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Must read Atlantic Article: "What if Trump refuses to concede?"
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fkalosar101@...
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 10:48 PM, Mark Lause wrote:
Thank you for you civil and though-provoking reply--most welcome. I'm bouncing around like a handball on these matters with a different idea every ten minutes and also approaching my rant limit, so have only one point to make in response. Ideology, which is what I'm trying to talk about in between bouts of madness, isn't the only thing, but it's an important thing. From the analysis, so to speak, of ideology, I want to move to a broader WITB, which is frankly without my capacities as a Concerned Citizen. How--pardon the cheesy quote--can we Dare to Struggle/Dare to win--under the current circumstances? That's what I mean when I try to talk about the responsibility of the Left as a whole and not that of comrades who have always been more or less in the right place. Somehow the socialist left has to engage with the broader, loosely autonomist, and in some respects frankly airheaded mass movement that is shadowing BLM before they tumble out of the essentially individualist, voluntarist framework of vulgar Graeberism into the abyss of neoliberalism, impotence or even quasi fascism. Is this possible for us septuagenarians or even the hyperintellectual young, new Old Leftists of eg Cosmonaut? The encampments do not prefigure revolution. How can this point be driven home before it is too late? Isn't that one place from which your general strike might come if the potential strikers could be convinced that the necessary verticality won't kill the planet?
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Mark Lause
Thanks, nor I.
I'm approaching this less as a historian than someone who's lived through the times we're discussing. Overall, I think the Left has never been coherent enough in my lifetime to do much more than make a strategic nudge here and there and, in hindsight, I think we've done remarkably well with what we've had. I have a serious bone to pick about how little we've had to work with.
A somewhat deeper caveat about what you're suggesting is that it reads way too much thought into decisions that are not really much more than those of a paramecium. They turn to what they think will warm them or, at least, make them feel warmer. The problem is that American civic culture was never very ideologically defined or obsessed with the battle of ideas in the 1960s. That pathetic level of analysis and understanding has just degenerated entirely. The former president of my union told me a few weeks ago that I'm engaged in a "crime against humanity" by not voting for Biden and an old socialist comrade recently asked me whether I was on the Republican payroll. That kind of shit-stupid is what you get from those in responsible positions. I have another Biden supporter shrieking that I want the dangerous reactionary working class people in her neighborhood are going to beat her up if Trump gets a second term. But the point isn't really this kind of individual madness. It's how media and political institutions shape it all into what passes for a collective political decision. I honestly think there are things at work other than an excess of libertarian thinking. The quite standard idolatry of the free market is quite sufficient to get us here. By the 1980s, the Republicans--and, yes, the Democrats, too--embraced that notion that what's good for the market is good for the society. This deepened over the next twenty years into systemic faith that capitalism means that greed is a social good--and, conversely rationalizing draconian cruelties inflicted on those who were least able to protect themselves. This converged with a corporatized Fundamentalist Christianity to create a religion of cruelty with the new century. Those who followed those first steps of Reaganism are going to find it very hard to backtrack and reconsider what they've been sanctioning. That's gotten progressively harder for them but not hard enough to make them rethink their assumptions. And, of course, the Democrats are constitutionally unwilling to challenge those assumptions. But I honestly wouldn't chalk this up to some kind of libertarianism that swept us away in the 1960s. If that were so, how could we have not had a serious shakeup in the party system, particularly as both engaged in that persistent expansion of the war machine year after year? Then there's the simply grotesquely antirepublican and antidemocratic centralization of the national police powers Cheers, Mark L.
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 10:06 PM <fkalosar101@...> wrote: On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 08:22 PM, <fkalosar101@...> wrote:
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fkalosar101@...
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 08:22 PM, <fkalosar101@...> wrote:
Sorry about that--I apologize for my tone. I have great respect for Comrade Lause as a historian and am not seeking a social media pissing contest with him, however upsetting I may find his dismissive response to my post. What I meant by saying that we are the enemy is that the Left as a whole capitulated to a form of neoliberalism by embracing the essentially libertarian ideology of eg the pop music industry and its leading figures as well as key elements of actual libertarianism during the struggle against the Vietnam War. This IMO has contributed to the absence of any popular socialist tendency in the US at present. We now have a widespread notion that even in the absence of the unstable fusion once known as "liberalism" in the U.S., you can have a valid non-socialist Left, which has IMO influenced the white and non-black "allies" of BLM to the extent that they are protesting not only police racist murder but the broader injustices and innate unsustainability of capitalism. Comrades Lause, Meeropol, and Proyect (et al) are of course not personally to blame for this,--on the contrary--but the ideological suicide of the Left over the past three quarters of a century remains the responsibility of the Left as a whole. Putting it another way, the de facto ideology of the encampments may increasingly represent the transformation of a revolutionary potential to a counter-revolutionary potential. It has much in common with the underrated persuasiveness of Trumpism, which gives concrete form to something new in the world of ideologies that has much in common with its nominal Left antagonists. WITBD? I'll only add that Trump's resolute hostility to the very notion of social infrastructure and actual governance has many points of coincidence with the vulgar Graeberism of the encampments. The only reason for voting Biden is to preserve such luxuries as a Postal Service and the CDC for another two or three years so that the Left can come to grips with its failures. The collapse of liberal democracy isn't something to cheer on even if it may be inevitable. Again--trying to keep this above the waist and serious.
