With the final presidential debate of this year over, the vast majority of people across the United States are even more disgusted with the elections than before. Both candidates interrupted and name-called the other, were self-aggrandizing and seemingly out of touch with reality. While this is not unique to this election cycle, the sheer magnitude of factors that create cynicism and apathy is certainly special.
But it is more than just the clownishly exaggerated theatrics, the broadcasted lies and stupefyingly narrow political options that make this election unique. There is a qualitative change in U.S. politics this year.
It is true that U.S. politics have never been tied to the truth in a meaningful way. Politicians and the media sympathetic to them usually operate by massaging some acts while omitting others. The last presidential debate fit this mold: the candidates focused on differences in worldview, policy details and the legacy of this or that program, policy and so on. Behind the debate there has been an active campaign of disinformation and outright lies, from Clinton’s refusal to answer meaningfully about pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State or Trump’s assertion that he has never committed sexual assault (!)
The primacy of outright disinformation in the dominant media narrative is one of several disturbing developments that this election cycle has made normal in U.S. politics. Behind them lie three key world political developments: a lack of a robust economic recovery from the Great Recession; a rapidly deteriorating international situation for U.S. ruling establishment, as exemplified by the disastrous and extremely delicate crisis in the Middle East and serious domestic discontent with basic features of U.S. society, as manifested in the Movement for Black Lives, the #NoDAPL struggle, Sanders’ movement for a political revolution and other major social movements.
Crisis for the US ruling class
Combined these make up a crisis for the U.S. ruling class. The conditions for its overseas domination—its empire—are rapidly eroding under pressure from worldwide resistance to the U.S.-led world order. The Obama Administration’s policy of quantitative easing has created only a superficial economic recovery, with the stock market doing better than ever and real estate and tech developers experiencing historic growth.
Meanwhile half of people in the United States live in or near poverty, and 13 percent experience hunger—a sign of dire poverty. Meanwhile, the brutal terrorism of police departments across the United States has triggered a mass backlash against racism in militant protests and outright rebellions. The arrogantly chauvinistic and brutal treatment of Native Americans has prompted an open conflict between Native Water Protectors and their supporters across the United States on the one hand and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and big oil on the other.
This crisis is the backdrop for this year’s election. Big donors and backroom maneuvering—the kind the DNC establishment used to undermine the Sanders campaign—helped the political elites and the super-rich determine the outcome of the primary, and Hillary Clinton is their clear choice. Wikileaks has even revealed that the DNC helped pick Donald Trump as the best opponent for Clinton.
These maneuvers indicate some awareness that the Democratic Party establishment is aware that Clinton is so unpopular that the only way she could win would be by illegally subverting the Sanders campaign and hand-picking the most unpopular available opponent in the general election.
Why is the ruling class throwing its weight behind Clinton? The political elites and super-wealthy donors recognize that the policies necessary to rescue the system are massively unpopular, and Clinton is completely willing to adopt those policies in their entirety, especially when it comes to the three major crises facing the U.S. ruling class.
False economic recovery
Though the New York Times, Washington Post and other major newspapers joined President Obama in welcoming the present economic “recovery,” the economy is in reality still in dire straits for the vast majority of the U.S. population. Wages are still low, and while unemployment may appear to be lower, the quality of jobs are much lower when compared with the pre-recession jobs market. Part-time employment is a much more significant part of the economy and savings are at a historic low point.
The rosy talk about the economic recovery speaks almost exclusively to the post-2008 recovery in the stock market and the financial sector as a whole. The banks that survived the 2008 crash consolidated and bought out their competition, leading to the kinds of super-profits that only monopolies can achieve. This has been assisted by an extremely generous manipulation of interest rates by the Federal Reserve, which has essentially pumped billions of dollars into the economy.
Yet, for all that has happened for corporate profits, the basic lack of buying power due to low wages, job insecurity and a general lack of savings amplifies the danger of a crisis of overproduction. In short, the recovery at the top without a recovery at the bottom establishes the conditions for a new economic crash. It appears increasingly likely that another economic crisis will take place during the next president’s term.
Donald Trump’s economic plan appears to be standard Republican Party orthodoxy: tax cuts at the top and other measures to assist “job creators:” the big capitalists who own the stores, factories, trucks, etc. that working people operate to make wages. This approach has proven itself to be grossly inadequate for producing economic growth, let alone economic recovery. Rather, it amounts to massive giveaways to the super-rich.
Clinton’s economic plan hardly looks better. In the final presidential debate, Chris Wallace asked Clinton, “In many ways [your economic plan] is similar to the Obama stimulus plan in 2009… Is your plan basically even more of the Obama stimulus?”
