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Fascism and the Suspension of Belief

 

 

In “Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss,” Adolph Reed reiterates the point he usually makes at election time, which is to vote for the Democrats despite their failings, which, this time around, includes genocide in Palestine, as well as preparing for a NATO war with Russia, Iran and China. He writes: “We must engage; the everyday world and its concrete challenges don’t go away just because we want to transcend them. And we have to relate to that domain through the Dems.”1 The difference between social democratic reformism and revolutionary Marxism does not go away either, just because we would like to transcend one of the two. What interests me in his article, in any case, is its conclusion. Reed writes: “I won’t be surprised if the next four years among intellectuals come increasingly to evoke scenes from Visconti’s The Damned, Bertolucci’s 1900, or Szabó’s Mephisto.”2 I personally lived through such scenes before, during and after my PhD thesis examination at the University of Rochester in 2000. Such pseudo-events are now a routine occurrence for me at conferences and other public gatherings. You could say I have a certain amount of expertise on the subject, as would the people who stage these pseudo-events, though it’s not likely that they think of what they’re doing as fascism. If it isn’t fascism, you can distinguish it from the real McCoy by thinking of it as micro-fascism with simulationist presuppositions. During one conference conversation, I repeated something I first wrote in my book Don’t Network, which is that the choice offered the professional-managerial class today would seem to be a distinction between (Foucauldian) discipline for the losers, or resisters, and (Deleuzian) control for the winners, or compliant flexible personalities. The panelists seemed to miss the point that the winners are not actually winners but are themselves the objects of control. The distinction can also be defined as first order (resistant) and second order (compliant) cybernetics. Think of the difference between Rick Deckard in the original 1982 version of Blade Runner, and KD6-3.7 in Blade Runner 2049, the 2017 sequel. My point was that both options are inadequate to critical social theory.

There are concrete, material reasons for the turn to fascism, most of them having to do with how capitalism seeks to ignore economic problems it should instead confront directly. It avoids these problems through militarism and through a change of the guard among the political elite, neither of which challenges the hegemony of capitalist rule. There are also ideological reasons for the turn to fascism, and films like Mephisto, or more recently, Megalopolis, attempt to capture these more elusive aspects of personality as people are lured, cajoled, threatened and whatever else into compromising situations in which they are expected to lower their political, cultural, ethical or civilizational standards and accept the morality of the thugs. Although I appreciated Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) and David O. Russell’s Amsterdam (2022), one of the films that captures this best is Werner Herzog’s Invincible (2001). In Nazi Germany, a strongman is enlisted by a conman to perform as a Nordic Aryan “Siegfried” in order to propagandize the notion of Aryan superiority. As an allegory of the culture industry, the film is one of Herzog’s most direct studies of fascism – though much of his work could be conceived in these terms. Not unlike a séance or a game of Ouija board, the con only works when people agree to suspend disbelief. The difficulty today is that people do not want to suspend disbelief and enter the game – or more exactly, the struggle. It becomes more difficult to fight fascism nowadays because people have the habit of suspending belief. Disbelief becomes generalized and people believe in nothing because others disbelieve. The postmodern suspicion of meta-narratives has become a meta-narrative of suspicion, leading to the repressive desublimation of culture and politics. Think of something like free love, in which people make no commitments to anyone, not even themselves, applied to politics and art. It’s all good because nothing matters. Clinically speaking, the condition that is encouraged is pathological narcissism, or the inability to enjoy all of the consumer society injunctions towards hedonism and permissiveness. These no longer work in giving meaning to so-called counter-cultural conversion strategies, which is why the petty-bourgeois disposition, after first having become a dominant disposition among all classes of society, has entered a stage of decadence.

What I want to address here is a phenomenon that I described in my previous blog post and that could use some more elaboration.3 In my book on the Obama portraits I wrote:

“Contemporary culture and politics are … caught in a Chinese finger trap. The greater the need for a radicalization of the political economy, the more that various forms of identity are proffered as the most pertinent problems and pressing issues of the day. This trap manifests the politics of post-representation.”4

Without repeating here my theory of post-representation, or what you could also refer to as post-politics, I anticipate that the far-right Trump regime will not be met with what historically was the most concrete, determinate form of opposition to fascism – namely, socialist and communist internationalism – but the only kind of left we have today, which is a postmodern left with liberal plus identitarian or nationalist characteristics. Expect, however, and this time around, a more revanchist form of identity politics, or micro-fascism, attuned to the mood music being played in Washington D.C. In progressive left circles, the belief in the inevitability of far-right politics as the only probable alternative to global capitalist crisis, on the one hand, and the persistence of the belief that identity politics are an entry point into radical left politics, on the other, will continue to undermine revolutionary theory and proletarian organization.5

Instead of radical class organization, which is what we need, the shiftless droning of the postmodern left is going persist. An anticipation of this can be found in Oprah Winfrey’s speech at the Democratic Party Convention, in which tributes to the “joyful warrior” Kamala Harris were interspersed with the refrain “we’re not going back,” which alludes to the MAGA notion of a golden age of robber barons and (Theodore) Rooseveltian colonial imperialism.6 Of course a progressive neoliberal like Oprah is not suggesting that liberals are not going back to a time of Old Left communist politics, but the Democratic establishment that pushed Bernie Sanders out of the 2020 nomination race did in fact say something to that effect: “this is not going to be the party of Bernie,” as Bill Clinton put it. The same goes for anyone who does anything more than hang a portrait of (Franklin) Roosevelt on a White House wall and sing the macarena at some United States factory somewhere, and this includes Sean Fain, Randi Weingarten, Sean O’Brien, Mark Dimondstein, Michael Coleman, and the like.

