The Mass Psychosis Of The U.S. Elections

I know US elections seem to last forever, but this current phase of mass political psychosis will come to some kind of conclusion on the first Tuesday in November or, more realistically, in the many weeks it will take to count the votes amid whatever chaos, in both liberal and reactionary forms, ensues.

Either the neoliberal war-hawk, former “top cop” of California, Kamala Harris, or the neoliberal war-hawk, accused rapist, and near-fascist billionaire Donald Trump, will be declared the winner. In this scenario whoever wins, everyone else, in the US and around the world, loses.

Since Trump’s victory in 2016, US politics has been in a crisis of legitimacy. Trust in public institutions is faltering and for many peoeple their conception of objective reality is largely influenced by the kind of media they consume.

The Democrats, for their part, have done everything in their power to resist progressive and social democratic leaning voices gaining any ground in their ranks. They fail to see how real left policies could appeal to a broad swathe of US voters - ideas capable of countering the influence of the cost of living crisis, corporatate greed or the might of the military-industrial complex.

The failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign to win the Democratic nominee for president on two occasions and reverse-engineer a left wing some kind of alternative political formation in the US combined with the success of Trumpism in the Republican party, has ushered in the most right-wing default political situation in many decades.

Recently, Dick Cheney, arch-neocon, life-long Republican, and architect of the dictatorial police-state built in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks has endorsed Kamala Harris for president. To be absolutely clear, nothing Trump did in his first term as president could compare to the heinous level of mass murder and evil associated with Dick Cheney and the wartime Bush administration.

Democrats know non-Trump voters have nowhere to meaningfully go, especially those in the handful of swing-states that determine each election in the sham democracy of the US and are happy to be in bed with the neocons, since their foreign policy has actually always been the same.

All one needs to do is look at the unquestioned support for Israel, Netanyahu, and the ongoing genocide being carried out against the Palestinians. Democrats, and US politicians in general, claim to be for freedom and the rule of law, except when it comes to Palestinians. They claim they are against brutal dictators, except for when it is strategically beneficial to their projection of global economic and military power.

As Netanyahu commits war crime after war crime, from the slaughter of many thousands of innocent people, the theft of land, the rape and torture of prisoners, the State-terrorist attacks on and invasion of Lebanon, to firing on UN peace-keepers the US stands by him.

No one believes the US wants to influence the situation in a way that would further erode their lack of legitimacy as an honest broker on the international stage. And, of course, the many billions in weapons and support that the US lets Netanyahu use to carry out his crimes, is more than enough evidence of the US’s actual position. They want a heavily armed proxy in the Middle East to guard their coporate interests.

Democrats and liberals are also more than happy to continue to drag out the war in Ukraine, so long as American voters continue to feel like it doesn’t affect them. For Nato, one of the US’s crucial mechanisms of maintaining military hegemony over the globe, losing ground and influence to Russia is non-negotiable, even if it means risking wider, more catastrophic consequences for people in Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the rest of the world.

Putin has made it clear that his position regarding the use of long-range missile attacks deep inside Russia would indicate a more direct involvement of Western imperialist powers, including Britain.

When Trump cynically claimed that disaster relief for hurricane victims would amount to only $750 while Ukraine and Israel get billions for war, he is partially right, although for the wrong reasons. And, more realistically, people trying to survive in a disaster situation, struggling to get any of the disaster relief available to them beyond the immediate emergency amount, this will mirror their direct, lived experience.

Whatever their political leanings, it will be easy enough for many of them to blame whatever party currently happens to have the presidency and then vote accordingly.

I say Trump “cynically” attacks the Biden-Harris regime because we all know there isn’t a humanitarian bone in bigot Trump’s body. Trump is generally opposed to emergency relief funding and Republicans are generally opposed to cutting anything from the Federal budget that isn’t immediately related to either give-aways to their corporate puppet masters or for the Pentagon.

