The Paul Street Report, 11.14.2022
It was so nice NOT to be writing about contemporary United States politics – an ugly topic, to say the least – last week. I will be making more and more of a habit of focusing on other subjects going forward.
But the mid-term elections were hard to avoid, and I naturally paid attention to the news and commentary regarding them.
Here are my top seventeen takes on the whole mess:
+1. The official song of the 2022 mid-terms should be Jim Hendrix’s Purple Haze. The widely expected “red wave” did not emerge but neither did the Democrats’ “blue tsunami.” Something different or in-between took place, full of mixed messages that have provided opportunities for both of the two sadly dominant US capitalist-imperialist parties to claim victory.
+2. David Brooks continues to be a statistically illiterate moron. In his New York Times column prior to the election and on his election night television commentary on “P”BS, this ridiculous blowhard saw the mid-terms as yet another opportunity to claim against all evidence that the Trump and DeSantis (see below)-era Republicans are a party of “populism” and “the working class.” This childish narrative, widely shared across the chattering skull and pundit class, is based on extreme false conflations between the lack of a college degree and rural residence on one hand and working-class status on the other hand. It leaves out people of color to a shocking degree and naturally deletes the racism, sexism, fundamentalist Christianity and general related authoritarianism (indeed neofascism) that by far and away trump economic anxiety as the driving force behind Republi-fascist voting (including the votes of actual working-class Republi-fascists). It helps the militantly elitist and fascist Republicans falsely and ludicrously brand themselves as the party of everyday working people.
+4. Another election cycle goes by where the US pretends to have a great “democratic” system despite: the absurd right-leaning partisan gerrymandering of the US House and state legislatures; the preposterous right-tilted malapportionment and absurd power of the US Senate; the ridiculous undemocratic Electoral College; the extreme power of the absurdly lifetime-appointed Supreme Court; the toxic and ongoing anti-democratic horror that is “states’ right;” the openly arch-plutocratic power of the nation’s campaign finance and corporate media systems. (I won’t even bother here to go into the de facto bourgeois class dictatorship imposed by private capitalist ownership of the means of production, investment, distribution, and communications.)
+5. Speaking of the abject violations of the core democratic principle of one person, one vote that are gerrymandering and judicial review – whereby elected officials choose their voters instead of the other way around – it appears that right-wing court rulings supporting a right-wing gerrymander in Republi-fascist Florida and undoing a Democratic gerrymander in Democratic New York may well account for the Republi-fascists’ new majority in the US House. As The New York Times reports, “those two decisions swung as many as six seats — potentially the entire [House] G.O.P. margin in a close-fought contest.”
+6. All this said, here is something worth applauding: the Republi-fascist wipe out in contested state elections where far right-wingers ran for jobs that would have put them in place to cancel popular votes their party didn’t like in the 2024 presidential election. As the Times reports:
“Every election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls this year, as voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process…The national repudiation of this coalition reached its apex on Saturday, when Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Nevada, defeated Jim Marchant, according to The Associated Press. Mr. Marchant, the Republican nominee, had helped organize a national right-wing slate of candidates under the name ‘America First.’…With [Nevada Rf Secretary of State candidate Jim ] Marchant’s loss to [Cisco] Aguilar, all but one of those ‘America First’ candidates were defeated. Only Diego Morales, a Republican in deep-red Indiana, was successful, while candidates in Michigan, Arizona and New Mexico were defeated…Their losses halted a plan by some allies of former President Donald J. Trump and other influential donors to take over the election apparatus in critical states before the 2024 presidential election.”
That’s nothing to sneeze at. God knows what’s going to happen in 2024-25, but the chances of a right-wing constitutional coup via contested state election nullification seem to have fallen significantly.
+7. The plutocratic corporate tool and geriatric imperialist Joe “Burn Pit” Biden – an open agent of potential nuclear Armageddon – will likely decide to run again in 2024 based on his party not getting its head completely caved in. Super! If he wins again, the soon-to-be octogenarian (he becomes “Octo-Joe” in six days) can be 86 years old at the end of his second term, assuming that he and Putin don’t blow up the world over Ukraine in the meantime.
