I know it’s the fifth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, but there is little to celebrate at such a grim moment. That being the likelihood Trump may very well win.
If he does, Black Lives Matter will be declared a domestic terrorist outfit, just like the Earth Liberation Front was under Bush.
Trump and Attorney General Giuliani would relish using the National Guard to crush blockades of oil pipelines and trains, and indigenous people defending their lands. There will be no more climate justice movement or even hesitant steps toward limiting climate change. An English-only law would likely be passed, DACA be withdrawn, and sanctuary cities outlawed. White supremacists, Neo-Nazis, the Klan, and the Alt-Right would all be welcome into his administration, overtly or covertly.
There would be an all-out assault on reproductive rights and Planned Parentood
Significant gains made at the National Labor Relations Board in the last few years will be overturned.
Huge swaths of the West under federal control will be turned over to logging, ranching, mining, and oil and gas industries.
Tens of millions would go from inadequate healthcare to no healthcare.
The Alt Right will aggressively disrupt the left.
Massive voter suppression becomes the norm.
There will be organized vigilante violence, perhaps even mini-pogroms, against Muslim and Mexican communities with the state turning a blind eye.
Don’t think it can’t happen; the WWI period saw hideous pogroms against African-Americans and Chicanos with state support. Entire communities were wiped out and thousands killed.
This would just be the beginning. Trump makes Reagan’s Voodoo economic policies like a beacon of rational economic planning. His combination of budget-busting tax cuts, decimating social welfare, roiling U.S. alliances, and abrogating free-trade deals would send the economy into a nosedive. As soon as a recession hits, Trump would immediately go hunting for scapegoats to distract his followers. This could include a ban on Muslim immigration, a registration program, and mass round-ups of immigrants, meaning concentration camps to hold them before they were ousted, overseen by his “deportation force” of Brownshirts.
There is a quaint notion on the left that somehow Trump is hot air. This ignores the dynamics he’s set in motion that will make new types of state-sponsored racial violence all but inevitable. This is not just a quantitative change over Obama and Clinton, but a qualitative one. In fact, it may even be worse that what I am outlining here. This is a man who muses about using nuclear weapons, he ignores even basic bourgeois political norms or rules, and he is lustily cheered by tens of millions when he calls for the assassination of his opponents and mass ethnic cleansing.
Yet a significant portion of the left is obsessed with how terrible Hillary Clinton is, both as a candidate and politically. As if this is somehow news. I see very little from the Facebook left on the extreme dangers Trump represents. I’ve gone to six different Trump events, and it’s evident he has consolidated a white nationalist movement that is demanding a 21st century apartheid state. Even if it doesn’t happen right away, Trump will inevitably go down this path as he sabotages the entire economy and U.S. foreign relations.
Meanwhile, there is a bizarre faith on the left that the ruling class will somehow keep him in check, despite the fact he will have control over every branch of government. This is matched by a warped belief that somehow extreme racist violence will create new left-wing mass movements. In reality, all the recent organizing gains will whither as the left is forced to wage losing defensive struggles against violent white nationalists.
No one will be able to stop his dictatorial, white supremacist agenda. Congress won’t stop him. He will have a majority on the Supreme Court, and while sections of the ruling class may be deeply unhappy, they will still be safe and obscenely wealthy and can always escape.
This election is a choice between two movements. Do you want to see movements like Black Lives Matter, Climate Justice, low-wage workers, immigrant rights, and other left social forces continue to grow and develop? Or do you want to see Neo-Nazis, the Klan, the Alt-Right on the offense and backed by a Trump administration?
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10 Comments
Donald J Trump and his neo-fascist and white supremacist nationalist movement must never be underestimation. He and his followers represent a very grave existential threat to American democracy and to peace, justice, safety, and security of the world, including our global survival. Thus, it is absolutely imperative that we defeat him and his ilk.
Keep calm indeed and as Alicia Garza advocates vote for the political terrain that gives us the better chance of moving forward. Here in MA I’m spending my limited time with the NO on 2 organizers who are fighting against charter school expansion and with efforts across the state line in New Hampshire to defeat Trump/elect Clinton.
The Greens to my great disappointment seem to be nowhere nearer to maturing as a political organization than they were 4 or 8 or 12 or 16 years ago. Many friends continue to work in and support the Party but personally I can no longer join them.
There is no left-right pendulum that swings passively back and forth; that is a myth. The back and forth is by the active pull of a tug of war.
Will voters be pulled away from principled candidates who will work to make desperately needed changes for the 99%, or will the duopoly parties be pulled away from their support of 1%’s interests?
Remember that in states that are solidly in the corner of either Democrats or Republicans—in other words, they are not swing states—a vote for the R’s or D’s there is a wasted vote that will have NO impact on the number of electoral college votes, and will not elect a president.
So vote for the parties that will not be in the televised debates, because with a 15% vote total you can “elect” them into national parties on all state ballots and actually have your vote count for something.
It’s time we go from sociopathic to outright psychopathic in our leaders .
“What the hell do you (we) have to lose”
Keep Calm and Vote Green: Fascism Is Not Coming
By Paul Street
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/keep_calm_and_vote_green_fascism_is_not_coming_20160923/
I say bring it. Actually, I think all the Armageddon rhetoric is totally over the top but even on a theoretical level- I say bring it. The left- such as it is- is only going to get weaker, the climate is only going to get less stable, the apathy and disillusion and cynicism stronger- so why not have it out right now? Even if I end up crucified, still better than having to look at Bill Clinton’s salacious grin.
Here’s my apathy, dillusion and cyncism Dave. The last sentence in Street’s Truthdig artticle,
“Let us join together after the latest quadrennial extravaganza to build and expand a great popular movement with a list of demands and the introduction of an election and party system that deserves passionate citizen engagement.”
