Trump has repeatedly said there won’t be a peaceful transition of power if he loses. He’s also said he wants to stay in power 3 or more terms. All of these are clearly unconstitutional. They clearly indicate his desire to rule the country as a dictator. And if it were to pass, it would be tantamount to a coup d’etat.
Yet no Democrats are calling for impeachment hearings. None
are calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office, or Congressional
hearings into the coup plot. They’ve even dropped all attempts to delay the
SCOTUS nomination until after the election, which essentially hands Trump the most
powerful weapon he has for carrying out his coup: Appealing to the Supreme
Court to give him the victory, as they did for George W Bush. The only difference
is that the Court was already far more right wing before RBG died than it was
in 2000. Add one more right-winger, 3 of whom would be Trump appointees, and
the odds in his favor go up even more.
Pelosi and Schumer, the 2 top Dems, could barely muster
feckless pleas for the Republicans to do the “right thing.” Fat chance, and
they knew it. The only Dem to make any speech-length argument on Thursday was
Bernie Sanders. But the only solution he could come up with was to beg everyone
to vote, arguing that a Biden landslide would make it impossible for Trump to
deny the vote. He even told us to drop our fight for “an agenda that works for
all, and not just a few” until after Biden is elected, in a desperate appeal to
win his base over to Biden, while not alienating Biden’s corporate backers.
Of course, nothing makes it impossible for Trump to deny the
vote. He denies things daily that are far less controversial. And if he is willing
to publicly conspire to violate the constitution, why should anyone believe
that the scale of his loss would matter to him? He’ll just say it was rigged.
The Sanders argument (which is also being made in editorials
and by other politicians), is essentially a concession in advance. Biden only
needs to win by 1 electoral college vote for it to be a legitimate victory. Not
200, nor even 1000. The Sanders argument implicitly allows Trump to interpret
anything less than a landslide as justification to stay in power if he loses.
Even Biden has dropped his earlier arguments that Trump was
attempting to create a dictatorship, adopting the naïve and conciliatory stance
that it’s all just bluster and there’s nothing to it. But if that was true,
then why the rush to get a new right-wing supreme court justice seated before
the elections?
Ultimately, the Democrats would much rather hold their noses
and accept another 25-40 years of a right-wing court, and a potential Trump
dictatorship, and along with it, all the violence and death he has threatened to
unleash against his opponents and protesters, than face the prospect of a
working class revolt that spins out of their control. Indeed, that is exactly
what Trump’s threats of post-election state repression are intended to do:
suppress any resistance by workers, students, immigrants, middle class
liberals.
This is why Dems focused on Russiagate in their impeachment
attempt, instead of the crimes Trump has publicly confessed to (no chance of
workers rising up over this issue). This is why the Democratic Party and its
billionaire supporters have all embraced the BLM movement, since it corrals
mass public outrage into harmless demands for racial justice that pose no
threat to capitalism or their wealth. Even better, its philosophical underpinning,
Critical Race Theory, is entirely consistent with the identity politics they’ve
adopted to replace their traditional base in the labor movement. We don’t need
to pay people more or provide them with healthcare or affordable housing. We
just need more woman and people of color in the boardrooms and in Congress.
Imagine what might happen if the thousands of people who’ve
been protesting in the streets for racial justice were to suddenly start
demanding the arrest of the CEOs and corporate boards of Amazon, Tyson, GM, Tesla,
and Universities, for profiteering off the pandemic that is disproportionately
killing Black, Latino and Indigenous people. Or the arrest of Trump for mass
murder, for lying to the public about the dangers of Covid (as confirmed in the
Woodward tapes), and his herd immunity policy, which has killed 208,600
Americans (again, disproportionately black and brown). Or if they were to
change their chant from “Black Lives Matter” to “Workers’ Lives Matter.” What
if, instead demanding the cops stop killing black people, they were to demand that
the cops stop killing poor people (the overwhelming majority of victims of cop
shooting are poor)? Or, instead of handing over trillions of dollars to Wall
Street, they demanded trillions to the unemployed, underemployed, and those who
don’t earn enough to support their families? “Not Dying for Wall Street!” And how
about demanding that trillions more be spent to ramp up testing, contact
tracing and PPE for truly essential workers, and free healthcare for all? Or trillions
to convert our infrastructure from fossil fuels to renewables, and the creation
of a green new deal with good paying, green union jobs for local communities?
And what if they demanded that the money to pay for all this came from the trillions
we currently spend on subsidies to corporations? And from higher corporate and capital
gains taxes? How about increased taxes on stock market transactions and mineral
extraction? And slashing the military budget and making peace with Russia,
China, Iran, instead of constantly competing with them for hegemony?
While all these are completely reasonable demands, and most
are desired by the majority of Americans, they would be interpreted by our
leaders, Dems and Repubs, alike, as a threat to their wealth and power,
particularly if they were being yelled in the street by mobs. Even more so, if
those demands were accompanied by trash fires, vandalism and looting.
Our leaders know full well that, as the pandemic persists
and likely worsens in the coming months; as more and more people become destitute
because of lost jobs, evictions, foreclosures, and death and illness to family
bread winners; as people become increasingly desperate to go outside and play,
socialize, spend time with friends and family; as climate crises (like deadly
fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, floods, droughts and food shortages)
become more common and more destructive; people will become more desperate,
angry and willing to go out into the streets and protest. And their protests could
very well become more aggressive and violent than what we’ve seen so far.
This is what both parties of Wall Street fear the most. And
what a Trump dictatorship promises to quell, through state violence and the
violence of his shock troop supporters.
But what if Biden is right and it is all just bluster?
Trump could still win legitimately. Or, perhaps Biden will
win, despite offering his supporters nothing other than “I’m not Trump.” Either
way, there are a lot of quite important things, (possibly the most important
things), that simply won’t change. Here’s what we can expect in 2021:
·
a continuation of the herd immunity policy and
hundreds of thousands more covid deaths
·
no serious investment in public health or plan to
provide free or cheap healthcare for all
·
no effective plan to curtail the climate crisis
and, consequently, an increasing number of people displaced and killed because
of it
·
no significant change to policing, or reduction
in the 1,000 people killed by cops each year, nor even a reduction in the
disproportionate number of black people killed by the police
·
no reduction in the number of immigrants deported
nor an effective path toward citizenship
·
continuing provocations with China and/or
Russia, bringing us closer to nuclear war
·
continued bailouts for Wall Street and the
country’s largest corporations; peanuts, or nothing, to the poorest and most
destitute members of society
·
a wealth gap that continues to grow worse,
increasing class tensions and threat of popular uprisings
·
If we are lucky, we’ll get a vaccine that has an
80% effectiveness, but that still can’t end the pandemic. Here’s why:
o
51% of Americans have said they would either
refuse it, no matter what, or they were scared and unlikely to take the vaccine,
o
Without a public health campaign to educate and
encourage vaccine use (and there has been none to date), the best we can hope
for would be 40-50% of the public gaining immunity, which is not enough for
full herd immunity, as too many people would still be vulnerable and could catch
and spread the virus
o
(80% effectiveness x 50% vaccination rate = 40%
of the public gains immunity)
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