Now, with Democrats aligning with more established reactionary forces, this right-ward shift will likely increase the challenges faced by whatever social democratic politicians assume they need to be “in the room” to get things done. The left in the Democrats is nothing but a mudguard for this corporate party.

Regardless, billions for bombs and pennies for you will resonate for many at the polls this November. If only there was a serious working class left saying that.

Finally, there was one other brief event that could put a significant wrinkle in the campaigning lead up to the election. That event was the short strike by dockworkers in the Gulf and East coast ports of the US.

The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) returned to work after three days on the picket lines and secured large wage increases over their next six year contract. The strike helped bridge the gap between the ILA and its west coast counterpart, the far more militant ILWU with its history of independent, left wing, and communist politics.

Negotiations on the other major issue, automation, that will lead to job-losses, has been kicked down the can until January 2025. In this case, we actually saw militant organised labour extract demands from the organisation representing their employers far in excess of what they would normally have been inclined to grant.

This was even after the major carriers that use these ports posted record profits during the pandemic and blatant price-gouging. By most conservative estimates, any one of the carriers involved could have covered the wage increases out of their 2023 profits alone and still had a record year.

In addition, the Biden administration appears to have leaned on the employers to settle, helping the Democrat’s image as the pro-union party in the lead up to the election. We have seen more union-friendly rhetoric during the Biden administration than people were used to seeing from Democrats, but we also saw the Biden administration help to crush the rail-workers strike.

We also know Kamala Harris is tightly linked to extremely anti-union tech and Silicon Valley types like Uber. Far worse, she didn’t think California could afford to fight its forest fire without the use of prison labour, which means slave labour, when she was top prosecutor of that state. The prospects of organised labour remain to be seen no matter who wins the presidency, but it’s clear that striking when you have leverage can pay off.

So, we have political crises in the two main parties, imperialist war and support for genocide, climate related disasters, and an important lesson from militant labour action. The absent factor in all of this is an organised, revolutionary left wing formation that can offer the US working class an alternative vision of politics, economics, and peace, and prosperity.

The social democratic vision of the Sanders movement capitulated to the Democrats, tailing them to the right just as the Democrats welcomed the architects of the post-9/11 horror into the ranks of their supporters. The only option for socialists now seems to be a principled refusal to participate in the sham democracy of this two party vote and direct the anger that many U.S. workers feel towards a positive vision of hope that puts ordinary people in control of our own destiny.

This organising has to take place in unions, on campuses where students are leading on international solidarity with Palestine, and in communities that are left behind when climate catastrophe hits. Ultimately U.S. socialists need their own political vehicle that can use intervention in the electoral terrain to build these movements.

Here, in Ireland, there are lessons to be gleaned from this analysis. It is clear that any tailing of bourgeois or even reformist parties is a dead end for socialists. We should never tie ourselves into a political alliance that would have us betray what we see as the mission of the working class - emancipating itself from capitalism and imperialism.

This states’ deference to their imperialist masters in the US, Britain, and Europe needs to be strongly opposed in transformative, not symbolic ways: like our trade unions leading on full compliance with Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel. This could have transformative power.

Socialists fighting to get unions to lead on the major bread-and-butter issues like housing, can empower our class and can stop the far-right from cynically exploiting peoples’ economic precarity. Standing with our brothers and sisters from minority backgrounds against racism directly confronts the right-wing bigots who look to divide and rule on behalf of the system.

The other clear lesson is the need for a nationally organised, deeply-rooted, principled socialist organisation that works tirelessly on all of these fronts.

Worker power combined with socialist politics and a message of liberation that only the people who, like the longshoreman in the US, literally make the economy function, can defeat the neoliberal establishment,

The reformist pretenders in Sinn Fein or in the Soc Dems who will be sometimes left and sometimes right on any given issue, tailing our rulers. We shouldn’t tail them in turn. When a real working class alternative is completely absent from politics, you get a situation like that in the United States which, with Democrats like Harris and Republicans like Cheney working together, might prove to be more reactionary than we can even imagine.

Until the two party regime is overthrown.