Before Oprah uttered those words, and even before Trumpsters created the MAGA slogan, the postmodern left was already reacting to the resurgence of the macro-political left that was making its way from the streets into the academy, from the Battle in Seattle through the 2008 banking crisis to Occupy Wall Street. And it was too much for the postmodern left to think that any class but the middle class could be the leader of progressive change. But this middle class, as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Fear of Falling, had already been transformed by deindustrialization, neoconservatism, the yuppie zeitgeist and the New Right.7 A globalized economy of precarity, downsizing and wage suppression beset the middle class, which was now out to save itself first and foremost, never stopping to think that to save itself it has to save the majority. Despite the illustrious rise, especially in the US, of postwar civil rights, second wave feminism and gay liberation, all of them not unrelated to the existence of the Soviet Union and postwar consumer prosperity, and all of them now defanged by postmodern anti-universalism and anti-normativity, the emphasis on diversity in government, business, education and the media is today a desperate expression of middle-class decline. What was once progressive today serves to maintain the status quo.

The North American left does not for the most part appreciate the extent to which class consciousness has been displaced by identitarian thought. And to the detriment of the left, the far right does understand this, even if only on account of its structural advantage as a detachment of the capitalist owners of the means of production. The ruling class benefits from identitarian culture wars as much as it does from labour. The crucial difference is that while class struggle illuminates the culture war, the culture war obscures the class struggle. Consequently, the two wings of the capitalist elite, neoliberal and neoconservative, can countenance one form or another of the culture war. In fact, they routinely, programmatically, stoke its two sides: racist and anti-racist, patriarchal and feminist, xenophobic and pluralist. They do not, in contrast, instigate labour struggle. They prevent it from developing, co-opt or destroy its leadership, sabotage its means of struggle and use government power to send strikers back to work. Although Donald Trump rails against identity groups as much as he does socialists, he claims that the Biden family are Marxist, not Mexican. He mocks the fact that it was “Pocahontas” (Elizabeth Warren) who put the critical last nail in the coffin of the Sanders 2020 campaign. Fascists believe that people prefer to fight against other identity groups than they do the bourgeois class. Since many poor working people aspire to a comfortable, middle-class existence, they aspire to what has been, since the 1970s, structurally improbable for most in their cohort. They compete with their class brothers and sisters in the hope of a better life.  

A study of the 2022 conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada found that while fewer than 4 percent of the two hundred or so presentations were concerned with questions of labour and class, more than 75 percent were concerned with one variant or another of identity politics.8 Most of these professionals have PhDs or graduate degrees. Thet are ostensibly the educated elite. An ad hoc study found that among American scholars in humanities and social science departments such as philosophy, political science, sociology, anthropology, literature and art history, there are very few who present themselves on department webpages as Marxist or socialist scholars, fewer than three percent. Among those who identify as leftist, a majority are invested in new social movement methodologies. Otherwise, the more prominent and trendy methodologies today are in health and care studies, race and gender studies, animal studies, new materialisms, international relations, and similar topics that combine easily with neoliberalism. Glancing at left and progressive booksellers, it is impossible to not notice the overwhelming number of titles since around 2012 dedicated to race studies and anti-racism.

This professional class of authors, academics and journalists is socialist to the extent that its members may be part of a teachers’ union, in which most are not remotely implicated as internationalists. Like most other unionized workers, their main concern is good pay, good work conditions and control over their professional domains. These unions are today heavily invested in DEI advocacy, which has little bearing on the forces that weaken them. In the years ahead, the Trump regime will instigate a more entrenched version of the culture war by imposing policies such as budget reconciliation restitution for whites who have been harmed by diversity mandates. His plans for education are to dismantle the Department of Education and privatize curriculum by placing it in the hands of parents. What is happening today is not a repetition of the shift of the working class from the Democrats to the Reagan Republicans. As Vivek Chibber has helpfully and accurately pointed out, the trickle-down anti-racism and anti-sexism of the New Democrat coalition of minorities and middle-class (sub-)urbanites is no longer enough to secure votes for the Democratic Party.9 The 2024 exit polls indicate that it is working-class minority groups, as opposed to the white working class, that is defecting in significant numbers. In 2016 this included a notable increase among of LGBTQ voters. The Democrats’ lead with non-college educated voters shrank (down 33 percent from Biden), as did the Latino vote (from 71 percent in 2008 to 53 percent in 2024). As Chibber puts it, the Democrats are not simply losing white workers, but all workers, regardless of race. He adds that this weakens the left wing of the party and strengthens the so-called CIA or Liz Cheney Democrats. And the reason for the shift is economic worries, which of course is counter-intuitive given Republican Party policy.

