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CURRENT SITUATION: NOTES ON THE GLOBAL CRISIS (30. On the last reactionary elections in the USA)
The results and the first statements of the arch-reactionary Donald Trump, candidate of the Republican Party mafia against the candidate Harris of the Democratic Party mafia, were announced by almost all the media following a similar pattern:
Donald Trump is the winner of the elections in the United States. He will be president of the United States for the second time. His victory has been confirmed. He obtains 312 delegates (the majority is 270) against Kamala Harris’ 226, with a resounding victory. Trump celebrated his victory with a party in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he appeared three hours before the final result. There, he proclaimed:
“We are going to fix everything that is wrong in this country.”
“It is time to leave behind the divisions of the last four years.”
(November 6, 2024).
Speaking of the most general and common political consequences for reactionary governments of cyclical capitalist crises, most media agree that
“Trump has benefited from the frustration of citizens after the sharp price increases of the last four years and the increase in illegal immigration”.
The part referring to the economic crisis – fall and change of governments, we underline it, because since the 20th century and more pronounced in these two decades of the present, we observe this trend of replacement of reactionary governments swept away by the crisis by other reactionary governments. What deserves to be complemented when referring to the “increase of illegal immigration”, is to say that Trump has benefited from having awakened the lowest xenophobic passions among voters, using it openly as one of the axes of his electoral campaign, while Kamala Harris has used a shameful xenophile speech. African Americans, Latinos and other immigrants do not forget that Hamala Harris, as Attorney General, was especially harsh against them with her “law and order” policy.
Trump has reached approximately 74,500,000 votes, a figure very similar to the one that led him to be defeated by Biden in 2020 with 74,225,000. On the contrary, the Democrat’s fall comes from the historical record of votes for a presidential candidate in the history of the United States with 81,300,000 votes for Biden in 2020, to 70,800,000 for Harris, with a loss of 10 million votes in 4 years and which places them in the most crushing defeat since 1988 (loosing the popular vote, the Electoral College, the Senate and the House of Representatives). Ten million voters who were key to expelling Trump from the presidency and who on this occasion, even aware of the possibility of his re-election, abstained from voting.
„
As of November 6, with the recount process not yet fully completed, the votes counted represented 65% of the voting-age population in the US. This figure represents only a one-point decrease from the record high turnout in 2020, which saw the highest level of participation in 50 years.“
(Statista)
„
Trump won the 2024 election with 312 electoral votes, over Harris’s 226, and obtained 50.4% of the popular vote, or 74,532,699 votes, according to CNN’s latest count. Final data will not be available until December.“
(CNN)
If one takes into account that 45% of eligible voters did not exercise their right to vote, then Trump won not with 50.4% of 100% but only with 50.4% of those who voted. The absolute figures will not be known for sure because the counting is state-run.
ON THE WORSENING OF COLLUSION AND STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE TWO FACTIONS OF YANKEE IMPERIALISM
It is true, as it has been said since the beginning of this century, that the depth of the “division of American society” has been expressed in the growing disputes between the Executive and the Legislative, aggravated with each change of authorities, especially in the middle of each legislative period. This is how the development of the contradiction is expressed, in the midst of collusion and struggle, between both factions of the American big bourgeoisie on the political level. This has been seen, for example, in the last presidential periods, as for example, in the problems for the approval of the budget, where only after difficult and long compromises (negotiations), between both mafias, an agreement was reached to end the forced suspension of the administration’s activities or to approve an “aid package,” etc.
For this reason, both factions of Yankee imperialism fought to resolve this contradiction in their favor, through a greater centralization of power in the Executive, applying presidential absolutism. This centralization develops in hard collusion and struggle in the elections for the replacement of authorities such as those that have just passed, in the struggle and collusion between Republicans and Democrats for the appointment of judges and prosecutors in charge of applying the laws at the federal and state level, as well as for the appointment of positions in the bureaucracy, one of the pillars of the bourgeois State, the other and main one being the armed forces.
