The Dark Future of the USA
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With some relevance to Trump / ‘insurrection’ etc hysteria generated by liberals and leftists, a couple recent articles by Glenn Greenwald:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-histrionics-and-melodrama-around
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/senate-democrats-use-the-jim-crow
Democrats and Republican leaders have used the filibuster to impose their own racist and anti-workers rules all the time, the electoral college is also a vestige of the chattel slavery system and both have used it too. Those insurrectionists who were at the Capital did not have the power to overthrow the government of the USA and they did not have the support of the majority of the workers
With some relevance to Trump / ‘insurrection’
What’s with the reluctance to call the storming of the Capital with the intention of overturning an election an ‘insurrection’? Surely the likelihood of success is not a criterion of whether something is an ‘insurrection’ or not, but the nature of the actions themselves.
Interesting background facts are in this BBC series:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001324rIsn’t that begging the question when the issue is whether what happened that day was a planned insurrection or a riot that got out of hand ?
Maybe it’s partly semantics. Is there anything about an “insurrection” that means it has to be pre-planned? Why couldn’t we call a riot that got out of hand an insurrection?
My personal take is that an emotional crowd was incited by a demagogue into becoming a mob and when faced with under-manned and reluctant police (why is a question that remains to be answered), their security barriers relatively easy to overrun, it transformed into a riot. Shocked and surprised by how easy the occupation was accomplished, that had not a clue on what to do next, to the point of asking Capitol police for directions on where to go.
Insurrections and revolutions have, nevertheless, been stirred by lesser unplanned events.
The Trump movement is a nebulous and amorphous phenomenon.
Seeing we can reliably judge that pro-Trumpers is over 45%, have anybody wondered why the general strike has never been voiced much less advocated and exercised.
Is it reflective of the social strata who support him, self-employed, small business owners, evangelical Christian nationalists, predominantly non-working class despite his popularity with many blue-collared in the rust states?
Is it a sign of just how narrow his support really is? Unable to organise any mass industrial action, much less an armed mass revolt by the various collections of militia groups.
Regardless of sympathy within the military ranks, Trump has been unable to influence the higher echelons of the command structure to involve itself. He has had to rely on the paramilitary federal forces of ICE and Border Patrol, for example, in Portland and Seattle hotbeds of leftist activity.
But it is clear that the Democratic Party will lose 2022 mid-terms and both houses will return Republican majorities. Rather than now being stubborn obstructionists thwarting the Democrats (other than authorising increased defence budget), Republicans will then enact their own partisan policies and Biden will have to veto by executive directives many of them, acquiring among many Republicans all the signs of an autocratic despot. It will empower more right-wing subversives. Challenging and reinforcing the already lack of legitimacy Biden holds with the Right. Destabilise the future political scene and only a few extremists using terrorism could spark off, a constitutional crisis.
Anyways, mere speculation. A rather less generous analysis of the American public opinion is that it is apathetic and passive on both right and left. Too self-centred and consumerist oriented to care about politics. They sit on the fence on most occasions, isolationist in domestic and well as foreign policy, more excited by the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
I think that one of the most important lessons for ourselves as democrats, who wish to use democratic processes to use democratically organise a transformation of society, is that all of the nay sayers of the left, who have told us for decades that the democratic process would be over thrown are wrong.
The big lesson of the capitol building riots were that the protestors captured exactly that they captured the building. Watching the news feed from that event the thing that the protestors found was that they were overjoyed that they had captured the building, which was followed very quickly by puzzlement because they despite capturing the building, the (capitalist) democratic process continued. YOu could practically see the thoughts forming in their heads “well we’ve captured the building, what are we going to do now”
Another example of this was the election of the 1st Dail in 1919, the delegates didn’t recognise the Westminster Parliament, the assembly created their own assembly building, but they remained as being generally recognised as the legitimate democratically elected assembly.
A future Socialist majority might be barred from entering the halls of Westminster, but they will still retain the legitimacy of the elected delegates of a Socialist majority. The state exists because the vast majority believe in the legitimacy of the state, if a majority of those people consider the elected delegates to be the legitimate body that represents them, there is little that a recalcitrant minority can do about that.