The lesson of the 2024 election, according to Chibber, is “the lesson of a century of struggle.” If he argues that “we just need a left that is capable of understanding it,” the reason is no doubt because the postmodern and liberal left that we have today is programmatically incapable of understanding it.10 This post-political, “critical” left, to the extent that it is leftist at all, in unable to suspend disbelief. Without a genuine leftist opposition to contend with, the liberal middle class will continue to scapegoat the working class for the problems created by capitalism and the ruling elites, fascist or not. Since so many of the people whose work life and identity no longer fit the Archie Bunker model, new stereotypes will be found by contemporary neo-Victorians, like for instance, Bernie bros, Brexiters, sports hooligans, online trolls, chain-store union organizers, dangerous immigrants (made more vulnerable by fear of deportation), Muslim or campus “antisemites,” etc.10 The important point is that this is a problem of middle-class projection since the conflict, now on blast due to the bipartisan blackmail, is not external but internal: the propensity of the American middle class to conspire against socialism and to keep radicalism “in the family,” so to speak, with the apolitical creative class sector vying against the politicized activist and NGO sector. If the latter identify as socialist, it’s most often a new (or never, as Ellen Meiksins Wood referred to it), postmodern or post-left variety that is too caught up in intellectual gymnastics to make the left relevant to the working majority. The most sophisticated of these tell us that Marxism was never so simple as to be comparable to Soviet communism, or that Marxist politics can be reduced to matters of political economy.11

The character of the struggle in the next four years is likely to be a con game that the majority are expected to go along with as they are called upon to do the obvious and suspend belief in socialism. One of the reasons for this, I argue, though not the only or even the most determinant, is that the struggle will continue to be encoded in the form of culture wars, whether nationalist or identitarian.  

 

Notes

1. Adolph Reed, Jr., “Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss,” nonsite (November 11, 2024), https://nonsite.org/going-forward-from-the-edge-of-the-abyss/.

2. Reed, “Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss.”

3. Marc James Léger, “Lessons from the Biden Debacle,” Blog of Public Secrets (November 11, 2024), https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2024/11/lessons-of-the-biden-debacle.html.

4. Marc James Léger, Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2022) 316.

5. See for example, Communist Revolution, “Perspectives for the Canadian Class Struggle,” YouTube (November 12, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mqHUg2pEnM&t=1146s; BreakThrough News “Trump’s ‘Populism’ Fraud: Cabinet Stacked for Ultra-Right, Billionaire Agenda,” YouTube (November 13, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrQ4DrdKf_c.

6. PBS NewsHour, “WATCH: Oprah Winfrey’s full speech urging voters to choose joy by choosing Harris at the DNC,” YouTube (August 21, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOYKC3blHY.

7. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).

8. Marc James Léger, “United Colours of the UAAC: More on the Politics of Diversity in Canada,” Third Text Online (May 31, 2023), http://thirdtext.org/mjleger-politicsofdiversity.

9. Vivek Chibber, “Requiem for the Obama Coalition,” Jacobin (November 7, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/11/obama-democrats-2024-election-race.

10. Chibber, “Requiem for the Obama Coalition.”

11. Crisis and Critique, “Michael Heinrich on the election of Trump, cautious biographies, Marx, ecology, capitalism and critique,” YouTube (November 6, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxhU5FhATIc; Robinson Erhardt, “Richard Wolff & Michael Hudson: Karl Marx and the Fall of the West,” YouTube (November 10, 2024). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Ovguv1BSA.

 

 

POSTSCRIPT

A good example of what I discuss in this essay can be found on the Verso books website. On November 18, 2024, three days after I posted this article, the publisher posted one of their countless promotional items, in this instance dedicated to “The Rise of the far-Right, and How We Fight Back,” with the subtitle “Books to arm yourself in facing the global rise of the far right.” [https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/the-rise-of-the-far-right-and-how-we-fight-back] While this posting has several titles on the rise of the far right, it has very few on socialism and communism, or on why New Left social movements have failed to do anything much to dislodge the grip of global capitalism. There are many Verso titles that could have been part of that discussion. Instead, and again, despite a few appropriately themed books on fascism and the far right, the majority of those recommended have to do with three topics that are in various ways symptomatic of the decline of the organized internationalist left: 1) localism, 2) attachment to bourgeois parties and liberalism, 3) culture wars and identity politics.

While the books that fall under these three rubrics have their relevance, it is not in any way obvious how all of them together represent a serious strategy for fighting the far right at the same time that we fight liberal capitalism. In fact, many of these readily appeal to the postmodern anti-universalist left in today’s neoliberalized academia, NGOs and new social movement circles, which is to say, they express the concerns and politics of the activist wing of the professional middle class. These titles include: Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (2020), The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (2020), Adam Greenfield, Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire (2024), Hannah Proctor, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat(2024), Sian Norris, Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack in Reproductive Rights Went Global (2023), and other books on abortion rights, Breanne Fahs, Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution (2024), a book that includes the SCUM manifesto by the fascistic Valerie Solanas, Leah Cowan, Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? A Tangled History of Resistance and Complicity (2024), Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History(2015), an anti-whiteness tract, Raina Lipsitz, The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics (2022), which promotes the DSA, Teen Vogue and AOC, John Nichols, The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace’s Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics (2020), Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht, Bigger Than Bernie: How We Can Win Democratic Socialism in Our Time (2021), a DSA movement builder, Isabell Lorey, Democracy in the Political Present: A Queer-Feminist Theory (2022), another tract in care studies and a critique of the multitudes rhetoric that Lorey previously helped to propagate (expect the same people to offer critiques of care studies within the next decade), Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Meronek, Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary (2023), a trans-liberation memoir couched in Cold War rhetoric of surviving the world and expanding freedom beyond mainstream institutions (ironic given the promotion of this kind of work by neoliberal universities and museums), Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024), Sharon Faye, The Transgender Issue (2022), McKenzie Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death (2023), Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History (2023). Six books on the Israel-Palestine conflict are also listed.

