COVID-19 Part IV: Why mass revolt is our only realistic hope
Of the responses to the ongoing protest movement by the two parties that dominate American political life, that of the Democrats is of greater interest. Not only do they represent the de facto official opposition to the Trump regime; over the past century, their party has frequently responded to social upheaval with attempts at pacification and reform, sanding down the rougher edges of capitalism and state repression. Indeed, since the 1960s, the Democratic Party has served as a vehicle for the rise of politicians and public officials of colour, including many African American mayors and legislators, and of course the first black president.
Statistically, talk of racist policing that harms people of colour more than whites has merit. But in the U.S., the loftiest political and economic elites enjoy a far more pronounced privilege relative to most of the population. The breakdown of the rule of law has afforded the wealthy and well-connected a special exemption from legal strictures, let alone the oppressive leviathan to which the poor and working classes are subjected. Democratic Party leaders benefit indeed from that system; some are its architects. They’re certainly not inclined to dismantle it.
Instead, Democrats aim to strike a balance among their conflicting political and institutional interests — mollify protesters and coax them away from the streets while resisting demands for police defunding, let alone abolition. Both the party’s presumptive nominee Joe Biden and his erstwhile challenger Bernie Sanders, who has become a functionary of the neoliberal party brass since his abject capitulation in the primary contest, advocate increases in police budgets.
House Democrats have introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, featuring several reforms that had been under discussion long before Floyd’s death. It proposes no systematic reduction of police budgets, and would face headwinds in a Republican-controlled senate anyway.
The party establishment has spent all of Trump’s presidency lionizing police (especially the FBI) and prosecutors as guardians of democracy, even as the bureau continued its longstanding practice of targeting civil rights activists, including the newly devised category of “black identity extremists.” “Rule of law” demagoguery, historically the wheelhouse of Republicans, has become a staple of Democratic rhetoric. Naturally, Democrats were noisy cheerleaders of the often dubious FBI-Mueller investigation of Trump associates and “Russian interference” as well, perceiving it as politically expedient — a liberal echo of Republicans’ protracted Benghazi and Whitewater inquisitions. There was overwhelming, bipartisan congressional support for the Protect and Serve Act of 2018, a bill that made assaults on police officers a federal hate crime — as if “blue” were a new racial category.
Moreover, this is an election year, and though a majority of likely U.S. voters both supports the anti-racism protests and favours reforms of policing and its role in society, three-word slogans advocating defunding or abolition of police are much less popular. Though there’s relatively little at stake in the 2020 election for the Democratic establishment and its nominee, both would prefer to win, just as you or I might prefer to win than lose at checkers.
Keeping popular power in check
The American power elite, and allied power elites in other countries, are terrified of the implications of a racially diverse mass movement. Washington and its security forces have gone to terrible lengths to suppress such formations in the past, most egregiously through political assassinations of civil rights leaders. Today, differences prevail within the various factions of the ruling class over how best to neutralize the largely spontaneous upsurge. The fascistic right demands an escalation of police and military force, while elements of the political centre and centre-left are alternately attempting to appease, co-opt, divide, and disorient the protesters.
This effort has manifested itself in various forms of “copaganda”: police, security forces, corporate executives, and politicians “taking a knee,”dancing, or marching alongside protesters in affected displays of solidarity (sometimes shortly before beating them, showering them with tear gas, and conducting large-scale arrests.) Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the Democratic Party majority in the lower house of the U.S. Congress, led a maudlin, kneeling “moment of silence” for George Floyd alongside colleagues outfitted in Kente cloth. Officials have renamed and painted the words “Black Lives Matter” on major thoroughfares, including one in Washington, D.C. near the White House.
As Chris Hedges notes, this all amounts to gaslighting, like flowers and chocolates from an unreformed abuser.
This moment has also given rise to absurd excesses of political correctness; quixotic, but generally useless, expiations of white guilt; and new forms of woke capitalism seeking to profit on a developing shift in social mores.
