Since 2014, even mainstream political science
acknowledges that the US state is profoundly unresponsive to the needs of its
ordinary citizens. The views and preferences of mass organizations and ordinary
people have no effect at all upon policy outcomes. None. Meanwhile, elite
organizations and the views of the owning classes are enormously influential.
Any state that ignores the will of its citizens so consistently and brazenly cannot
be termed a republic or a democracy. The United States, whatever it may have
been in the past, is a plutocratic oligarchy. Seen in this light, it is no
wonder that progressives rarely hold office and, even when they do, struggle to
enact even the most tepid policies. The electorate, for its part, has
understood this for decades: the single universal predictor of regular voting
is higher income. A plurality of working class people, and a majority of poor
working class people, do not vote at all.
The widening gap between the needs of the masses and
the policies enacted by the government has potentially serious consequences. We
must remember that fascism does not arise merely from reactionary politics, but
from a crisis in the established bourgeois order. The unresponsiveness of the
state to the people’s needs provides a catalyst for such a crisis, and let us
be clear: this unresponsiveness is bipartisan, as is the fascist threat. We see
the signs in the sad state of cities around the country, in the hopelessly
corrupt response to the pandemic, in the growing desperation of a population
that has turned to opioid abuse and suicide to find some relief from their
circumstances, in rising censorship and political violence, in hysterical war
propaganda against Russia and China, and in the stark image of a Presidential
inauguration conducted behind concrete barricades and a ring of soldiers. Under
these conditions, there is a very real possibility that the country could
become ungovernable.
In all this, the main progressive and left
organizations provide the same answer to the masses that they always have, an
answer that has had the same basic form for the past four decades: “We must
stop ____”. Whether the blank is filled by Reagan or Bush or Trump makes no
difference. The status quo, however bad, must be defended against the greater
evil. Once that is done, we are told, our needs may be met. But they never are.
In fact, it is precisely the status quo that prevents progressive policies
being enacted and leads inexorably to crisis, of which the election of
unscrupulous huckster Donald Trump is only one expression. To repeat: the
election of right wing Democrats creates the very conditions which produced the
faux-populist Trump in the first place. Moreover, if supporting rightist Democrats
is “strategic” as its defenders have stubbornly argued, should we not have seen
some measurable policy result in forty years? Today, the prescription to
support the Democrats without question or criticism reaches even more absurd heights,
as organizations like the moribund old CCDS and CPUSA enjoin leftists to unite
with the military, the state security apparatus, and Bush-era war criminals to
oppose Trump. If ever there was a ‘red-brown alliance’, this is it.
One might imagine, after reading the preceding
paragraphs, that they might be followed by a vague call to organize the masses
directly or to build a labor party out of thin air. Not at all. In fact, what I
propose should be acceptable to even the most yellow-bellied reformist:
strategic voting. Progressive votes should be given only to those candidates
who demonstrate tangible effort in support of progressive policies. Failure to show
such effort would result in a coordinated withdrawal of votes. Either
progressives can continue on the path of political cowardice and watch the
country sink further and further into apathetic misery or we can adopt a new strategy
that acknowledges the basic principles of electoral organizing.
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