Much on this “how to fight fascism” list proves the point I made in this article. I would make an exception for the following two titles: Kristin Ross, The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life (2024), and Lydia Hughes with Jamie Woodcock, Troublemaking: Why You Should Organise Your Workplace (2023). Of course, if you organize your commune and your workplace to be anti-racist, and so on, that is fine, but if you seek to organize them according to the priorities that some people attribute to micro-political and anti-Marxist identity politics, you can expect that 1) your project will fragment in no time, 2) you will not develop into a mass movement. In other words, you will have what we already have, which is a postmodern left that in some limited quarters is planning for a “dirty break” inside the Democratic Party, a failed strategy for a failed programme. The bigger picture is the post-aligned movement in the “Global South,” whose destiny, and notwithstanding the current obsession with Domenico Losurdo’s critique of Western Marxism, is unfettered capitalist development as the best means to alleviate the problems caused by capitalism.

 

Lessons of the Biden Debacle

 

Projection on the wall of the African American Civil War Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., during a Palestine solidarity demonstration, December 2023.

 

Given the commentary on the election of Donald Trump, there is on the liberal left a clear understanding that the Biden-Harris administration did very little to appeal to the average American voter. Ralph Nader, for instance, suggested that worse than handing the vote over to Trump, the Democratic Party is no more likely this time around than in 2016 to do any soul searching and house cleaning.1 Both to his credit and his discredit, as a reformer, Nader said the quiet part out loud by stating that the Democratic Party cannot be reformed. A worse case of disavowal can be found in an interview with Thomas Frank, who credited Joe Biden for having been the most progressive President, when it comes to labour issues, since Franklin Roosevelt.2 While acknowledging that huge sums of cash are given to both parties, he failed to mention that many donors give to both parties and that both of them serve the same Wall Street interests, thereby ignoring the elephant in the room that BlackRock CEO Larry Fink had gifted the media in the days before the election.3 This underscores the complicity of the duopoly that not only keeps out third parties but, more importantly, keeps socialism at bay, an ideology that Frank, in his book on populism, characterizes as un-American. In other words, liberals, and even many leftists, are satisfied to identify the many problems caused by the neoliberal order, but few draw the obvious link to capitalism. So long as the wealth of the United States is assured, pleading for this or that cause, social issue, underserved community, or other, is par for the course among the conscientious.

Beyond lamenting the paralysis of liberal democracy, which has been a reality since the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, there are a few takeaways from this election that can nevertheless serve the renewal of left forces. First, the failure of the Democrats is not due to the person of Kamala Harris, who is generally unlikeable but nevertheless competent as a neoliberal technocrat. It is because many were unwilling to ignore the genocide in Gaza that is happening with the full support of the Biden administration. The fact that the same revulsion is not felt about the proxy war in Ukraine is an indication that the revulsion does not go deep enough, but one does not want to complain too much. The slaughter of civilians and the demolition of civilian infrastructure is certainly not on the same order of obscenity as the deaths that occur between warring armies. And both parties have engaged in the draconian policing and censorship of Palestine solidarity. A second takeaway is the fact that this election showed the limits of the Noam Chomsky and Adolph Reed injunction to vote for the lesser of the two evils. With the Trump administration seeming to be potentially less disastrous than the neoliberal acceleration towards nuclear Armageddon, there was this time around no clear indication of which would be worse: Trump would be worse on domestic policy and Harris on foreign policy.4 Either way, the sense that the two parties tag team against the general interest gave third party challengers a clear conscience against the bipartisan blackmail.

A third and less certain takeaway is the sense that the Harris debacle and the genocide of Palestinians has made it easier for the left to move on from culture wars. In the Barbie movie, which despite itself explains so much about our cultural moment, the problem with Ken is that he is naively sexist and did not learn the lesson that a suited gentleman in the “real world” had imparted to him, which is the fact that the “patriarchy” is still in power but has become more sophisticated, for example, by bankrolling films like Barbie and a more diverse line of dolls. The garden variety left, including its anarchist and hipster variants, has not got beyond the “do both” class plus identity logic of intersectionality, even when, for example, feminists identify with the 99 percent.5 The Trump “movement” will undoubtedly add fuel to culture war fire, and “progressive” neoliberals will probably respond in kind. This retaliation has partly to do with the middle class needing to justify its class distinction and advantage against the working class, which it likes to consider the natural ally and base of the far right. The reason the left will not likely do better than it has since the time BLM displaced OWS – causing the “left” to go all in with decoloniality, in the academic sector, and multipolarity, in the Stalinist sector – is because it on the whole rejects Marxist internationalism, opting instead for weak power in metropolitan centres and comprador power among weak nations. Think of Greece, Spain, Mexico or Brazil. There are also aspects to this issue that no genuine socialism can resolve, as addressed for example by Fredric Jameson in his book, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army.6 However, problems that no one can resolve, or that are already resolved by normative ethical and legal standards, which is to say, in universalist terms, will continue to be defined as failings of the universalist, class-oriented left, especially by people who are more committed to identity than to socialism. In the interregnum, “monsters” like privilege theory and Afro-pessimism will continue to proliferate, as will efforts to embed identity politics in left politics and verbiage.

