2464. The Two-Party System and the 2016 Presidential Elections

By Charlie Post, The Brooklyn Rail, October 4, 2016

For over eighty years, the reformist left in the United States has sought to transform one of the capitalist parties into a “people’s” party. Both the Communist Party’s popular front strategy and the social-democratic strategy of “realignment” (formulated by the brilliant ex-Marxist Max Shachtman) sought to transform the Democratic Party. The Democrats, through the 1950s, were a coalition of urban real estate developers, Jewish and Catholic capitalists and southern planters who enjoyed the voting support of northern industrial workers, black and white, middle-class liberals, and most southern whites. The reformists’ goal was to drive out the conservative, pro-capitalist elements—especially the Dixiecrats—leaving the labor officialdom and middle-class liberals to dominate a “labor-liberal” Party. As Paul Heideman pointed out in a recent essay in Jacobin,1 there was a realignment in the Democratic Party in the 1970s—but not the one the reformists hoped for. The southerners abandoned the Democrats for the Republicans, but with urban growth the non-WASP capitalists were joined by new capitalists in high technology and the media, and an increasingly neo-liberal urban middle class. Rather than becoming a labor-liberal party, the Democrats moved sharply right in the 1980s as the official leaders of the labor, civil rights, and women’s movements were marginalized.

Today, we are seeing a realignment within the oldest party of industrial capitalism in the U.S.—the Republicans. The party establishment—those with the closest historic ties to old-line, WASP manufacturers, bankers, and financiers—have lost control of the party to a right-wing populist, Donald Trump. Since the 1960s, the mass voter base of the Republican Party has been made up primarily of older, suburban, white, middle-class small-businesspeople, professionals, and managers, many of whom are self-described Christian fundamentalists, and a minority of older white workers, including a minority of union households. Until recently, the Party base’s particular passions—especially its hostility to the democratic gains of people of color, women, and LGBT people—could be contained. Minor concessions to the social conservatives on abortion, affirmative action, voter restrictions, and same-sex marriage/legal equality maintained their loyalty, while capitalists set the substantive neo-liberalagenda for the Republicans (and the Democrats as well). As in the Democratic Party, the non-capitalist elements of the Republican coalition were clearly junior partners to capital.

In 2016, a radical, right-wing, middle-class insurgency that began in the wake of the world economic crisis of 2007 – 08 has displaced, at least temporarily, the hegemonic capitalists in the Republican Party. Donald Trump’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate is the most recent act of a struggle for the leadership of the party that began in the aftermath of the global recession and the election of Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate. While capital did push back against the first wave of middle-class radicalism in the Republican Party—the Tea Party—during the 2014 Congressional elections, these rebels were not vanquished. In fact, they have become even more radically nationalist and populist, imposing a Presidential candidate hostile to the neo-liberal agenda. 

In the immediate aftermath of the 2007 – 08 global recession, the mainstream media predicted, and much of the left hoped for, a sharp turn to the left in both public opinion and state policies. Growing support for “socialism”—more capitalist state regulation of the market economy and the expansion of social welfare—seemed to sound the death knell of neo-liberalism across the advanced capitalist world. The 2008 election, when Obama and the Democrats scored large majorities with vague promises of a return to “New Deal” policies, seemed to confirm these prognostications. However, within two years of Obama’s election it was clear that the U.S., like other capitalist societies, was experiencing a sharpening political polarization. While capital and mainstream political leaders remained committed to austerity and deregulation, there was widespread rejection of neo-liberalism from both the left and the right. On the one hand, a significant portion of youth and working people were moving left—as manifested in the Wisconsin Uprising, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and, electorally, in the massive support for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries. On the other, we saw the radicalization of the older, white middle classes around a right-wing populist program that targeted both people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBT folks, and the “corporate establishment.” 

The Bush and Obama administrations’ bail-outs of banks, the auto industry, and some homeowners was the catalyst for the radicalization of the Republican electorate.2 The “Tea Party” began as an alliance between a grass-roots rebellion of older, white, suburban small-business people, professionals and managers, and elements of the capitalist class. The middle-class ranks of the Tea Party railed against “corporate welfare” and “bailouts for undeserving” homeowners, in particular people of color who held sub-prime mortgages. Capitalists like the Koch brothers saw an opportunity to advance their libertarian agenda of defeating Obamacare and privatizing Medicare and Social Security pensions.3 Broader layers of the capitalist class encouraged the Tea Party’s mobilizations as long as it championed the weakening of unions, further deregulation of capital, and social-service austerity. Capitalists were also happy to manipulate hostility to Obama’s health care plan to force the Democrats to increase subsidies to the private health care and insurance industries. 

This alliance continued through the 2010 Congressional elections, when the Republicans won a majority in the House and deprived the Democrats of their filibuster-proof “super majority” in the Senate. While particularly right-wing capitalists like the Koch brothers helped finance the Tea Party, most capitalists continued to hedge their bets electorally. Capitalist donors slightly preferredthe Democrats over the Republicans in 2010. The rise of a new populist right targeting immigrants, people of color, and unions for the current economic crisis represented a radicalization of the white, suburban middle classand a minority of older, white, native-born workers. Capital was more than willing to use this nativist, racist, and anti-union movement when their interests coincided. However, the new right has an agenda independent of and, at points, opposed to that of capital. 

The issues of immigration and the possibility of a Federal credit default distinguished the Tea Party right from the political establishment. The minority of older white workers who voted Republican viewed undocumented immigrants as competitors on the labor-market; while the older small businesspeople and professionals who made up the majority of the Tea Party cadre and voters viewed undocumented immigrants are a threat to their “quality of life” and competitors for scarce social services. Mass deportations and denying the undocumented any path to citizenship (and access to social services), with lower Federal deficits, would protect the “earned benefits” (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) upon which they rely.

Capitalists, however, have a very different perspective on both immigration and the debt ceiling. Not only do high-tech industries want access to skilled foreign professionals, but labor-intensive industries like agriculture, construction, landscaping, domestic service, child-care, healthcare, and hospitality rely on low-wage, vulnerable immigrant labor. Capital wants a precarious migrant workforce without legal status, disciplined by selective deportations, to labor for substandard wages in these industries. The two most important “business lobbying” organizations—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—are leading the fight for an immigration reform that would create massive “guest worker” programs and a long, difficult and complex “path to citizenship” for those in the U.S. without papers, while opposing wholesale deportations and other policies that reduce the size of the immigrant workforce. 

Capital supports massive cuts to social spending in the U.S. and a reduction of the Federal budget deficit. However, the Tea Party’s political brinkmanship—its willingness to let the U.S. default on its public debt by refusing to raise the debt ceiling in 2011—estranged capital from the Tea Party. Both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable led the opposition to attempts to “shut down the government” as a threat to the U.S. and global financial system upon which capitalists depend.