Most of the rioters who took the capital building their minds is still in 1776. Some were talkings about making the American revolution but it was the bourgeois revolution of 1776, they are living in the past, their main objective was to take the building and some government officials by taking the building they were not overthrowing the government The USA is a federal republic and every state is like a republic, California by itself can survive as a separated nation without the federal government
We must pay attention to the civil right movement that is growing in the USA at the present time, the wspus should also pay attention to that movement instead of following conspiracist theories
There is going to be a rally on June 20 for the poor people’s campaign, and a movement for voting rights and civil rights, there is also another face in the American society
As we expected more revelations are being made public concerning the conspiracy sedition trial.
Oath Keepers stockpiled a cache of supplies and weapons in a hotel just outside of Washington, D.C., in preparation for the January 6 Capitol attack, federal prosecutors have found.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.1285411/gov.uscourts.azd.1285411.7.0.pdf
According to the prosecutors’ memo arguing for the pretrial detainment of Oath Keepers member Edward Vallejo, he and other members of the so-called “quick reaction force” (QRF), transported weapons, ammunition and enough essentials to last 30 days into a Comfort Inn in Arlington, Virginia.
Kelly Meggs, dropped off “at least three luggage carts’ worth of gun boxes, rifle cases, and suitcases filled with ammunition” at the hotel on January 5. A North Carolina team brought rifles, which they kept in their cars in the parking lot.
The fact that the circumstances of Jan 6 did not pan out as they hoped, does not mean there was no serious intent to escalate the situation through violence or the potential threat of violence.
Two books have appeared this month that are relevant to this discussion:
Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague, The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped it (NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022). Note that ‘the people who stopped it’ were Republicans who formally supported Trump but prioritized their constitutional obligations, those whom Trump loyalists call RINOs.
Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them (NY: Crown, 2022). She identifies the warning signs on the basis of international experience and applies them to the US.
I do not expect discontinuity in constitutional forms. There will still be elections but they will be held in conditions that ensure Trump can ‘find’ the votes he needs to win (like Putin in Russia). Vigilante terror will neutralize ‘enemies of the people.’ I agree with ALB that this is all very bad for the competitive viability of US capitalism. Major donors may shift their backing to the Democrats (Sheldon Adelson was a big donor to Trump, but after his death his widow announced she would not be making more political donations).
The top brass is presumably contemplating under what conditions they might intervene to prevent civil war, but the military is deeply penetrated by far-right elements, especially Christian nationalists.
One of the basic reasons for its permanent destabilisation is the constitutional makeup of the USA.
Many of the reasons I see expressed by nationalist politicians in the EU are much the same as those of Americans insisting on their individual state rights.
I cannot comprehend how such basic laws on who can vote and who cannot and the rules of how to vote are not federal, as in the case of that other union of states, India.
America’s state autonomy is a recipe for partisan gerrymandering of the election system.
Add to this, the filibuster, the Electoral College, the disproportionate representation per population of two senators per state, and the US political process is chaotic.
But because of American exceptionalism, American’s cannot recognise its failings and are blinkered to any reforms.
It is designed for glacial change, the sex Equal Rights Amendment passed half a century ago is still to be fully ratified.
The 1960s Civil Rights Act is being amended by the new Lewis Civil Rights Bill but it is being stymied by Republicans in the Senate.
Some background reading
https://www.nationalmemo.com/republican-efforts-to-restrict-voting
When the Republicans win both houses in the 2022 Midterms, we can expect a sea-change in US politics with Biden depicted as an autocrat as he tries to use the presidential veto to hold back Republican policies.
The USA constitution is like I told a teacher on Constitutional Law: It is like toilet paper and it was created to protect the slave drivers and still, many clauses are vestiges of the slavery system.
In other countries elections are handled in a different way, and every vote is counted and the majority is the winner, and every political party has a representative at every voting place and they have to seal the box,
A political campaign is done by the members of the political parties, members are faithful to their political parties, they have their own newspapers and journals and a plumber or carpenter can become a senator
To register a political party you only need two pictures and several signatures, and electoral center is an independent institution that is also supervised by different political parties, and voting is done during a weekend or is a holiday
They have schools to educate their own members, the communist parties, and others are interviewed on the television and radio, and it is not a big deal to talk about their own program, in the USA the communist party is invisible and it is the son of the devil
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