Certain pseudo-left circles seem to think that the January 6 assault on the US Capitol was no big deal.

Radical journalist John Pilger, for instance, tweeted that “the made-for-media theatrics on Capitol Hill were not an attempted ‘coup’. Coups are what the CIA stages all over the world. Neither was ‘democracy’ in peril. What democracy?”1 Jacobin magazine, the unofficial outlet for Democratic Socialists of America, announced that, appearances notwithstanding, the takeover was a defeat for the ultra-right in the face of growing ruling class unity.2

Over at Sidecar, a blog site recently unveiled by the New Left Review, the editors airily dismissed the “hysteria over the Capitol Hill occupation”. “Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy – oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc – constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy,” wrote Mike Davis, a member of NLR’s editorial committee:

What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all, shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home.3

It was the usual parade of slobs, rednecks and grotesques, in other words, so what, really, was the big deal? Once the fuss died down, Davis went on, the only change would be that Trump would find himself out in the cold, as “more traditional interest groups” such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable and the ultra-wealthy Koch family took the reins and steered the Republican Party back in a more conventional direction.

Thus, it was nothing to write home about – or so the radically blasé assured us. But this was nonsense. The January 6 uprising was not a simulacrum, but the real thing: America’s most serious constitutional breakdown since the Civil War. If the coup had succeeded, it would have plunged the US into a period of dark authoritarianism, as Trump wreaked vengeance on a long list of enemies, with no-one in a position to hold him back. Pilger is right to put ‘democracy’ in quotation marks, since the American version has become so fraudulent. But there is a difference between hollowed-out democracy and no democracy at all. If Trump had gotten his way, Americans would have been in a position to see first-hand how big that difference can be.

As for the dark comedy of it all, it is worth keeping in mind that the 1923 beer-hall putsch was also a “half-baked” affair that came to “an ignominious end” when the Munich police opened up with a volley of gunfire, sending Hitler and his cronies running for cover.4 The New York Herald chortled in the aftermath that Erich Ludendorff, Hitler’s monarchist associate, “may never live down the laughter”, while The New York Tribune declared that both men were “down and out and thoroughly discredited”.

But no-one was laughing 10 years later, when Hitler entered the Reichskanzler’s office and began transforming Germany into a Nazi totalitarian state.

No-one knows whether the American crisis will reach such extremes. But two things are clear in the wake of last week’s titanic events. One is that the uprising was not an isolated event on the part of a president who should never have entered the White House in the first place and now, fortunately, is nearly out the door. To the contrary, it is the result of pressures that have been building for a generation.

The other is that unless the working class steps in and takes matters in hand, the decline will accelerate. With its ancient constitution, America is like a Model T limping down the road, as Teslas and BMWs go whizzing by. Conceivably, there are ways of repairing the old contraption and bringing it up to date. But it will not happen by wishing and hoping, and invoking the timeless wisdom of the founders. Rather, it will only take place if the working masses overthrow the ancient bourgeois republic and replace it with a social democracy suited to their needs. Otherwise, the downward slope will intensify. For the moment, the US is deficient in terms of classic fascist parties with their uniformed stormtroopers and the rest. But that shortage will be rectified, as the crisis grows.

Death throes

The January 6 assault begs comparison with any number of events – with Munich in 1923, with Mussolini’s March on Rome a year earlier, or with “the great secession winter of 1860-61”, as historian Henry Adams called it, when the US constitutional order finally collapsed under the impact of slavery.

But an incident nearly two centuries earlier is no less relevant. This was in January 1642, when England’s Charles I took 400 soldiers and tried to arrest five members of parliament on treason charges. The five men escaped. But such was the shock over the executive branch’s violation of legislative prerogatives that civil war became all but a certainty.

The comparison is important, because America, in a sense, is still stuck in the 17th century. Indeed, the conservative political theorist, Samuel P Huntington, argued in the 1960s that America was a Tudor polity founded by Puritans, who were appalled by Stuart absolutism and who longed for the good old days of Elizabeth I – the English Deborah who had sunk the Spanish Catholic Armada in 1587. Tudor devotion to England’s “organic” constitution, Huntington noted, was quite genuine. Despite his brutality, for example, Henry VIII was a master politician, a proto-LBJ, who was adept at manipulating the complex power structure of the day and making it do his bidding. His daughter, Elizabeth, was also a skilled practitioner. For Puritans, constitutional complexity was a source of strength. The Stuarts’ great sin, in their view, was not only their crypto-Catholicism, but their disregard for traditional constitutional constraints, which could only end in national defeat.5

