American election
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Actually some commentators say it was the pandemic that won it…with Trump’s failure to deal with the pandemic, had not the pandemic arisen, Trump would have campaigned on his economic achievements and in a poll (if we still trust those) more American claim to be better off now than under Obama … and that is with the effects of the pandemic.
Recall also that part of the Biden campaign strategy was to keep him away from the media and let Trump shoot himself in the foot.
Consideration of Ways of Voting for Socialism
The Tasmanian government held a referendum in 1981 on the damming of a wilderness river that would result in submerging a pristine unexplored natural environment and the obliteration of neolithic cultural caverns.
The government gave electors the meager choice between two places to dam the river.
Now 55% of electors voted formally. But 45% of electors voted informally by writing “NO DAMS” across their referendum papers. The 45% informal voters succeeded in stopping the dams.
* * *
It may still be Australian federal law that you can “send the government a written message” in the margin of your ballot paper without invalidating a formally filled out vote.
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When our companion World Socialist Party — the Socialist Party of Australia — stood for the seat of Melbourne Ports in the 1934 federal election, our candidate urged “people not to vote for him unless they understood socialism and its implications”.
He got 10% of the vote against a formidable campaigner Jack Holloway, head of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, who had actually defeated the Prime Minister of Australia, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, at the previous election.
And during the election the “communist comrades” called us “social fascists”.
* * *
For electorates where the Socialist Party of Australia had no candidate ‘we urged socialists to write “SOCIALISM” across their ballot paper’.
Here is some comment about the alternative media’s complicity in muting the Hunter Biden story and the loss of Glen Greenwald to The Intercept an outlet he co-founded in 2014 with the stated mission of holding power to account with the power of unrestricted journalism..
Greenwald’s Intercept Resignation Exposes The Rot In All Mass Media
When our companion World Socialist Party — the Socialist Party of Australia — stood for the seat of Melbourne Ports in the 1934 federal election, our candidate urged “people not to vote for him unless they understood socialism and its implications”.
He got 10% of the vote against a formidable campaigner Jack Holloway, head of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, who had actually defeated the Prime Minister of Australia, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, at the previous election.
And during the election the “communist comrades” called us “social fascists”.
Bit like somebody here calling us “Trumpers” because we refuse to vote for the arch capitalist Biden (along with Trump)
This article is interesting for exposing the very flawed system of “democracy” in the US
More on the choice between cholera and the plague.
It’s come up twice in France this century in the second round of presidential elections in France. The context of the first is well-explained in this article:
”When Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Party candidate for the 2002 French Presidential election, unexpectedly finished in third place in the initial round of voting – behind the Gaullist conservative Jacques Chirac (first) and the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen (second) – progressive and leftwing voters in France were presented with a stark choice: should they support Chirac in the run-off or should they abstain from voting at all and risk a (still unlikely) victory for the Front National. Characterising the decision as a choice between ‘cholera and plague’, most progressives took the first option, often demonstrating their unhappiness by turning up to vote in rubber gloves and nose-pegs. One group of activists even set up a symbolic shower in a Paris square and invited Chirac voters to pass through it after voting.”
If Chomsky and the others who urged a vote for cholera had done this when they went to vote for it, then we might have a little more respect for them. But they didn’t out of fear that some people might not want cholera or were indifferent between dying of that and dying of the plague. So they played down the effects of cholera and exaggerated the effects of the plague (likely fascist coup).
Here’s a newspaper headline from 2002. The issue came up again in 2017 when the run-off was between the current French President Macron and Le Pen’s daughter Marine.
Statement from Maoists for Biden on his electoral victory that looks to have come from the planet Zanussi.
AOC positions herself as the “loyal opposition” to Biden
As DJP pointed out earlier: If you think something is a “lesser evil” then you must also think it is an “evil” and presumably you won’t be surprised when it does “evil” things.
Lesser-evilism reduces political action not even to trying to improve things gradually but merely to trying to stop them getting as worse as they might be. It’s the politics of defeatism.
