Disaffected Groups: "We need to unite!"
Sympathizer: “What shall we unite around?”
Democratic Party organizer: “Our differences!”
“I kind of wanted everyone to lose.”
-------Krystal Ball “Rising,” on the 2020 elections
The
electoral verdict is in and the American people have rejected media drama in
favor of thinking for themselves. They dislike Donald Trump’s governance, but
are far from pronouncing him an Adolf Hitler clone, having awarded him some
nine million more votes than last time around, to the horror of “woke”
partisans, who are far more disliked than he is.
Supposedly
a vicious misogynist, Trump’s share of the white woman vote, already a
majority, went up. Widely referred to
as the most racist president ever, his vote among blacks and Latinos also
increased. Allegedly popular only with “white nationalist” voters eager to
usher in fascism, his share of white, male, non-college educated voters went down. Either he or they are not as
fascist as we’ve been led to believe.
To
repeat: after four years of saturation media coverage denouncing Trump as
racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, neo-Nazi scum, more Hispanics, Blacks, and
white women voted for him than did four years ago, while his support among the
“fascist” demographic declined.
Meanwhile,
the hoped for blue wave that would soundly repudiate President Satan once and
for all was nowhere to be seen. The Democrats lost House seats, failed to
capture the Senate, and flipped not a single state legislature.
Predictably, the corporate Democrats blame the “radical” New Deal base of their
party for this dismal performance, ignoring mounting evidence that the
programmatic preferences of that base are, in fact, quite popular with the
American people, sometimes even with Trump supporters. For example, every swing
state House Democrat that supported Medicare For All won while
stand-for-nothing “moderates” lost. More striking, “conservative” Florida
passed a $15 an hour minimum wage by 60%, and also voted for Trump. Similarly,
recreational marijuana won in Montana and South Dakota, and medical marijuana
in Mississippi, all states that went for Trump by double digits. Other
“radical” proposals, like student debt forgiveness, paid family leave, a Green
New Deal (with federal jobs guarantee), and the breaking up of “too big to fail”
banks, continue to win strong public support. Perhaps most surprising is a Business News report from this past
January headlined “Majority of Americans favor wealth tax on very rich,” a
position that “free trade” enthusiasts regard as the very gateway to Bolshevik
slavery.
In
short, the American people are not ideological fanatics of either the left or
the right, but practical-minded folks seeking a better life by embracing social
and democratic norms widely accepted throughout the developed world. But how
can corporate America enhance its power and profit out of a “narrative” like
that? It can’t, so we hear instead that a deeply-divided country is headed for
civil war over cultural issues. If that turns out to be the case, both sides
will have succumbed to vulgar sectarian propaganda.
Chief
among the ideological arsonists pushing us in that direction, of course, are Democratic
Party elites, currently celebrating Joe Biden’s victory at the polls. But
exactly what does this “triumph” prove? No more than that Democrats can win by
a narrow margin against a reality T.V. buffoon who won the presidency with a 31
percent approval rating in 2016, and then convinced enough people that they
were “better off” during a raging pandemic and economic collapse than they were
under Biden-Obama to nearly do it again. Just 150,000 votes in four states
would have delivered re-election to Trump.
Is this really something to celebrate?
Recall
that this is Biden's fourth time running
for the presidency, and each previous attempt showed his public support
dropping commensurate with the amount of media exposure he got. In other words,
the more people got to know him, the less they wanted anything to do with him.
The only reason it turned out differently this time was coronavirus and Trump,
a deadly combination that made the doddering imperialist Biden appear
marginally less disastrous than reactionary nationalist Trump.
