Intermezzo Americana?

Maybe some of us, many even, will sleep a little better tonight. Just that tad more restfully. It's been a good day. Some big symbolic changes.

But what we mustn't do is think we can turn off the alarm clock. Nor turn it back. Because we've had our wake up call and now, somewhat unusually, our world has a second chance, of sorts.

 

But for others, the same desperate fears and frustrations that led to their giving all their hopes and trust to a snarling sociopath grip their hearts and minds tonight as they have for years, decades, whole lives. We may condemn them for their bad choice, laugh and sneer at their credulity, denounce their apparent bigotry. 

 

Except, one in five of them would have voted for Bernie if the Democrats had run him, and many more were originally part of the New Deal Coalition targeted by Reagan and dismissed as deplorables by both Clintons. Many were Latin Americans. And many more than last time were black.

 

They will still be there in four years. Will they still be angry, still afraid? Still as many?

 

The people who destroyed their worlds, closed their factories, poisoned their water, sent their kids to desert wars and shut down their futures - they are as much in the Oval Office tonight as they were four years and forty years ago. They promise to listen more, to heal better and certainly progressive voices are louder than before. 

 

Yet they have always promised so, and power is seductive and elites so terribly good at absorbing real challenges. It's not conspiracies or cults; it's just what happens when authority is based on rank and hierarchy, greased of course by filthy lucre. It has been so ever since we were persuaded to give our grain to the priests to store in the temples. And then the priests gave the grain to soldiers and made themselves into kings and emperors and built palaces and capitols. Primus inter pares. 

 

But senators need tribunes to call time on their deeds. Symbols need to be more than themselves. You don't "speak truth to power". You tear it down and share it out. Otherwise, nothing ultimately changes until the all that is left to make it happen is the whim of the mob and the rumble of the tumbril. Biden quoted Kennedy today but not to the extent of repeating his not particularly radical but still prescient predecessor's warning that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

 

So the monster is gone. And perhaps we can sleep. But not too deeply or too long. 

 

The world may have a second chance, but it only gets one wake up call.

 

And we've just had it.

 

 

Biden and Business As Usual - Liberal Delusion Number 119

 One week out from the US Presidential election and, not entirely unlike last time, the so-called progressive wing of the Establishment, the liberals and social democrats, their sponsors and media mates, have perhaps a little more cautiously than last time more or less called it for Joe Biden. Trump is toast, disintegrating faster than bone spurs in an X-ray machine.

Yet, while yesterday's Rasmussen national poll giving the incumbent Trump a 1% lead is still something of an outlier, most other polls, while giving Biden a lead of around 7% on average all show things tightening. With the impact of the efforts by Republican governors to effectively disenfranchise poor and black voters over the last two years, a tack seen on balance as favouring Trump, and the robust efforts to impair voting by mail in this virus-ridden poll, the result may yet be much, much closer than the broad left, and some traditional conservatives, might like to wish. 

Certainly, it is far too soon to call the result – especially once you factor in the massive pile up of Democrat votes in relatively few big states set against the need to balance that with wins in smaller states to tilt the winner-takes-all maths of the Electoral College (the body that actually elects the President). As we know from 2016, the President does not need a majority of votes cast to carry the college. He just needs to come close and come ahead in the right places.

Taking a hunch, Biden on balance may probably win; and yet his victory will be a truly hollow one; less the routing of far right, neofascism and rather more the temporary stopgap Hindenburg provided against Hitler’s Nazis in their 1932 contest. That even now the outcome is actually still in question with Trump averaging the support of around 9 in 20 voters demonstrates that this vote will not conclude anything in spite of all the pious hopes of liberals for the USA to return to being “a normal country” and of their counterparts everywhere for “politics as usual”, a resumption of the comfortable spin of two sides of the same capitalist coin taking buggins turn at squandering people’s hopes and dreams and our planet’s resources and biosphere alike.

Biden’s legacy is toxic – from his active  backing of crime legislation that has incarcerated almost 3 million predominantly black people to work for free on behalf of the military and big corporations in a form of modern slavery under Bill Clinton to fostering the continent-wide fracking rolled out under Obama. Like many liberals his stance is that of a chameleon, from cold blue to hot red and back again depending on circumstances. And, in Biden’s case, it seems to also be who he listened to last - Bernie or Barack, Kamala or Hillary.

Trump has made much play of Biden’s memory issues. Some have seen this as a 74 year old man trying to disingenuously portray a 78 year od man as “past it”. But in truth Joe’s memory lapses extend far back in time to much younger days: this is a man who in his first run for President, way back in 1988, forgot to credit Bobby Kennedy when he used his words to invoke patriotism, forgot to mention he was quoting UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock when he asked why his wife was the first in her family to go to college and who somehow forgot that rather than topping his law class, came 74^th out of 86 and, in a strikingly Trumpian outburst, told a questioner he almost certainly had the higher IQ.