The fall 2013 government shut-down marked the end of the uneasy alliance between the Tea Party and the capitalist class. The campaign to “Fix the Debt” was launched in 2012, bringing together dozens of former Senators and Congressmen and over one hundred fifty CEOs of some of the largest U.S. transnational corporations in support of a “grand bargain” of closing corporate tax loop-holes while lowering the overall tax rate “in exchange” for “restructuring” (i.e. massive cuts to) federal pensions, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. While the “bargain” garnered the support of Obama, the Democratic leadership, and mainstream Republicans, key leaders of the Tea Party refused to accept this compromise, sparking the government shut-down of fall 2013.4

In the midst of the 2013 budget crisis, leaders and staff of key elements of the “business lobby,” (National Retail Federation, National Federation of Independent Businesses, National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable) and the “Fix the Debt” campaign began to wage primary campaigns against Republican lawmakers who had engineered the government shut-down. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce led the mobilization for mainstream Republicans. Scott Reed, the Chamber’s chief political strategist launched “Vote for Jobs,” targeting key Senate and House races to defend incumbents like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and defeat Tea Party intransigents. “Vote for Jobs” made very effective interventions in the Republican Congressional primaries and in the general election in November 2014. Only one Republican was elected to the Senate without the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce. 

Initially, the capitalist class’s attempts to discipline the Republican Party appeared to be successful. Despite calls by the still sizeable Tea Party contingent in both chambers to shut down the government to block Obama’s Executive Order on immigration, bipartisan coalitions in both the House and Senate pushed through the nearly $1.1 trillion spending plan in late December 2014. But while a government shutdown was avoided, the greatly reduced Tea Party contingent in the House and Senate was able to block serious discussion of a pro-corporate immigration reform. Their continued influence was most clearly seen when John Boehner, Republican Speaker of the House, was forced out of Congress despite having successfully navigated several budget deals. While his replacement, Paul Ryan, is considerably to the right, he has clearly distanced himself from the populist insurgency that has metamorphosed into the Trump campaign. 

Donald Trump’s “outsider” campaign for President marked a deepening of the right-wing radicalization of sections of the middle classes and of the crisis of capitalist hegemony in the Republican Party. When Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in June 2015, few political commentators took his campaign seriously. With a field dominated by mainstream Republicans like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, most believed that Trump’s campaign would be short-lived. However, within a month of announcing his bid for the presidency, Trump was out-polling a crowded Republican field. And in July 2016, he became the official nominee of the Republican party.

What makes Trump unacceptable to the Republican establishment and their corporate backers is not merely his unabashed racism and misogyny, his casual references to his penis size, nor does their hostility flow from electoral calculations, though it is true that Trump is likely to lose the presidency and possibly help return Democratic majorities in the House and Senate—Trump, in many ways, is a radical, right-wing opponent of capital’s dominance over the Republican Party.5Not only does Trump express the xenophobia and racism of his populist base, but he rejects central tenets of the bipartisan neoliberal agenda that has impoverished segments of the middle class along with working and poor people. Capital is clearly uneasy with Trump’s stance on immigration and the federal debt—he floated the idea of trying to persuade creditors to accept less than full payment on loans to the U.S. government.6 The corporate elite is even more disturbed by his ideas about foreign policy and global “free trade.” 

Trump rejects the established “U.S. role in the world”—a muscular, imperialist foreign policy ready to use military force to protect the global interests of U.S. capital. While there have been debates within the U.S. ruling class over where and when to send troops since Vietnam, no segment of the corporate class questions the U.S. alliance with the most stable capitalist power in the Middle East, Israel, the justice of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the maintenance of nuclear hegemony. Trump has also made incendiary comments on “bombing the shit” out of the Islamic State forces, threatened to break off negotiations with the Iranian regime, and called for U.S. allies to pay for U.S. military and political protection. Not surprisingly, those allies are uneasy: “In many capitals, Mr. Trump’s formal and off-the-cuff foreign policy proposals: his threat to pull out of NATO; his musings about removing the United States nuclear umbrella over Japan and South Korea; his pledge to slap huge trade tariffs on China—are regarded with a mix of alarm and confusion.”7 As an advocate of an “America First” politics that has been rejected by the U.S. corporate elite since the 1940s, Trump is perceived as a much less reliable agent of U.S. capital globally than a committed and experienced imperialist politician like Hillary Clinton.8

Even more disturbing for the corporate elite are Trump’s positions on “free trade” and taxation. The removal of any and all political obstacles to the free movement of capital and goods—but not labor—has been a fundamental element of neo-liberal orthodoxy for well over thirty years. From Bill Clinton’s signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the entire U.S. capitalist class and its political representatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties have promoted the liberalization of trade and investment. Equally important to the neo-liberal agenda is the lowering of taxes on U.S. corporations and wealthy individuals, theoretically to promote investment. Trump is opposed to both of these pillars of neoliberalism. He blames NAFTA and other trade deals for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, and calls for tariffs as high as 40% on imports to protect U.S. jobs against “unfair” competition—despite warnings that this could spark a global trade war that could damage the role of U.S. corporations in the world economy.9 Nor do any sections of capital in the U.S. support higher taxes on wealthy individuals or punitive taxation on those who “export American jobs.”10

Despite winning the nomination, Trump’s politics have alienated a broad swath of the Republican establishment. Within a month of the Republican National Convention, more than seventy prominent Republicans sent a letter to the Republican National Committee urging it to cut off funding to Trump’s campaign, and instead shift resources to vulnerable Republicans in House and Senate seats.11The New York Times estimated that over 110 Republican leaders had, by late August, declared that they could not campaign or vote for Trump.12

Trump’s right-wing nationalist populist positions on foreign policy, trade, and taxation help explain why growing segments of the capitalist class in the U.S.—including former Tea Party backers like the Koch brothers—attempted to block his nomination.13 Even more ominously for Trump, traditionally Republican corporate funders are either sitting out the Presidential election or supporting the more reliable spokesperson for capital, Hillary Clinton. A USA Today survey of 156 individuals, corporations, and organizations that have donated at least $1 million to super PACs since January 1, 2015 found that many who usually donate to Republican candidates “up and down the ticket” are not providing funds for Trump. Some are actually donating to Clinton, while others are focusing their donations on “down ticket” Republican candidates for the House and Senate. Not only has Clinton been successful in raising funds from investment bankers,14 but the usually Republican defense industry is backing her 2 to 1 in campaign donations.15

Data on the overall contributions to Presidential candidates through early August reveals an even more lopsided capitalist preference for Clinton over Trump.16 After deducting contributions from civil servants and public officials, non-profit institutions, unions, retirees, and Democratic and Republican ideological groups, Clinton raised over $150 million from the capitalist class, compared to Trump’s mere $5.5 million. Clinton received over 90% of corporate donations from business services, education, health care and pharmaceutical producers, electronics manufacturers, construction services and contractors, lawyers, and the film-television-music industries. She has garnered donations from over 80% of traditionally Republican capitalists in general manufacturing, finance-insurance-securities, and real estate (Trump’s own industry). This is an especially big problem for Trump, who self-financed his primary campaign, but is not in a position to provide the approximately $1.5 billion needed to run in the general elections. 