To understand why it is that more than 74 million Americans voted for a criminal charlatan who tried to coup his own country, one needs to combine all the resources of scholarly knowledge. In the most immediate sense, voters voted for the alternate of the two parties. The following, which itemizes the record of the Biden administration, are some of the main reasons why:

2021

After assuming office, Biden failed to impeach Donald Trump, denying investigations into the January 6 coup plot for more than one year. During the January 6 storming of the capital, within which professional and armed militias acted as a special detachment whose mission it was to prevent the vote counting, Biden said nothing, eventually calling on Trump, the leader of the coup, to address the nation. Biden ultimately failed to jail Trump for the January 6 insurrection and for stealing government documents. Biden persistently advocated a strong Republican party and he increased spending for Capitol police by $2 billion, even though what occurred on January 6 was a government and intelligence-orchestrated stand-down that included senior agents of Capitol police who were later denounced by the rank and file, some of whom committed suicide. Among the more egregious acts of post-representational government, the Biden administration allowed some 800,000 Americans to die from COVID-19 and failed to mitigate anti-vaxx disinformation. Through the CIA and a subsection of the Department of Energy that had previously lied to the public about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, and with all of this reproduced by the stenographers in the newspapers of note, not to mention supposedly progressive sources like The Intercept, Biden perpetuated the Republican-concocted lie that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan, allowing neo-McCarthyite witch hunts against organizations like EcoHealth Alliance and the World Health Organization, thereby undermining pandemic research and public health policy. Biden also propagandized disinformation about genocide in Xinjiang while expanding the trade war with China. He at the same time appointed Victoria Nuland – who successfully plotted the removal of the democratically elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, which ultimately led to the Russian invasion of 2022 – as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth-ranking position in the State Department. 

Biden neglected the state of Texas after winter storm Uri. He maintained Trump’s child detention centres for migrant families and ultimately failed to reform immigration policy. He advocated the PRO Act, which strengthens the power of union bosses over the rank and file. He defended the Department of Justice’s seizure of the phone records of Washington Post journalists, which had started under Trump. He defended the bombing of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in May 2021. He appointed Neera Tanden as his senior advisor and staff secretary, a founder of the pro-austerity Center for American Progress. Biden failed to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, overseeing the largest upward transfer of wealth since Obama and Trump. He broke his election promise of a public option for health care. His bipartisan infrastructure bill was reduced from $4.7 trillion over ten years to $355 billion. The Build Back Better bill raised the price of gas to pay for bridge repairs, a regressive tax policy. The bill also facilitated Wall Street investor privatization of roads, bridges and water systems. It included state and local tax cuts for the wealthy. To the ire of most Democrats, Biden refused to criticize Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s railroading of the infrastructure bill. He also failed to get rid of the Senate filibuster, which allows rural areas, about 17 percent of the electorate, to control the Senate.

Biden increased military spending with the goal of an eventual war with China, which is a nuclear power that cannot be defeated militarily. The same goes for Russia and this is well understood by military analysts. He increased government tracking of “extremists.” He reversed his election promise to abolish the death penalty, pledging to execute the Boston bomber. He exonerated Trump and US Attorney General Bill Barr for their attack on protesters in Lafayette Square in June of 2020. In June of 2021, the Biden government bombed Syria and Iraq. Vice President Kamala Harris cancelled a planned visit to Detroit after flooding in late June. Biden welcomed Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, who had dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi killed in 2018. Biden approved a Trump arms deal for $23 billion with the United Arab Emirates. Kamala Harris announced to the Vietnamese that “America is back.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez signed an anti-China resolution supporting Hong Kong separatists.

Biden failed to cancel $1.3 trillion in student debt. In August, he cancelled $10,000 in student debt for people earning under $125,000 per year. This initiative was later struck down, as could be expected, by a Trump-appointed judge. He did cancel $5.8 billion worth of debt for 300,000 students with disabilities, which was due to the streamlining of a programme already in existence with the Department of Education. Biden made it faster by eliminating the monitoring process. He later overturned the possibility of student loan bankruptcy. The Biden administration killed Afghani civilians as the US Army was leaving the country. He did not re-enter the Iran nuclear deal that had been rescinded by Trump. During the spread of the COVID Delta variant, Biden pushed economic and school reopening, terminating pandemic relief measures and unemployment benefits on Labor Day. He collaborated with Ukraine to “retake” Crimea from Russia. In September, he deported 12,000 Haitian refugees. From January 2021, Biden had deported 600,000 immigrants. He continued Trump policies towards Cuba. He allowed human rights lawyer Steven Donziger to be prosecuted (persecuted) by the justice system in the interest of Big Oil. The Federal Election Commission ruled in November that foreign capital can be used to influence American politics. For example, foreign nationals can support ballot committees and direct ballot initiatives, directly affecting domestic policy. So much for Russiagate. Biden imposed sanctions on Nicaragua after a Sandinista election victory. He imposed sanctions on Afghanistan, causing conditions of starvation for 23 million people. He boycotted the Beijing Winter Olympics under false pretences. Through the CDC and OSHA, he eliminated COVID safety standards.

