The Trumpoid ejecta will contain valuable clues as to precisely which properties of modern political physics came together to blow up governance in the United States as the world looked on in appalled amusement. These elements predate Trump; he did not invent them, and their poisonous effects will survive him. What remedies will be applied? By whom?
Those who have turned Nov. 3 into a fetish object, insisting that All Will Be Well once a (D) replaces the (R) on our national throne, will take little interest in the repair work. These are the Facebook faces turning purple with rage at any suggestion that Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are not a three-person godhead poised to batter our nation’s sinful heart and redeem us from Trumpian evil. They refuse to acknowledge that when Trump is thoroughly discredited (and the repudiation will reach world-historic heights), the forces that brought him into being remain intact. The Democrat hierarchy has no track record of truly opposing these tendencies and in fact is complicit with many of them. We should be thinking hard now about how to address the damage in 2021 and beyond.
It’s hard to recall now, given the budding love affair between mainstream Dems and George W. Bush, but once upon a time Bush’s term in office was also considered a disgrace, so much so that he, a sitting president, wasn’t invited to his own party’s convention in 2008. (Neither was Cheney.) The economy was in the toilet thanks to years of corrupt non-regulation of the banking and mortgage sector, and the illegal conquest of Iraq, sold to us with a pack of lies, was turning into the criminal quagmire that it remains today.
Obama sailed into office and promptly turned the page on all that in the spirit of bipartisan kissy-face, which he claims to have thought would lead to a technocratic, kumbaya consensus with the reprobate Republicans grateful at the second chance he was giving them. It didn’t.
The Bush-era actions that Obama et al. decided to consign to unexplored history included: the destruction of habeas corpus by the creation of dungeons at Guantánamo where people are (still) held without trial; a regime of systematic torture of prisoners using secret drop-off sites in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere; destruction of the evidence of same, including videotapes, by the CIA; illegal wiretapping and electronic surveillance of citizens in violation of the 4th Amendment as exposed by Edward Snowden (Senator Obama voted to grant retroactive immunity to the telecom partners); rampant bank fraud leading to the 2008 financial collapse and loss of home equity by 8 million households (many African-American); grotesque tax cuts for the hyper-wealthy. None of these profoundly destructive patterns of criminal and/or immoral behavior led to investigation, a public airing of what occurred, prosecution, or reversal. At best, there were squishy attempts at “reform,” most of which could be ignored, watered down later, or reversed.
Obama then deepened the rot by: persecuting journalists like James Risen and Julian Assange, paving the way for Trump’s more demagogic attack on Fake News; crushing the Occupy movement with an 18-city coordinated paramilitary attack; suppressing evidence of bankster crimes while reassuring the financier oligarchs that he was “standing between you and the pitchforks”; undermining the historic opportunity for truly universal health care with the insurance-friendly Obamacare mess (handing Congress back to the Republicans in the process); leaving intact the crushing student debt that is bankrupting entire generations; and so on.
In short, Obama and the Democrats became partners in much of the worst of the W era, pushing the window of what is now possible, both in terms of overt crimes and the ongoing looting of the nation by the rentier elite, sharply in the wrong direction. Obama himself, the quintessential centrist, chided critics with paternalistic admonishments about the limits of what was possible, limits which he had done little to expand.
All of which led directly to Trump’s election.
Many found Obama’s discourse as president measured, lofty, and statesmanlike; I thought he was a pompous ass. But there’s no arguing with success. He left office with considerable popularity and while in office convinced a goodly part of the masses that someone was on their side, despite the evidence of their own gradually sinking attempts at maintaining a livelihood. Now we are at a similar juncture as the slash-and-burn Republicans prepare to leave a trashed and looted nation to the next series of Democrat stand-ins.
But we are not in 2009. Twelve years have passed in which the rich have become richer, the yachts huger, the prisons fuller, the debts heavier, the racists scarier, the cops bloodier, and the planet hotter—all before the breakdown of everything brought on by COVID-19. And we have, to lead us out of this thicket of simultaneous social crises: Joe Biden! Mr More-of-the-Same running a Hidden Basement Campaign, which is set to succeed by default. A figure built on yesterday’s vaguest ideas wrapped in contentless word salad that the poor fellow can’t even spit out in full sentences.
It would take the pen of a Trotsky to describe to what profound depths our political culture has sunk for it to present to us these two caricature candidacies at a moment of such gravity for all humanity. Obama arrived during an acute crisis of late capitalism and served it well; he cobbled together some salvage measures so the plutocrats could dump the costs on the most vulnerable and bounce back untouched. Meanwhile, he soothed the populace with fine phrases. The crisis was not solved, but merely kicked forward, and is now upon us again. But the complete absence of credible leadership from any quarter suggests that the system has no idea how to save itself this time around.
It is particularly curious that in this all-important election year, the usual dynamics of a presidential campaign have mostly disappeared, and not just because of the lock-down measures taken to try to save our immune systems. After the mad scramble of the early primaries, with endless debates and literally dozens of potential leaders to choose from, it now seems as if all that talk of putting someone in charge is an afterthought. Even Bernie Sanders sounds like a lost anachronism as he pounds away at his 50-year-old discourse about serving working people instead of the billionaires.
Have we accepted that no one is in charge? And that no one is riding to the rescue? Into the vacuum will surge new social forces—how healthy they are depends upon us.
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