Biden’s 1988 primary candidacy collapsed with his hubris and lies, but this year it seems the Democratic National Committee was so fearful of a truly transformational candidacy in the shape of Bernie Sanders that they set aside everything. From Joe’s economy with actualite through his son’s unquestionably dodgy dealings in Ukraine to the outstanding, un-investigated claim of sexual assault by him on a young female intern working in his office in the 1990s, it doesn't matter - all that does is that he isn't Trump.

And it shows.

Biden was credited as the winner of the final debate last week: most polls found him to have stood up to Trump, though relatively few were enthused by him. The debate was seen as treading water and unlikely to shift more than a handful of voters. And yet a throw away comment by Biden in the closing moments may yet prove to be disastrous.

Asked about climate change, Biden seemingly boldly announced he would close down the oil industry. Unsurprisingly, Trump suggested this was the big news of the night, leaving Biden stumbling to correct himself that this would be done “over time.”

It is true we need to shut down oil, but the fact is Joe Biden has no particular interest in doing so. Nor does he have much understanding of what might replace it. Where Bernie Sanders (or the Green Party Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins) might have talked about transitioning jobs in oil into renewables, Biden betrayed his lack of knowledge and even belief in the need to change by having little to nothing to say. It was after all, under the Obama-Biden Administration that the plug was effectively pulled on the previously burgeoning US renewables industry in favour of opening up the country to fracking - so much so that his now running mate, Kamala Harris, sued them unsuccessfully in her capacity as Attorney-General of California to stop them drilling off the seismically sensitive Pacific coast.

In the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, once a Democratic bastion but in many counties now with a registered Republican majority, Biden’s confusion and slipperiness may be his undoing. For this is where liberal managerialism comes unstuck – it was precisely its detached elitism, foisting fracking on poor communities and now after they have made some modest economic gain from it in spite of their environmental catastrophes deciding to shut it down, that turned voters away from the likes of Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. 

Biden had established a narrow lead with the prospect of winning the state's vital Electoral College votes back, but on the ground Trump’s campaign by all accounts is reaping a swift dividend from Sleepy Joe’s apparent wish to now shut down the very industry he and Barak Obama imposed on the state. The very latest Pennsylvania statewide poll, out tonight, gives a 2% advantage to the President.

Donald Trump is an appalling, nasty, greedy, sociopathic narcissist. It is truly difficult to find any redeeming features in the man at all. Yet like Hitler, he has fed on genuine grievance and directed it to his advantage, however dissembling and disingenuously. Unlike Hitler, he has no ideology and is not as well organised, but that is not to say that, once he is gone, someone more coherent won’t emerge at the head of his huge and still very much intact base vote and the armed militias he has told to “stand by”. 

That the Democrats have singularly failed to destroy him and his creed is proof enough that they have yet again failed to even begin to understand the forces that created him in the first place – because they and the corrupt elitism they represent and buttress are perhaps the primary force. They, like New Labour under Blair in the UK,  saw so many working class Democrats as having nowhere else to go and so eminently betrayable to the corporate interests that have bought the Dems lock, stock and barrel – so much so that a movement like Sanders’ socialist one was seen as a threat rather than the once-in-a-generation transformational opportunity that it was.

And if in the end Joe Biden just squeaks in, with a half-baked programme, a promise simply to not-be-Trump and a Supreme Court soaked in Tea Party bigotry, the next four years are already lost and the next forty seriously at risk.

Jonestown, USA: The Death Cult of Donald Trump

"I could stand on the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters."

So Donald Trump lauded his supporters for their blind loyalty ahead of the 2016 Presidential election. His comments typically divided opinion - his detractors saying he was fomenting violence, his supporters claiming it was a joke.

Both rather missed his point: his voters, his "base", were and remain so loyal that any normal contract of mutuality between a political leader and their supporters has been pretty much suspended in these days of populist farce with the coronavirus crisis somehow the surreal icing on the most amazingly beautiful cake. Ever.

As Trump's already crowded tableau of the grotesque has expanded exponentially, many have asked how such a character has come to lead what remains in destructive terms at any rate the most powerful nation on the planet. He has comprehensively failed to deliver any of his promises to his disenchanted base, instead delivering tax cuts to the rich like himself, and plundering the White House budgets and sinecures with an unparalleled nepotistic largesse. His behaviour ranges from the bullying to the bizarre and back again, his own loyalty to his staffers as thin as his thin skinned ego.