Clinton gave a characteristically evasive answer, but she began by praising the 2009 stimulus, then argued for continuing the basic policies of the Obama economic plan, albeit with slight modifications offered in vague, couched terms like investing “from the middle-out and from the ground-up.” In other words, a slightly-upscale version of the economic stimulus is the best the “progressive candidate” has to offer, despite the fact that the same plan failed to produce a meaningful recovery for the vast majority in the United States.
These are our options as we face yet another economic crisis. For the past several years the Federal Reserve has been keeping interest rates at or slightly above zero (albeit with periodic interruptions), meaning that the most generous possible monetary policy has only produced a kind of tepid recovery. Another systemic economic crisis consequently will require much more dramatic action, which neither candidate seems to consider an available option, offering leaving poor and working people nothing. Moreover, a bank bailout like the ones both Bush and Obama organized during the Great Recession were so massively unpopular that it remains to be seen if poor and working people would tolerate yet another one if faced with an economic collapse.
Of course, the other method of producing growth in the past decades—military spending—bodes even more ominously when viewed in context of the growing drive towards war.
Overseas empire crumbling
Both candidates postured extremely hawkishly at the debates, exhibiting an almost-giddy willingness to escalate military conflict with even major powers, including Russia and China. At the final debate, for example, Clinton claimed that Donald Trump was simply “Putin’s puppet,” a completely unprecedented claim in U.S. politics. Even during the heyday of McCarthyism candidates would think twice before calling an opponent an outright agent of another state.
It is worth noting that the allegations against Wikileaks—the alleged link between Trump and the Russian government—are completely false. According to Clinton, Russian hackers feed Wikileaks their information, Wikileaks publishes that information and Trump uses that information to gain an unfair advantage against Clinton. She also claimed that several national security organizations have linked the hacks back to Russia. While the October 7 statement by the NSA did in fact attribute the hacks to Russia, they did so in less-than-conclusive terms; they appeared to be “likely” by Russian actors.
The government has said nothing about the recent Podesta leaks (the leaks from Clinton’s campaign chair), which offer the most damning evidence against Clinton, including Clinton’s conscious flip-flopping on her position on trade deals, vicious personal attacks, efforts at undermining the Sanders campaign, and other ugly internal dealings of the Clinton campaign.
Most important, however, Clinton and her staff actually said and wrote the contents of the leaks. Even Clinton herself has not questioned the authenticity of the leaks. They are not fabrications or smears on Clinton, but simply leaked information.
This position has also put Clinton into the awkward position where she on the one hand must defend herself from Trump’s allegations that the elections are rigged by the media and on the other can argue that Donald Trump is a serious threat to the U.S. electoral system as a “Russian puppet.” The elections are either fragile enough to be open to manipulation by a “Manchurian candidate” or by the pro-Clinton media—or they are not.
It is extremely worrisome to people around the world that Clinton systematically avoids answering questions about the leaks by diverting with anti-Russia rhetoric even to the point of threatening to attack Russia. This kind of aggressive talk and posturing is par for the course for Clinton, who is well known as a feverish advocate of militarism.
That reputation also proves well-earned when it comes to Syria, where she has refused to back down from her proposed no-fly zone, which she argues would “provide safe zones on the ground” in Syria. Let us make this clear: a no-fly zone is an act of war. It would mean the government of Syria loses sovereignty over its own airspace. Syrian aircraft could no longer fly in Syrian airspace under threat of United States attack, even on civilian flights. Moreover, a no-fly zone implicitly blames the Syrian government for all the deaths in the Syrian Civil War, since the Syrian government and allied Russian air forces are the only forces to have made significant use of air power in the conflict.
No-fly zone a brazen act of escalation that risks war with Russia
Donald Trump has taken a softer position on the Syria question, advocating for working with the Syrian government and Russia on the crisis, but has otherwise exhibited an extremely aggressive foreign policy targeting China and Latin America, even admitting that he would adopt a cavalier willingness to use nuclear weapons.
Clinton, however, as the ruling class’ candidate of choice is the true war candidate. Not only does she advocate for the most aggressive measures against Syria of any mainstream politician, she also partakes in the same kind of brinksmanship with China. She demonstrated this in an official capacity as Secretary of State when she engineered the Pivot to Asia. Hillary Clinton is just as willing to initiate a major power war as Donald Trump. Her foreign policy in its exact details, though, is even more provocative than Trump’s.
