deerhoof

SORRY NOT DYING IN A NUCLEAR WAR IS AN UNELECTABLE POLICY

Well now we have Trump at the U.N. taking a page from the Hillary Clinton playbook and threatening to “annihilate” Iran. (To be fair, Clinton’s word was “obliterate,” not “annihilate”. ) This is a proposition for mass murder of millions of innocent people, a nuclear detonation, and possible nuclear war.

Whether most Americans generally realize it or not, they actually want a socialist president, not more of these deranged Republicans or corporate Democrats. This is no theory. The latest poll finds Americans more likely to vote for a candidate who:

Taxes billionaires +34 Medicare For All +17 Weapons for Israel -30 War with Iran -33 (and that was before today’s threat of nuclear holocaust)

Though some politicians pay clever lip service to popular opinion, neither party’s mainstream actually represents any of these views in their policymaking. This includes the attack on Iran, which was desired and enabled by AIPAC-funded Democratic Party leadership.

From other recent polls we know there’s a whole list of other issues where most Americans hold socialist positions that are not represented by the mainstream of either corporate party:

People who claim that the “left” is too extreme for criticizing billionaire-owned, warmongering, omnicidal politicians are simply not paying attention. Culture has moved on. It’s the politicians themselves who are pretending that some imaginary “center” exists that wants to both-sides the biggest threats to human survival. If you’re still thinking that the positions held by people like Harris or Newsom in any way represent the center, or rationality, or survivability, you’ve now been left in the dust.

Yes our population does include some who genuinely like corporate Democrats. They’re a small and shrinking minority. Such politicians and their cheerleaders would probably increase their popularity if they would just say out loud that they hate Palestinians, Iranians, Latin American and African immigrants, and poor people, and that they love Big Oil, Big Tech, and billionaires. Not because the polls have shown these to be popular opinions, but because it would at least make such politicians more believable. Instead they play the moral superiority card and the good intentions card, and then turn out to be completely untrustworthy once in office. Is it any wonder they so often lose must-win elections to those who are willing to say such things out loud?

It’s not the left wing of the Democratic Party that’s made itself unelectable, it’s the corporate wing. They’re the one churning out spoiler candidates and committing atrocities. Just because it might not appear that way to everyone, because of the hundreds of millions of dollars AIPAC spends on smear campaigns and disinformation campaigns against popular left candidates, and a media owned by the same billionaires that explicitly oppose the left, doesn’t mean this isn’t true.

If you feel that your democracy is being undermined under Trump but didn’t feel that way under Biden, you are saying that you felt democratically represented by Biden’s policies, which included funding a genocide against popular opinion, lying about it, breaking both domestic and international laws to make sure the genocide was intensified and that the U.N. could do nothing about war crimes when committed by the U.S. or Israel, and physically attacking students who spoke up against their tuitions being used to make the genocide more effective. If those policies left you feeling well-represented, that’s fine, but it makes you an extreme-right voter.

Republicans may be the ones publicly accelerating humanity’s leap over the cliff at the moment, but the actual policies that mainstream Democrats are proposing in response don’t come anywhere close to meeting the seriousness of our global polycrisis:

I understand that many see some logic in trying to elect a “moderate” fascist over an “extreme” one. But that lesser-of-two-evils argument falls apart as soon as you understand that fascism is not actually popular with Americans. And even if a lesser fascist were to gain power next time, this alternation between the two wings of fascism simply ensures that your kids will grow up under fascism, and that the anti-fascist opinions that most people actually hold are automatically iced out of the discourse and out of any future policymaking.

Once you consider electability and survival realities, continuing to support the Democratic Party as it currently exists is completely illogical and suicidal. Our other options are:

Some of these outcomes may be mutually exclusive, but pursuing all of these strategies simultaneously for the time being is not a contradiction, but a way to increase the odds of success.

Many will still try to say that socialist victories, third party victories, or revolution can never happen here. Those who make predictions about what political shifts are and aren’t “realistic,” as a way to protect the status quo from the left’s attempts to save humanity, are simply not paying attention. Today’s rate of global change and severity of danger is both unprecedented and increasing, and no one can predict the future based on assumptions that it will be like the past. There is no guaranteed continuity with the relative comfort so many Americans have enjoyed their whole lives. Most Americans know nothing of the stress of ground wars, drought, gas shortages, drone killings, or battling your neighbors for scraps of food that they have so often felt comfortable inflicting on others. It’s those who have survived U.S. violence that are the ones with the relevant wisdom, should they be inclined to share that wisdom with their attackers.

Revolutions happen all the time. The U.S. was founded on one. Capitalist empires have a tendency to collapse after 250 years. My terms for people who claim that revolution is impossible, that we have to make do with our two corrupt parties as they are, that two-party voting is the most important or only thing we can do to save ourselves, and that every other creative idea that gets proposed is an unrealistic pipedream, are:

There’s one thing you absolutely have to do to defeat fascism and that is to directly name the perpetrators and their crimes. Genocides, invasions, and a militarized police state that rounds up political dissidents and non-white immigrants are fully Hitlerian, fascist policies — even when they are carried out by Democratic or Black or Jewish lawmakers. You may have to experience some emotional discomfort and call out a politician you voted for, once admired, or that you are being peer pressured never to criticize. Calling out only half of the perpetrators just ends up replacing them with other perpetrators.

Those who look at the Trump presidencies and say “This isn’t America. This is an interruption of America,” but who still think of chattel slavery and Jim Crow as part of “Black history,” U.S. “annihilation” of Iran as part of “Iranian history,” U.S.-funded genocide as part of “Palestinian history,” and ICE and border walls and concentration camps as part of “Latin American history,” need to realize they are using a racial double standard. These policies are better understood as interruptions of Black history, Iranian history, Palestinian history, and Latin American history, much more than Trump is an interruption of American history. He is the apotheosis of American history.

Remember that one of the main purposes of Donald Trump is to entertain liberals. Don’t we remember who was the most popular character of Star Wars? The guy in the mask that everyone loved to hate. Trump keeps liberals glued to their screens. Talk show joke writers have never had it so easy. He provides endless material for whoever writes Democrat fundraising emails. How substantial a difference would a visiting Martian really perceive between someone with a Trump hat or bumper sticker and someone with Trump constantly on their screen? On the other hand, the left doesn’t want to be entertained by Donald Trump, nor by the industry that makes so much money obsessing over hating Donald Trump. What it wants is to replace fascist capitalism with a sustainable system that doesn’t incentivize its leaders to detonate nuclear bombs to protect billionaire profit margins.

#blog