Who are Trump’s voters? Despite claims that he has won the “white working class,” the vast majority of Trump’s supporters, like those of the Tea Party, are drawn from the traditional and new middle classes, especially the older, white male and less well-off strata of these classes. Clearly, Trump’s right-wing opposition to neoliberal trade and tax policies resonates with a minority of older, white workers, including a minority of union members.17 However, the claims that most of his support comes from “the white working class” are based on a problematic definition of the “working class” as all non-Hispanic whites without a college education. Not only does this conception allow mainstream commentators to caricature white workers as ignoramuses swayed by demagogic buffoons like Trump, but it allows them to misrepresent the social basis of Trump’s campaign.18First, while approximately 55% of Trump supporters do not have a bachelor’s degree, this demographic makes up approximately 70% of the U.S. population—they are under-represented among Trump voters. However, the college-educated white new middle class (professionals and managers), is approximately 30% of the population, but are over-represented, at 40%, among Trump supporters. Not surprisingly, the median household income of Trump voters is around $70,000 annually.19

More importantly, the category “non-college educated whites” includes both wage workers and the self-employed—the traditional middle class. The Economist found that “better-paid and better-educated voters have always formed as big a part of Mr. Trump’s base as those at the lower end of the scale for income and education.”20 A systematic review of Gallup polling data demonstrates, again, that most Trump supporters are part of the traditional middle class (self-employed) and those sectors of the new middle class (supervisors) who do not require college degrees. They tend to live in “white enclaves” isolated from immigrants and other people of color, have worse health than the average U.S. resident, and are experiencing low rates of inter-generational mobility. While not directly affected either by the decline of industry in the Midwest or by immigration, these sectors are experiencing declining living standards and are fearful about their children’s prospects of remaining in the middle class.21

The impact of three decades of neoliberalism, in particular the stagnation of real incomes and growing inequality, combined with massive losses of personal wealth (mostly housing values), growing personal debt, and growing economic insecurity among broad segments of the U.S. working and middle classes since the recession of 2007 – 08, has fueled the deepening polarization of U.S. politics.22 While younger working- and middle-class voters have been disproportionately attracted to the left-wing populism of the Sanders campaign, older white middle-class voters have been drawn to Trump.23 Caught between a decimated labor movement and an extremely aggressive capitalist class, parts of the middle classes are drawn to a politics that scapegoats immigrants, unions, women, LGBT people, and people of color. The Trump phenomenon is part and parcel of the growth of right-wing populism among the middle classes across the capitalist world, as seen in the growth of the U.K. Independence Party in Britain, the National Front in France, and the Five Star Movement in Italy.24

Right-wing populism is ideologically similar to the classic fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Without question, the Trump campaign has allowed genuinely fascist elements in the United States—white supremacist organizations that physically confront unions, immigrants, native-born people of color, and LGBT people—to emerge into the political sunlight. Trump’s encouragement of physical violence against his political opponents and the emergence of the “Lion’s Guard”— “an informal civilian group dedicated to the safety and security of Trump supporters by exposing Far-Left rioters”—are alarming.25 The hiring of the “alt-Right” Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon as the head of Trump’s campaign sends a clear message to various “racialists” and “white nationalists” that they have a place in mainstream U.S. politics.26

While Trump gives aid and comfort to the still relatively tiny fascist right (the Klan, etc.), his campaign is not fascist. More importantly, neither the fascist elements around it—or Trump himself—have a significant chance of coming to power. Populist ideology, alone, does not define fascism. Fascism is a social movement of the middle classes that is organized as both an electoral party and a street-fighting organization that seeks to physically defeat the organizations of working people (left-wing parties, unions, etc.) and destroy the institutions of capitalist democracy. Fascism becomes a mass movement with the potential of taking political power when left-wing movements threaten, but fail to take power; and capitalist classes continue to fear challenges from below. Trump is attempting to win an election, not abolish representative government. More importantly, U.S. capitalists, unfortunately, have not faced any serious challenge to their dominance in the U.S.They have no need to turn power over to the radicalized middle classes. Faced with a Trump nomination, most capitalists have joined much of the Republican establishment in either sitting out the election, or crossing partisan lines to support the “reliable” neoliberal Hillary Clinton.28

The claim that Trump is a fascist is not simply an academic or analytic problem. More importantly, it buttresses a strategy for the progressive left that is self-defeating.29 Reasonably frightened by the prospect of a Trump presidency, the official leadership of the unions and organizations of women, people of color, immigrants, and LGBT people will double down in their support of Clinton as the “lesser evil.”30 This strategy is based on two illusions. The first is the notion that Trump has a reasonable chance of being elected President. Most political commentators agree that Trump can win onlyif there is a sharp decline in voter participation, especially among young people, women, and people of color.31 While Trump cannot raise sufficient funds to finance an effective general election campaign, Clinton is armed with a much larger war chest. Fueled by the widespread loathing of Trump among young people, women, people of color, and immigrants, Clinton will build a massive “get out the vote” machine—well beyond the foot soldiers provided by the AFL-CIO and the mainstream organizations of women, LGBT folks, and people of color. While she may not be able to mobilize the electorate on the scale Obama did in 2008, when nearly 60% of eligible voters came to the polls, the election is Clinton’s to lose. 

Second, lesser-evilism has actually accelerated the drift to the right in U.S. politics. The fear of alienating their Democratic “allies” has led the official leadership of reform movements in the past eighty years to derail the sort of social movements—militant labor struggles, mass movements against racism, sexism, and war—that can win reforms and build left-wing consciousness and politics. In the name of “being realistic,” these forces follow the Democrats, dropping demands for real reforms. The Democrats are then free to “compromise” with the Republican right. This can be seen clearly in the marginalization of Sanders and his supporters at the Democratic convention, congressional Democrats’ continued support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Clinton’s choice of the “free trade” advocate Tim Kaine as her running mate, and her sharp tack to the right on foreign policy.32 With social movements weakened and invisible, the “alliance” with the Democrats allows the populist right to remain the main voice of militant opposition to the failed policies of the Democrats. Put simply, the left’s support for a rightward-moving Democratic Party as a “lesser evil” to the populist right actually facilitatesthe growing right-wing radicalization. Only by rebuilding effective extra-electoral resistance to capital and the state, no matter which party is in power, and by creating a mass political party that can speak for working and oppressed people, will we be able to defeat the right.

