The Election That Could Break America

[Serial_Apologist]

There was a time, not long ago, when I believed that the inbuilt checks and balances of the American political system would save it from disaster. That hasn't been the case: I wonder whether any party can instigate constitutional reform (e.g. the outdated electoral college system).

Yes, the relatively reined in constitutional powers of the presidency were what we were always informed would safeguard American democracy against totalitarianism.

But unless we understand the principles underlying present-day crises, as manifesting in perpetual economic downturns, eco-destructions, climate changes, mass migratory population exoduses and new virus proliferations, we will just go on round and round repeating the same mistakes and not learning history's lessons.

There is nothing at all that innately guarantees democracy's continuation, even where apparently firmly and long-founded, as here and in America; and as I said when I first joined the forum there is nothing to prevent the ruling classes from reducing countries including ours to third world status, if by whatever means, persuasion or repression, they can restore their ways of making money to conditions pertaining when competition was the highest virtue irrespective of social and environmental consequences, i.e. before the rise of trade unionism and then mass consumer choice became the ideological option of the now-hegemonic section of the Right that uses it and the working class's isolation from its social roots in community solildarity to sustain its ruling legitimacy. They, our present-day rulers and democracy contraveners, are gambling on emasculating any potential for working and lower middle class people to resist such decline and organise to bring about less wastefulness, and in economic favour of more egalitarian change, social, cultural and personal inclusiveness.

These values shouldn't be incomprehensible to the many contributers to this forum who rightly and understandably bemoan the reductionist, commercially-orientated thinking driving the dumbing down of the BBC, which in effect epitomises the privatised consciousness of today's isolated, isolating individualism - not that it doesn't of course have centuries of history behind it: the history that calls on us to identify with past eras when people thought and acted very differently, and intimately self-identify with them in the name of nationhood and "continuity", as if these were eternal values in some way separable from present-day realities.

How the economic and political forms of the present capitalist model maintain its hegemony - the leading super-wealthy beneficiaries of the status quo finally to blame to be brought to book - remains as key to the devising of new relevant strategies for removing and replacing them with accountable systems and intelligent practical people to run them as was always the case. Except that this time the stakes are much greater, and as a precondition of survival the diversionary games of those apparently willing to take all of us away with themselves have to be unmasked at every opportunity and level of activity, especially now. It will take much courage, of the kind we applaud in key workers who put their lives on the line for little material reward, but there is nothing else worth living for.

[Serial_Apologist]

The problem with this prognosis is that the USA would not survive the collapse of China, in the way that it could (and in the end did) survive the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This crystallises the nature of the ruling classes' dilemmas, worldwide, and probably helps us account for the reversion to the ideologics of nationalism among sections of them. Having invested their hopes and well as wealth in the interlocking systems of trade and exchange, they now find themselves in particular at odds with those sections of the working class - the red wallers disillusioned following decades of bureaucratic welfarism who have been rendered surplus to requirements by the long-term transfer of investments and production to parts of the world where the US and other supportive powers maintained extreme right wing régimes in power for decades, first of all (in the 19th and early 20th centuries) to maintain colonial control, and later to guarantee exploitation by first world-based multinationals and ensure re-patriation of profits to the home countries.

For what it's worth my own view is that we, on the left, under-calculated the long-term demoralisation and literal exhaustion of the indigenous working class populations of those countries, and their capacity to resist and fight what became known to us as neo-colonialism, the leverage of control by the multinationals - as we did in the case of the USSR - and are now having to pay the price in terms of reluctant acknowledgement of "identity politics", at a time when it is so difficult if not impossible to present the primordial case for class - that having been demagogically usurped by the Far Right.

We still do have a case for presenting the prioritisation of class, de-mystified of the connections with locale, as are in my view being disgracefully justified in Schama's recent documentary on Romanticism, as if national boundaries were in the very nature of things, and offered as an explanation or understanding of how the present situation has come about, if not a key to its resolution, as we once so apparently fervently believed. The over-arching factor of environmentally sustainability overhangs everything: we have to get the Extinction Rebels on side, somehow.

[Richard Barrett]

reluctant acknowledgement of "identity politics", at a time when it is so difficult if not impossible to present the primordial case for class

I think the relevant concept here is what the Americans call "intersectionality", although a lot of the time, with some luminous exceptions like Angela Davis, this lacks the essential component of class, without which for example the reactionary nature of the Obama presidency becomes hard to deal with, and, more crucially, without which the economic power to effect change is replaced by a much vaguer sense of protest, even if this can extract the odd bit of concession from the authorities if they're in the mood.