This is no doubt a response to an increasingly difficult international situation for U.S. imperialism, as the entire Middle East is aflame in the aftermath of the U.S. invasions and attacks on Iraq, Libya, Syria and—through its military and diplomatic assistance to Israel—Palestine. Endless war, meddling and interventions have provoked a widespread backlash against the United States throughout the region from both the left and the right. It is impossible to understand the rise of the so-called “Islamic State” independently from this backlash, especially given that its recruitment strategy has essentially positioned itself as the primary reactionary force in opposition to the West. In other words, the “Islamic State” is a direct outcome of U.S. policies.
In Asia, too, the United States’ position is rapidly crumbling. This week, for example, the Philippines—a U.S. colony since the Spanish-American War—dramatically broke with the United States by forging an economic alliance with China. The resistance to the U.S. bases overseas has also become much sharper in Japan and South Korea, especially with the resistance to the planned naval base on Jeju Island and deployment of the THAAD missile system in South Korea.
People’s movements attack foundations of US capitalism
The Movement for Black Lives, the #NoDAPL struggle and the broader anti-racist movements are movements against a key part of the U.S. capitalist system. Founded on slavery and the genocidal expulsion of Native peoples from their land, the only way of maintaining capitalism as it has developed in the United States is by maintaining a system of white supremacy. Just as the British and French empires ruled over African, Asian and Middle Eastern colonies through a strategy of divide-and-rule, so too do the U.S. capitalists seek to divide and rule at home.
This is precisely why Clinton flip-flops on issues such as mass incarceration and police terror, why she tries to walk away from her “super-predators” comment and argue that she can be a president “for all Americans:” the conditions have shifted, so she needs to adopt a subtler approach. It is no longer acceptable in the public discourse to refer to Black Americans as “super-predators,” but the “Blue Lives Matter” movement has kept alive the myth that police are getting out-gunned on the streets. Hillary Clinton is not for de-militarization of the police and consequently is not for any significant change to the regime of police terror that the Movement for Black Lives has come out against.
So too her non-responses to questions about climate change policy is an indicator that she is completely unwilling to challenge oil companies’ imperious economic and political power. Here too we see a movement whose goals, if fulfilled, would seriously threaten the very foundations of the global capitalist economy and the U.S. state which protects it. An end to world consumption of fossil fuels, to factory farming, to massively wasteful manufacturing processes and the other factors contributing to climate change would require a fundamental restructuring of the economy. For such a restructuring to have a real impact in mitigating the effects of climate change, it needs to take place on a time-frame impossible for global capital to turn a profit.
Clinton’s unpopularity, the U.S. rightwing and the future of US politics
These movements are natural responses to the domestic and world political economy. The ludicrous drive for profit from fossil fuels in the beginning stages of a climate catastrophe is lead to the vicious attack on the Standing Rock Sioux’s right to control their land and resources. Journalists, Native Water Protectors and activists have been assaulted by attack dogs and are facing criminal charges. Black, Brown, Native and poor white people in the U.S. are still dying at the hands of police in spite of a sustained countrywide movement and rebellions in Baltimore, Ferguson, Charlotte and elsewhere.
The economic situation is untenable at best but offers no conventional economic solution, especially when it comes to monetary policy. Meanwhile, the massive profits offered to Haliburton, Exxon, Texaco, Coca Cola and other huge transnational corporations by the overseas domination by the United States increasingly stand on shaky ground. People around the world are no longer willing to accept U.S. occupations and bombings so that millionaires may steal oil and other natural resources or operate sweatshops.
In other words, the contradiction between what the vast majority in the United States and around the world need and want and the system that the bankers, military contractors and imperialist politicians benefit from is at a historic boiling point. There is no easy way out of this situation for either side, and the resulting struggle magnifies itself with each new development.
The escalation of struggle undergirds Clinton’s deep unpopularity. She represents the establishment that helped assemble and maintain the present system, and the vast majority know it because of Bernie Sanders’ challenge to her candidacy. The veneer of popular government and of positive governance have slipped away as more become aware of the contradiction of needs between the ruling class and the working class.
Trump, however, represents a limitation on that awareness. Growing class consciousness has not reached a point where the Trump campaign’s transparent race-baiting, misogyny and xenophobia fails to gain traction. Rather, there is a significant fascist movement growing at the campaign’s feet. It is a response to the same conditions causing the general amplification of class struggle—conditions that both Democratic and Republican presidents and Congresses have created.
The traditional right wing is disintegrating under the pressure: many, including the neoconservatives who backed George W. Bush’s presidency, are now flocking to the Democratic Party. Others are swinging to the right to abandon the Republican Party establishment to join Trump’s insurgent fascist movement. Others still have not found their place in the realignment of the two-party system, explaining in part the growth of the Libertarian Party and Gary Johnson’s campaign.