+8. Speaking of Biden, here’s something remarkable about the 2022 mid-terms: the Democrats won voters who told exit-pollsters they “somewhat disapproved” of the sitting president by 49 percent to 45 percent. That is historically rare if not unprecedented and should be taken as a measure of how much US voters rightly hate and fear the neofascist party of Trump, Taylor-Greene, Gosar, and DeSantis. In the 2010 and 2018 midterms, voters who “somewhat disapproved of Barack Obama and Mr. Trump overwhelmingly backed the opposing party — by margins of 40 points and nearly 30 points.”
+9. If he can avoid impeachment (which requires a simple majority in the House), “Burn Pit” Joe may well dig Republi-semi-fascist control of the US House. It will give him a welcome excuse for his and his dollar-drenched neoliberal party’s failure to win and advance even semi-progressive policies (“we don’t have the votes”) and for him to pursue his beloved pastime of “reaching across the aisle” (since “we have no choice” and must “find common ground” to “get things done”). It worked for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Expect Octo-Joe to feel compelled to work with the Rfs under the specter of their threat to mark up his record with multiple party-line revenge impeachments.
+10. Potential global nuclear war and global warming – two grave existential menaces both rooted in the anarchic madness of capitalism-imperialism – were largely if not completely absent from the mid-term elections. With all due respect, what in f*#k are we supposed to make of a “democratic” elections and party system that pushes the two biggest issues of our or any time to the margins of public debate and consciousness?!
+11. Also missing from the mid-terms: the rest of the world. This deletion is nothing new of course. As the most powerful oppressor state and empire in the history of humanity, the United States has been sucking up the wealth and health of much of the rest of the world for at least the last 77 years (the global Pax Americana was born at the end of World War II). It is by far and away the leading force behind numerous forms of planetary misery, with the climate catastrophe now in the lead. As usual, the notion of the United States having any core responsibility to nations and people outside its borders was completely missing in electoral action.
+12. Enough with “it was Roevember.” I have on social media seen numerous liberals and even progressives claim that the mid-terms showed the “brilliance” of the Democrats’ campaigning against the Supreme Court’s June 24th, 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson decision – the horrific ruling that killed Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Court decision that had established women’s constitutional right to an abortion. Please. This exaggerates the extent of Democrats’ mid-term success and grants undeserved cover to the Democrats’ refusal to meaningfully mobilize masses against the well-telegraphed Dobbs decision – a decision partly rooted in the cynical calculation that the abolition of a basic human and women’s right would work to their advantage in the mid-terms. But worst of all, it strikes me as a big raised middle finger to the many millions of childbearing-age females stuck in the 22 or so states that have essentially banned safe and legal abortion following Dobbs. Wtf did the mid-terms do for women and girls with current or future unwanted pregnancies in Republi-fascist prohibition states like Ron DeSantis’s and Greg Abbot’s Florida and Texas? Is Joe Biden now about to wake up and (as Rise Up for Abortion rights demanded on the date of the Dobbs ruling) properly declare the war on abortion a national public health emergency and issue an executive order granting women and girls access to safe and legal abortions without apology on federal lands and military bases across the whole United States? No, he isn’t.
Say the Democrats miraculously keep the House (they are still counting ballots as I write this morning) and expand their small margin in the Senate with the run-off election in Georgia next month. Does that mean that the Democrats will act on their promise to “codify Roe v. Wade as national law”? Not at all. Doing so would require sixty votes in the Senate, which the Dems do not have, under the reactionary filibuster rule, which the Dems are unwilling and afraid to eliminate. And even an imagined national abortion rights law would likely be shot down by the Christian fascist US Supreme Court. Do the Dems have the gumption and power to expand the size and change the composition of the absurdly right wing high court? No, they do not.
+13. Democrats are crowing about how many of Trump’s preferred MAGA candidates went down, reveling in his potentially waning chances (but see my next take) of coming back to the White House in 2025. Okay, but they might want to reflect on the rising star of Ron DeSantis, who might be a more dangerous fascist than Trump. DeSantis rolled in Florida, making big incursions into the Miami-Dade Latino vote. He is one evil motherfucker and a force to be reckoned with. (How far is DeSantis’ “political stunt” of deceiving Latin American migrants onto an airplane and dumping them like human garbage in a northern liberal enclave from packing people into boxcars and shipping them to concentration camps?) On the other hand, and on the positive side for the Dems, they have reason to hope for a Trump-DeSantis war inside the Republican Party. If Trump goes all out with narcissistic rage against DeSantis’s ascendancy, he could help sabotage the party heading to 2024. Trump is already taking aim at DeSantis with insults and threats reminiscent of his juvenile but effective attacks on other Republican presidential candidates (Jeb Bush and Marc Rubio et al.) in 2015 and 2016. Here’s hoping that these two rabid Florida fascist dogs can both lock their teeth on the other’s jugular veins going forward.
