The impending election storm – CounterPunch.org

Here is some of the latest evidence that the United States is now staging a bourgeois electoral spectacle every four years for the third year in a row, having placed a fascist madman representing a fascist party at the head of its presidential nomination.

There is a not-so-subtle deviation in the attack by Donald “They Eat the Cats and Dogs” Trump and his fascist running mate JD “Cat Lady” Vance on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio – an attack that led to the closure of schools and public buildings due to bomb and shooting threats and the march of the fascist Proud Boys on the city. The deviation here is the attack not only on “illegal” immigrants, but now on perfectly legal immigrants – “legals” who, by the way, are understood by locals across the red-blue spectrum as contributing to the economy and community of an American city.

(I am thinking here of all the hard-working and completely “legal” Sudanese and Congolese families I have worked with and tended to in Iowa City over the past decade.)

This, along with the vile and animalizing accusation that these legal immigrants are killing and eating their neighbors' pets, is a sign of the vicious and potentially genocidal racism that lurks behind the legalistic guise of “legal” and “illegal” people, and behind what the Nazi scum Trump and Vance mean when they say “real Americans.” This “real American” is a white man who stands proudly above strict social hierarchies and oppressive structures of race and gender, with guns and whips in hand. This “real American” keeps his wife barefoot and pregnant, leaving his mother and mother-in-law and childless aunts and sisters to care for children until death and perform related domestic duties. (In a chilling echo of The Handmaid's Tale(In The Woman Who Knew Nothing, a widely read novel depicting a dystopian, fascist future, Vance made clear his belief that women's only real function in society was to bear and raise children and to look after the home, shared with women who either “have not had children” or are beyond childbearing age.)

The Road to Springfield is a snapshot of much of America if and when our ruling class and its political system, including the sinister Democrats, let Trump back into the White House – which could well happen.

Also notable in the wild drama surrounding Springfield is Vance's open statement to CNN that he is willing to “make up stories” – that is, to invent racist urban legends overnight, such as the ridiculous accusation of eating pets – in order to advance the arch-nativist terror of the richest US party.

Speaking of departures, we've always known that Hitler fan Donald “Poison Our Blood” Trump, like all good fascists, is anti-Semitic. But Trump recently broke new ground by essentially saying that if he loses the next election, “despite everything I've done for Israel,” it will be largely the fault of the Jews.

“In my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to lose if I were at 40 percent,” Trump said at an anti-Semitism event organized by Israeli American Republicans major donor Miriam Adelson. After the event, Trump, as keynote speaker at the Israeli American Conference funded by Adelson, said:

“If I don't win this election – and that is a big part of the Jewish population, because 60 percent of them are voting for the enemy – Israel will no longer exist in two years. If I win, Israel will be safe and secure and we will stop the poison of anti-Semitism.”

By “the enemy” he means the capitalist-imperialist Democratic Party, which he likes to describe as “communist” and “Marxist.”

There are four terrible things about these Adelson-sponsored comments. First, he homogenizes an entire ethnic group while showing no sensitivity to their own internal complexity and the fact that their historical voting behavior reflects a mix of considerations, of which defense of Israel is only one. He identifies Jewishness with unreserved support for the genocidal fascist apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing state of Israel. I should add that some of the harshest critics of the State of Israel I have met in the last year are young Jewish college students. And let's forget that its “enemy,” the Democratic Party under Biden and Harris, has strongly supported Israel as it has perpetrated genocide in Gaza for the past 11-plus months.

Third, in classic fascist fashion, Donald Trump refers to the not-so-left capitalist-imperialist party of the USA, the Democrats, as “the enemy”. The hated enemy. That is the language of domestic war. What do you do with hated enemies? You destroy them by any means necessary. You drive them to run for their lives and leave the country.

Fourth, Donald “Vengeance” Trump is preparing the Jewish people in general for post-election retribution, whether or not he wins, and perhaps especially if he fails.

Fifth, the orange fascist signals a frightening connection to the classical European 20^th The 19th century fascism of Hitler and his gang by targeting the Third Reich's greatest ethno-cultural enemy, the Jews, whom Hitler and his Nazi Party almost completely exterminated in Europe between 1941 and 1945. Never forget that he gave the thumbs up to the Proud Boys who wore t-shirts that read “6MWE” while rioting in Washington DC after the 2020 election. “6MWE” is short for “Six million dead in the Nazi Holocaust were not enough.”

