Dispatch on American Political Dystopia
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
There is seemingly no end to the lethal and dystopian absurdity of US-American political life right now.
Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump not only walks free but has a decent shot of being re-elected to the most dangerous job on Earth. What the fascist fuck! Hey, so what if he’s a malignant narcissist, a fascist, a convicted felon, a pandemic spreader, a vicious white-supremacist, a putschist, and an adjudicated sexual abuser who has been openly channeling Hitler this year? So what if he seriously tried to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy as US president four years ago?
The Trumpist/Trump-appointed US Supreme Court ruled this summer that a US president has full legal immunity to order the military to assassinate a political rival. The list of now “constitutionally” prosecution-free presidential crimes is endless. Under this Fascist Fuhrer decision (United States v. Trump), the presidency is granted dictatorial powers.
Anything a US president does as an “official duty” is immune from prosecution. Tell the Justice Department to investigate the wife or son of a political enemy? Order the US Attorney General to interfere with election counts? Order a hit squad to murder environmental activists? Order US Border Patrol to shoot asylum-seekers? Send in the military to conduct extra-judicial assassinations in the nation’s cities? It’s all good! “Official duties,” don’t you know!
The malevolent, orange-tinted maniac Donald “Retribution” Trump has escaped trial, much less conviction for trying to turn the world’s most powerful nation into a dictatorship in 2020-21. He holds vengeance-promising campaign/hate rallies in which he calls his militantly centrist and capitalist-imperialist election opponent Kamala Harris a “communist.”
When a youthful right-wing gun nut with an AR-15 nearly assassinated the fearless orange fascist leader, Trump’s deranged and women-hating Republi-Nazi running mate and fake ex-hillbilly JD Vance immediately blamed the shooting on “the left” – the traditional bogeyman of fascist ideology.
Donald “Shithole” Trump’s cult/party convention in Milwaukee last month was a monument to masculinist violence, punctuated by the chant “Fight, Fight, Fight!” and calls for “Mass deportations now!”
Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump continues to purvey his Goebbels-worthy Leviathan Lie of a stolen 2020 election. He has recruited swing state county election officials who will not certify 2024 votes results that go his opponent’s way.
The corrupt and impeached Trumpist-fascist attorney general Ken Paxton of Texas recently ordered raids on the homes and offices of Latino civil and voting rights activists. Paxton joins Trump and Trump’s malicious, women-hating running mate and other far-right politicos in purveying the malicious and false claim that the White Houses is flooding the nation with “illegal” immigrants being brought into the US to vote for Democrats!
When the Democrats tried to head-off Republi-fascist nativism by signing off on a right-wing border bill earlier this year, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump ordered his Christian Fascist Speaker of the US House to block the legislation for purely partisan and political reasons – to deny a “conservative” and bipartisan policy victory to a capitalist party the Fatherland forces insist on calling “radical Left” and “Marxist.”
The neofascist Heritage Foundation has brought a vast network of billionaire-backed right-wing policy groups together to create Project 25, a giant and minutely detailed policy blueprint for the full Christian white nationalist, arch-patriarchal, and eco-cidal takeover of American government and society.
Donald “Get Wild” Trump denies any connection with this arch-authoritarian plan for counter-revolutionary makeover. So what if his campaign’s “Agenda 47” is cribbed from the massive P-25 scheme? So what if the plan’s architects include veterans of Trump’s first administration who will play leading roles in the next Trump White House?
The head of the Heritage Foundation says this scheme for a new Amerikaner class dictatorship without the outer shell of bourgeois democracy is a “revolution” that will be “bloodless” if “the left” allows it to be. This is a not-so veiled threat of violence against anyone who dares resist neofascist consolidation after the 2024 elections.
Things are equally and relatedly dystopian in their own different ways atop the other and not-so leftmost political wing of the US American bird of prey.
In defense of the Republi-fascist Donald “Poisoning the Blood of Our Country” Trump’s opponent, an MSNBC morning talk show host boasts that the US under Joe Biden has drilled more oil than any country in history – this even as the wildly excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels create the hottest four days ever recorded in human history. So what if extreme weather resulting from capitalogenic climate change ravages the nation and world during a summer that included a day in which a temperature registered above the Arctic Circle was higher than a temperature registered in the US deep Southwest? Hey, who cares?
The Biden-Harris administration’s real time Project 2024 has included the escalation of a truly reckless and lethal inter-imperialist proxy war on nuclear Russia’s long southwestern border in Ukraine, now even in Russian territory.
Then there’s the continuing US/Biden-Harris funding, equipping, and military and political/diplomatic protection of the leading US imperial asset Israel’s live-streamed epically criminal genocide and ethnic cleansing operations in Gaza.
When the Democrats’ new presidential candidate Kamala Harris was confronted with righteous youthful protesters calling out her and Biden’s sick support for literal genocide two weeks ago, she told them to shut the F*#k up “unless you want to elect Donald Trump.”
The Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago claimed to be a grand triumph of racial, ethnic, and social “diversity” and “inclusion” but pointedly REFUSED to permit a single solitary Palestinian speaker to take the stage! Tens of thousands of anti-genocide protesters were surrounded by massively deployed riot police as Democratic delegates engaged in a giant lovefest to celebrate their nomination of a mass incarcerator and mass murderer – “Killer Kopmala.”
In their DNC speeches proclaiming love for Harris, the leftish Dems Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders steered clear of any meaningful defense of the imperially slaughtered Gazan people.
Hey, when will “left” MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki go to his famed “big board” to project the total number of Palestinians likely to be killed, maimed, and orphaned by Tel Aviv and Washington this year?
The DNC strove to outdo the Republi-fascists in national chauvinism, wildly chanting “USA, USA!” while Biden boasted that “no other country on Earth” but the glorious USA can “lead the world” and Harris promised to always “defend Israel” and to maintain the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”
Like the Obama cult, movement, and presidency, the overnight Harris crusade aims to grant the American Empire a grand multicultural re-branding by changing the color and now in this case also the gender of the face in the highest imperial place. Call it Obama 2.0, with gender added to race to complete the identitarian makeover. With Harris as with Obama, we should remember Frantz Fanon’s acid observation: “What matters is not so much the color of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.” Ditto for gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and identity, and the class of your family of origin.
Speaking in opposition to Trump and in support of Biden-Harris, “leftist” (LOL) MSNBC’s morning talk show host Joe Scarborough (who began his professional life by legally representing the first US murderer to kill a doctor in the open name of anti-abortion politics) told his viewers that “America is great, America is good.” In support of this religious and chauvinistic claim, rejected by most of thinking humanity (thanks to Uncle Sam’s long record of mass global terror and devastation) Scarborough offered the size of the United States’ gross domestic product ($27 trillion!). the scale and killing potential of its military, and the supposedly happy fact that “the US drilled more oil in the last year than any country in history.”
The Democratic Party presidential and vice-presidential candidates used their DNC platforms to promise liberal and progressive-sounding policy changes they know they can’t enact given the absurd power and right-tilted mal-apportionment of the Minority Rule US Senate and the Christian Fascist majority on the corrupt and illegitimate Trump High Court.
It is widely understood that the coming presidential election will take place in just a handful of states and effectively require Harris to out-perform Trump by 4 to 5 percentage points in the national popular vote to win. This is thanks to the archaic, openly anti-democratic slave-owners’ obscenity that is the US presidential Electoral College.
The nation is careening to some kind of constitutional crisis and potential major civil conflict after the next election. Anarchic US capitalism-imperialism has hatched a two-party system whose right-/Reich-most wing no longer accepts defeat through mere elections, no matter how tilted to the right the nation’s electoral rules are.
As the longtime tracker of the right David Neiwert reports, neofascist paramilitaries are gearing up for mass bloodshed after the election. If Trump wins the coming likely contested contest, they’ll come out to shoot protesters they’ll label as “radical terrorist antifa.” They’ll get heavily involved in immigrant round-ups. If Harris wins, Neiwert says, the green paramilitaries will show up brandishing assault weapons “at ballot-counting centers, as well as at any other sort of body involved in counting and certifying the votes.” A Harris inauguration will be followed by “at least a year or two of dedicated domestic terrorism against various government entities, as well as liberal figures, including stepped-up attacks against drag queens. They’ll lean quite heavily into the Christian nationalist authoritarian agenda, against anyone supporting the, um, ‘demonic liberal agenda.’” Blue zones in red states will be targeted for violence.
The coming bloodshed, evident to anyone following right wing online channels, holds shockingly little interest to Democratic politicians and to federal, state, and local law enforcement. A big problem here is fascism inside the gendarme forces. As Neiwert tells Rick Perlstein, “the FBI has shown itself to be extremely problematic under Christopher Wray in terms of the ongoing presence of dedicated Trumpists within the FBI. That’s the wild card. Law enforcement is our main guardrail for these kinds of things, and we have Trumpist cops working on the local level, we have them working on the state level, and we have them working on the federal level.”
The class rule system that has brought us to this dystopian moment has long passed its overthrow (forget “use-by”) date. Nothing less than a people’s socialist revolution can get us out of this capitalist and imperialist quagmire, which has brought us to the mutually reinforcing brinks of environmental collapse, nuclear war, and fascist rule.
There is liberating opportunity as well as eliminationist and authoritarian menace in the current perilous moment. It is possible that civil conflict and even civil war between hyper-polarized late bourgeois-democratic “blue” America and fascist “red” America this and next year(s) could provide an opening for actually radically Left forces to re-polarize America between humanity and class rule/capitalism-imperialism and bring forth a serious movement for what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters: “the radical reconstruction of society itself” and what Marx and Engels rightly called the only alternative to “the common ruin of all” – “the revolutionary [socialist] re-constitution of society at large.”
This essay appeared initially on The Paul Street Report.
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