+14. There are increasingly loud Republican rumblings about how the sick orange dumpster fire has cost their party in the last three elections (2018, 2020, and now 2022). But can the rightmost major party truly shed itself of the tangerine-tinted malignant narcissist from Hell? Trump has a durable sick hold on a vast swath of the party’s demented Amerikaner base, which is empowered far beyond its numbers by the weight it carries in the presidential primary elections. It’s not at all clear that the whiny stinker DeSantis – himself a lethal threat to what’s left of US democracy – can swing over enough of these noxious MAGATs to counter Trump’s nomination power. Or that the corrupt Mitch McConnell wing of the party can overcome the diseased gravitational pull of Trump’s perverted base.
+15. Issues vs. Parties and Candidates. Notice how much better US humanity sometimes does when it gets to vote on specific issues instead of for manipulative and partisan ruling class parties and their money-soaked candidates? As in Kansas earlier this year, voters given the opportunity to decide on behalf of defending and/or entrenching women’s right to an abortion in state constitutions did the decent thing in Michigan, Kentucky, and California. In far-right white reactionary South Dakota, voters given the chance to choose Medicaid expansion for poor people did so. Illinois voters backed a useful referendum that make it a state-constitutional right to join a union. (But let’s not overdo it: in Republi-fascist Iowa, an extreme gun rights amendment to the state constitution passed 65-35% and in Republi-fascist Tennessee 70% of voters chose to back a measure enshrining the state’s anti-union “right to work” bill in the state constitution.)
+16. Speaking of plutocracy, the 2022 mid-terms have naturally set new records for private candidate, campaign, and party funding. The elections were privately backed to the tun of $17 billion, a new mid-term mark. It is reported that the right-wing billionaire megadonor Peter Thiel spent $32 million on the elections. The lions’ share of bankrolling has certainly come from the deep pockets of multi-billionaires, billionaires, multi-millionaires, and millionaires, who do not fund elections just for the fun of it. Much of the campaign cash is untraceable thanks to the holy Supreme Court’s openly plutocratic and ironically titled 2010 Citizens United decision. Between the Supremes’ Buckley-Valeo (1976) and Citizens United rulings, the wealthy few and their corporations enjoy essentially unlimited capacity to purchase candidates and hence policy on both sides of the major capitalist party aisle. It’s “America, the best democracy money can and did buy.”
“The voters got the final say, as they always do.” So said senior adviser Anita Dunn after the nation’s last dollar-drenched biennial electoral extravaganza last week. What planet does Ms. Dunn live on?
+17. Bourgeois-democratic American Style election outcomes, even decent ones, don’t achieve very much for the people without mass mobilization in the streets and public squares beneath and beyond the election cycle. It’s not mainly about who’ sitting in the White House, the governors’ offices, the judiciary, and the legislatures at the end of the day; it’s about who’s sitting am marching in the streets and public squares and who’s ready to shut shit-down and make a revolution. I know I quote this passage from Howard Zinn too much but I’m going to do it again because nobody has ever said it better:
“The Election Madness…seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us…No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death…I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth…But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice. Let’s remember that even when there is a ‘better’ candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore…Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”
(I have two problems with this passage: bourgeois governments’ only real responsibility is to capital and its empire; we desperately need to overthrow such governments via popular socialist revolutions, not just “shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress.” Still, this is a useful starting point for seeing and organizing beyond the quadrennial and biennial major party candidate-centered corporate-managed electoral extravaganzas that are sold to us as “that’s politics,” the only “politics” that matters.)
Let me conclude with two quotes from the great German communist playwright Berthold Brecht. Send them to anyone you know among that vast and underestimated group of people who are understandably but nonetheless dangerously disengaged from any and all political struggle:
“If you fight you might lose; if you don’t, you have already lost.”
“Those against politics are in favor of the politics inflicted upon them.”
And this from Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”