As for the control of the judicial apparatus, during the previous Trump administration, the Democratic control over the Supreme Court was reversed through the appointment of “conservative” judges linked to the Republican Party; now, at the last moment, before the transfer of powers to the new administration, the Democrats intend to reverse it by using their meager majority in the Senate to appoint judges who respond to the orientation of the Democrats. In the high bureaucracy, the Democratic Party has maintained greater control.
So, in these elections, the problem has been at stake, under what sign this greater centralization of power in the Executive was going to occur as part of the process of reactionarization of the imperialist bourgeois State. It has not been, therefore, between reactionary democracy or fascism.
As a consequence, with Trump’s victory in the presidential elections and with the Republican majority achieved by his Party in both chambers, we will see an absolute centralization of power under the signature of the imperialist faction that this Party represents, ganged up by Donald Trump as president, who will subject the judiciary and the bureaucracy, the intelligence apparatus and the armed forces to greater control. The president centralizes the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches in his hands. Which means one more step in the reactionary nature of the Yankee imperialist State, a bourgeois dictatorship led by the financial oligarchy, a reactionary democracy with increasing suppression and restriction of rights and freedoms.
On the further decomposition of imperialism on all levels
In American society, in these reactionary elections, ideologically, it has been reflected, on the one hand, in a rotten imperialist, reactionary, post-modernist and social-chauvinist thought represented by the “democratic” mafia, which focuses on the “identity discourse” to mobilize, in search of social and partisan support, the academic and technocratic petite bourgeoisie plus representatives of the upper layers of the minorities to seek on that basis to manipulate the broad masses of the population in the service of the old order and the imperialist war and, on the other hand, in a racist, chauvinist “identity” discourse, of “original American values”, of “Christian values of service of the woman to the man”, of the woman as a child-bearing machine for wage slavery and cannon fodder for imperialist wars, anti-abortion, that is, ultra-reactionary represented by the “Republican” mafiosi appealing to the lowest instincts of the masses degraded to electoral cattle, with a pro-re-industrialization discourse that clashes violently with the most parasitic and most decomposing character of imperialism. Both the rotten post-modernist thought of one imperialist faction, and the equally rotten “conservative” ultra-reactionary thought of the other imperialist faction, correspond to the rotten ideology of imperialism in its most advanced phase of decomposition and general and final crisis and sweeping away by the world revolution through People’s War.
THE US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS BEAR THE INDELIBLE MARK OF SLAVERY
Or why is the president not elected directly?
The answer lies in the origins of this bourgeois dictatorial state, as can be read in the following quote:
“
Kings are born kings; presidents are elected. But how? James Wilson clarified that the delegates are in Philadelphia “by no other part of this plan are they more confused than by the form of the election for the office of president.” Wilson had proposed at the Convention that the president be elected directly. But James Madison had introduced that, “
b
ecause the right to vote is greater in the northern states than in the southern states,
(…)
the latter, on the basis of the negroes, cannot have any influence in the election.”
In plain text: In a direct election, the northern states, where there are more qualified voters, would also have more votes. Wilson’s proposal was rejected by a majority of 12 states to one. Some delegates at the Convention were of the idea that Congress should elect the president. This method, known as indirect election, facilitates the participation of the people in the election and keeps at bay “the excesses of democracy”; it filters the will of the many through the judgment of the few. The senate is elected indirectly, for example: senators are not elected by the people, but by the parliaments of the states (direct election was introduced in 1913 …). But the indirect election of the president poses a problem: the election of the president through Congress collides with the principle of the separation of powers.
Wilson put forward another idea. If the people cannot directly elect the president and neither can Congress, perhaps another body can fill the void. Wilson’s second proposal was that the people should delegate to an electoral college of elected delegates, an assembly of honourable men with the corresponding wealth and reputation, who should properly take over the election process. This compromise was approved. But this compromise was made on the basis of another compromise: on the basis of the proportion of slaves. The number of delegates to the male electoral guild was not to be represented by the number of eligible voters in each state, but by the number of its representatives to the House of Representatives. The representation of a state to the male electoral guild was determined by the standard for parliamentary representation
–
one congressional representative for every 40,000 people, of which enslaved people counted as three-fifths. The male electoral guild was a concession to the slaveholders, which was as much imbued with mathematical calculation as with political calculation.”