What is the future of the Republican party? It is unlikely that the middle-class insurgency will permanently transform the Republicans. While the party establishment and their capitalist backers are sitting out the Presidential campaign, they are attempting to reassert their hegemony in the Congressional elections. First, the Republican National Committee and corporate donors are pouring millions into the Republican congressional campaign, hoping to stave off a Democratic sweep.33 Even more importantly, the party leadership has been able to defeat several challenges from the remnants of the increasingly pro-Trump Tea Party. The Chamber of Commerce and farm organizations funded Roger Marshall’s successful primary challenge to the Kansas Tea Party Congressmen, Tim Huelskamp.34 Tea Party challenges to John McCain of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida were defeated, along with all the other Tea Party candidates challenging mainstream Republican candidates.35 Whether or not Trump’s likely defeat in November leads to a Democratic majority in the House or Senate, the Republican establishment will likely move to reorganize the party so that this sort of right-wing populist insurgency never succeeds again. In all likelihood they will follow the example of the Democrats after the right wing of the anti-war movement temporarily seized control of the party with the McGovern candidacy of 1972, by creating unelected “super-delegates” who will guarantee that the party base will never again upset the apple cart. 

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Endnotes 

1. “It’s Their Party” Jacobin 20 (Winter 2016).
2. The following paragraphs are based on Charles Post, “Why the Tea Party?” New Politics 53 (Summer 2012.
3. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
4. The following paragraphs are based upon Charlie Post, “Whither the Republican Party?: The 2014 Elections and the Future of Capital’s ‘A Team’ ” Brooklyn Rail (December 2014) and “The Future of the Republican Party” Jacobin (December 23, 2014).
5. For a similar analysis, see Nichole M. Aschoff, “Why Elites Hate Trump” Jacobin (May 5, 2016).
6. Binyamin Appelbaum, “Donald Trumnp’s Idea to Cut National Debt: Get Creditors to Accept Less” New York Times (May 6, 2016).
7. David E. Sanger and Jim Yardley, “In Donald Trump’s Rise, Allies See New American Approach” New York Times (May 5, 2016).
8. David E. Sanger and Maggie Haberman, “In Donald Trump’s Worldview, America Comes First, and Everybody Else Pays,” New York Times (March 26, 2016); David E. Sanger, “Paul Ryan on Foreign Policy Is Closer to Hillary Clinton Than Donald Trump” New York Times (April 14, 2016); Mark Lander, “How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk,” New York Times Magazine (April 21, 2016).
9. Binyamin Applebaum, “Experts Warn of Backlash in Donald Trump’s China Trade Policies” New York Times (May 2, 2016). See also “Reforming The U.S.-China Trade Relationship To Make America Great Again” Trump: Make America Great Again!
10. “Tax Reform that Will Make America Great Again,” Trump: Make America Great Again!
11. Anna Palmer, “Dozens of Republicans To Urge RNC to Cut Off Funds for Trump” Politico (August 11, 2016).
12. Karen Yourish and Larry Buchanan, “At Least 110 Republicans Leaders Won’t Vote for Donald Trump: Here’s When They Reached Their Breaking Point,” New York Times (August 29, 2016).
13. Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, “Corporations Grow Nervous About Participating in Republican Convention,” New York Times (March 30, 2016); Kristen East, “Charles Koch: ‘It’ Possible’ Clinton is Preferable to a Republican for President,” Politico (April 23, 2016); Kenneth P. Vogel, “Billionaires Fund Anti-Trump Delegate Push: Super PAC Mounts State-By-State Effort To Elect Convention Delegates Who Oppose Trump” Politico (April 12, 2016).
14. Amy Chozick and Jonathan Martin, “Where Has Hillary Clinton Been? Ask the Ultrarich,” New York Times (September 3, 2016).
15. Austin Wright and Jeremy Herb, “Defense Industry Bucks Tradition With Donations to Clinton” Politico (August 23, 2016).
16. Data from www.opensecrets.org.
17. Timothy Aepeel, “Special Report: Why An Emblematic American City Has Turned to Trump” Reuters (May 25, 2016).
18. See Jack Metzger’s excellent “Misrepresenting the White Working Class: What the Narrating Class Gets Wrong,” Working-Class Perspectives (March 14, 2016); and Lance Selfa, “Are White Workers the Base of Trump Reaciton?” Socialist Worker (January 13, 2016) for excellent critiques of these claims.
19. Nate Silver, “The Mythology of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support” FiveThirtyEight.com (May 3, 2016).
20. “Uptown Trump,” The Economist (April 263, 2016).
21. Jonathan Rothwell, “Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump” Gallup Draft Working Paper (August 1, 2016); Dan LaBotz, “Trump emprte les primaires républicaines secousse politique aux USA,” Journal solidaritéS, N° 292 (25/08/2016). Many thanks to LaBotz for providing an English translation.
22. A new study of the impact of unemployment linked to trade in former industrial regions like the Midwest have found that moderate Congressional Republicans and Democrats who supported “free trade” are likely to be defeated by either right-wing populist Republicans or left-wing populist Democrats. See David Autor, et al. “Importing Political Polarization?: The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure” Working Paper: Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics: University of Chicago (2016).
23. It is not clear whether Clinton will be able to mobilize the younger voters who supported Sanders, many of whom may not vote in November. Harry Enten, “Clinton and Trump Are Losing a Lot of Young Voters” FiveThirtyEight.com (August 18, 2016).
24. For the European populist right, see F. LePlat (ed)., The Far Right in Europe (London: Resistance Books, 2015).
25. See also Ben Schreckinger, “Meet the Vigilantes Who Patrol Trump’s Rallies,” Politico (April 25, 2016).
26. David Weigel, “Racialists Are Cheered by Trump’s Latest Strategy” The Washington Post (August 20, 2016.
27. For an excellent critique of claims that Trump is a fascist, see Chip Berlet, “Trumping Democracy: Right-Wing Populism, Fascism, and the Case for Action” Public Eye (December 12, 2015).
28. Eli Stolkos, “Republicans Consider Clinton Over Trump,” Politico (May 4, 2016); Patrick Healy, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, “With Donald Trump in Charge, Republicans Have a Day of Reckoning” New York Times (May 4, 2016); Ben White, “Hillary Forces Target Bush Donors” Politico (May 5, 2016); Amy Chozick, “Hillary Clinton Targets Republicans Turned Off by Donald Trump” New York Times (May 6, 2016).
29. David Broder’s excellent “Antifascism of Fools” Jacobin (March 21, 2016) and Dylan Riley’s contribution to “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” Jacobin (December 15, 2015) makes these points in much greater detail.
30. What remains of the U.S. left, most influenced by the popular front strategy of the U.S. Communist Party, has jumped on the defeat Trump/elect Clinton bandwagon. Linda Burnham, “Notes on the Election” Organizing Upgrade (May 1, 2016).
31. William H. Frey, “Can Trump Win In November?:” The Avenue: Rethinking Metropolitan America (March 2, 2016).
32. Sean Hackbarth, “Tim Kaine Also Has A Great Track Record on Trade” U.S. Chamber of Commerce(July 27, 2016); Maureen Dowd, “The Perfect GOP Nominee” New York Times (August 13, 2016); Peter Beinart, “How Democrats Became the Conservative Party” The Atlantic (August 19, 2016); Edward-Isaac Dovere, “Pro-Trade Democrats Call Labor’s Bluff” Politico (August 31, 2016).
33. Jennifer Steinhauer and Rachel Shorey, “Souring on Donald Trump, Republicans Pour Money into Senate Races” New York Times (September 7, 2016).
34. Carl Hulse, “Voters in Kansas Send Message by Ousting Tea Party Firebrand Tim Huelskamp from House” New York Times (August 3, 2016).
35. Lizette Alvarez, “Marco Rubio and John McCain Win Primaries in Florida and Arizona” New York Times (August 30, 2016); Rachel Bade and Elena Schneider, “GOP Establishment Trounces Tea Party in Congressional Primaries” Politico (August 3, 2016).