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Jerry Monaco
I want to make a distinction. Trump is not only a distraction he is practically irrelevant to what is happening. Yes, he is a culmination but the Republic has been in danger for about 75 years now. The ruling class's unwritten constitution of "Empire" has overwhelmed the written constitution and it is the Democratic Party that was the architect of the unwritten constitution. Now everyday democratic freedoms are at stake and there are whole sections of the Democratic Party, who are shocked. Let me repeat, Somebody like Trump has been inevitable for the last 20 years and has been baked into the unwritten National Security State constitution for the last 75 years. All this liberal non-sense of focusing on Trump is what has gotten us in this situation in the first place. Trump could say or do anything and it wouldn't matter without the backing of his enablers. If his enablers get away with a less legal coup d'etat then and only then will Trump be the main problem, because then he and his cronies will begin to purge as many people as they can. Focusing on Trump as the main problem is demobilizing. Focusing on Trump is focusing on Biden as an alternative to Trump. Let's be clear if Biden gets put into the Presidency instead of Trump we will just be waiting around for the next Trump. Trumps and their kin are inevitable in the current system and the only reason to hope that Biden wins over Trump is that it will give us time to breathe and organize. Trump barely knows how to play chess. But while the Republicans are playing the game of chess very badly everybody else is playing ducks and drakes. This not only includes the liberals it also includes the left. There is nothing. There is absolutely nothing that anybody is doing of real import to prevent a coup d'etat that is as plain as the street scene out my window. There are rank-and-file organizations and they should be preparing stress tests for mobilization. We need an ad-hoc leadership of mostly people of color to lead working people to form now and to test their powers of mobilization now if we are going to prevent this. Those of you who think we are fighting Trump in this slow-motion legal coup d'etat are deluding yourself. We are not fighting Trump. We are fighting the whole Republican Party and the billionaires behind it.
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 8:22 PM <fkalosar101@...> wrote: On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 06:05 PM, Mark Lause wrote:
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fkalosar101@...
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 06:05 PM, Mark Lause wrote:
Your saying so does not make it so. This is a glib and arrogant cheap shot that does not constitute a valid reply to what I wrote. Your deserved eminence as a historian does not make this kind of shallow nonsense acceptable or even tolerable.
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Mark Lause
We are not the enemy. Neither are we particularly effective about being THEIR enemy.
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fkalosar101@...
Trump is far more than a distraction. He is a harbinger of the end of
'liberal democracy" in the united states, very possibly the agent of that dissolution. If you fail to grasp the consequences of the convulsion that will probably ensue from that, you are in the same camp as Ted Kaczynski, John Zerzan, and--on the other hand--all the halfassed autonomists who have been shadowing BLM with their self-indulgent little Zones in the childish belief that such stunts are themselves revolutionary--the more so because any other form of infrastructure, voting, military command structures and other revolutionary necessities are just like fucking old and like horizontal and like we are better than fucking that, and OK boomer and let's shoot all the computer programmers, and fuck you. The whole thing and nearly the entire corpus of potentially revolutionary young people are imbued with the transcendental individualist nonsense that, following in the path of the Popular Front, finally evicted any hope of mass socialism during the struggle against the Vietnam War--thanks in part to neoliberal oracles like the armies of wealthy rock star who got themselves accepted as somehow revolutionary while pushing de facto libertarianism, having one's cake and eating it too, and the politics of abstract moral gesticulation--in short, Rolling-Stoneism and the bullshit that goes along with it. This ideology is the degenerate and increasingly fragmentary offscouring of the old Popular Front--which, being Stalinist, did not really care what people thought or said as long as in the view of the leadership the idiots involved were useful and could be used. The reason why the Left is repeatedly confronted with the problem of the lesser evil is that the left has completely, utterly, and irrevocably failed--beginning with the Vietnam antiwar movement--to commit to socialism except as a kind of Science Fair project to which any child can bring her own clever papier-mache exhibit. The Biden lesser evil offers us the continuity of the infrastructure that the current mass left movement regards as unnecessary, if not an actual impediment, where they do not stupidly take it for granted--a Postal Service, accurate government statistics, functioning bourgeois elections, a CDC, an NIH, the WHO, international standards bodies, the census, and thing after boring thing that our anarchist Left, very much like the Trumpists, regard as an impediment to "air fraydom." This necessary infrastructure has not been seriously threatened in any election before now--not even by the terrifying candidacy of George Wallace. When the broad eclectic ex Popular Front Left en masse yielded a consensus for this bastard libertarianism instead of socialism in order to fight the Vietnam War, the Left de facto opted for a Lesser Evil that continues to bedevil us to this day. The enemy is us.