2022

The US instigated war in Ukraine, which came to fruition in 2022. In January, the US stole $7 billion from Afghanistan as 13,000 newborns had starved to death. Biden broke the Minsk II Ceasefire Agreement, stoking a NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. The Biden administration announced that the US debt is $30 trillion (today $37), a crisis staved off through bank bailouts and military Keynesianism, but which increases wealth inequality. Billionaire wealth increased 90 percent, to $5.5 trillion, since the pandemic started in 2020, leading to inflation, low wages, lower standards of living, consumer debt ($18 trillion), student debt, layoffs, school closures and cuts to health care. Biden abandoned his promise of $15 minimum wage. If standards of living had kept pace since the early 1970s, minimum wage would be over $35 per hour. Biden did not close tax loopholes on billionaires and tax evaders. As in the 1920s, American capitalists are seeking to solve the debt crisis through war and austerity. JP Morgan Chase has declared that war with China has already begun. The use of war to solve economic problems is a core feature of fascist ideology. The obvious problem is that war does not solve economic crises, but a war economy can be used to bolster an economy in conditions of social, moral, cultural and political decay. War with China was the priority of the Biden-Harris administration, fuelling the normalization of far-right fascism alongside genocide, as well as anti-communism. Rather than tax the rich to reduce debt, Biden borrowed money from China and Japan. The Ways and Means Committee rejected the taxation of corporations.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, some 100,000 US troops had been relocated from Afghanistan to Europe. By May, some $20 billion in weapons had been sent to Ukraine. Throughout his term, Biden sent $175 billion in weapons to Ukraine and $22 billion to Israel. These sums are part of an annual $1.5 trillion for military expenditures. Taxpayers subsidized weapons manufacturers without any say by Congress. Biden did not stop oil drilling on federal lands and increased natural gas extraction. He reduced coverage under Medicare, which contributed to privatization. He authorized the largest Medicare premium hikes in its 57-year history. He refused to lower the cost of drugs and vaccines. He appointed anti-Social Security crusader Andy Biggs as head of Social Security. Touting himself a Rooseveltian pro-labour president, Biden did nothing to prevent union busting. Although he promised in 2019 that he would codify Roe v. Wade into law, Biden refused to defend abortion legislation. Biden tripled FBI warrantless communications data searches. He redirected COVID funding for war in Ukraine. He ignored Israel’s murder of the American Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. He sent 450 troops to Somalia. After US sanctions, the Russian ruble became the best-performing currency of 2022. Biden did not rescind Trump’s reductions of protections for endangered species.

By August, Biden had expanded Trump’s border wall projects. He allowed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to visit Taiwan to provoke China. A phony inflation scam led to the highest gas profits and corporate company profits in US history. After the Homeland Security hearings ended, no top officials were charged for the January 6 insurrection. The Inflation Reduction Act was scuttled in the Senate, as expected, giving handouts to renewable energy corporations in tax credits, concessions to fossil fuel companies, new leases for gas and oil exploration, no new limits on carbon emissions, weakening of the Environmental Protection Agency, help to the health insurance industry, protections for Big Pharma, zero impact on inflation, no tax hikes, side deals for pipeline permits, and tax initiatives as well as grants to companies like Exxon and Sunoco. European governments criticized the Inflation Reduction Act as economic war. The kinds of jobs that increased under Biden were mostly in the low-pay hospitality industry. In August, the Federal Reserve forecast “pain” for working families as well as a recession. Biden ended free COVID-19 tests that had been made available through the postal service. On the television news show 60 Minutes, Biden declared the pandemic was over and pledged his commitment to war with Russia and China. At that time, 3000 Americans were dying of COVID-19 every week.

The Biden administration gave the Pentagon wartime procurement powers. Before the end of 2022, Biden had detained more migrants at the US-Mexico border than all previous presidents. He used his presidential powers to reduce the number of border crossings. Biden ended negotiations with North Korea. In November, Biden fell asleep during an interview. Biden called on Congress to prevent a railway strike, banning a strike by 120,000 workers by signing bipartisan anti-strike legislation. Biden pushed the DNC to put South Carolina first in the primaries, giving “white” working-class voters over to the GOP. The CIA militant Abigail Spanberger was chosen to oversee contested states.

2023

In 2023, the National Defense Authorization Act passed a record $858 billion military budget. Biden followed the Trump plan to build the US-Israel embassy on Palestinian land. The omnibus bill included $45 billion more for Ukraine in weaponry and ended the Iran nuclear deal for good. Biden failed to end “right to work” laws, which encourage employees to avoid unionization. Biden allowed states to determine what they want regarding the eviction moratorium. His administration heroically shot down a stray Chinese weather balloon. Seymour Hersch confirmed US involvement in the bombing of the Nord Stream II pipeline, an act of ecoterrorism against a NATO ally (Germany). Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ignored the East Palestine railroad disaster. Biden banned all on-foot immigration at the Southern border, denying emigrants asylum rights. Food stamp allocations were cut for 42 million Americans. The Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were bailed out by the federal government. Breaking his election promises, Biden approved a huge oil exploration project on federal land in Alaska.

In April, Federal Reserve plans kicked into gear and job cuts began. The CIA revealed that Ukrainian President Zelinsky had embezzled $400 million of US taxpayer money, with no consequence. Biden escalated the assault on migrant rights, making all migrants illegal and sending 1500 US soldiers to the Southern border. The Biden administration trained Ukrainian pilots on F-16s, breaking one of the last of its red lines to prevent war with Russia. This ignored the fact that only 20 percent of Americans wanted to expand American involvement in Ukraine. Biden proposed $1 trillion in social spending to finance debt and $375 million more for Ukraine. This “social spending” would bring cuts to social programmes like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, health care coverage, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP food stamp assistance), rent support, housing assistance, education spending and public transportation.

In June, the US and the United Kingdom signed the “Atlantic Declaration,” a plan for economic warfare against Russia and China. The Biden White House intervened in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Pacific Maritime Association tentative agreement with 22,000 West Coast dockworkers – after contracts had expired for more than one year. By June, 1.5 million recipients were cut from Medicare coverage, which was expected to grow to 24 million. Disenrollment was defined as “medical unwinding.” Biden cut 4 to 5 million from Medicaid health coverage by August. Biden made reductions to the child tax credit and to expanded unemployment insurance, as well as SNAP. All of this caused child poverty to increase by 12 percent. Between April and November, some 2 million children had been removed from Medicaid. Biden sent illegal cluster bombs to Ukraine. He sent $350 million in weapons to Taiwan. The Secretary of State Tony Blinken green lit the extradition of Julian Assange. The eventual release of Julian Assange from US extradition, which had no legal basis, is possibly the signature “achievement” of the Biden administration. In August, it was revealed that the US pressured Pakistan to remove Imran Khan as Prime Minister. So much for Russiagate. Biden fast-tracked border wall construction in South Texas in exchange for $100 billion in GOP support for Ukraine war spending. By the end of 2023, Biden’s ICE border police doubled the number of deportations.