The net outcome is a general realignment of the two-party system. The Democratic Party has moved sharply to the right under Clinton’s now-unchallenged leadership. It engaged in corrupt backroom bargains with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile to eliminate the Sanders campaign using the vast resources at the Democrats’ command, and now Clinton’s coalition alone essentially rules the party. Under that leadership, the Democrats now appear poised to sweep both the White House
and potentially the Congress.
With some anticipating the Democrats’ near-complete control of both the legislature and the executive, what are the Democrats’ plans? Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, stated that one of his two major policy goals as Senate Majority Leader is to cut corporate taxes—a shockingly rightwing proposal. Combined with Clinton’s thoroughly neoconservative foreign policy, the Democrats’ substance appears now to be indistinguishable from that of the Republican Party 20 years ago.
The Republican Party, for its part, has also moved sharply to the right. Its new platform stripped out much of the language that balanced its essentially far-right character. This new platform emerges out of a nearly 10-year-long crisis of constituency within the Republican Party, which has struggled to redefine its identity as its Reagan-era base dies off and its ideas appear more antiquated amid a generally-leftward shift in public opinion.
This crisis was the backdrop for the Tea Party’s rise in 2010 as a significant faction of the Republican Party in opposition to the neoconservative Republican establishment. Donald Trump took that one step farther by functionally defining the Republican Party as a vehicle for fascist, semi-fascist and other ultra-right elements. Nevertheless, that struggle is far from over as Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, John McCain, George H.W. Bush and other leading figures of the Republican Party establishment continue to publicly distance themselves from Trump, in some instances even actively discouraging Republicans from supporting Trump.
On the whole, it is safe to assume that the Democratic Party has stably shifted to the right and consolidated much of Clintons’ efforts to destroy its social-democratic legacy. If Clinton wins, it is safe to assume a the implementation of a far-right foreign policy similar to that of George W. Bush and only the most token support for progressive domestic policy. The Republican Party appears to have cleanly split down the middle with the establishment almost uniformly standing with the Ryan-Romney faction and with the most active elements of its new base mobilizing around fascist ideas.
What are revolutionaries and socialists to do in these new conditions?
Where does this new political climate leave poor and working people? What are the new responsibilities of revolutionaries and socialists?
More life on Earth is at risk now than it has been in decades. The danger of yet another war—this time potentially the first war between major military powers since the Cold War—is alarmingly real. Climate change has already passed its tipping point, meaning that revolutionizing the means of energy and food production is imperative for the future for life on Earth, human or otherwise. The economy is teetering on another crisis, threatening poor and working people all around the world with more hunger, homelessness, insecurity and general poverty. There is a far-right and fascist movement on the rise in the United States.
Relentless, militant struggle is the only way forward. As the ruling class adopts a high-handed approach by maneuvering Hillary Clinton into office despite her massive unpopularity, it is clearer than ever that direct action tactics—marches, rallies, sit-ins, occupations and other militant grassroots tactics—are the only tactics available to us. Of course, we welcome the support of any elected officials, but the initiative remains in the streets, campuses and workplaces.
Labor and other organized expressions of the working class assume new importance: only by the working class organized as a class can the vast power of the state be overcome and the interests of the many be put above those of the few. In other words, our only viable recourse is to fight back with most people in society identifying and organizing on a class basis across lines of nationality, sex, gender, sexual preference, race and all the other differences and divisions of our class. While liberation from all the many forms of oppression in society is only possible with the overthrow of the oppressing class, the victory of the struggle for socialism and liberation is only possible when our class is organized to maximize our striking force.
The anti-war struggle is a critical component of that effort. Just as it played a major role in unifying millions against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now too a major effort is needed to unify ourselves against a major war in Syria that threatens to become a war with Russia. Aggressive military strategy in East Asia also requires resolute struggle and movement-building. Just as the anti-war movement was able to build broad unity among people of all nationalities, races, genders, sexes, etc. during the Bush administration, our task is to reactivate that mass movement.
As the public outcry in opposition to invading Syria in 2013 shows, the vast majority of the U.S. population is already opposed to more war, and the effect of that reality can have a decisive limiting impact on militarism and imperialism. A major challenge will be to overcome the war hysteria for which Clinton has already begun to lay the foundations.
We are in a critical point in history. Struggle more than ever is absolutely imperative. A rightwing presidency is at this point inevitable and so too are the corresponding dangers for all poor, working and
oppressed people, whether we are ready for it or not. Joining organizations of struggle—revolutionary socialist parties, anti-oppression groups, anti-war groups, labor unions, etc.—is of basic, foundational importance. Boldly speaking out can help wipe away the politics of fear that the election has helped create, and only being organized can amplify and sustain our voices.
