By J.E. Karla
If we have a scientific view of history we can make confident predictions about the world of politics. It was easy to predict that Bernie Sanders would lose, and even an unrivaled crisis of capitalism couldn’t save his “movement.” Here’s another safe bet: Donald Trump is almost certainly going to be re-elected in November. We know this the same way we know how the coronavirus spreads — with a principled observation of material conditions.
This is depressing, but knowing that Trump has a nearly unbeatable edge frees us up to work on something more useful than the same “lesser evil” strategy we’ve been duped into over and over again.
We are prone to getting duped because most political observers in the US are liberals with an idealist outlook as superstitious as a creationist or fortune teller. Many of them suspect the truth about Trump’s impending victory, but they think it’s because Fox News and other right wing media have somehow hypnotized “working class” voters into ignoring their true self-interest.
The truth is actually the complete opposite. Right wing ideology secures political unity among its subjects precisely because Donald Trump best serves their interests. Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest broadcast alibis for his supporters — highlighting the roles played by non-Trump actors in the coronavirus crisis, for example, a disaster caused by every part of the ruling class, including Trump. The alibis, however, are secondary to the material interests at play, and if Fox and their friends didn’t exist, some other voices would step in to justify reactionary rule.
The basic interests at hand are settler colonialism and white supremacy. The liberal system that the elections ratify actually invented the white middle class — small-scale white capitalists and landowners, managers, technicians, professionals, functionaries, and favored workers. Europe industrialized, destroyed its peasantry and found itself with more people than it could feed. Its ruling class armed this excess population, shipped them to the “New World” and empowered them to secure their existence by expropriating Native people and the enslaved. The resulting political surplus granted to even the poorest “white trash” was both the cheapest social program ever launched and a chief obstacle to any mass mobilization against the large bourgeoisie.
But falling rates of profit have eroded the surplus that made the order work, and the white middle class has been in big trouble since at least 2008. Middle-aged white men have experienced an unprecedented increase in mortality since then, driven by drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. They got laid off from managerial positions or bankrupted during the last economic crisis and never got those jobs or businesses back. Where they didn’t swell the growing ranks of the homeless they landed in dead-end service-industry jobs, took up gig economy piecework, or ended up dependent on disability checks and the painkiller prescriptions that come with them.
Donald Trump’s appeal — Make America Great Again — has always been an unsubtle promise to restore that white supremacist premium. As soon as white voters bought into the plan, he had a nearly insurmountable advantage in the Electoral College — an institution explicitly designed to favor white supremacist parties. Only a nominee that swamps him in popular support could overcome this structural advantage.
Instead, the Democrats are going to nominate Joe Biden. It seems like a blunder on their part, but let’s take a materialist look at this decision too. Between tax cuts, canceled environmental protections, attacks on labor, and gutted social programs Donald Trump has done gangbusters for the bourgeoisie. They made trillions before the coronavirus struck, and they know that he’s the guy most likely to let them kill as many people as they need to for the stock market to get going again.
Most of the liberal class shares these interests; they too benefit from a Trump victory. That’s why they have only opposed him with conspiracy theories or West Wing-style bullshit about “America’s place in the world.” They even downplay the very real harms of his racist policies — they don’t want to stir up the people under attack, their class enemies. Fox News gives viewers a reason to stick with Trump, MSNBC gives viewers arguments they know won’t stick. Liberals don’t really mind if he’s in charge, he just embarrasses them.
The best irony of all: they ended up with the one nominee more embarrassing than Trump.
So the system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do, and its major players are acting like they’ve always acted. We can anticipate that it will keep rolling right along no matter how many doors we knock on or how many of us hold our noses and vote for the other rapist. Biden’s long history of reactionary corruption is the only source of any real uncertainty about November’s outcome, as maybe the ruling class will decide to switch horses — they are both going the same direction, after all.
One thing we do know for sure is that the bleeding won’t stop until we cauterize the wound. We can’t heal our disease until we cut the capitalism out of us once and for all. Anything else is superstition, and we now have experimental proof — again — that electoral politics is the worst kind of faith healing, at best.