So Puritans believed. But the 1640s brought about a divergence, when the civil war forced English parliamentarians to abandon tradition and to ‘new-model’ both government and the military. Safe in their New England redoubt, their American co-thinkers did the opposite by burying themselves ever deeper in the old. The upshot in 1787 was a US constitution that took Tudor-style pluralism and updated it with various 18th century add-ons: John Trenchard’s and Thomas Gordon’s writing about checks and balances in Cato’s letters, which were required reading in the colonies in the 1720s; Viscount Bolingbroke’s 1749 pamphlet, ‘The idea of the patriot king’, which laid the theoretical basis for the US presidency; Baron de Montesquieu’s Spirit of the law, which was also a key text of the day; and so forth.

But the core remained unchanged. Separation of powers was the antidote to tyranny. Checks and balances were the key to stability. Loyalty to the ancient constitution was the source of national strength. These were ideas that the founders incorporated in an unbreakable legal contract they called the US constitution.

Which, give or take the occasional war, mass uprising, and industrial revolution, brings us to the present day. But plus ça change … which is why Washington never seemed more 17th century than it did last week, when another monarch sent his forces trampling over the legislative realm. The only difference was that this time Congress had each branch’s limits and responsibilities in writing, which is why House speaker Nancy Pelosi is now determined to invoke the constitution’s most punitive mechanisms by impeaching Trump in his final days in office.

As Marx noted during the Civil War, “Up to now we have witnessed only the first act … the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”6 That judgment may have been a trifle premature when Marx made it in 1862, but eventually the question of a revolutionary break must occur.

No historical analogy is complete, obviously. The United States may be a Tudor polity that has persisted long past its sell-by date, but it is also a high-tech economic power, not to mention the first empire to achieve global hegemony. That makes the contradictions all the more acute. Thanks to America’s obsolete constitution, US politics have never been more dysfunctional, the political classes never more out of touch. The legislative process on Capitol Hill is chaotic, democratic accountability is nil, while corruption is so rampant that Americans hardly notice – it is simply the air they breathe.

The results are all too evident in the growing social decay out in the hinterlands. Some 22 million jobs have vanished since the start of the pandemic, a massive foreclosure crisis is looming, while the total Covid-19 death toll is nearing 400,000. Anger is growing too, quite legitimately. But, since Americans have no way of expressing it democratically in an upside-down political system, they can only do so in ways that are increasingly incoherent and self-defeating. They follow a Mussolini-style demagogue like Trump, they trash the Capitol, they race-bait whites, or they beat up passing black pedestrians.7 The left meanwhile languishes in tiny woke ghettoes.

The upshot is a system in its death throes. But, since Americans cannot blame themselves and certainly cannot blame the constitution, they must direct their anger at someone else. In previous generations, this might have been the Jews. But, since that is verboten, it is now – yes – the Russians. This is why Pelosi took time off from blaming Trump last week to charge the Kremlin with ultimate responsibility: “Putin wants to undermine democracy,” she told the press. “That’s what he’s about domestically and internationally, and the president gave him the biggest of all of his many gifts to Putin, the biggest gift, yesterday.”8

Blinded by conspiracy theories and spooked by ghosts of its own making, the Democratic leadership is incapable of diagnosing the problem in a sober and scientific fashion, which is another reason why it can only intensify. In the end, the republic will go down not with a whimper or a bang, but amid a welter of confusion and scapegoating.

Notes.

1) twitter.com/johnpilger/status/1347871961175744512.︎

2) jacobinmag.com/2021/01/capitol-building-riot-business-trump.︎

3) newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/riot-on-the-hill.︎

4) RJ Evans The coming of the Third Reich New York 2003, pp193-94.︎

5) Huntington’s politics are repugnant, but his insights are still considerable. For more on America as a Tudor polity, see Political order in changing societies New Haven 1968, pp93-133.︎

6) ‘A criticism of American affairs” Die Presse August 9 1862 (emphasis in original).︎

7) youtube.com/watch?v=DDGR200Xx9A.︎

8) youtube.com/watch?v=42LQKZEQgeM.︎

This article first appeared in Weekly Worker.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Donald Trump was supposed to be yesterday’s man. His margin of defeat now stands at a hefty six million popular votes, or four percent, his efforts to hold onto power are looking more and more foolish, and even diehard supporters like Republican senator Roy Blunt of Missouri now acknowledge that Joe Biden will “likely” take office on January 20. So he is finished, kaput, done for.

