BY PAUL STREET
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/26/trump-out-now/
I am an author, political
commentator, teacher, and historian who prefers in “normal times” to spend most
of my time researching, writing, and teaching. This summer and fall, however,
I’ve been out protesting with Refuse Fascism raising
the demand “Trump-Pence Out Now” – out immediately.
That’s because these are
not “normal” times. The deadly coronavirus that has been spread by the
pandemo-fascist Trump administration has already killed 220,000-plus Americans
and will likely 200,000 to 300,000 more by Inauguration Day (January 20th) next
year. The United States is in the middle of a related and attempted rolling
coup being carried out by a White House that knows it cannot win a second term
in conventional fashion. With a long list of enemies and groups on its hit
list, the Trump administration seeks unchallenged dominance but lacks enough
voter support to prevail without subverting what’s left of democracy in the
elections system. It is therefore undertaking a multi-level assault on the
American electoral process.
The cable news talking
heads keep scratching their heads on how Trump is talking only to his base and
not trying to broaden his voter support beyond his 43-45%. They might want to
reflect that Trump and the GOP’s main plan this summer and fall has been to
cripple and steal the election, not to win it in a “normal”/conventional
fashion.
This attack is what ought
to be expected from a regime whose relentless pathological criminality (see
point # 2, below) has defied our capacity for belief and processing malevolent
evil. “The enormity and variety of Mr. Trump’s misdeeds,” The New York
Times’ Editorial Board observed two Sundays ago, “can feel overwhelming.
Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new
outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars.” (“A Man Unworthy of
His Office,” New York Times, October 17, 2020, Sunday Review, p.2).
Why have there not been
millions in the streets engaged in non-violent protest every day this fall to
demand the immediate removal of a vicious regime that has violated numerous
civilizational and democratic norms and is doing its best to sabotage an election?
We are up against seven
narratives that stand in the way of the mass action required. In what follows I
briefly counter each of these anti-mobilizing storylines.
+1. “There’s an
election coming up, so chill.” Yes, we know about the election. The polling
data looks promising for Joe Biden (like it did for Hillary Clinton this time
in 2016). Most of the electorate rejects this evil president. But voting to
remove Trump, while necessary, is insufficient. The incumbent president,
vice-president and attorney general have made it clear that they intend to use
both constitutional and extra-constitutional means to cripple and steal the
contest. The methods include racist and partisan voter suppression in key
battleground states, replete with the sending of armed “poll-watchers” into
minority precincts; attacking the legitimacy of the mail-in ballots that are
required by the very pandemic that Trump has multiplied across the nation;
deploying an army of right-wing lawyers to contest the Electoral College slates
in states that go for Biden; jamming through a far-right Supreme Court nominee
(Amy Coney-Barrett) who can be expected to join 4 or 5 other
Republican-appointed judges to in signing off on the at once constitutional and
extra-constitutional theft of the contest; preparing violent mobs to suppress
anti-coup protests; preparing to declare martial law and putting in the streets
paramilitary forces (from the Department of Homeland Security, especially ICE
and Border Patrol) accountable only to Trump. As Salon’s Chauncy de
Vega recently
observed:
“Donald Trump continues to
make it clear that he does not intend to leave office peacefully if
he is defeated… Trump considers any election in which he is not the ‘winner’ to
be null and void. Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the
United States Supreme Court is an obvious quid pro quo to secure his
‘reelection’ if his attorneys and other agents can sufficiently sabotage the
vote on Election Day and beyond….During his debate with Biden, Trump…commanded white supremacist paramilitaries to be prepared to attack his
and their ‘enemies’ if he loses on Election Day or is otherwise removed from
office…Trump also wants Joe Biden and other leading Democrats imprisoned and
perhaps even executed because he deems them to be guilty of ‘treason’ and a
‘coup’ attempt against him. Trump and his Attorney General William Barr have
also threatened to use the United States military against the American people
if they dare to protest the outcome of the 2020 Election if Trump somehow finds
some extra-legal (if not outright illegal) way to stay in office.”
Meanwhile, the openly
anti-democratic Electoral College continues to overrepresent the nation’s most
white, rural, reactionary, and “red” (Republican) regions in ways that work to
Trump’s advantage. Captive to an archaic 18th Century national charter
drafted and passed by and for slaveowners, merchant capitalists, and publicists
for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare, we still don’t elect American
presidents by a national popular tally based on the elementary democratic
principle of one person, one vote.
Even in the unlikely event
that Trump is defeated by popular and Electoral College margins so large that
he can’t semi-credibly contest the outcome, the wannabe fascistic dictator will
remain in a position to do unthinkable damage for eleven more weeks. The world
can’t wait until January 20th, 2021 for the defenestration of this lethal
lunatic, who has called for the imprisonment of his political opponents,
including Joe Biden. Trump recently led his frothing Michigan backers in hate
rally chants of “Lock Her Up” directed at a state governor who some of his
armed neofascist backers were plotting to kidnap and murder. Trump has recently
called the nation’s leading infectious disease health expert a “disaster,” and
described people who advocate public protections against COVID-19 as “idiots.”