But
nobody really wants Biden, since he
had no detectable campaign in the primaries, and barely any in the general
election. In lieu of issues, he piously opposed an imaginary American Nazism
while making vague references to restoring the nation’s “soul.” But he
militantly opposed material aid to Americans trying to survive medical and
economic catastrophe, especially single-payer medical care and universal basic
income, both achieved elsewhere but not in the “greatest, powerful, decent
nation in the world,” as Biden
refers to the United States. If it hadn’t been for the black vote in South
Carolina and Barack Obama’s successful effort to organize a united front of
neo-liberal suck-ups behind him, Biden would have remained mired in the
obscurity that characterized his other three campaigns for the presidency.
So
just exactly who is this masked man? To put it simply, he’s a career Reagan
Democrat with pugnacious contempt for virtually every key Democratic
constituency. Blacks are either “superpredators” (HRC coined the term, but
Biden concurs) or spongers on the look-out for “free stuff.” Hispanics are
unworthy of attention, unless they express impatience with mass deportation (far
higher under Obama-Biden than under Trump) in which case they are
contemptuously urged to “vote for Trump.” Young people, their lives torpedoed
by Biden and the “free traders” years ago, are crybabies who shirk the
responsibility to miraculously rise from the economic rubble. College males are
instinctive rapists deservingly subjected to Star Chamber proceedings that
destroy their lives and careers before they start. Women exist to be sniffed
and fondled, except for gender ideologues, whose “diversity” dogmas are to be
exploited for political gain. Seniors struggling on fixed incomes with all the
afflictions of advanced age are balanced-budget obstructionists whom Biden must
keep in line by slashing their Social Security and Medicare.
While
thus releasing his bowels on the groups that make up the Democratic base, Biden
avidly courts the loyalty of a handful of Republicans in the suburbs that have
no ideological affinity with any of them. Look no further for reasons why he
nearly lost the election: the grim march of the coronavirus death toll was the
only thing he had going for him.
In
the face of all this, we are told, quite absurdly, that Joe Biden
“underperformed,” which is certainly one way to describe a campaign where the
candidate hibernates in his basement to hide an increasingly obvious inability
to utter a comprehensible sentence. But we could say with equal validity that
Biden and his addled brain over-performed,
thanks to an undisclosed pharmaceutical regimen and the weakness of his
political opponent, a loud-mouthed imbecile with a lousy record. Obviously, the
bar couldn’t have been lower for Biden. All he had to do to achieve the
much-desired repudiation of Trump was offer something useful to the American
people: Medicare For All, debt relief, a housing guarantee - anything. But he
couldn’t, not because he’s under-performing, but because he’s
overly-prostituted – to capital and the national security state.
And
who knows how long he can sustain the farce that he has what it takes to be an
effective president? Given his frequent lapses into gibberish and embarrassing
inability to identify his own whereabouts or what day of the week it might be,
it’s very likely he’ll fail to complete his term in office.
Which
brings us to Prom Queen Kamala Harris, a self-declared “top tier” candidate who
soared to 2% in the polls before dropping out of the race long in advance of
the primaries. Popular with the media, if not with anyone else, she brought melanin
and female genitalia to the Biden ticket, neither known to be an effective cure
for infectious disease or economic collapse, but nevertheless Biden
prerequisites for the vice-presidency.
Such
priorities are reflective of an already failed identity politics that seeks to
sever class loyalties with discrete market demographics around gender, race,
and ethnicity. The technique is to convert blacks, women, Latinos and other
constituency clienteles into professional grievance-mongers entitled to
symbolic redress, so as to avoid having to offer anything of political
substance to the oppressed majority of the population – subordinated order-takers
forced to labor for those who own.
Diverted
by this zero-sum competition of marginalized minorities seeking top victim
status, Democrats have come to be known (and increasingly despised) for their
wafer-thin multiculturalism and deep identity chauvinism, both oblivious to
contradiction.
Inordinate
attention is given to fighting “hate,” which is denounced and penalized with
ever greater zeal, making it increasingly difficult to separate the haters from
those who would see them properly punished. [New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, reporting on the
ground from Charlottesville: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right.
I saw club-wielding ‘Antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the
park.”]