But if that is the case, how is it that Washington’s biggest has‑been has turned the tables on his opponents and is now setting the standards for Middle East policy for years to come?

That is the head-scratcher posed by the November 27 assassination of top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. With all the signs pointing to Israel as the culprit, several things seem clear. One is that US secretary of state Mike Pompeo green‑lit the operation – either at his meeting five days earlier with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the futuristic Red Sea city of Neom, or he did so shortly thereafter. Another is that, politically, Trump has benefited from the killing as much as Netanyahu, if not more.

After all, this is the man who asked the Pentagon to provide a list of Iranian targets shortly after US TV networks declared Biden the winner.¹ Even though he allowed himself to be dissuaded from launching a military assault, he was clearly pleased when Israel stepped into the breach and did it for him.²

But there is a third thing that is clear: the losers. Not only is it Iran and Fakhrizadeh himself, not to mention his family, friends and co‑workers, but US Democrats – big time. Talk of resurrecting the 2015 Iran nuclear accord – one of the ‘crowning achievements’ of the Obama administration – is now dead. Hopes of avoiding a confrontation in the Persian Gulf are rapidly diminishing. In effect, Trump has put America on a collision course with the Islamic Republic and, what is more, has arranged matters so that the confrontation will take place under Biden’s watch. That way, it will be left to Democrats to deal with the fallout, while he jeers from the sidelines. And there is nothing the Biden team will be able to do to stop it.

This explains the president-elect’s remarkable silence in the wake of the Fakhrizadeh murder. Normally, one would expect at least a tweet out of the future president, or a sidekick like Antony Blinken or Jake Sullivan – respectively Biden’s designated secretary of state and national security advisor. But, four days after the killing, there has been nothing. Such silence speaks volumes. Biden knows he has been boxed in and that, instead of implementing his own foreign policy, he is now reduced to implementing the incumbent’s. But he is too afraid to admit it.

Paralysis

So how did a so-called loser like Trump pull it off? The short answer is that he merely had to stand by and watch, as his opponent tripped over his own two feet.

Biden is a victim of his own deference to the Jewish state – a position of abject servility that renders him all but helpless when it comes to atrocities like the Fakhrizadeh killing. He is a self-proclaimed Christian Zionist, who has declared that, if it did not already exist, “the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region”.³ If Israel knocks off the occasional Iranian physicist, therefore, he is in no position to complain, since, by his own admission, Israel is merely acting on America’s behalf.

But Biden is the victim of something else: years of Democratic hypocrisy and double talk. Two events have seared themselves into the party’s collective memory. One occurred in 1972, when George McGovern ran on a peace platform during the Vietnam War and got walloped by Richard Nixon by a margin of three to two in the popular vote. The second was in early 1991 when 80% of Democrats in the Senate and 67% in the House voted against the use of military force in the coming Persian Gulf War – a war that, as everybody knows, turned into one of the most one-sided slaughters in modern imperial history. The lesson that the Dems took from both is that, while occasionally throwing doves a bone, they must never allow themselves to be out-hawked again. Even when making peace, they must emit great billows of tough-guy rhetoric to show that they are just as much a war party as their Republican rivals.

Pseudo-macho rhetoric of this sort was on full display in an article that Biden wrote about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the 2015 Iran agreement is formally known. The piece, published in mid-September this year, made a simple point: Trump was wrong to walk away from the JCPOA in 2018 and, if elected, Biden would make re-entering the pact a top priority in 2021. But, lest readers think that his attitude was anything less than bellicose, Biden tossed in an additional argument, to the effect that, by abandoning the pact, Trump had “worsened the threat” posed by “a bad regional actor” and that only Democrats knew how to put Iran back in its place.

“[T]here is a smart way to be tough on Iran, and there is Trump’s way,” he said:

Before Trump, years went by without a militia rocket attack on US facilities in Iraq. Now they happen regularly. Instead of restoring deterrence, Trump has emboldened Iran. Instead of ending ‘endless wars,’ Trump has repeatedly brought America to the brink of a new one. If this is what Trump considers success, I would hate to see what failure looks like.⁴

“By any objective measure,” he added, “Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ has been a boon to the regime in Iran and a bust for America’s interests.”