As the link I gave above puts it:
”the lesser evil calculus – the proposition that one must choose the candidate most likely to win who will do the least harm – continues to exert its pull. ‘Vote for me,’ says the ‘cholera’ candidate, ‘not because I have good policies but because I’m not the other guy, and the other guy, well, just look at him! You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, now would you?’ The pitch is as old as politics itself and a constant source of frustration to those who see the need for more than just piecemeal change. It is an appeal to fear, and a brake on real progress. ‘Don’t waste your vote on a principle,’ say the cholerites; ‘Don’t risk a bout of plague.’
There are a number of arguments that can and should be made against this kind of political blackmail. For one thing it leads to apathy and resignation; the lesser evil is still evil, after all, so in agreeing to support the cholera candidate one is sanctioning a view of politics as an essentially tragic and futile process – a deeply conservative sentiment.”
twc,
‘It may still be Australian federal law that you can “send the government a written message” in the margin of your ballot paper without invalidating a formally filled out vote. ‘
Good to know that the socialist tradition here is operational… possible to write a message in the margins!
Wish a 21 C Melbourne Port campaign could glisten into light before its centenary of that event.
Hopefully the ‘Trumper’ slurs should have faded into a distant feeble echo.
Some Democrats don’t agree with AOC and her analysis. According to today’s Times of London, the party’s chief whip in the House of Representatives, Jaime Harrison, told the Andrew Marr show on the BBC yesterday:
“The issue of socialism and ‘defund the police’ was a big problem for Joe Biden in this election.”
Representative Abigail Spanberger is quoted as saying:
“We need not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”
I think we can agree with her on that. We don’t want members of the Democratic Party claiming to be socialists when they are only leftwing reformists.
Speaking of Glenn Greenwald, here is his piece (on his new site, since he has quit Intercept) from Nov 8 titled ‘No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump.’: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/no-matter-the-liberal-metric-chosen . It denounces the thesis of Trump as Unprecedented Evil, as Neo-Nazi Tyrant and other nonsense eternally repeated in the hysterical liberal/leftist echo-chamber.We have to be careful of those who wish to smear the left of the Democratic Party such as Spanberger who is, btw, ex-CIA.
It is convenient scapegoat for the Establishment Democrats to blame its Justice Democrats for what was a failure to achieve a landslide with their corporate candidate. The ‘blue wave’ did not materialise. Last time they put the blame on Sanders. And i am not all surprised that the MSM media are echoing Spanberger and Clyburn statements far and wide.
AOC defended herself on CNN
“..not a single member of Congress that I’m aware of campaigned on socialism or defunding the police in this general election,”
On Twitter she said “When it comes to ‘Defund’ & ‘Socialism’ attacks, people need to realize these are racial resentment attacks. You’re not gonna make that go away. You can make it less effective.”
It is exactly as we all expected and predicted to happen. The Democratic Party Left are no longer required – Republicans are – so AOC are being attacked.
But if i recall a few years ago we on this forum were praising Sanders for bringing back the word socialism into the America’s popular politcal discourse
"Progressives have assets to offer the Party that the Party has not yet fully leaned into…Every single swing seat member that co-sponsored Medicare for All won their re-election, and so the conversation is a little bit deeper than saying anything progressive is toxic." –@AOC pic.twitter.com/nGxfVpGWYi
— Justice Democrats (@justicedems) November 8, 2020
I don’t think we were “praising” Sanders for that, were we, or even attributing it to him? We were just noting that the word “socialism” was ceasing to be a dirty word in the US, especially amongst young people, and that this gave us a foot in the door to put over our case and what we mean by socialism.
We never accepted that Sanders was actually a socialist. He only claims to stand for what many Americans think exists in Sweden.
I know you think that if Sanders had won the Democratic Party nomination he’d now be the President-elect. But I don’t think the popularity of the word “socialism” has spread to the extent that someone calling themselves a socialist could be elected President!
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