Trump’s attempts to retain office despite losing the election failed for a simple reason: the complete absence of any interest among leading capitalists or state bureaucrats to eradicate or even weaken the Constitutional order in order to extend Trump’s presidency.
It is not only in the US that we see the fusion of Big Tech with militarized police forces and the slide into anti-democratic and authoritarian political systems. These are worldwide trends rooted in the structural contradictions of contemporary global capitalism.
While Trump remains a major figure and his mass base a serious problem, today his party is weaker than ever. While Republican disarray benefits Democrats, Biden’s party still faces COVID, economic depression, climate change, and racism.
President Joseph Biden, in office for less than a month, continued to move ahead with his plan to solve the American health and economic crises and to reassert U.S. global dominance. As he pushes ahead with his relief program, Republicans have lined up behind Trump.
Samantha Agarwal discusses the foundations of BJP rule in India and prospects for resistance. (From our Summer 2020 issue.)
As Biden enters office, the left must properly reflect on what has been perhaps the most contemptible administration in US history, to launch a movement of our own against the bipartisan neoliberal and imperialist hegemony.
New Politics is co-sponsoring an online discussion of how the Left can organize to fight the Far Right under the incoming Biden administration, scheduled for Sunday, January 24th at 2:00 pm ET/ 11 am PT.
Will the left be seen as jeopardizing the desire for a period of stability after the insurrection? Will Black Lives Mater demonstrations seem too extreme? Or might the depth of the crisis combined with pressure from the left push Biden to adopt more far-reaching progressive economic and social policies?
We have to call this a failed coup because the intent was to overturn the election of Joseph Biden by forcing vice-president Mike Pence and the Congress to declare Trump the president. It was an attempt to overthrow the incoming elected government by force.
The rise of the radical right is based on interrelated but distinct dynamics: market capitalism’s destructiveness; the Left’s failure to respond to market capitalism; and the Right’s ability to sustain the belief that the Left is still a threat.
It would be devastatingly stupid, complacent beyond belief, to expect US democracy to remain sufficiently stable in the coming years to deny this incipient fascism more opportunities to congeal, and grow.
Biden will endorse the old normal Obama handed to Trump, but he will also push profiteering and control of education through technology, a project supported by both Democrats and the GOP from the start of Trump’s administration.
An atomized, racially fragmented, demoralized working class will always be prone to Trumpism. If Biden and the Democrats stick to the policies they have implemented and backed ever since the late 1970s, disorganized workers will either further shift to Trumpism or (as is more likely with Blacks) simply abstain.