Blinken, Sullivan or whoever else wrote the piece on Biden’s behalf must have thought this was all terribly clever. But it was fatuous nonsense through and through. Rather than making Iran stronger, Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of punitive and comprehensive sanctions brought it to its knees. GDP contracted by 9.5% in 2019 alone, living standards plummeted and widespread rioting erupted, while the country’s ability to deal with Covid-19 was crippled. Even though Iran had emerged as one of the world’s leading hot spots, The Lancet reported last April that its ability to cope with the pandemic was “substantially impeded by unilateral economic sanctions”, with medicine, test kits, protective equipment and ventilators all in short supply.⁵

Where Mongols supposedly used catapults to hurl disease-ridden bodies into besieged cities so as to spread a plague, America was now working to the same end by blocking hospital equipment and pharmaceuticals. Indeed, the Trump administration went so far as to veto a $5 billion International Monetary Fund emergency loan to enable Iran to get through the crisis. Yet here was Biden saying that Trump was not being tough enough on Iran and that he himself would do even more.

This explains Biden’s current paralysis. He cannot say that Trump and Netanyahu are weak, since nothing is tougher than sending out a hit squad to gun down a scientist in broad daylight. But he cannot say they have gone over the top either, since, by his own admission, one can never be too tough in dealing with an outlaw country like Iran. So he has said nothing. For fear of offending doves, neoconservatives and an ultra-right government in Jerusalem, he has decided to hold his tongue.

Dead deal

The implications for the JCPOA are plain. If Iran had killed the head of the US department of energy – the agency in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal – missiles would already be flying. The same would be true if it had knocked off the head of the Israeli nuclear research centre near the city of Dimona. Given all that, it is hard to imagine how Iran can now sit down at the table with a country that believes that it and its Israeli partners have an unqualified right to continue killing its leading citizens. If Iranian president Hassan Rouhani so much as raises the possibility, the result will likely be a nationalist reaction that sends his government reeling. Negotiations are thus off the table, while it is hard to imagine how the JCPOA can ever be brought back to life.

But Iran’s options at this point are limited as well. Fakhrizadeh – a professor of nuclear engineering at Imam Hossein University in Tehran and the so-called ‘father’ of Iran’s nuclear programme – was the fifth Iranian nuclear scientist to be killed by Israel since 2010. If a 12-person death squad did indeed ambush him at 2pm local time some 70 kilometres outside of Tehran, as Iranian journalist Mohammad Ahwaze, citing government sources, has reported,⁶then the ongoing security breach has been nothing short of massive. If Iran had tried to infiltrate a team that size into Israel, dozens of alarms would have gone off before a single shot was fired. But apparently, Iranian intelligence is so inefficient, so financially strapped – or perhaps so thoroughly penetrated by Israeli double agents – that no flags went up at all.

The military balance of power is meanwhile woefully lopsided. Israel has launched thousands of air strikes at pro-Iranian targets in Syria and Iraq with minimal fear of retaliation. While Iran has staged military exercises, in which a mock US aircraft carrier is attacked and destroyed, any such attempt in real life would be tantamount to suicide, given America’s overwhelming advantage in firepower. Iran could also continue refining uranium now that the JCPOA is a dead letter. But doing so would expose it to yet more US-Israeli retaliation, this time on an even grander scale.

Iran is unable to defend itself, but unable not to defend itself either. But if it cannot strike at US or Israeli military targets, it can take aim at Saudi Arabia – the soft underbelly of the US-Israeli Middle East axis and the victim in September 2019 of a highly effective drone strike by Houthi militia forces in Yemen. This is why bin Salman was reportedly reluctant to go along with the Fakhrizadeh assassination at the November 22 Neom meeting – he is afraid that a Biden administration will not defend him against Iranian retaliation the way Trump would.⁷

But MBS is now in the thick of things regardless, as the mood darkens in the Persian Gulf, which means that Biden will have no choice but to firm up relations with him as well, now that he has walked straight into the trap set by Trump and Netanyahu. It is yet another example of why it is impossible to fight incipient fascism with a force as weak and duplicitous as the US Democrats.

Notes.

