Trump as president again?
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Since Biden appears to be on the way out we need a new thread on whether or not his successor will be Trump and what he represents.
Here’s an extract from the speech to the Republican Party Convention yesterday by JD Vance, Trump’s running mate as vice-president:
“I grew up in a place that the ruling class in Washington had cast aside,” Vance told the crowd. “But in these forgotten corners of our nation, people don’t ask for much—they just want a fair shot and a government that works for them.” (https://time.com/6999989/jd-vance-trump-vice-president-running-mate-rnc-speech/)
And a comment on it:
“his vision of a class struggle between disenfranchised, scorned workers and those who brutally govern them, from Washington.”
Classic populism.
But he’s backed by the same sort of shady vulture capitalists as financed the Brexit campaign in Britain and who are more interested in having less government interference in their profit-making activities than in improving the lot of the working class (in fact they are not interested in that at all).
I’m personally pinning my hopes on Pigasus, the people’s pig and the only honest candidate… Vance claiming to have the interests of the working class at heart is also about as ludicrous as billionaire Trump claiming the same. They’ll fool millions of working-class voters nonetheless, partly due to the dearth of genuine working-class organizations and groups to counter them.
The current situation in the US is also sort of reminiscent of the ’60s and ’70s in certain respects. The protests against the American-backed Israeli war on Palestinians (which is what it is) have their counterparts in the protests against the American war against the Vietnamese. There are also countless people on the left currently cheerleading for Hamas, who are anything but the liberators of Palestinians, just like people threw their support behind the National Liberation Front (the so-called “Viet Cong”) back in the day.
Maybe worth having this scumbag’s full acceptance speech for future ref….
https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/jd-vance-accepts-republican-vice-presidential-nomination-215130693790
it’s 35 minutes….
and this is what passes for politics!Aside from the garden-variety leftist objections to Vance seen in the CPUSA article that ALB has linked to above, there is also:
Pro-Israelist paranoia about him:
https://archive.ph/E8nAhPro-Palestinian complaint about him:https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/the-shift-j-d-vances-anti-palestine-record
Libertarian complaint about him:https://reason.com/2024/07/18/what-the-media-hate-about-j-d-vance
Meanwhile, as for Harris, this libertarian wonders ‘Could Kamala Harris Be an Anti-War Candidate?’:https://reason.com/2024/07/22/could-kamala-harris-be-an-anti-war-candidate
It’s sort of funny how Harris’ father was an economist who had sympathies for Marx. I’m sure the Trump camp will not overlook that when they go around denouncing the Harris campaign and the Democrats as (“Cultural”) “Marxists,” as they usually do.
Something on the Trump and the Republican Party’s economic programme.
This bit suggests the might have stolen a plank from new Party of Business government here:
“But Moore said he believes that Trump would be pragmatic in office and focus on the needs of business to drive economic growth.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/rncs-day-focus-economy-trumps-plans-111942382
No Festival of Life this time around, like there was at the infamous 1968 protests of the Democratic National Convention, but it seems that there are some pro-Palestinian protesters as the DNC starts up in Chicago. It’s sort of unfortunate, though understandable when one compares the different circumstances, how many of them are only pushing for the “freeing of Palestine,” for whatever each person means by that. While such anti-war (or anti-genocide) protests are important, they’re sort of a step back from 1968 when people, such as the Yippies and others, were talking about both ending American aggression in Indochina and implementing far more radical societal transformations. At any rate, a one- or two-state “solution” will never “liberate” Palestinians from capitalist hegemony or solve the innumerable environmental and other problems stemming from global capitalist production.
Here’s a list of some of the groups participating in the “2024 March on the DNC” in Chicago, https://www.marchondnc2024.org/join. There are loads of Trotskyist and other bourgeois-“progressive” organizations that I don’t particularly care for.
I should maybe also mention that the Yippies’ politics were also quite bad in many respects (e.g. their often uncritical support for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front). There was certainly much to critique in the ideas of Abbie Hoffman and (the later yuppie-turncoat) Jerry Rubin, two of the co-founders of the Youth International Party.
Meanwhile, appropriately enough, the conspiraloon candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, has endorsed Trump.
At least in the swing states. Under the undemocratic US election system, where it is not the candidate who obtains the most votes who wins but the candidate who wins the most seats in a “electoral college” made up of representatives of the various states who vote as a bloc, this makes sense.
This system also means that the candidates base their campaign on appealing to electors in these ten or so states. Thus, since he has no chance of winning there anyway, Trump can deliberately alienate electors in California (“lefty liberals”) and New York (“Wall Street versus Main Street”) in order to win votes in the swing states.
Then there are the legal manoeuvres by the Democratic Party to keep third party candidates off the ballot paper and by the Republican Party to keep voters off the electoral roll. And no effective limits on campaign spending.
What a farce ! Not that that stops US governments lecturing other states about how to hold “free and fair” elections.
“At least in the swing states. Under the undemocratic US election system, where it is not the candidate who obtains the most votes who wins but the candidate who wins the most seats in a “electoral college” made up of representatives of the various states who vote as a bloc, this makes sense.
This system also means that the candidates base their campaign on appealing to electors in these ten or so states. Thus, since he has no chance of winning there anyway, Trump can deliberately alienate electors in California (“lefty liberals”) and New York (“Wall Street versus Main Street”) in order to win votes in the swing states.”
Yep, as Ira Katznelson and co note in their critical introduction to American political economy The Politics of Power, which is worth a read, the electoral college system itself was actually invented and favored by the “Founding Fathers” due to their fears of an excess of democracy:
After creating an executive independent of Congress, delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] were not about to propose selecting the president through direct election, which would reflect the same popular opinion they saw lurking in legislatures. Instead, the convention delegates devised a plan by which a majority of members of the newly created electoral college would elect the president.
The electoral college system was created because the Founding Fathers feared direct democracy and the southern slaveholding interests thought this would help protect them from the demands of more populated northern states. (182)
A lurker on the forum has drawn attention to this.
Excellent title and interesting stuff on the Democratic Party as the Party of Wall Street.
https://www.leftvoice.org/whos-funding-harriss-lesser-evil-campaign/
Harris vs Trump vs Stein/West:
about the Muslim vote and Arab-American vote in the US:
Harris, Trump, or Neither? Arab & Muslim Voters’ Anger Grows
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