In short, the more “hate” is
condemned, the more it flourishes, and the more that legal penalties are
applied to it, the less that real tolerance for others can actually exist.
Straight into the trash go mutual concern, shared purpose, compassion, and
understanding – the essence of a politics of justice – each deliberately amputated
from the body politic by ideological knife blades carving out turf for official
minorities.
New
gender identities are continually advanced, whose “cause” pushes into the
shadows the increasingly dire problems of an economic majority producing more
and more for less and less with no hope of relief. Economic exploitation is
forgotten as the aggrieved guardians of identity boundaries mobilize to police
attitudes rather than economic priorities. By now it is a familiar sight to see
billionaires awash in gluttonous excess compete to become the world’s first
trillionaire while far below them on the wealth pyramid ant-size “victims”
argue about pronoun use, safe spaces, and toilet access.
Somehow
such discussions have gotten the label “Marxist,” though there is nothing at
all Marxist about them. Marxism is a commentary about hierarchically ordered
classes in conflict over the production of goods and services necessary to
general survival, not a perpetual status squabble about whose intrinsic
qualities are most important. The central idea in Marxism was never that workers
should “hate” owners (or even that owners necessarily hate them), but that they should organize and overcome the hierarchical
structure of classes, so that wealth can be produced and distributed rationally
and democratically. The point was not to denounce individual capitalists for
embodying evil, but to note that their struggle to avoid bankruptcy required
that they embrace cutthroat competition to push down wages to starvation levels.
Whatever its flaws, Marxism was at least focused on the contradiction between
hierarchical economics and democratic politics, which continues to cause
serious and perhaps terminal problems to human society down to the present day.
But
for Democratic Party elites and other adherents of identarian politics this is
all quite irrelevant. For them, political conflict involves a moral crusade,
not a test of reasoning power and social organization. Thus, the reactionary
right must not be opposed by argument and evidence - a pointless strategy against
the evil partisans of hate - but by violence and censorship. The enemy must not
merely be defeated, but annihilated.
Obviously,
mutual respect based on common appreciation of the unique miracle each of us
actually is can have no place in our public discourse if these assumptions are
correct. Division of the spoils mediated by selfish competition between
“winners” and “losers” is all that there is. Little wonder that many Americans
have become so distrustful that they venture out in public only when fully
armed. Others consider it proof of great moral courage to break up a “hate”
speaking event or physically attack “the enemy” in the streets. It’s true that
the United States is flirting with fascism, but it’s anybody’s guess as to
which groups are the most “fascistic.” The totalitarian impulse runs along the
entire political spectrum.
For
what it’s worth, fascism historically involved a strong charismatic leader of a
disciplined, armed party, imposing unity and conformity on the basis of a clear
program commanding mass support. It is difficult to see how this applies to Donald
Trump, who has no discipline, is too lazy to adhere to doctrine (or even
understand it), and who sows chaos and division rather than unity and order. At
least as authoritarian as he is are his dogged opponents, who tried to
interfere with the electoral college to change the outcome of the 2016
elections, and later staged media show trials (Russiagate) and imposed
censorship in order to delegitimize his victory, which to this day they do not
accept. Ever since then free discussion has been increasingly hamstrung by tech
giant censorship and slimy red-baiting charges against all who criticize, plus
the traditional informal imposition of doctrinal unity on all key issues – the Middle
East, Russia, “dictators,” free trade, NATO, immigration, climate change, and
“diversity.”
All
of which points up the fact that our real dictator is the entertainment and information
industry, which holds nearly unlimited power without ever having to endure the
indignity of a democratic election.
Matt Taibbi, “Which is the Real
Working-Class Party Now?” November 6, 2020, www.substack.com.
On Latino support for Trump see Suzanne Gamboa and Carmen Sesin, “Trump’s gains
among Latino voters shouldn’t be a surprise. Here’s why.” NBC News Online,
November 5, 2020
Paul Blest,
Discourse Blog, quoted by David Doel on the Rational
National, November 8, 2020