1) nytimes.com/2020/11/16/us/politics/trump-iran-nuclear.html.︎

2) Within hours of the killing, Trump retweeted a statement by Israeli journalist Yossi Melman that Fakhrizadeh’s death was “a major psychological and professional blow for Iran”.︎

3) youtube.com/watch?v=FYLNCcLfIkM.︎

4) edition.cnn.com/2020/09/13/opinions/smarter-way-to-be-tough-on-iran-joe-biden/index.html.︎

5) thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30083-9/fulltext.︎

6) dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8997575/Assassination-Irans-nuclear-scientist-involved-62-people-including-12-gunmen.html.︎

7) middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-israel-iran-mbs-us-attack-reluctant.︎

This column first appeared on the Weekly Worker (UK).

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the popular vote and remain in office beyond January 20 was always dependent on a steady build-up in momentum – not at the polling booths, obviously, since that was a lost cause, but on the streets, in Republican-controlled state governments and in the courts. And for a couple of weeks the strategy seemed to be working. The Proud Boys put on an impressive display of neo-fascist violence at the November 14 Million MAGA March on Washington, for instance, as they chanted “Fuck Antifa” and beat up every leftist they could get their hands on. With few exceptions, Republican congressmen and senators lined up behind their leader as well, amid polls indicating that 68% of Republican voters thought the election may have been rigged.¹ Trump himself continued tweeting up a storm about election malfeasance in Michigan, Georgia and elsewhere.

The “big mo”, as the elder George Bush called it back in 1980, seemed to be on his side. But then it all went to seed.

First, there was Rudy Giuliani’s disastrous November 19 press conference, in which the president’s personal lawyer accused Democrats of “mass cheating”, while his colleague, attorney Sidney Powell, raged about “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China” that was being used to hack election computers and steal the election on Joe Biden’s behalf. Reporters had a field day describing the brown hair dye coursing down Giuliani’s jowls, as his rhetoric grew more and more heated. Two days later, a federal judge tossed out a Giuliani lawsuit seeking to overturn the vote in Pennsylvania on the grounds that it was filled with “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by evidence”. Then Powell told a rightwing TV news channel the next day that not only were Venezuela and Cuba in on the conspiracy, but top Georgia Republicans “probably” were as well – at which point the Trump legal team had no choice but to give her the boot so as to preserve Republicans unity in the face of a Democratic bid to win two Senate seats in a special Georgia election set for January 5.

Finally, there was Michigan’s bipartisan state election board. Its job is to certify the vote, and on November 23, its four members met in Lansing to decide what to do. If the board had been deadlocked despite results showing Trump trailing by more than 150,000 popular votes, the effect would have been to throw the state’s 16 electoral votes into the House of Representatives, where obscure constitutional language gives Republicans a crucial advantage despite being in the minority overall.

But the decision was not even close. After a few hours of deliberation, one of the election board’s Republicans joined with his two Democratic colleagues in voting to certify, while the other merely abstained. The effort to move Michigan out of the Democratic column thus failed 3-0.

Individually, any of these missteps would have been a serious blow to Trump’s long-shot bid to hold onto power. Collectively, they were devastating. Sensing a change in the wind, Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration, the organisation that runs much of the US federal bureaucracy, announced that she would make “resources and services available” to Biden, so his team could proceed with the transfer of power. Even more dramatically striking was Trump’s follow-up tweet:

I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our Country … Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.

Face-saving rhetoric aside, was it a sign that Trump was at last throwing in the towel and that weeks of threats and defiance added up to nothing more than an extended tantrum on the part of a man-child in the Oval office?

The answer to the first part is that it is impossible to be sure, since Trump has plenty of manoeuvring room in the eight weeks or so until inauguration and he seems to be growing more defiant with each passing hour. “We are moving full speed ahead,” he said in one late-night tweet. “Will never concede to fake ballots & ‘Dominion’,” he added – a reference to the supposedly Venezuelan-owned computer firm that he says is helping Biden win.

As for the second assertion about an infantile temper tantrum, the answer is a definitive no. Yes, some people like to think that Trump is nothing more than a cry baby who wandered into the White House by accident and who is now on his way out. But they are the same people who like to think his reign was “an aberration” and that his failure to hold onto power means that the constitution has “passed the test”.²

Crisis

This is nothing more than wilful political blindness, since it should be clear at this point that the crisis is no more reducible to Trump himself than the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 was reducible to Kaiser Bill. On the contrary, Trumpism is a product of a political breakdown that can only deepen, regardless of what the next few weeks have in store.