CHARLIE POST is a long-time socialist political activist who teaches at the City University of New York and is active in his faculty union.

2456. To Defeat Hitler Vote for Hindenburg! – “Lesser Evil” Voting Then and Now

By Stanley Heller, Economic Uprising, July 2, 2016

Hillary and William Clinton at Trump's wedding

In 1932 in Germany there were four national elections including two for the powerful position of president. The two leading candidates for president of Germany were Adolf Hitler and Paul von Hindenburg. Today when we hear the word Hindenburg we think of the zeppelin with that name that burned in New Jersey in 1937, but Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg was a very famous man for decades in Germany.  During “the Great War”, which we now call World War I, he was Chief of the General Staff of the German army. In the last years of the war he was in effect military dictator of Germany.  The German revolution ousted the Kaiser from power, but the leaders of the SPD (the very big German socialist party which supported the war) allied with counterrevolutionary forces and after massacres of the revolutionary Left made Germany into a capitalist republic.  Hindenburg, who should have been in disgrace for his failed war leadership, came through the period with his reputation unscathed.

Longstory short.  The SPD steadily weakens. Hindenburg is elected President of Germany in 1925. The Great Depression hits Germany like a hammer and the Nazis go from getting 3% of the vote in 1928 to 18% in 1930.  Their goons are running the streets. The German communists (KPD) follow the orders of Soviet ruler Joe Stalin to totally go it alone.  They claim that the SPD were just another kind of fascist, “social fascists”  For its part the SPD refuses to work with the communists.  In 1932 Hindenberg runs for reelection, the KPD runs its own candidate and the SPD supports Hindenburg as the “lesser of two evils”.

Most people will agree that Hitler was the ultimate evil, so Hindenburg was certainly “lesser”, but the SPD strategy did not work as planned. Hindenburg won the April 1932 run-off presidential with a solid 53% of the vote. “Mission accomplished” or so the SPD thought. Hindenburg stayed in office and he continued to choose the Chancellors and cabinet. However, the string of men he picked totally failed to rescue the German economy. Then Hindenburg made a fateful decision.  In January 1933 he appointed Adolph Hitler as chancellor in a deal that gave the Nazis only 3 of the 11 cabinet positions.  This was thought all that would be needed to keep Hitler under control.  Brilliant plan. Hindenburg was putty in Hitler’s hands.  Within two months Hitler had bullied Hindenburg to sign an “Enabling” Act” which gave the Nazi leader dictatorial powers.

So what has this got to do with today?  Well, we have a candidate running for president who a lot of people have compared to Hitler.  And we have as his opponent a woman who

stands for the status quo, a millionaire who does the bidding of Wall Street, a bloody war “hawk” with notches on her belt from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Libya, a blind supporter of Israeli war crimes in Palestine and elsewhere. Yet people are running to herto defeat Trump, to save them from “Hitler”. (See Halle/Chomsky defense of lesser evil voting )

Now obviously, obviously things are a lot different in the U.S. now compared to  Germany in the ‘30’s. Joblessness though a lot higher than the “unemployment rate” is not as massive as in the ‘30’s.  The U.S. hasn’t felt the shock of a terrible defeat in war and a loss of territory. Though Trump has been embraced by enthusiastic neo-Nazis their gangs are not (yet) running riot.

On the other hand there are two threats we live under that were unheard of in the 1930’s. One is nuclear war. We were told with communism gone there would be an “end of history” and the danger of nuclear war would be gone, but any chance for nuclear disarmament in the 1990’s was completely thrown away by Bill Clinton.   At present the U.S. government still has hundreds of nuclear weapons on hair trigger, meaning they could launch in minutes.  Russia probably still has the same.  With NATO expanding and Putin conquering, the two nuclear powers are eyeball to eyeball again.

The other threat is out of control global warming.  Climate scientist Robert Howarth (who was on the short list in 2011 for Time magazine’s person of the year) says we’re on a path to go over the crucial 1.5 degree centigrade increase in just 13 years.  Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. have leveled off in recent years, but methane emissions from fracking have undone all the good and the total global warming gases are increasing at record levels. This is a path to catastrophe, a catastrophe from which there may not be a recovery.  Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees world temperature increase the permafrost releases massive amounts of methane and we go into a feedback loop of another big jump in temperatures.  One of many results is that large areas of the world become either under water or uninhabitable.  If you think we have refugee problems now, wait until there’s tens or scores of millions of climate refugees.

Hillary Clinton will absolutely not save the world from either menace.  She raised no objection to Obama’s trillion dollar nuclear modernization program or his (or was it her) drive to stick NATO right in the face of Putin.  Clinton supported the Keystone XL pipeline as Secretary of State and only changed her mind under relentless pressure from Bernie Sanders.  She calls for an 80% cut in carbon emissions by 2050.  That sounds like a big deal, but it’s a totally inadequate measure to stop the warming that’s coming, a death sentence for coastal cities and genocide for Africa.  Let me emphasize this climate menace is on the way. The balance of nuclear terror may hold for more decades, but the things that balance global gases, like the world’s oceans can no longer do the job.

So who should we vote for in the U.S. presidential election?

Before we answer that question there are others to deal with first.    What is the minimum we need for continued human civilization (as opposed to a global war of all against all as livable land areas dwindle) and what would create the force, the movement, the organization necessary to win the minimum changes?

