Thursday’s presidential debate presented only two visions: right-wing demagoguery wrapped up in half truths and whole lies, and the dwindling mental faculties of an aging leader who, in many respects, reflects the deepening twilight of the United States’s global hegemony.
Throughout the night, Donald Trump and Joe Biden rushed to outflank each other from the right, attempting to channel the fears of sectors of the working and middle classes who feel the effects of the United States’ weakened position at the head of the neoliberal world order and are seeking alternatives to a multi-layered crisis. The result was repeated vicious attacks on immigrants, an emphasis on protectionist trade and foreign policies to protect against challenges from ascendent powers like China, and two different paths for increased militarism.
It’s clear that the two candidates are out to protect the interests of U.S. capitalists at the expense of immigrants, Palestinians, and the democratic rights and living conditions of millions of working and oppressed people — both in the United States and in all corners of the world under the yoke of imperialism.
For Trump, who came into the debate with multiple felony convictions, his performance seemed more disciplined and coherent than in the past. He certainly got a boost from Biden’s poor showing, which allowed Trump to be seen as confident, charismatic, and energetic. Many agree that had Trump faced a more viable candidate, he would be in much more political trouble for the constant lies and far-right rhetoric he was putting forward. Still, Trumpism is undeniably a dynamic political force that has proven hard to beat.
Trumpism seeks to deepen inequality through further deregulation of the market, which includes an attack on workers’ standard of living and their rights against the bosses. The former president postures as a strongman who can “drain the swamp” of career politicians getting rich off the backs of the working class, but his first term and his subsequent re-election bids have shown him to be decidedly in the camp of capitalists who seek to ensure their profits while attacking the rights of workers to fight for their interests. After all, Trump was no friend of the striking UAW workers last fall: not only did he speak at a non-unionized factory, he squarely denied the workers’ demands.
Trump has been able to open space for a Far Right attached to proto-fascist forces to drive the political discourse further to the right. These elements have even been able to launch a strong offensive on the democratic rights of the oppressed, including the right to abortion, trans rights, affirmative action programs, voting rights, and immigrant rights. Under Trumpism, we saw the deployment of the National Guard on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, a scene reminiscent of the deployment of the National Guard by segregationist southern governors during the civil rights movement.
Even before this debate, sectors of capital were being won over to Trump — especially compared to the last election where capital lined up behind Biden. As Martin Wolf writes in Financial Times, “Many billionaires and business people support Donald Trump. That is no surprise. He would be good for profits, they believe. He offers lower taxes and less regulation. Some have argued that certain policies of his — the tax cuts and toughness on China and freeriding allies, for example — were not foolish.”
And further, Trump’s foreign policy is winning more supporters, as a recent Foreign Affairs article highlights, through calling for, “A return of peace through strength: the case for Trump foreign policy.” This debate, in which Trump at least “acted” more Presidential than he has in the past, may mean even more sectors of capital being won over to Trump as he continues to present a case for his own brand of imperialist solutions to the crisis of hegemony — namely, relying more on unilateralism than Biden’s multilateral approach — which Biden has struggled to resolve in a meaningful way, especially following Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
A Shallow Level of Debate
From the economy and inflation, to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, neither Trump or Biden went beyond surface level sound bites and gut-level responses.
In Trump’s rare “on message” performances, the message was appalling. The United States is experiencing “hell” due to inflation, on the international stage the country is the laughing stock of the world. And the primary problem for the U.S. is undocumented immigrants who are taking “Black jobs, Hispanic jobs” and gobbling up U.S. resources and benefits like Social Security.
Biden also functioned under the premise that undocumented people are a problem, pivoting to an incoherent response against undocumented immigrants in what should have been a strong answer on abortion. For all of their claims in the last election about opposing Trump’s demagoguery around the border, the Democrats have completely followed the Right’s lead on the issue and have shifted their position significantly to the right — from an already right-wing position! — in what seems to be an arms race of who can be more brutal towards migrants. It was Biden who just this month went further than Trump did during his term to close the southern border to immigrants.
While Trump may say he does not want war, his politics put the United States in a more openly confrontational relationship with China, and even the rest of European capitalism as he seeks to increase tariffs on foreign goods. But his isolationist politics are more a difference of degree than of kind: the Biden administration’s policies and bipartisan consensus over the last four years have also been aimed at containing China’s growing influence.
Trump did his best to dodge the fact that his position on Palestine and Israel is no different than Biden’s. Trump correctly pointed out that it is Israel that is standing in the way of a ceasefire, but then went on to explicitly support the genocide of Palestinians, calling on Netanyahu to “finish the job,” and demonizing pro-Palestine anti-war protesters in the United States. Biden, on the other hand, defended his position of support for Israel, and doubled down on the need to “eradicate Hamas,” which is code for continuing military operations in Palestine.
And on economics, neither Trump or Biden articulated any policies to tame inflation beyond doubling down on their previous moves: Trump wants deregulation, higher tariffs, protectionist foreign policies, and a militarized border, while Biden wants some regulation mixed in with nationalistic, populist economic policies that tail Trump’s “America First” agenda and throws money to capitalist manufacturers to build green capitalism. Biden and Trump simply played the blame game and accused each other of being the “worst President in the history of the nation” and calling their policies “among the best in the history of the nation.”
This shallow debate was a show of anti-immigrant chauvinism and how successful the Right has been at leading the debate on immigration and the border and an unilateral, protectionist international foreign policy.
A Terrible Showing for Biden and an Open Crisis for the Democrats
By all accounts, Biden’s performance was terrible — so much so that a growing number of Democratic Party donors and high profile figures are saying that he needs to be replaced. The podcast Pod Save America, run by political pundits who previously worked under President Obama, raises as a central issue in their latest show “having a conversation whether the best thing for America is for Biden to step aside.” Every major news outlet across the political spectrum is running stories and op-eds questioning Biden’s candidacy and examining a potential — and unprecedented — path to replace him as the Democratic Party nominee.
