2025-02-07
Divided, we fall
I gave up on the two party system decades ago when I realized that any pretense that the US was democratic was just that, pretense. That the underlying system was, in fact, stacked for capitalism against people. The crisis we see today is the continued unfolding of that reality but it's gotten far worse. But this was the logic of the system, the design of the system. It was predictable and should have been foreseen.
This morning I forced myself to listen to the current episode of Jon Stewart's podcast which I normally don't listen to. This interview with Hakeem Jeffries, representative for Brooklyn seems to affirm just how broken the current political process is, but also, just how broken the Democratic Party is. They still think they are in the game. They still think "reaching across the aisle" has meaning. They're still playing by a rulebook from 10 years ago. They're still trying to use the legal framework of history to control fascists. Trump and his fascists do not bother with the law. Isn't this obvious by now?
In all of this interview I heard nothing to indicate that the Democrats understand the immediate crisis or the deeper institutional, systemic crisis.
The Republican Party is now fascist, the Democratic Party is now a pointless sideshow. Grassroots Democratic activists will dislike hearing that kind of thing and they'll continue to resist. In the short term elected Democratic Senators and Representatives will do their press conferences with small gatherings of protestors in support. They might get injunctions and a few small legal stalls. If street protests gather steam with numbers and frequency, if real resistance is shown in support of elected Democrats, then things will get interesting. If a real mass movement comes out I'd expect Trump to come down hard. Will it get to that point?
That's all in reference to the current moment.
There's also the question of longer-term resistance. Under the umbrella of the Democratic Party as it currently exists it will flail and fail because the current party resists the Left. The larger crisis is not just Trump and the Fascist Party transferring power to oligarchs, it's also the decades long failure of the status quo which the Democratic Party is seen to defend. They view their role as defending the Constitution, the rule of law and the long-standing institutions of government. This last bit, the institutions and bureaucracy, are what so many view as fundamental to the problem. Why?
From the new MAGA Right the messaging is that these institutions are inefficient, wasteful and that in many cases they should not exist in the first place. This is especially true when the institutions are a part of the domestic social safety net, foreign aid or regulation. That's why they're trying to tear it all down. Does this solve deeper problems, the crises we face? Of course not. But this is a fundamental disagreement between the two parties that has existed for many decades. It's not resolvable. It would seem that the MAGA Right has recognized this and has decided it's no longer interested in maintaining that status quo. The plan seems to be stop pretending and to just go for IT. Which is to say, no more pretense of democracy.
CHANGE is now happening. I don't see how the old institutions hold. Fascism is here and it has momentum and motivation that's been building for years. In the short term I'm not sure the Left will rise to the occasion. I'm outside the loop looking in, but from my tiny house in the woods it seems like the framework of the resistance is the side that just lost the election. That's a likely indicator of where this goes. The side that lost was (and is) in conflict with itself.
Simplified: younger progressives beat down by older white middle class moderates that have dominated the Democratic Party for decades. It's nothing new. We've seen glimpses of the potential energy of the progressives with Bernie Sanders in 2016 and most recently the anti-Zionist campus activism last year. Last years' protests against the genocide and in support of the Palestinians were beat down. It didn't get the broad support it needed and should have got. That's the energy that's needed now.
Frankly, I don't think the comfortable, moderate white middle class base of the Democratic Party has the stamina or commitment to resist on its own. And the progressives can't do it on their own. I hope I'm wrong but I don't expect the resistance to last long. One day protests won't cut it. This is a crisis that requires all day every day protests. Other countries do it. But the US?
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