The death toll of the
pandemic that Trump has fanned and continues to lie about (“it’s going away”) may
well reach half a million (nearing America’s body count during World War II) by
next February. This regime must go now.
+2. “A sitting
American president wouldn’t actually steal an election. That’s just too
much. That wouldn’t
happen here.” Really? This is a neofascist lawless “law and
order” presidency that respects few if any constitutional and social
conventions. From sadistic child separations and concentration camps at the
border to the deployment of paramilitaries to sweep up civil rights protesters
designated as “terrorists,” the encouragement of violence on the part of
neofascist militias (the Proud Boys and the like), setting new Orwellian
falsehood records, and the fanning of a deadly pandemic whose lethality Trump
clearly understood from the beginning even as he publicly downplayed it, and so
much more, the Trump regime has demonstrated a malignant and pathological
willingness to subvert longstanding rules of civilized and democratic conduct.
This is a man who praises neo-Nazis, calls “Black Lives Matter” a hate slogan,
applauds the paramilitary street execution of an anti-fascist activist (Michael
Reinoehl), and defends a teen fascist (Kyle Rittenhouse) for murdering two
civil rights marchers in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The orange-brushed wannabe fascist
strongman has now used one of his patented super-spreader hate-rallies to lead
chants calling for the “locking up” of Michigan’s governor – this in the wake
of the arrest of “Michigan Militia” members who were inspired by a Trump Tweet
to plot that governor’s assassination. Trump’s recurrent paranoid-style rants
about the supposed menace posed to the nation by “the radical Left,” replete
with bizarre claims that Joe Biden is a “trojan horse for socialism” and that
Kamala Harris is a “communist” (actual Leftists laugh darkly at these
preposterous “charges”) are clear fascist-style plays meant to suspend what’s
left of democracy and impose ruthless “law and order” from the top down.
Along the way, the
tangerine-tinted tyrant has used his own infection by the coronavirus as an
opportunity to downplay the pandemic while assaulting the nation’s top
infectious disease expert (Dr. Anthony Fauci) and touting a hack radiologist
(Dr. Scott Atlas) who advocates ruinous “herd immunity” as the top disease
authority. The hack’s strategy could kill as many as 3 million Americans. The
preening Antichrist Trump’s devil-dances on the stages of his super-spready
hate rallies to demonstrate his supposed “youthful” and Darwinian vitality
while proclaiming that his virus “affects virtually nobody.” COVID-45’s
proclamation is a sadistic insult hurled at those who loved and miss people
among the 220,000-plus felled by the Trump Virus
Donald “There Won’t Be a
Transfer of Power” Trump is not hiding his campaign to extinguish what’s left
of electoral democracy. His claim that the only way he can lose is “if the
election is rigged” is a not-so-veiled call for civil war and martial law
if the tally appears to be going against him. He openly declares that he may
not honor the outcome. This would be a good time to remember the Russian
dissident Masha Gessen’s
first rule on dealing with authoritarian heads of state:
“Believe the autocrat. He
means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others
claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a
rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to
practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the
1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s
anti-Semitism was all posture.”
The notion that Trump
wouldn’t try to pilfer an election takes naivete and childish enablement of
abuse to new levels. The real question about Trump is not what would he do to
stay in power but rather what wouldn’t he do?
Sadly, this naivete is fed
daily by a corporate cable news media whose talking heads continue even now
to act like there’s something surprising about Trump’s latest barbarian
transgressions.
+3. “The people, the
Democrats and the government will rise up to remove Trump if and when he tries
to steal the election.” That’s good to know, if true, but there’s not much
“if” about it and it may be too late to stop the crime if we wait until after
Election Day. As the distinguished historian Timothy Snyder recently told
Chauncy de Vega, “we are in a slow-motion Reichstag Fire right now.” The
attempted coup is already underway and Trump has considerable institutional and
extra-legal power to carry it out, including white-nationalist (Republifascist)
partisan control of state legislatures in key battleground states, the
allegiance of many white states, county, and local police and National
Guardsmen, the loyalty of untold thousands of armed far-right extremists
(including many military and ex-military cadre and commonly coordinating with
police), and a Supreme Court about to become super-majority right-wing thanks
to the imminent approval of the “Christian” Republifascist Coney-Barrett by the
Republifascist -controlled U.S. Senate. It is important to organize on a mass
scale now, not just after the formal election day. The sooner we organize and
demonstrate in large numbers to counter the rolling coup, the better.
The Democrats’ track record
on resisting stolen elections in this century is not good. They laid down in the face of the right-wing assault on the decisive Florida ballot count in
2000-2001 and did nothing to challenge the theft of the 2004 election.