Within the Democratic Party leadership, there has been some long-stated doubt about Biden’s ability to be a viable candidate. Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted last November about whether Biden winning the nomination was “in HIS best interest or the country’s?” Yet the fact that no viable alternative to Biden has emerged within the Democratic Party is telling of how the party as a whole lacks a coherent vision and plan to deal with Trump or the growing economic and political crises facing the United States.
These critiques have overwhelmingly focused on Biden’s age and perceived frailty, qualities which were on full display on Thursday night. But the problem with Biden isn’t just his age — it’s his and the regime’s politics.
The Democratic Party is the staunch defender of the failing project of multilateral neoliberalism, and while it attempts to channel the energy of the social movements and the labor movement into support for the status quo, it’s finding this role increasingly difficult to maintain — especially in the years following the 2020 BLM uprising, the squashing of the railway strike, and now the genocide in Palestine. The momentum Biden built for his campaign coming out of the State of the Union address earlier this year is gone, and another comeback is highly unlikely.
While Trump told a “grand narrative” of a country in crisis and the vicious anti-immigrant policies he hopes to enact, Biden wasn’t able to paint a coherent picture of how he hopes to resolve the challenges facing U.S. imperialism. He was unable to articulate a vision of “Bidenomics” or even of populist promises to make the United States a leading manufacturing center — indeed, at times he didn’t even take the full allotted time to answer a question and just trailed off incoherently.
In truth, there’s not much for him to say. Four years after Biden took office, the Far Right has consolidated a wing in Congress and in the state governments and have been able to advance in a widespread attack against the rights of trans people, people of color, and immigrants, as well as on our reproductive rights, the right to vote, and the right to protest. Though Biden is no stranger to weaponizing abortion to make a case for the Democratic Party’s brand of lesser evilism, it is no surprise that he did not argue to protect reproductive rights: after standing aside to let the Supreme Court and the states eat away at access to abortion, Biden has no place left to go but to the right on abortion in an attempt to sway more conservative voters who are wary of a second Trump term. Biden’s lesser evilism argument is largely exhausted.
As we have commented before, the U.S. political regime is experiencing an “organic crisis” that has weakened the government and forced the Democratic and Republican parties (who are bourgeois parties representing the capitalist, ruling class) to struggle to grapple with new political phenomena. This has led huge sectors of the masses to lose faith in the traditional political parties and institutions of the capitalist regime. Last night was an expression of this. “We deserve better,” “we are in hell” — these were among the messages making the rounds on social media.
We Need a Revolutionary Alternative
The important political role of the working class was made explicit during the debate, as both sides directly appealed to these sectors, and not just the middle class. This should give the working class confidence in its own power, and raise the important idea of the working class using that power to fight for its own interests, taking the lead in addressing issues of the international working class and oppressed.
In fact, the struggle for Palestine has demonstrated the potential power of and connection between the working classes of the world. Tens of thousands of workers across the globe responded to the appeal of the Palestinian Trade Unions to stand against the brutal offensive against the people of Palestine by the State of Israel. In the United States, thousands of young labor activists, shaped by the experience of the pandemic and BLM, took up the cause of Palestine, fighting for ceasefire resolutions. In an important experience for the labor movement, academic workers in the University of California system went on strike to oppose the repression of the student movement in solidarity with Palestine.
Switching to a younger and more charismatic Democratic candidate isn’t going to solve the problem facing the global working class and oppressed. The fact that there was no viable alternative to Biden during the Democratic primary shows the depth of the internal crisis is inside of the Democratic Party, and why it cannot provide real answers to the working class and oppressed.
Instead, we need our own party. Were it not for the conscious policies of the left wing of the Democratic Party and the union bureaucracy, we could already have one. Rather than focussing on building real political representation for the working class and oppressed, the left wing of the Democratic Party and the union bureaucracy have encouraged the Left to abandon the fight for class independence in favor of tying our fate to the Biden candidacy in a lesser evil logic that, as we mentioned above, fail to deliver. Groups like the CPUSA (who don’t officially endorse Biden, but emphasize that a victory for Trump is something that should be avoided at all cost,) or Jacobin Magazine, or left-wing union bureaucrats like Shawn Fain give either backhanded or direct support to the Democrats on the premise that “they are our only hope,” even when they are not.
Far from safeguarding democracy, these groups help push sectors of the working class, and Black and Brown voters, into the arms of Trumpism due to their rightful disillusionment with the Democratic Party.
This is why we need the leading sectors of the of the labor movement, BLM, the anti-war movement in solidarity with Palestine, and other struggles to fight for class independent politics and take up the task of building a party for the working class that fights against neoliberalism and the politics of the far-right. We need a party that fights against the police, for immigrant rights, for universal healthcare that includes the right to abortion and child care, and higher wages and to address climate change. This party would fight for socialism, which means the expropriation of large scale industries, taking take the economy out of the hands of the capitalists (who prioritize profits over people) and into the collective hands of the working class who would democratically discuss and decide how to run the economy in the interests of everyone.
The UAW strike showed concretely the power and possibility of unity among the multiethnic and multi-gendered working class. So has labor’s stance in support for Palestine, although this stance must be greatly strengthened and widened. We need to build off of these experiences and build politics that offer concrete, revolutionary optimism for the future based on the full rejection of the capitalist (and imperialist) system. That is the only hope we have of stopping the advance of the Far-Right, an end to imperialist war, and the continuing economic instability experienced by the working class.
Originally Published: 2024-06-29 17:03:00
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