(Jill Lepore, The TRUE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES)
The manipulation of American voters by the two mafias that take turns in the American government
Here is a historical testimony by HENRY KISSINGER in his book World Order, Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History, 2014, who here acts as a prophet of the past, but which has the value of a confession of part and of a fulfilled “prophecy”:
“
Until now, Western history and psychology have treated truth as something independent of personality and prior to the experience of the observer. But our era is on the verge of a change in the conception of the nature of truth. Almost all websites contain some kind of personalization function based on a tracking of Internet codes intended to establish the user’s background and preferences. These methods want to stimulate users to “consume more content” and, in doing so, be exposed to more advertising, which is what ultimately sustains the Internet economy. These subtle orientations are in keeping with a broader tendency to manipulate the traditional understanding of human choice. Products are ranked and prioritized to offer those that one would “like” and online news is presented as “the news that might interest you the most.” Two different people who turn to the same search engine with the same question do not necessarily receive the same answer. The concept of truth is relativized and individualized: it loses its universal character. Information is presented as if it were free. In effect, the recipient pays for it by providing data that will be exploited by people he does not know, in ways that will then shape the information offered to him.
Whatever the utility of this approach in the realm of consumption, its effect on policy decisions can be transformative. Difficult choices in political decisions are always lonely. Where, in a world of ubiquitous social media, does the individual find room to develop the strength to make decisions that, by definition, cannot be based on consensus? The saying that prophets are not recognized in their own time is true insofar as they operate beyond conventional conception: that is what makes them prophets. In our era, the technical time of prophets might have disappeared. The search for transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the power to make solitary decisions.
The American elections, especially the presidential elections, represent another aspect of this evolution. It has been argued that in 2012 the electoral campaigns had files on tens of millions of potentially independent voters. Extracted from social networks, from open archives and from medical records, these files offered a profile probably more precise than the person involved could have made from memory. This allowed the campaigners to choose the most appropriate technology in each case: a personal visit from friends already affiliated (also found via the Internet), personalized letters (extracted from social networks) or group meetings.
Presidential campaigns are about to transform into media competitions between internet operators. What were once substantive debates over the content of government activity will be reduced to candidates becoming mouthpieces for a marketing effort pursued by media whose intrusiveness would have been considered the stuff of science fiction just a generation ago. The primary role of candidates may become fundraising rather than program-making.
Is the marketing effort intended to express the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate a reflection of big data research into individuals’ likely preferences and biases? Can democracy avoid evolving into a demagogic outcome based on an emotional appeal to the masses, rather than the reasoned process envisioned by the Founding Fathers? If the gap between the qualities required for election and the qualities essential to holding office becomes too wide, that conceptual knowledge and historical sense that should be part of foreign policy could be lost, or the cultivation of these qualities could take up so much time in a president’s first term as to prevent him from fulfilling his role as leader of the United States.”
Whoever wins the electoral farce, always with fraud on one side or the other, will apply in essence the same strategic guidelines and objectives of Yankee imperialism to maintain its status as the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower and world counterrevolutionary gendarme, just as it has been with all the presidents of the United States to date, as one witness testifies thus:
“
The twelve postwar presidents have passionately claimed the exceptional role of the United States in the world. They have all postulated, as an axiom, that the country is engaged in a selfless struggle for the resolution of conflicts and the equality of all nations, whose ultimate measure of success will be world peace and universal harmony.
All the presidents of both political parties have proclaimed the applicability of American principles to the entire world (…) What for other countries would have been a mere rhetorical flourish has been presented, in the American debate, as a specific model for global action.”
We translate all the Yankee demagogy with a single phrase:
the
“pax americana.”
This imperialist objective is a historical and political impossibility because we are in the offensive of the world proletarian revolution that will sweep away imperialism and world reaction from the face of the Earth with a People’s War.
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