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Jerry Monaco
There is a similar essay-review in the NYRB. Liberals are generally ignorant of the world they created. They have established the system of legally ratified coups d'etat through out the world yet are surprised that it can happen here. If the Republican Party can stay in power through a coup in the uniform legality then they will. The Republican Party's political program consists of five baisc principles: 1. Maintain State Power; 2. Serve the capitalist paymasters of the Party; 3. The power of the U.S. capitalist class must expand in the U.S. and internationally or else it will contract. 4. The Republican Party believes that White Supremacy is essential to Capitalist Class Power in the same way that grapes are essential to wine. They believe that you can only "make" Capitalist Class Power through White Supremacy. The present day Republican Party feels itself in the same position as the Slaveocracy in the 1850s. They believe that unless their power expands it will contract. They believe that the only way to maintain the expansion of their power is to increase the power of their paymasters. They believe that the only way to do this is to make all marginalized groups and especially "non-'white'" groups second class citizens. The fear of "demographic change" is so deep in the Republican Party that they believe that the only way to maintain party is to make it so that the "new demographic" is not able to have their votes count. And since they identify the Capitalist class with White Supremacy they believe the only way to save and expand capitalism is by staying in power. Trump himself is a distraction. Legalized regime change has happened here in the past and will happen again in the future. The worse the world situation gets, the more the system itself is threatened, the more the threat of global warming becomes real to the masses, the more likely regime conflict and resulting overthrows will occur.
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Mark Lause
True, but we were discussing what the subject line indicates. Of course, the Democrats are using all of this for their own purposes, but those are pretty simplistic and predictable. Everybody knows what the Democrats are going to do: 1) Whine about how helpless they are; and 2) Blame everybody else for their helplessness. . . . . Oh, and maybe we should add one more: 3) Saying that whole future of 'our democracy' rests on your voting for us, and that defense of democracy requires exercising the oligarchic option of excluding every other alternative that should be on the ballot.
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Steven L. Robinson
True as to this particular story, but it is only part of a whole line of stories and speculation that has circulated for many weeks, usually in liberal publications. Whatever ends Trump may be using such speculation for, the loyal opposition seems more than eager to latch on to it and use it for their own purposes.
If we have seen one thing over the past four years or so, the Trump reality show is something that the Dems are more than capable of using as well. Making it all about Trump seems to be the preferred messaging of choice not only by the Biden campaign but by the entire Democrat leadership.
SR
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Mark Lause
This particular story is attributed to WH staff sources and confirmed by Republican officials in Pennsylvania.
On Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 12:03 PM Steven L. Robinson <srobin21@...> wrote:
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Steven L. Robinson
You are assuming this whole cottage industry of stories about Trump refusing to give up power comes from the White House. It makes more sense to me that these stories are coming from Democrat sources or sources friendly to the Dems to rally the support of their base. If that is so, it seems to be proving effective.
SR
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Mark Lause
I fully agree on the importance of the issue (and the article). The U.S. is not now and never has been a "democracy." Our eighteenth century gentleman's system of government has always reserved mechanisms like this for them to engage in the ultimate monopoly of "cancel culture." Still, it's very peculiar for such a story to be leaked and they always leave me wondering whether the leaking is more important than the story itself. As began with the size of the inaugural crowd, Trump and his circle floats a lot of this raw sewage to test responses. If they were doing this to test the response of the Democrats, they needn't have bothered--Chuck and Nancy will write a very strongly worded letter if the results of an election are overturned. It rather seems most immediately that this is a test of how loyal the Republican functionaries in those states are going to be to the new regime in the RNC.
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John Reimann
This is really a "must read" article on the upcoming electoral crisis. It is most likely that the election will not be determined on election night, due to mail-in ballot counting. A "Constitutional crisis" is likely to ensue, one in which the sitting president will hold almost all the trump cards (no pun intended). This article explains the different scenarios in which that crisis can be played out. What it mentions but doesn't stress sufficiently, in my opinion, is how that battle will be played out in the streets - complete with violent clashes. Further, if Trump is returned to office through the means outlined in the article, he will be driven - or drive - far further down the road he's already taken. Completely absent from the article is any sort of class analysis, or more precisely, any thought to the role of at least a sector of the working class as a class. As far as I can see, given the general failure of the left - including all the various protest movements of recent years - to really seek to build an explicitly working class force, the only way that the working class can start to play an independent role is through the unions. Through a huge struggle within the unions, overtly political strikes can be called, leading up to a national general strike. That would completely transform the present balance of forces. Here is the link to the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/ “Science and socialism go hand-in-hand.” Felicity Dowling Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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