By Joseph Kishore, David North
September 03, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "WSWS"
-- US President Joe Biden delivered
a speech on Thursday evening that has no
precedent in the history of the country. Cutting
through all his evasions and circumlocutions,
Biden essentially acknowledged that the United
States—supposedly the world’s pillar of
democracy—has a mass fascist movement that is on
the verge of overthrowing the Constitution and
taking power.
“There is no question that the Republican
Party today is dominated and intimidated by MAGA
[Make America Great Again] Republicans, and that
is a threat to this country,” Biden said. “Trump
and the MAGA Republicans,” he added, are
promoting “an extremism that threatens the very
foundation of our Republic.” They “do not
respect the Constitution” and do not “recognize
the will of the people” or “accept the results
of a free election.” They are “working right now
… to give power to decide elections in America
to partisans and cronies, empowering election
deniers to undermine democracy itself.” They see
the failure of the January 6 coup “as
preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections.”
Consider for a moment what this means. Donald
Trump is not merely a deranged individual acting
on his own. The United States is ruled through a
capitalist-controlled two-party system. He
stands at the apex of one of the two
state-sanctioned parties, the Republican Party,
which already exercises enormous institutional
power.
The Republicans control the governorship in
28 out of 50 states and the state legislatures
in 30. They hold 50 out of 100 seats in the US
Senate and 211 out of 435 seats in the House of
Representatives.
At both the state and federal level,
Republicans occupy a vast number of judicial
seats, including a majority of seats on the
federal Courts of Appeals. And, most
notoriously, Republicans control the US Supreme
Court.
Beyond its immense presence in the judicial
and legislative branches of government, the
Republicans are deeply entrenched in the
military, which is riddled with fascist-minded
generals and lower-ranking officers. All the
security and police agencies—the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of
Investigations (FBI) and the Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), to name only the best
known—are collectively staffed with hundreds of
thousands of fervently pro-Trump Republicans. A
similar fascistic infestation is present in
virtually every local police precinct in the
country.
The Republican Party also controls
significant sections of the corporate media,
which is an auxiliary institution of the state
and its political parties.
The fact that one of the twin pillars
of capitalist politics in the United States is
led by a fascist, endorsed his rejection of the
outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and
supported, both covertly and overtly, the
violent coup attempt of January 6, 2021 means
that a substantial section of the ruling class
actively favors the overthrow of the
Constitution and a rapid and violent shift to
dictatorship.
For Biden—who has for the past 19 months
flattered his Republican “friends,” extolled the
virtues of “bi-partisanship,” and even
proclaimed his support for a “strong” Republican
Party—to go on prime time national television to
issue his unprecedented public warning testifies
to the extent of the fascistic danger. But the
president made no attempt to explain how the
United States has reached such a point.
References to history, economics and even
politics were absent from his speech.
Instead, Biden offered nothing but a
moralistic appeal that implicitly blames Trump’s
voters for the danger of dictatorship. They are
motivated, he said, by “fear,” “division” and
“darkness,” and have rejected the “light of
truth” in favor of the “shadow of lies.”
Somehow, “Trump and the MAGA Republicans”
emerged out of this “shadow” and will be cast
away with Biden’s semi-infantile oratory and, of
course, by voting for Democrats in the next
election.
Biden could not provide any credible
explanation for why 74 million people, including
a large percentage of working people, cast their
votes for Trump in 2020. Excluding from his
speech any reference to economic interests and
class divisions, let alone to the
corporate-financial domination of the two-party
system, Biden made no effort to expose the
glaring contradiction between Trump’s crude
right-wing “anti-Establishment” demagogy and his
unswerving defense of ruling class interests.
In America’s entrenched two-party system,
sections of workers and the middle class back
the Republican Party not out of conviction but
by default. To the extent that Trump has a base,
it is because the Democrats have nothing to
offer and the Republicans are expert at
manipulating real grievances and discontent.
Biden’s failure to expose the real economic
basis of Trump’s policies was not a matter of
forgetfulness. Rather, notwithstanding the
conflict between the two parties, they both
represent, in the final analysis, the ruling
capitalist class and its national and global
financial-corporate interests.
The Republicans have been able to build up
broader support only because the Democratic
Party has rejected all measures that have
anything to do with improving the conditions of
the working class. It is a party of Wall Street
and the military, mobilizing behind it sections
of the upper middle class based on racial and
gender politics. Since coming to power, Biden
has pursued, in all its essentials, the same
policy as the Republicans, including on the
pandemic.
Biden and the Democratic Party are nervous
about the political and social implications of
what the Republicans are doing. They realize
that once such extreme actions as overturning
the Constitution are taken, they cannot be
undone, that the entire system of class rule is
being destabilized.
The Democrats, however, are far more fearful
of the growth of a social movement from below
than they are of dictatorship. Moreover, the
Democrats’ central preoccupation in their
conflict with Trump has always centered on
foreign policy. Notably absent from Biden’s
remarks on Thursday was any reference to the
expanding US-NATO war against Russia. This is
for two reasons. First, they are aware that the
war is deeply unpopular. Second, the Democrats
are relying on the Republican Party, “dominated”
by “extremists,” to help carry out this war.
The Democrats have paved the way for this
reactionary dynamic by telling workers they are
“deplorable,” by denouncing workers as racist,
and undermining democratic consciousness by
denigrating the American Revolution and Civil
War.
In line with their moralistic denunciations
of those who led great struggles for social
equality, the Democrats have spent the last 50
years getting rid of social programs and
slashing taxes for the rich.
The danger of a fascistic dictatorship is
ongoing. An extended process is reaching a
turning point. The threat of dictatorship is
rooted, fundamentally, in 1) the objective
crisis of American capitalism and the decline of
its global supremacy; 2) the intensification of
economic exploitation and, as a consequence, the
extreme growth of social inequality; 3) the
systematic suppression of social struggles by
the working class; and 4) the 30 years of
uninterrupted war which, since Biden came to
power, has developed into a direct confrontation
with Russia and China. Trillions of dollars in
military expenditures to prepare for World War
III leaves nothing for essential social
programs. The escalation toward all-out war
requires the escalation toward dictatorship.
The answer to the danger of dictatorship is
the development of the class struggle. Only to
the extent that the working class breaks out of
the restraints that have been imposed upon it
can the real class alignments come to the fore.
This must be connected to a socialist economic
and political program that can appeal to the
broad mass of the working class. Only in this
way will the forces behind the Trump movement be
exposed. To the extent that Trump has a mass
base, two-thirds of it, if not three-quarters,
is sustained by the hot air of his demagogy. The
development of the class struggle will burst his
balloon.
The solution to the growth of fascism is not
the moralistic pieties of Biden and the
Democrats, but the development of a movement
that unites the American working class in
struggle, on the basis of an international
socialist program, against all forms of
capitalist exploitation and imperialist war.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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