For climate I see no way to avoid intolerable climate change unless there is a government takeover of the energy, heating and transportation industries and a “Manhattan Project” crash program for 100% renewable energy by 2030.  The bloated armaments industry which lives on wars and the need for ever more nuclear “modernization” should be nationalized, too.  Its industries need to be converted to peace time use and its workers hired in “green” jobs. This has to planned at the highest level and worker run at the day to day level.  We need a new system, a social democracy that is able to maintain a sustainable ecology, in short “ecosocialism”.

Now the Democrats and Republicans are both staunch defenders of (somewhat different versions of) capitalism and nothing in the short run is going to change that. Unfortunately if we have 13 years to fix the climate all we have is the short run.  The recent farce at the Democratic platform committee where every proposed method of weaning away from fossil fuel was rejected should disabuse those who think the Democrats can be a vehicle for the necessary drastic changes need in the next decade.

The largest Left party is the Green Party which gets a miniscule vote in national elections and gets denounced for taking away votes that naturally belong to the “lesser evil”.  It’s hampered by a voting system totally stacked against third parties.  (As a result no party other than the Democrats and Republicans has won a single presidential electoral vote in almost 50 years.)  It sees its role as running in elections, period.  It rarely takes part in creating social movement or anti-war actions.

That’s not enough.  There needs to be something else, something that will run in elections, but that will also organize massive disruption to undo the power structure and build a new ecosocialist society. It has to be an ever rising tide of democracy and environmentalism.  We must do what is necessary to build the build that movement, that force and we can’t be intimidated by the fear of being taunted as the “spoiler” in elections.  We have to say in advance that if our actions result in a more repressive, more racist and environmental Know Nothing party taking over for a while, so be it.   We’ll have to grit our teeth and deal with it.  There’s no time for glacial progress. Human society is at stake.

 On June 20 Juan Gonzalez, the great journalist, former Young Lords leader and current co-anchor on Democracy Now!  spoke at the Bernie Sanders’ “Peoples Summit” .  He told the thousands attending, “Don’t make the mistakes of 1968 that elected Nixon.”  What were those mistakes according to Gonzalez? People came to Chicago to “confront” the Democrats who were about to nominate Hubert Humphrey.  Also SDS told people not to vote.   Gonzales claimed “there would have been a positive change, if Nixon had not been elected.”  The lesson, though Gonzalez didn’t say it outright is “vote for Hillary”.

Actually, what Gonzalez proposed would have been suicide for the movement. Hubert Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson’s lickspittle and junior partner in war crimes against Vietnam.   A Humphrey victory could well have led to eight more years of genocide for the people of Vietnam. Instead Chicago in ’68 was a milestone of direct action.  Neither the Chicago police riot nor the prosecution of protest leaders on bogus charges dampened spirits .   The Yippie and Left protests of ‘68  led to many more direct actions and the eventual radicalization of part of the U.S. military.  Thousands of U.S. soldiers would no longer fight for the empire.  They refused to be cannon fodder.  That scared the bejeezus out of the power structure and that’s what ended the war.

 Two more recent movements come to mind, the 2006 immigrant “boycott”  and what’s going on in France today.  On May 1, 2006 millions of Latinos “boycotted” work , maybe five million undocumented and documented workers went on a one day strike.  They came out into the street to protest an anti-immigrant law that was making its way through Congress.  The law was never passed.   Fast forward ten years and the neoliberal Socialist Party of France proposes a labor law to reduce labor rights.  For a month tens of thousands have come into the streets night after night to demand its defeat.

So what do we do here in the U.S. this election year?  As far as the election I’d counsel voting for Jill Stein of the Green Party for president.    I don’t have illusions that the Green Party will win the presidency. Nor do I think a “Green New Deal” is at all an adequate way to dealing with capitalism and I don’t like Stein’s blindness about Russia’s horrific role in Syria .  However, the Green Party will actually be on the ballot in 30 or 40 states.  A vote for the Green Party will be noticed and it’s the best vehicle we have to send out a certain message.

The message the vote will deliver to the public is that we’re uncompromising, yes “uncompromising”.  We’re not dogmatic about some belief or program, but we’re uncompromising about the need to preserve human civilization and to avoid a massive die off of human and animal life.  We realize that politics as usual is a death sentence and we won’t participate in our own executions. We intend to promote an ecosocialist tide and turn it into an unstoppable deluge.

Our main work is not electoral. During and after the election we continue our base work, organizing in the neighborhoods, workplaces and in the streets, coming out to the July 24 anti-fracking march, standing with immigrants, denouncing great power aggression and  indifference to the plight of Syrians, condemning the Saudi-U.S. war on Yemen.  We need to organize the millions of angry people that came out for Bernie and who are now being told to dive into the Democratic Party graveyard.

The Left in the ‘30’s had a slogan “socialism or barbarism”.  It needs to be updated for a world that faces even greater perils.  “Ecosocialism or the abyss”.

2455. Learning from History: Who’s going to be the lesser-evil in 1968?

By Hal Draper, Independent Socialist, January 1967

Hal Draper (1914-1990)

In 1968, when the presidential sweepstakes come up again, liberals all over the country are likely to face the California Syndrome. At the risk of sounding like a Californian, I’m referring to the political pattern that was acted out in the recent Brown-Reagan [1] contest in that state – whose denizens have this in common with New Yorkers, that they tend to think that whatever is happening in their state is What’s Happening. Sometimes it is.

In ’68 the problem is going to be: vote for Lyndon Johnson [2] again or not. Among all those schizophrenic people you know whose heart is in the famous Right Place – viz. a little left of center – ulcers are going to ulcerate, psychiatrists’ couches will get political, and navels will be contemplated with a glassy stare. Johnson or Nixon? Johnson or Romney [3]? Johnson or Reagan [4]? Johnson or anybody? As a matter of fact, even before this point is reached, there bids fair to be a similar pattern inside the Democratic Party machine itself: Johnson or Kennedy-Fullbright, [5] or its equivalent.

Now radicals have been wont to approach this classic problem with two handy labels, which in fact are fine as far as they go. One is called the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pattern, and the other is called the Lesser Evil pattern. Neither of these necessarily quite describes What’s Happening. To see why, let’s take a quick look at both of them in terms of 1968.

1 The ’68 race could be a Tweedledum-Tweedledee affair, and it may be. For example, Johnson versus Governor Romney. One can defy even Max Lerner [6] to insert even a razor-thin sentence between the politics respectively represented by these two millionaires. In fact, there is bound to be a sector of liberal sentiment which would indeed see the Lesser Evil in Romney, since there is as yet no evidence that Romney is quite as rascally a liar as the present Leader of the Free World. But roughly speaking, these two are politically indistinguishable: this is the defining characteristic of the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pattern. (The sociological label for this invented by the professorial witch-doctors is Consensus Politics.)