Biden supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration of war against Gaza, which is under Israeli occupation. Biden threatened war with Iran. He travelled to Israel the day after it bombed hospitals and killed 500 Palestinians. After Israel bombed the Jabaliya refugee camp, the US accepted the fact that Israel made Palestinian civilians into “legitimate targets.” Biden supported Netanyahu from November to December as 20,000 Palestinian civilians were killed and hospitals bombed. The Israeli regime murdered doctors, nurses and patients, stacking them in piles of body bags. Biden responded to this by opening an Education Department inquiry into anti-semitism on college campuses. Meanwhile, Congress increased the military budget by $145 billion to a total $884 billion. Biden expanded the Israeli conflict to the Houthis, with the US and the UK bombing cities in Yemen.

2024

In January 2023, Biden dropped bombs on Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Somalia. The Biden administration meddled in the Taiwan elections. So much for Russiagate. Biden continued government investigations into campus anti-semitism. He used the Espionage Act to attack WikiLeaks member Joshua Schulte with a 40-year prison sentence for exposing global spying by the CIA. Through the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, he got the GOP to approve another $118 billion in war funding for Ukraine, again, in exchange for the Anti-Immigration Bill. Biden did nothing to stop the killing in Gaza, even after it was estimated that there were more than 100,000 civilian deaths and injuries. As he dismissed an International Court of Justice ruling on the possibility of genocide in Gaza, Biden became known as “Genocide Joe.” The US then kidnapped Haitian President Ariel Henry, who was forced to resign. So much for Russiagate. The federal budget cut $500 million from education, the first major cut to education since 2015. Biden once again expanded warrantless surveillance. He appropriated more money for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. He broke another of his red lines and authorized long-range missiles for Ukraine. Biden and the GOP invited the war criminal Netanyahu to address Congress at the same time that Israel was bombing Rafah and police were cracking down on encampments at the University of California and Wayne State in Detroit. After Trump was charged with 34 criminal counts, Biden stated that “no one is above the law.” This was while the International Criminal Court had charged Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes leading to genocide. Biden rescinded the right to asylum, adopting Trump’s anti-immigration policies and breaking his election promise to protect immigration rights. After a Trump assassination attempt, Biden said that violence “is not us.” This was as The Lancet medical journal estimated that 186,000 had died in Gaza. Under the Biden administration, and after a NATO summit, the alliance established an office in Kiev. After his debate fiasco with Trump in July, Biden refused to step down as the incumbent candidate for 2024. The CDC declared COVID to be “endemic,” which is the consequence of failing to coordinate an elimination policy. By then, approximately 1 million Americans were being infected daily, contributing to the several millions who now suffer from Long COVID. States then moved to criminalize mask-wearing. Whereas the US falsely blamed China for creating the COVID-19 virus and causing the pandemic, the CDC is at this moment doing very little to prevent the H5N1 bird flu virus from spreading.

2025 and Onward

What is most surprising about the Biden administration is that it managed to lumber on for four full years, almost as though a demonic force was keeping this shell of a man alive to do its destructive bidding. In the summer of 2020, after Biden barked his campaign at prospective voters like a half-deaf army sergeant, it was obvious that his candidacy was a pitch for militarism. I made a meme re-using the “how about a nice cup of shut the fuck up” soldier meme to indicate the fact that he was clearly giving people their marching orders. After some 500,000 deaths in Ukraine, and close to 300,000 deaths in Palestine, Biden and Harris did the US public one significant favour: they made it plain – once again, for those who pay attention – not only that the Democratic Party is as a party of Wall Street and the Pentagon, but that the latter are destructive anti-social forces rather than the bastions of liberalism that the American Creed preaches. The subject of interest during the next four years of Trump is whether American progressives and the hangers on of a dying liberalism can move beyond their bogus politics of reforming this bourgeois party. This question cannot be displaced by focusing on BRICS or putting one’s hope in the “axis of resistance.” Indeed, it can only be displaced by the working masses organized internationally in the interest of human survival and universal emancipation.

 

 

Notes

1. Ralph Nader Radio Hour, “The Mourning After – Ralph Nader Radio Hour,” YouTube (November 9, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vos3IJghWFc.

2. The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, “THE ELITES HAD IT COMING (with Thomas Frank),” YouTube (November 9, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SogjrjL1Ti8.

3. Geopolitical Economy Report, “Billionaire BlackRock CEO: ‘Doesn’t matter’ who wins US election; Trump & Kamala benefit Wall Street,” YouTube (November 3, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chPfp01rsD0.

4. I recommend this interview with Pepe Escobar regarding the geopolitical challenges that lie ahead: Dialogue Works, “Pepe Escobar: Iran’s Explosive Reaction to Israel’s Attack - BRICS Just Changed EVERYTHING!” YouTube (November 5, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEqxtWsDIGQ.

5. See for example Liza Featherstone, “All That Remains of Neoliberal Identity Politics Is Fascism,” Jacobin (October 31, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/10/all-that-remains-of-neoliberal-identity-politics-is-fascism; THIS IS REVOLUTION podcast, “Is the Racial Reckoning Over? ft. Toure Reed,” YouTube (July 9, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhq-kItsIx0.

6. Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (London: Verso, 2016).