What, now? What, after this election? What, we/you weren’t, aren’t already doing it? What, consult the Facebook left first? What, better and more intelligent than the ZNet commentary left? What, where’s this list of demands that one wants to get up and push? At the Shared Program website that Street signed onto? What, you haven’t already been pushing these demands and organising around them “physically”, grassrootly, already, long befor this, this 2016 electoral extravaganza? What, too busy? What, lots of articles, essays and books to write and read? What, it’s up to the rest of us members of the Precariat? What, we have to pull our fingers out, stick our necks out, because “we” all know where to go, what to think, how to organise? What, you reckon “we” all know what’s good for us, where we’re all heading, and how to get there? What, OR, Stein, The Next System Project, The Zapatista’s, Syriza, Left Unity, Podemos, Die Linke, Parecon, ZNet, Truthdig, Truthout, Counterpunch, Red Pepper, Media Lens, Nuit Debout, Occupy, Corbyn, Sanders, oh, fuck, and all the rest, a plethora of stuff and more, have glued the left together?
Cynthia Peters,
“IOPS creates the space for us to do the essential work of movement building and envisioning a better world. Without these elements, we’ll continue to work in isolation.”
What, isolation? After all this time, with the internet and everything as well? What, with all the great ideas and visions and shit and books and books and more books? Wht, with all those dedicated hardcore never say die radicals?
Maybe not Armageddon but gated communities, countries, regions are coming, rapidly, if they are not already here…and the Precariat will only grow, increasing stress, anxiety and mental illness, psychological distress and who knows what kinds of reactions. It ain’t just global warming or climate whatever to worry about. Small left radical groups all over the place fighting the good fight, isolated and impotent, yet with the right kind of positive attitude, all members exhibiting the positivity and energy of an Eveready battery. Continued articles and essays from the elite intelligent experienced activist community about what’s needed, just like Street wrote at the end of an essay essentially about nothing other than his right to vote however he wants.
OR is apparently about grassroots activism, as is Stein and the Greens, but somehow the two aren’t on the same page. Well, fuck me, how surprising. That’s a good start. It’s 2016, not 1999, or 1968, or 1936-39, or 1870 odd to 1920 odd, or 1889, or 1871, or 1864, or 1848, or what else….
Jesus, 2008 came and went and that shit’s worse than it was before. Here’s Street again,
“The International Organization for a Participatory Society (IOPS ) has the very real potential to be all this and more. It is the “future” left-egalitarian organization we’ve been waiting for. It’s time to stop waiting and, as a start, to join.”
It’s time to stop waiting and join….join WHAT? WHERE? With whom?
I think we need more manifestos. Where’s Peter?
I’m off to buy something to get the lemons high up on the tree so I don’t have to climb the bugger and cut the shit out of myself. Then I’m gonna wait for a sound file from England and do some recording. Then I’m gonna watch the football team I support play in the Grand Final. Then I’m gonna visit and look after my mother who’s got dementia. Then I’m gonna go to work for the next six days to do what I need to do to keep my family intact, but read in the mornings. Depressing shit, like Chasing The Scream, or The Precariat Charter, or The Rise of the Robots, or about a universal basic income that merely accentuates the very vivid idea that market capitalism is the most absurd way to organise an economy, or try to make head or tail out of someone’s vision for a better world and then have no-one to talk about it, or sit for hours wondering what I myself can build or organise, perhaps by leaving some note on the noticeboard at the local library about a meeting, concerning what I have no idea.
Apathy, delusion and cynicism. But whatever ya do, keep smiling.
Go Swans.
Disillusion, not dillusion or delusion, WTF!
“James,” such depressing garbage (sorry) at the outset of your long comment….I’ve already joined together with lefties of all kinds of stripes (many were big Sandernistas, some are Greens, many are voting for HRC to block Trump, some just don’t focus on electoral matters at all) to fight the Bakken Dakota Access Pipeline in the high holy electoral state of Iowa. You might be amazed how minor differences over the big election are when it comes to people uniting around social movement causes like protecting water and keeping fossils in the ground to save livable ecology . It’s that other politics, the more urgent and indispensable politics of movements beneath and beyond the extravaganza…and imagine, gee, guess what, its ongoing and “Street” participates in that while also taking a position (without an excess of electoralist illusion) for Stein and Baraka in the election. It’s called walking and chewing gum at the same time. You’ve set up a false dichotomy between one (a) arguing for unity and advocating for an improved elections and party system after election (because let’s face it: the quadrennial intra-leftist blood-letting over how to respond to this really messed up US elections and party system is a big problem) and (b) practicing unity and advocating electoral and party reform prior to the election. But false dichotomies are rife on the left (as elsewhere) and drive endless online nastiness so by all means carry on.
I won’t argue about my comment being depressing. Garbage? Your right to decide. More like a passionate and emotional outburst, no doubt. Online nastiness? Possibly what happens when one writes emotionally in the comments section of a marginal left media site and someone particular is in the firing line. Why you? Possibly because I have read you more than most, books included, tend to agree and cannot usually fault your point of view. Strange, I know. False dichotomies? Unintended consequence of the emotional energy. No, much simpler than that. Only really the last sentence of your article that sparked the response. Residual frustration. I am sure you do stuff, as most people like yourself do, but not really my point. I was responding more to Dave’s (who also is heavily actively involved in similar stuff as yourself) comment re apathy, disillusion and cynicism, which is depressingly growing in me as Dave said it probably will, in his comment. My comment was a photograph of exactly that and shit I haven’t let go of that Michael Albert suggests I should. If Ed had not linked your article Keep Calm (irony), and that very last sentence wasn’t there, I would not have written a thing. I may have just said gidday to Dave. Psychological triggers that churn shit up. And no doubt, just like yourself I will carry on. No choice.