2 In contrast, the Lesser Evil pattern means that there is a significant political difference between the two candidates, but –To explain the “but,” let’s take – for reasons that will appear – not a current example, but the classic example.

The day after Reagan’s election as governor of California, a liberal pro-Brown acquaintance met me with haggard face and fevered brow, muttering “Didn’t they ever hear of Hitler? Didn’t they ever hear of Hitler?” Did he mean Reagan was Hitler? “Well,” he said darkly, “look how Hitler got started ...” A light struck me about what was going on in his head. “Look,” I said, “you’ve heard of Hitler, so tell me this: how did Hitler become chancellor of Germany?”

My pro-Brown enthusiast was taken aback: “Why, he won some election or other – wasn’t it – with terror and a Reichstag fire and something like that.” – “That was after he had already become chancellor. How did he become chancellor of Germany?”

Don’t go away to look it up. In the 1932 presidential election the Nazis ran Hitler, and the main bourgeois parties ran Von Hindenburg, the Junker general who represented the right wing of the Weimar republic but not fascism. The Social-Democrats, leading a mass workers’ movement, had no doubt about what was practical, realist, hard-headed politics and what was “utopian fantasy”: so they supported Hindenburg as the obvious Lesser Evil. They rejected with scorn the revolutionary proposal to run their own independent candidate against both reactionary alternatives – a line, incidentally that could also break off the rank-and-file followers of the Communist Party, which was then pursuing the criminal policy of “After Hitler we come” and “Social-fascists are the main enemy.”

So the Lesser Evil, Hindenburg, won; and Hitler was defeated. Whereupon President Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the chancellorship, and the Nazis started taking over.

The classic case was that the people voted for the Lesser Evil and got both.

Now 1966 America is not 1932 Germany, to be sure, but the difference speaks the other way. Germany’s back was up against the wall; there was an insoluble social crisis; it had to go to revolution or fascism; the stakes were extreme. This is exactly why 1932 is the classic case of the Lesser Evil, because even when the stakes were this high, even then voting for the Lesser Evil meant historic disaster. Today, when the stakes are not so high, the Lesser Evil policy makes even less sense.

In 1964, you know all the people who convinced themselves that Lyndon Johnson was the lesser evil as against Goldwater [7], who was going to do Horrible Things in Vietnam, like defoliating the jungles. Many of them have since realized that the spiked boot was on the other foot; and they lacerate themselves with the thought that the man they voted for “actually carried out Goldwater’s policy.” [8] (In point of fact, this is unfair to Goldwater: he never advocated the steep escalation of the war that Johnson put through; and more to the point, he would probably have been incapable of putting it through with as little opposition as the man who could simultaneously hypnotize the liberals with “Great Society” rhetoric.)

So who was really the Lesser Evil in 1964? The point is that it is the question which is a disaster, not the answer. In setups where the choice is between one capitalist politician and another, the defeat comes in accepting the limitation to this choice.

New development

For the moment, so much for the Lesser Evil pattern. But there is an interesting difference between the classic case (Hitler and Hindenburg in 1932) and the Johnson-Goldwater case. There really was a significant political difference between Hitler and Hindenburg; the general himself would never have fascized Germany. If he called the Nazi to the chancellorship, it was because he believed that the imposition of government responsibility was the way to domesticate the wild-talking Nazis, that the burden of actually having to run the country would turn the “irresponsible” extremists into tame politicians like all the others, in the pattern usually seen (as with the Hubert Humphreys [9]). But Hindenburg himself was not a Hitler and he really was a Lesser Evil. What the classic case teaches is not that the Lesser Evil is the same as the Greater Evil – this is just as nonsensical as the liberals argue it to be but rather this: that you can’t fight the victory of the rightmost forces by sacrificing your own independent strength to support elements just the next step away from them.

This latter pattern is what has been going on in this country for the last two decades. Every time the liberal labor left has made noises about its dissatisfaction with what Washington was trickling through, all the Democrats had to do was bring out the bogy of the Republican right.

The lib-labs would then swoon, crying “The fascists are coming!” and vote for the Lesser Evil. In these last two decades, the Democrats have learned well that they have the lib-lab vote in their back pocket, and that therefore the forces to be appeased are those forces to the right. The lib-labs were kept happy enough if Hubert Humphrey showed up at a banquet to make his liberal speeches; or, before that, by the Kennedy myth which bemused them even while the first leader on this planet poised his finger over the nuclear-war button and said “Or else!” With the lib-lab votes in a pocket, politics in this country had to move steadily right-right-right-until even a Lyndon Johnson could look like a Lesser Evil. This is essentially why – even when there really is a Lesser Evil – making the Lesser Evil choice undercuts any possibility of really fighting the Right.

But now notice this: when the Lesser Evil named Johnson was elected in 1964, he did not call in the Greater Evil to power, as did Hindenburg. He did not merely act in so flabby a manner that the Right wing alternative was thereby strengthened – another classic pattern. These patterns would have been old stuff, the historic Lesser Evil pattern in full form.

What was bewildering about Johnson was that the Lesser Evil turned out to be the Greater Evil, if not worse. Was it then the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pattern, after all? Am I merely then saying that the apparent difference between Johnson and Goldwater (even within the framework of capitalist politics) was just an illusion? Is the conclusion merely that all capitalist politicians have to be the same, that therefore the case against voting for the Lesser Evil is that there is no Lesser Evil?

I don’t think that’s the answer; I think there is a third pattern around, which is neither Tweedledee-Tweedledum nor the classic Lesser Evil choice. If the Johnson-Goldwater contest was one example, then an even better one was provided by the recent Brown-Reagan race. For Pat Brown really is a liberal, whatever you may think of Johnson; and thereby hangs the tale.

Because this genuine liberal, Pat Brown, acted for eight years as governor of California in no important respect differently from what a conservative Republican would have done. The operative word is acted. He sold out the water program to the big landholding companies as his two Republican predecessors never dared to do. He fought tooth and nail for the bracero system [10] as no Republican governor of an agricultural state dared to do.

It was he (not Clark Kerr [11]) who in 1964 unleashed an army of police against the Berkeley students. After the Watts uprising, it was he who named John J. McCone’s commission to whitewash the whole business, and who then supported the right wing’s anti-riot law to intimidate the ghetto. It was Brown who gave the liberal Democratic CDC the final decapitation when he personally mobilized all his strength to oust Si Casady as CDC head. [12] If half of this had been done by a Reagan, the lib-labs would be yelling “Fascism” all over the place. (As they will during the next four years, no doubt.)