Most of the corporate elite, professional managerial class, and the politicians who represent their interests, particularly in the U.S. and Canada, aim to narrow the public’s focus to a discursive terrain they perceive as consonant with their interests: systemic racism — embodied, they suggest, in the accumulated, individual character faults of white people. This doctrine has been co-signed by ambitious professionals and aspirants of colour who’d prefer to see more faces like theirs (and necessarily fewer white ones) in positions of power and prestige, and by corporate consultants hawking the idea that racism inheres in all white people, requiring special expertise and constant supervision to manage. Some variants even indirectly attribute police killings of people of colour to whiteness itself.
Constituent groups of the Movement for Black Lives have received financial support in recent years from the Ford Foundation and other corporate entities. This most likely reflects, not an elite-instigated “colour revolution” as some speculate, but rather a vote of confidence that the racial identity politics of those groups represents no meaningful challenge to neoliberal capitalism.
As the essayist and political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. has observed, mainstream anti-racism represents the “progressive” wing of neoliberalism. It affords no systematic critique of an extremely unequal distribution of wealth and resources. Its complaints about the failings of society don’t rule out an ideal of “justice” in which each racial group is proportionately represented at every gradient of the wealth distribution, and among victims of every injustice.
Orthodox anti-racist theory holds that whites are not only never harmed by racism, but actually benefit from it. A further implication is that whites can bring about a just society by relinquishing “privileges” like a lesser risk of unjust imprisonment or murder by police, or by surrendering their positions to give employees of colour a boost up the institutional ladder. But to advocate a society in which everyone is entitled to life, justice, and dignity, one must venture outside this paradigm.
In contemporary practice, a racial essentialist politics identifies not only statues of Confederate leaders as legitimate targets, but those of their Union and abolitionist counterparts too, along with monuments to George Washington, and the Emancipation Memorial featuring Abraham Lincoln, symbolic as they are of white power and authority. Not even Spanish literary giant Miguel de Cervantes, himself enslaved by Barbary pirates in the 16th century, has escaped the vandals’ wrath.
Indeed, what began as an apparent sincere commitment to eradicating icons of white supremacy (such as Confederate statues installed during the Jim Crow era for the specific purpose of belittling African Americans) risks devolving into a nihilistic crusade of cultural defacement and destruction for its own sake. Racialism stoked by the Democratic Party and its allies has certainly played a role in this unwholesome development.
None of this is to suggest that fighting racism and discrimination isn’t important, or that whites no longer harbour racist views or engage in racist behaviour for which they must be accountable. The point is, the elites aim to distract and divide a movement remarkable for its multiracial character, by encouraging its participants to fixate on skin-deep differences rather than unifying experiences and aspirations.
We shouldn’t underestimate the ruling class’ ability to divide and rule by exploiting “anti-racist” cant. This is a technique former British PR firm Bell Pottinger executed to great effect in South Africa, mounting an influence campaign to taint credible corruption accusations against then-president Jacob Zuma and his associates as a conspiracy of whites defending “white monopoly capital.” The conscious aim was to reopen old wounds in a still highly unequal post-apartheid society, and more importantly, deflect scrutiny from corruption at the nation’s commanding heights.
Similar manipulations must be resisted today; otherwise, the chief perpetrators and enablers of police violence, the system of mass incarceration, the impoverishment of most of the population, the depredations of imperialism against global south nations, and the wave of destruction wrought by the pandemic will use them to evade accountability.
Trump, meanwhile, will exploit images of seemingly mindless destruction, vandalism, and repudiation of America’s revolutionary history to undergird his own loathsome identity appeals to mostly white, mostly male, largely affluent voters.
Trump is the tip of the iceberg of institutional decay
Throughout Trump’s term in office, there has been a concerted campaign to concentrate blame in him for the erosion of what remains of American democracy. He is often portrayed as an aspiring dictator, warmly disposed toward other authoritarian leaders, in whose absence the country would go “back to normal” and democracy would be restored. This is at best a half-truth.