In other news about the republic fascism that Democrats and the mainstream media don't like to call fascism (yes, there are a few brief exceptions), the Reich Party is going ahead and fielding an avowed “black Nazi” who Donald “Execute the Central Park Five” Trump has called “Martin Luther King on steroids” as their North Carolina gubernatorial candidate, despite evidence of his “extremism” becoming public. The Reich Party has put Donald “Why don't my generals follow my orders like Hitler's?” Trump's golf partner, Senator Lindsey Graham, in the race to try to get Nebraska's Republican-fascist state legislature to reverse the state's practice of apportioning its Electoral College votes by congressional districts. The idea is to win Nebraska over to the winner-take-all rule so that “the enemy” (those “Marxist” Democrats) can't claim the potentially decisive electoral college vote in Omaha. And the Trumpist Georgia Board of Elections just voted 3-2 to require a full hand recount of the 2024 election in Georgia. This measure (a) builds on the lie that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” and (b) is designed to prevent the state’s votes from being certified by the December 25 deadline, thus pushing the presidential election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where Trump is certain to win because the House will vote by state delegations, not by members. According to the 12th Amendment of 1804, “The candidate with a majority of the electoral votes shall be President. If no candidate has a majority, the House shall choose the President by ballot from among the three best candidates. Each state has one vote in the House of Representatives.” (Trying to get things passed in the House under the 12th Amendment was part of criminal right-wing Trump lawyer John Eastman’s election cancellation strategy in 2020-21.)

I have long been tired of appearing prescient and being in the position of saying “I told you so” about the electability and behavior of US presidents, from the messianic militarist Bush 43 to the arch-neoliberal imperialist Wall Street Obama44, the fascist Trump 45 and the genocidal Joe Biden 46. The most important legitimate reason to say “I/we told you so” is not to elevate oneself above others, but to suggest that we, who saw all this crap coming in advance, might want to be heard by as many people as possible, because we seem to know a thing or two about the core nature of this society and this political superstructure, knowledge that is crucial to figuring out how to overthrow a capitalist system that is actively working to destroy any prospects for a decent future in ways that I have been writing and talking about for many years now.

Here is an interesting dialogue with a reader reflecting on the impending electoral crisis:

“Hi Paul: Regarding your last article at 𝐶𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑝𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ, 'Ten True Things About the Election and America': Please correct me if I'm wrong, but could your list include what Harris and her supporters have made clear, namely that not only is Trump unfit to be president, but that his presidency would mean the end of elections and democracy in the US? In that case, how can they allow him to take office if he wins? We know that Trump will never go quietly if he loses. Aren't the Democrats essentially implying the same thing? Haven't both sides made some level of post-election conflict all but inevitable? Best, JF.”

My answer, too short to really get into the topic, but hopefully still relevant:

“Well, if the Democrats were going to prevent Trump from taking office after a win, they would have to have their own narrative of the election being stolen (and a Trump win would likely be a steal on multiple levels) and have reached out to the Pentagon and gained their support, right? I have no idea if the Biden-Harris forces and the Democratic campaign are working on these things. They probably should, as crazy as that sounds. But I don't think the Democrats really have that in them. They can't properly call the other party fascist, even though that party openly flaunts neo-fascist and, in fact, (classic historical fascist values ​​and agendas). Maybe I'm wrong. And I have no idea where the military stands on this issue.

This is the first US election in my lifetime where it seems as though the military is part of the equation of how things play out between the two ruling parties. At least never to this extent. Wild times, but perhaps not so surprising. Fundamental contradictions are coming to the fore and everything is changing.

And by the way, what the Democrats call the 'end of democracy' is really the breaking away of the outer shell of what Marxists rightly consider to be bourgeois democracy, which rests on the underlying dictatorship of capital. That dictatorship will remain intact under a consolidated American version of fascism in the US, and is actively destroying the prospect of a decent future for humanity through its environmental impact, regardless of which of our two dominant parties wins or keeps the White House.”