And I repeat that I don’t think this took place simply because Pat Brown was a Tweedledee reflecting image of Reagan. Here is a somewhat different interpretation:

A profound change has taken place in this country since the days of the New Deal – has taken place in the nature of capitalist politics, and therefore in the two historic wings of capitalist politics, liberalism and conservatism. In the 1930’s there was a genuine difference in the programs put before capitalism by its liberal and conservative wings. The New Deal liberals proposed to save capitalism, at a time of deep-going crisis and despair, by statification – that is, by increasing state intervention into the control of the economy from above. It is notorious that some of the most powerful sectors of the very class that was being saved hated Roosevelt like poison. (This added to the illusions of the “Roosevelt revolution” at the time, of course.) Roosevelt himself always insisted that a turn toward state-capitalist intervention was necessary to save capitalism itself; and he was right. In fact, the New Deal conquered not only the Democratic but the Republican Party. When Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal were succeeded by Eisenhower’s regime, the free-enterprise-spouting Republican continued and even, intensified exactly the same social course that Roosevelt had begun. (This is the reality behind the Birchite charge that Eisenhower is a “card-carrying Communist”!)

In the three and a half decades since 1932, and before, during and after a second world war which intensified the process, the capitalist system itself has been going through a deep-going process of bureaucratic statification. The underlying drives are beyond the scope of this article; the fact itself is plain to see. The liberals who sparked this transformation were often imbued with the illusion that they were undermining the going system; any child can now see that they knew not what they did. The conservatives who denounced all the steps in this transformation, and who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new stage, were also imbued with the very same illusion. But even Eisenhower – who has never been accused of being an egghead, and who, before he was nominated for the presidency, made exactly the same sort of free-enterprise-hurrah speeches as Reagan was paid to make for General Electric – even he was forced to act, in the highest office, no differently from a New Deal Democrat. Because that is the only way the system can now operate.

Fruits of lesser evilism

Under the pressure of bureaucratic-statified capitalism, liberalism and conservatism converge. That does not mean they are identical, or are becoming identical. They merely increasingly tend to act in the same way in essential respects, where fundamental needs of the system are concerned. And just as the conservatives are forced to conserve and expand the statified elements of the system, so the liberals are forced to make use of the repressive measures which the conservatives advocate: because the maintenance of the system demands it. [13] Just as when Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley [14] and then invoked it against striking workers. What is more, because the liberal politicians can point a warning finger towards the right and because the lib-labs will respond to it, they are even more successful than the conservatives in carrying out those measures which the conservatives advocate. It is not necessary to claim that even that pitiful man, Hubert Humphrey, is merely a hypocrite. No, I fully believe, myself, that he is as sincere a liberal as the next lib-lab specimen. It is liberalism which requires the examination, not Humphrey’s morals. Nor was that even more pathetic man, Adlai Stevenson, simply a rascal when he found himself lying like a trooper at the UN in the sight and knowledge of the whole world. [15]

So besides Tweedledee-Tweedledums and besides the Lesser Evils who really are different in policy from the Greater Evils, we increasingly are getting this third type of case: the Lesser Evils who, as executors of the system, find themselves acting at every important juncture exactly like the Greater Evils, and sometimes worse. They are the product of the increasing convergence of liberalism and conservatism under conditions of bureaucratic capitalism. There never was an era when the policy of the Lesser Evil made less sense than now.

That’s the thing to remember for 1968, as a starter.

Notes

1. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (Democrat): California state attorney general, 1951-59; Governor of California, 1959-67

2. Lyndon B. Johnson: the Texas Democratic vice-president was sworn in as president in 1963 after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He went on to win election to a full term in a landslide against GOP candidate Barry Goldwater in the presidential race in 1964. At the time of the writing of this article, Johnson was planning to run as president; but he later announced he would not seek another term as president after the January, 1968 Tet Offensive exposed the U.S.’s inability to win the war in Vietnam and his poll figures dropped precipitously.

3. George W. Romney: Served three consecutive terms as governor of Michigan, from 1962 to 1968. Chairman of American Motors Corp. from 1954-1962, and a contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.

4. At this time, Ronald Reagan was the Republican governor of California. He later (1980) was elected president and served two terms. His presidency personified the new drift to the right in U.S. politics – a ruling class backlash against the political and social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. He was famous, like the current president, for making inane statements such as: “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.”

5. This refers to a hypothetical 1968 presidential ticket of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Sen. J. William Fulbright. Kennedy served as attorney general in brother John F. Kennedy’s brief presidential administration, and then became a senator in 1964. He was assassinated on June 5, 1968. Fulbright of Arkansas (who once employed Bill Clinton as an intern) was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright was an early Vietnam hawk who became a leading establishment opponent of the war.

6. A well-known liberal newspaper columnist of the day.

7. Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential nominee who ran against Johnson in 1964. He advocated using nuclear weapons to defoliate Vietnam.

8. Johnson ran for president in 1964 promising to de-escalate the war in Vietnam. When he won the election, he did the opposite, sending hundreds of thousands more troops.

9. Hubert Humphrey: elected as vice president with President Johnson on the Democratic ticket in 1964, and he was his party’s unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1968.

10. The bracero program: a post Second World War government-sponsored plan aimed at importing low-paid Mexican labor to the U.S. Mexicans under this program were allowed to come and work in the U.S., but were required to return to Mexico when their work term expired.

11. President of the University of California system during the Berkeley students’ famous Free-Speech fights in 1964.

12. Original note by author: The reader is referred to the October 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine for a brilliant (and detailed) exposition of all this, including an analysis of how it all could be done by a man who really is a liberal. Ramparts does this in terms of concrete facts; in this article I am generalizing.

13. It is worth noting that although the trend toward statification that Draper describes began to shift by the late 1970s toward “globalization,” i.e. more neo-liberal capitalist policies, the same political pattern was apparent. Not only Republicans Reagan and Bush, but also Democrat Clinton, carried out the neo-liberal policies. Therefore Draper’s point that liberalism and conservatism tend to converge around the particular historic interests of the ruling class still applies.

14. Taft-Hartley: 1947 labor bill that curtailed the rights of unions. Among other things, it empowered the government to obtain an 80-day injunction against any strike that it deemed a peril to national security. The act outlawed sympathy strikes or boycotts (boycott against an already organized company doing business with another company that a union is trying to organize), denied legal protection to workers on wildcat strikes, and outlawed the closed shop.

15. Adlai Stevenson: US diplomat & Democratic politician; governor of Illinois 1949-1953; Democratic presidential candidate 1952, 1956; US ambassador to UN 1961-1965. Famous for making a presentation to the UN in 1962 revealing the presence of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. Stevenson’s presentation denied important facts. For example, the U.S. had recently launched an armed CIA invasion of Cuba – landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Stevenson denied U.S. involvement. Stevenson also left out of his presentation the fact that the U.S. had placed nuclear missiles in Turkey pointed at the Soviet Union.