Trump certainly possesses some impulses of a dictator, a disposition he flaunts in his campaign-style public addresses. Yet he has failed in his presidency to consolidate control over the executive branch of his own government, let alone the wider state. For every servile apparatchik who unquestioningly fulfills his demands, however ludicrous, one finds a handful of flagrantly insubordinate officials with motives both admirable and base.
The dominant news media, sympathetic to the Democratic Party “opposition” and neoconservative critics of the president, has been harshly critical of Trump and his administration — usually, but often not, for valid reasons. Notwithstanding his protestations about “fake news,” the president hasn’t attempted in any meaningful way to stifle his critics within the politico-media establishment. (The case of Julian Assange is a different story entirely; however, most establishment journalists studiously refrain from significantly alienating the American power elite and thus needn’t fear such persecution.)
Needless to say, that isn’t how dictators conventionally operate. His instincts aside, Trump lacks the competence and ideological coherence of autocrats past.
In any event, American democracy, even in the era of Trump, faces a more insidious challenge than that of a traditional one-man dictatorship. It’s what the political theorist Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism”: in effect, the capture of the country’s institutions by a nexus of authoritarian bureaucracy and corporate power. The former is determined to protect the U.S.’s world-hegemonic status, even at the expense of any last vestiges of meaningful democracy. The latter, primarily concerned with the bottom line and maximizing market share, is a willing partner.
As Wolin wrote in 2003, reacting to an invasion of Iraq on false pretences:
Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers. That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents.
The inverted totalitarian paradigm was emergent when Wolin described it, whereas today it is fully consummated. Institutionalized, ostensibly democratic processes, such as voting in presidential elections, have been reduced to a cosmetic exercise in legitimization of a fundamentally anti-democratic system. Reform, even of the mild variety, is virtually impossible within its institutional confines. This deprives the citizenry of any realistic alternative to mass revolt if it wishes to reclaim even a modicum of sovereignty and dignity.
There is no lesser evil
Under sufficient, sustained public pressure, the U.S. political establishment and its allies abroad may cave and offer more substantive concessions. But protesters have nothing to gain and much to lose by following the advice several prominent black Democratic mayors and other political figures have dispensed in recent weeks: go home and vote.
The idea that a vote for the espied lesser of two evils, in and of itself, would offer any lasting relief for disenfranchised Americans is a chimera.
Leaving aside their far-right political affinities, both the incumbent president and the Democratic presumptive nominee are elderly men whose basic cognitive functioning — let alone their ability to run so complex an institution as the U.S. government — is plainly lacking, either in an advanced state of decline or never fully present in the first place. What this means is that a vote for either of them is effectively a vote for a presidency by executive committee, a team of mostly unelected handlers representing corporate, financial, and imperial interests. An analogy that has long described the U.S. president as a figurehead or puppet of elite ventriloquists is now quite literally true, and will remain so whether Biden or Trump prevails this fall.
Both Team Biden and Team Trump promise a continuation of war, aggression, corporate profiteering, corruption of state institutions, and continuing state violence and coercion against the poor and working class. Neither will take meaningful action to address the two most immediate threats to human civilization: the crisis of the biosphere and nuclear proliferation in an era of renewed hostilities among the great powers.
The only realistic ray of hope for America’s masses is what the anti-racism mobilization has demonstrated: that a broad coalition of people subjected to intolerable conditions has the wherewithal to take over the streets and disrupt business as usual.
There’s a great opportunity for a broad-based political left to force the kind of change that Americans and the world so desperately need, defying a broken, sclerotic system unwilling or unable to deliver. Now is the time for a popular movement to not only sustain its presence in public spaces, but redouble its efforts, while articulating clear demands: a decent, livable future; a coordinated, internationalist, humanitarian response to the pandemic; a state and economy that serve the needs of the public; an end to racism and all other forms of oppression; ramping down of America’s quest to dominate the world, even at the cost of international tensions careening toward disaster; the resignation or removal of Trump and an end to his monstrous policies.