Consistent with late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s description
of them as “the Inauthentic Opposition,” the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats
have been actively aiding and abetting Trump’s presidency from the dreary
Hillary Clinton campaign through the prolonged RussiaGate drama. The
Russia-Trump-Mueller drama deflected national attention away from Trump’s worst
crimes while congressional Democrats continued to grant giant military budgets
and surveillance powers and (this year) corrupt corporate bailout funds to the president they all-too-accurately described as insane and dangerous. The
Democrats are the party of Hollow
Resistance.
Hopes for the U.S. military
command acting to remove Trump and smash his violent forces if he defies the
election to seem far-fetched. It could happen if Trump refuses to honor a Supreme
Court ruling against his likely challenge to the election, one is free to
imagine, but relying on the imperial Pentagon to save “democracy,” or what
little is left of it, by removing its commander-in-chief feels to me like
desperate barking up a very wrong tree.
+4. “Trump is a
symptom of an authoritarian, corporate-dominated, and bipartisan system that
went off the rails of democracy long ago.” That is 100%
correct[1]. But Trump and Trumpism are malignant fascistic
tumors that must be cut out for a gravely sick patient, American democracy, to
be re-born. One does not endorse cancer or the conditions that give rise to it
by removing a deadly tumor that threatens to kill the patient in short order.
And a mass movement to remove the Trump-Pence-Barr regime could become a great
popular precedent for a deeper and broader movement to transform America in
politically and socially democratic ways.
+5. “We’ll face
violent repression if we protest the attempted coup.” Perhaps, but we will
face even more repression in a second (and third?) white-nationalist Trump
term.
+6. “I am too focused on my
specific cause to get focused on the distant matter of who is sitting in the
White House.” Your cause matters a great deal but, yes, comrade, you are
indeed overly focused on your specific cause. In a second Trump term, something
certain to be much worse than the first one, Black lives won’t matter, LatinX
and immigrant lives won’t matter, women’s lives won’t matter, gay and
transgendered lives won’t matter, livable ecology won’t matter, public health
won’t matter, consumer rights won’t matter, civil and human rights won’t
matter, health insurance be shredded, won’t matter, workers and economic
justice won’t matter, and – this is the threat most specific to Trump – efforts
to fight to make all these just and beautiful causes will face unprecedented
repression.
+7. “I can’t be
bothered with all this; I need to stay focused on my private affairs.” We
all certainly must watch out for ourselves and our loved ones, yes, but the
political system that results from widespread citizen demobilization,
privatism, and atomization ends up negatively impacting supposedly private and
family experience. Look at how Trump’s fanning of the pandemic has invaded our
daily lives. Wait until he and his neoliberal fascist allies go full bore after
Social Security and tear up health insurance protections for Americans with
pre-existing conditions. Politics has a way of coming back and haunting us when
we don’t join with our fellow citizens to make a better world
Millions of Americans may
have to get in the streets and stay there to compel the nation’s power elite to
force Trump out. Then we will struggle to compel post-Trump Washington to
address the misery, sickness, oppression, poverty, meaninglessness, and
absurdity faced by hundreds of millions of Americans with real solutions. Since
both of the dominant political parties are owned by concentrated wealth and
power structures who have are inherently opposed to such solutions, that
struggle must carry us into a confrontation with the whole damn interrelated
evils of class rule, racial oppression, patriarchy, police-statism, empire, and
ecocide – the unelected and intertwined dictatorships that gave rise to the
Trump regime and its inauthentic opposition among other atrocities. The sooner
we start mobilizing in a serious way against the “slow-motion Reichstag Fire”
currently underway, the stronger our movement will be. November could be too
late. The attempted coup. A real popular resistance needs to be underway too.
The establishment centrists in charge of the Democratic Party do not have
anything remotely close to what it takes to undertake such a resistance. They
can be counted on to behave in accord with their core institutional mission:
keeping the citizenry passive, crippling popular resistance, wrecking bottom-up
class struggle, and taking the risk out of democracy.
Endnote
1. I think in retrospect
Trump may be seen as like a rock that takes out half your teeth in a mouth that
was already so rotted, with gums so diseased and teeth so wobbly that you could
hardly chew food even before the stone hit; like a roof so weakened by water
leakage and termites that a big snowfall collapsed it all of a sudden in
November. I always thought that the opposition between (a) Sheldon
Wolin’s “inverted
totalitarianism” (“corporate-managed ‘democracy’’’) and (b) more
aggressive hate-rallying and gun-toting Amerikaner white nationalism/neofascism
was something of a potentially false dichotomy. Wolin’s soft authoritarianism
softens people up for the harder authoritarianism of real and wannabe fascist
strongmen.
Paul Street’s new book is The Passive Resistance: Obama,
Trump, and Politics of Appeasement.
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