And yet still he remains a not unlikely victor in the November elections, assuming he allows them to take place (not as frivolous a conjecture as a few short weeks ago). While many Americans are clearly terrified and embarrassed by him, just as many love him and hang on his every word, rebutting his many lies as either the Deep State forcing him to do its evil bidding or alternatively denouncing the reportage of his comments as biased "fake news", even when the man is broadcast mouthing his verbiage.

We may have thought he had reached his nadir last week when amidst his latest of many ramblings on the covid pandemic, he encouraged armed groups to go onto the streets to "liberate" themselves in States that were following the lvirus lockdown rules set his own Federal government. With the President effectively calling for an act of treason by his followers, it has to remain an open question as to what these same groups of nascent fascist militia will do with their heavily armed arsenals if Trump does lose the election, the so-called "boogaloo" insurrection fostered enthusiastically on social media by the US far right. But, incredibly, there was worse yet to come.

Recently, the medically ignorant President waxed on TV about hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that a rogue French doctor briefly claimed could help cure Covid-19 based on a very limited trial. Later research has in fact indicated that it actually leads to a higher than average death rate among covid patients treated with it. But this was too late for one elderly Arizona couple who were scared of contracting the virus. They watched the President speaking on the alleged "game-changing" virtues of chloroquine and took it in the form of a treatment for fish parasites that contained the drug. The man died and his wife was hospitalised. 

At least chloroquine is a drug, approved for treating some conditions even if Covid-19 virus is not among them. But yesterday, in what must surely become a moment of infamy for the USA, Trump mused in yet another eclectically self-centred press conference on the merits of intravenous administration of disinfectant and ultraviolet light into human bodies to kill coronavirus. Dismissing the objections of a reporter as fake news, he "consulted" with a rather awkward looking, but criminally silent, White House doctor on whether she had heard of such treatments and suggested she was going to experiment on them.

 "I am not a doctor," he candidly admitted. "I am a person who has a good... you know what..." - he gestured to his head.

The reaction across the world has range from humorous disbelief to frustrated anger but Trump's supporters have rallied to him, predictably denouncing the scientists and reporters who highlighted his shocking statements as misrepresenting him or not sharing his genius-level insight, or both. Some claim he was referring to ozone therapy, an as yet unproven treatment touted by some as a potential response to the virus.  Much more likely, he was thinking of the intensive lobbying by Mark Grenon, who has been marketing a form of industrial bleach, chlorine dioxide, as a cure for cancer, autism and, now, surprise, surprise, coronavirus. Like Trump's monologue suggested, Grenon, who manufactures chlorine dioxide and sells it to be taken orally in water, apparently believes that if disinfectant kills something outside the human body, it can be taken internally as well.

Consequently, in the hours following his diatribe, government officials and cleaning manufacturers have had to scurry anxiously to the airwaves to warn people not to drink or inhale bleach or other disinfectants given the potentially fatal consequences. And yet, the very pleadings of these "experts" may well be like a red rag to some raging Trumpites to believe in their President's self-proclaimed genius and damn the advice. There must be a high chance indeed that some, out of faith or confusion or both, will be mixing dettol with their beer right now with possibly fatal consequences.

Liberals may sneer at the seemingly moronic nature of Trump's base. Social media is awash with jokes about Darwinism and faked pictures of rednecks demanding their right to die. But snake oil peddler Trump is very much a product of the society liberals created, a reaction to the bloodless pseudo-meritocracy of the Clintons, Obamas and Bidens of this world. They it was who presided over the destruction of swathes of US industry and the communities associated with it through their imposition of the free trade NAFTA framework over the 25 years up to Trump's election. As industry after industry folded, lives were ruined as liberals proclaimed a place called Hope, a comfortable Nirvana for some, but for many a distant, unreachable mirage.

It is not lack of intelligence nor some form of inherent misanthropy that drives most Trump supporters to lionise and pump up the ego of this narcissist. It is the desperation of decay, of the decline and fall of the American Dream and its transformation for many into a Nightmare of impoverishment. It is the hope of a quick and simple solution that will bring instant results - as with most forms of populism, there is no patience or planning, just a visceral desire. Trump may peddle lies, but so did Democrat after Democrat, from Clinton to Obama, and Trump's falsehoods are at least ones that chime with their sense of loss and anger. That his claims are incredulous matter little - for in this context incredulity is synonymous with hope.

It is not an isolated phenomenon in a state of social collapse, which is effectively what the USA has been in for two decades or more. History has repeatedly shown how tenuous any society is and how quickly the veneer that marks civilisation can fall away.