 

 

 

I joined Kiko’s Freethinkers Forum for an election night discussion on what can be done politically outside the two-party duopoly. All six hours are available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znh85Un1_x8. I had jokes prepared but only had the chance to tell a few. Here are the rest. * Why do the Democrats need a strong Republican party? Because they’re assholes. * A large group of American Haitians arrive at the airport in Mexico City. The customs agent asks them: “Why are all of you leaving the U.S. at the same time?” One of them replies: “We’re afraid of being blamed for eating people’s pets.” The agent says: “But everyone knows you’re not eating pets.” The man replies: “That’s why we’re leaving.” * Why did the Democrats cross the aisle? Because it gets harder to own the libs these days. * Why did Kamala Harris’ Marxist father disown her? Because she’s a genocidal robocop and she smells bad. * Why did J.D. Vance’s mamaw give him a magical mithril shirt? To help him bring the evil ring to Saron. * Why did J.D. Vance have sex with his couch? Because his mamaw had a headache. * What do Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh have in common? They wanted to give America a great replacement. * What did the editors of Jacobin say when they lied to their readers? No, the DSA is not the party of Kamala Harris. * Why did Kamala Harris choose Tim Walz [pronounced Walls] as her V.P. running mate? To keep out the immigrants. Don’t come. * What is worse, Lindsay Graham or a dump truck full of vomit and excrement? Lindsay Graham. * How did Oprah Winfrey replace Bill Cosby as the only African American on the Forbes 400 list? When you screw people, make sure it’s legal. * Why was North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson wasting his time when he burned his hand on a hot exhaust pipe? Because people already know that black fascists are stupid. * How is it that Kamala Harris understands that genocide and nuclear winter are “good opportunities”? Because, as Bill Clinton puts it, she has “that extra responsibility gene.” * Why does it now cost East European countries with records of human rights abuses five Euros to join the NATO alliance? Because of inflation on the administration fee. * How does Antony Blinken sleep at night? First he lies on one side, then he lies on the other. * What happened to all the pets in Springfield Ohio? They were eaten by J.D. Vance’s mamaw. * Why did Victoria Nuland tell the United Nations that she wanted to quote-unquote “fuck the E.U.”? Because after her affair with Dick Cheney no one else would have her. * What would North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson do if you had two cows? He would enslave you and your cows and go back to posting passages from Mein Kampf on NudeAfrica.com. * What does medical science call someone who has been diagnosed with Downe Syndrome, Alzheimer’s, Autism, Turrets Syndrome and Neurodevelopmental disorder? Marjorie Taylor Greene. * When a supporter of J.D. Vance has unprotected sex with him, what is the most disgusting thing she has when she wakes up in the morning? A signed copy of Hillbilly Elegy. * What does a plate of asparagus risotto have in common with AOC? They both make the left smell bad. * Why did Antony Blinken tie a shoestring around his balls? So that he remembered to bomb Iran before masturbating. * Did you know that there is a new website that publishes the names, photos and addresses of all the most dangerous criminals in the United States? It’s called Congress.gov. * Why did Donald Trump use a condom when he raped journalist E. Jean Carroll? Because he believes in protecting women whether they like it or not. * Why are Democrats promoting Tim Walz’s dad vibes? Because families separated at the border are going to need them. * Why is Kamala Harris promoting veterans’ home loans and home downpayment loans? Because Tim Walz told her that according to Matthew 25:40, “to the leased of these you do onto me.” * When was Tim Walz in Tiananmen Square? Around the same time Joe Biden got arrested for supporting Nelson Mandela. * [to be said by pulling back eyes, and in a Chinese voice] United States hegemony is just-a like athe-letes-a foot. After a while, very irritating. * What’s the difference between Truth Social and effective deterrence? On Truth Social you are certain to be punished. * Why are white American men not afraid to vote for Kamala Harris? It hides the fact that they’re not insecure about her relation to Dick Cheney. * Why does RFK Jr brush his teeth with shit? Because the toothpaste companies refused to remove the fluoride. * What did Kamala Harris’ father say to her when he disowned her? “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” * What did the Democrats say to their voters when the U.S. became a Nazi dictatorship? Keep calmala and carry onala. * Why do the Democrats use kids as pentanol drug mules? Because kids are cost-effective and you can use the money saved to bomb Donbas and Gaza. * How many DSA members does it take to screw in a lightbulb? That depends on how recently they’ve whacked off. * Why did Cardi B and Harrison Ford endorse Kamala Harris? Because they’re legally blondala. * What’s the difference between RFK Jr and Harriet Tubman? Harriett Tubman was a heroine to slaves, but RFK Jr was a slave to heroin. * Why did the infirm, inept, and foul-smelling YouTube podcaster Douglas Lain get an erection at the vegan all you can eat buffet in downtown Portland? Because he saw the salad dressing. * What did Donald Trump say to the topless teenage girl he was photographed with by Ghislaine Maxwell? [in a hoarse voice:] “I don’t want your money. I want your vote.” * Why is Kamala Harris considered a “joyful warrior”? Because she enjoys killing Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, Yemenis and Russians. * Why did Donald Trump urinate on the secret documents he brought with him from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago compound? Because the Supreme Court said that he couldn’t piss all over the Constitution until they made him dictator. * Why did Joe Biden smack Donald Trump on the ass? Because at the end of the day, the Democrats are just as weird as the Republicans. * Feminists for Liz Cheney. 

 

 

 

My October 21, 2024, interview with Trevor Bell on The Iron Fist and The Velvet Glove podcast in Australia is available on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rNkMASc46A. Thanks to Trevor.