This is not mere Marxist boilerplate, in which capitalism is always caught up in a crisis that is forever intensifying. Rather, it reflects real events, as they have transpired over a quarter of a century. Economically, the pattern is clear. Where the US growth rate hit 4.8% per year in the late 1990s and then bounced back to 3.8% following the dot-com bust of the early ‘aughts’, it only attained a peak of 2.9% in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown – before crashing through the floor, thanks to Covid-19. After weakening steadily over the course of more than two decades, in other words, US economic growth has finally collapsed. Since more pain is plainly in the offing, it is a safe bet that the economic shakeout is just getting underway.

Imperially, the trajectory has been the same. After rising steadily in the 1990s, US militarism positively boomed after 9/11 with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and then with the Nato intervention in Libya, the US-backed jihad in Syria, a neo-Nazi-led coup in Kiev, and finally a US-backed Saudi air war on Yemen, starting in March 2015. But then came the crash, as Islamic State went on a rampage in Syria and Iraq, terrorist atrocities occurred in Paris, San Bernardino and elsewhere, and the worst refugee crisis since World War II erupted, as millions fled war zones across the Middle East. It was the imperial bust that brought Trump to power, since it allowed him not only to promise to rev up the economy by gutting environmental regulations, but also enabled him to go on the warpath against Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Washington establishment and their ‘forever wars’ in places that few Americans could find on the map.

But, after first unfolding on an imperial and economic level, the crisis has unfolded on a constitutional level as well. This aspect also started with a boom back in 1987, when the hoopla over the constitutional bicentennial allowed everyone from arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond to Supreme Court chief justice Warren E Burger to see who could heap more praise on America’s founding document. Ronald Reagan never reached greater heights of Hollywood hokum than when he assured the faithful at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall that the constitution was divinely wrought: “After all,” he said, “both Madison and Washington were to refer to the outcome of the Constitutional Convention as a miracle, and miracles, of course, have only one origin.”

It was morning in America, the US was a city on a hill, while Reagan was nothing less than “a Prospero of American memories”, as Time magazine put it in a particularly icky Fourth of July cover story.³ But then came the bust in the form of bitter infighting on Capitol Hill, back-to-back government shutdowns, impeachment, a stolen election – and then a decade and a half of war, plus more pseudo-scandals in the form of ‘birthergate’ and ‘Benghazigate’. As jarring as all this was, what followed was even worse. Incapable of analysing why the machinery had enabled Trump to gain the presidency, Democrats opted to blame the Kremlin instead. Thanks to Russia, Russia, Russia, Washington entered into another round of civil war that was the most serious of all.

Which brings us to the present impasse. If Trump had succeeded in forcing the election into the House, the effect after all those interrelated and overlapping breakdowns would have been nothing less than explosive. Overwhelmingly black cities like Detroit would have risen in revolt, as Republicans sought to cancel the urban vote, while white suburbs and rural areas would likely have done the same. Trump might not have minded, since the disorder would have allowed him to move toward dictatorship and mass repression. But not everyone in the amorphous right-leaning entity known as the Republican Party was willing to go along with that.

So they stopped short of going over the cliff. As a result, the cry from the faithful is now the usual one about the constitution working, the system functioning as intended, checks and balances doing their duty, and so forth.

But that is nonsense, since the march to mayhem is merely on pause. A counter-democratic Electoral College, a grossly unrepresentative Senate, a gerrymandered House, a rightwing Supreme Court and a constitution that in general grows more rigid and change-averse, the older it gets – such features of a pre-modern, pre-democratic political structure are not going to go away any time soon. On the contrary, they are worsening, as widening state population discrepancies cause power to shift to white rural states all the more, further fuelling an overall drift to the right. Pious wishes that such problems will magically fix themselves will lead to nothing. After all, once a machine breaks down, the problems can only multiply, as any car owner can attest. This is why ‘we, the people’ – led, of course, by the working class – must eventually step in and do the repairs themselves. This does not mean using tools bequeathed by America’s ‘founding fathers’, since those are plainly inadequate. Instead, it means new tools that workers democratically create themselves.

Until then, the crisis – economic, imperial and constitutional – can only accelerate. This is not Marxist dogma, but the reality of post-Trump America – assuming, that is, that Trump really is on the way out.

Notes.

1. thehill.com/homenews/campaign/526464-half-of-republicans-in-new-poll-say-rigged-election-was-stolen-from-trump.

2. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/23/trump-us-constitution.

3. content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,144460,00.html.

This article first appeared in the Weekly Worker (UK).

The post The End is in Sight appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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