In the fifth century, as the Roman Empire collapsed, the astonishing logic of philosophers accurately calculated the distance of the Moon from the Earth to within a few thousand miles. Yet this triumph of rational enquiry fell away in barely two generations to a dislocated world filled with levitating saints and talking serpents. This destruction of reason in favour of the fantastic was driven by the religious dogma of Church and Emperors who closed down the classical schools of philosophy and science on the grounds that it was heretical to seek to understand or explain the God-given world. Rather it was simply to be accepted.

This has distinctly uncomfortable echoes over fifteen centuries later in the growing power of evangelical Christians within American government , which has fervently dismissed science as worthless or even malign in the covid crisis. Pastors and preachers excuse Trump's self-evident abundance of sins on the grounds that he has been sent from God Himself and publicly bless the Orange Prophet. And while Trump's definition of monotheism is almost certainly intimately concerned with placing an idol named Donald at its centre, he obviously does nothing to deter the fawning adulation of the evangelical priesthood.

Heaven sent, allegedly.

So unsurprisingly, wrapped up in a combination of existential despair and millenarian fantasy, like so many religious zealots throughout history, Trump's base in no small numbers would seemingly contemplate giving their own lives for the President. When some of his elected supporters suggested older Americans would be willing to die to save the economy from the impact of the covid lockdowns, they found an abundance of apparently willing victims. And similarly, when Trump ruminated on opening the churches for Easter in spite of the virus, plenty of pastors were happily jangling their temple keys.

Yet while his opponents detest him with a vengeance, there is a little festering Trump curled up inside every centrist: Hillary Clinton's disparaging characterisation of his supporters as "a basket of deplorables" in 2016 wasn't a one-off accidental comment. It simply illustrated how contemptuously removed from ordinary Americans the US elite has become with the same remote Political Class that plagues the pseudo-democracies in much of the rich world. They may sarcastically dismiss the demands of protesters for an end to the lockdown, but seem relatively impervious to the fact that without their next pay cheque, many of them are financially ruined in a nation with little welfare support. Work or starve: it is even today an all too familiar choice for the US poor.

And so while they will emphatically deny it, for liberals, Trump is a necessary evil, distasteful but hypocritically serving the purpose of focussing discontent on ethnic minorities, Muslims and migrants. However shrill, however embarrassingly stupid he may be to them, he keeps the line of sight well away from the real thieves of hope and helps them neutralise any true insurgency, such as Bernie Sanders' now kettled socialist movement.

Trump may or may not win at the polls this autumn, but either way, post-pandemic, the social dislocation will accentuate rapidly and new movements and leaders will emerge. A younger generation is rising which will inevitably have to face the increasingly sharp choice to be made: co-operation or conflict, Utopia or Bartertown.

But for now, the USA is hostage to a cult, one led by a man whose phraseology and thinking have become increasingly infantilised. He has no plan beyond the next cowardly boast, the next demand for praise, the next incredible, simple solution to our complex world, revealed to it by He Himself. In this insatiable quest for his personal aggrandisement, he may not shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue, but like a latter day Jim Jones with the USA as his very own Jonestown, he will happily take sacrifices in honour of the divinity he deep down believes himself to be.

The only difference, of course, is that at least Jim Jones took the poison himself.

Super Choice on Super Tuesday

Sanders and Warren

SUPER-TUESDAY, the only second working day of the week to lay claim to such a dubious titĺe, is about to dawn

Democrats in 16 states across the USA will be voting for the party's Presidential candidate. In today's opinion polls, Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders leads centrist Joe Biden in the three largest states - California (35 to 14%), Texas (31 to 26%) and North Carolina (28 to 14% with billionaire Mike Bloomberg on 20%).

But with Amy Klobucher endorsing Biden and Pete Buttigieg out of the contest, the liberal vote may begin to coalesce against Sanders as the divided Democrat Establishment rally around either former Vice-President Biden or, perhaps less likely now, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

While the centrists fall like nine-pins, progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren, now touted by some as a perhaps still unlikely VP candidate for Sanders, continues to run as high as 17% nationally. As the race tightens, she will now be ever more critical to how the party's existential contest turns out and with it the long-term future of democracy in what remains perhaps the most powerful and certainly the most destructive nation on Earth.

It is to be hoped that personal ambition does not cloud out the reality that the nomination is far beyond her grasp now. While she and Sanders retain significant policy and perspective differences, they have worked together many times over the years and the progressive wing of a party still stitched up by the Clintonite Democratic National Committee needs to unite to have any chance of overcoming the myriad of obstacles about to be chucked at them on the path to the Presidency.

Barring any last-minute upsets, by Wednesday morning, Warren will have a crucial decision to make - one that anyone hoping to see a first glimmer of a reversal of the populist right's surge across the globe must hope she calls correctly, stands down and backs Bernie.