federal law, the rules of the two parties themselves, and de facto agreements within the ruling class to deny real ballot access to any other political party. Both parties are cross-class alliances which have changed over time. Sectors of the working class and petty bourgeoisie, the masses of voters, are tied to coalitions of fractions of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois coalitions set the policies and the rules of the game, and the working class and petty bourgeois voters are then magnanimously allowed a choice of poisons. This truncated Republic is then called a democracy! The system prevents the rise of other parties through five basic mechanisms: an expensive and Byzantine bureaucracy that would-be parties must successfully thread their ways through to gain ballot status and to maintain ballot status; a winner take all system based on geographic districts and states; a mass media monopoly by the bourgeoisie; simple repression; and cooptation. All five mechanisms have been honed over time, often in combination. The Populist Party was coopted in the North but repressed in the South. The Socialist Party of the early 20 th century was repressed and divided. The radical wing spent the 1920’s in semi-legality as the Communist Party, while the pro-war wing was slowly absorbed into the two parties. The mass movements of the 1960’s were met with repression, while the Democratic Party worked overtime to woo as many of its leaders as possible into its ranks. Nevertheless, the system failed once when the ante-bellum two party system collapsed leading to the Civil War, and it has been shaken several times since. It has been slowly unraveling as the result of reforms won by the civil war and more recent mass movements. Now, reactionary regime change to reverse those gains is underway, but at the same time, a historic opportunity for a different kind of regime is also growing. [1] ( #_ftnref1 ). Capitalism had not yet fully emerged from the detritus of European feudalism during the first centuries of the British invasion of North America. With the emerging Atlantic commercial and slave economy, Native Americans were slated for dispossession, slavery, ethnic cleansing, and genocide which meant exclusion from any kinds of rights in the new state. The others excluded from political rights were the exploited: women and children exploited at home, slaves, apprentices and indentured servants, and propertyless male workers. Instead of a system based on wage labor, the social regime of the British colonies was based on patriarchal family labor and slavery, with relatively insignificant adjuncts of other kinds of unfree labor and “free” wage labor. [2] ( #_ftnref2 ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections ) https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/101-child-population-by-age-group#detailed/1/any/false/2545,1095,2048,574,1729,37,871,870,573,869/62,63,64,6,4693/419,420 https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/ https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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