You say "Biden and Trump are on the same side: the side of capitalism." But are they both on the side putting overt white supremacists and fascists in state power? Are they both interested in a disorganized and personally self-interested approach to the pandemic that has so far cost more lives in the US than every other country, including every other capitalist state? Are they on the same side when it comes to the right to an abortion? Are they on the same side when it comes to building the strength of extra-legal white supremacist gangs? The white Left view that there were no significant differences between Trump and Clinton is what allowed Trump to bring his virulently white supremacist gang into the White House in the first place. This is deeply personal to me. I have already suffered from the growing racist movement that has developed under the Trump regime. There is no contradiction between voting for the least racist and fascist of two capitalist candidates so long as only capitalist candidates can win the presidency, and building the mass working class movement. In fact, that movement can only be built by leading in the fight against Trump's attempt to solidify authoritarian rule in the US. That's why the Green Party is smaller, and even less important than it was in 2016. Please don't make the same mistake twice.
I felt the need to deepen and extend my critique, because it is also vitally important to fight voter suppression coming from the Left. So, here, with my comments in red, is my annotated version of Ezra Brain's
Presidential Debate #1: The Squabbles of Capital
The first presidential debate, for all its drama and chaos, showed that there are actually very few political differences between the two candidates.
Except one is calling on racist, misogynistic paramilitary gangs to help him overthrow the results of an election for the first time in US history.While it is certainly alarming to watch Donald Trump continue his increasingly overt overtures to the far right, we must understand that it is the working class, not Joe Biden, that has the power to fight back against the far-right. A great many forces have the power to fight back against the Trump right, and we should be about uniting all of them, even including the Lincoln Project and Republicans Against Trump.
The first presidential debate of the general election was a raucous affair, This was pretty much the lead Fox News went with. "a raucous affair" is what Trump was aiming for.with Donald Trump playing the part of vaudeville villain to Joe Biden’s fumbling imitation of an Everyman. Trump was relentlessly antagonistic,He wouldn't mind that description at all! attacking Biden for everything from his record to his grades in college to his son’s drug addiction, and attacking him politically from both the left and the right. However, all of their bickering disguised the fact that, on the issues, very little separates the two men.Sure, once you leave aside the fact that one of these men is an authoritarian, and white supremacist of the first order, bent on suppressing the African-American vote "like you've never seen before," using white supremacist paramilitaries to maintain power, suppressing free speech, and freedom of the press in a way not seen in this country in my lifetime, and generally destroying any democratic institutions, such as they are. Both oppose defunding the police, the Green New Deal, and "largely symbolic" Medicare for All. Which is not to say both have the same expansive view of the uses of police powers, especially to suppress people of color, and the left, both don't believe that climate change is a real thing, and have no plans whatsoever to combat it, and both would continue the same anti-science, and callus way of handling the pandemic, or health care in general. You have set very Trump-friendly bars here. Both support imperialism and are in a race to see who can be the toughest on China. Trump did distinguish himself by refusing to condemn white supremacists,Not a minor point! Also a very Trump-friendly way of putting it. He didn't just refuse to condemn white supremacists. He said explicitly they needed to built militias to take on the Left and BLM, he actively help build their movement with his comments, and told them to "stand by" for their marching orders. Did you miss all that?
but Biden, for his part, strongly defended the police. Although their rhetoric differs, both candidates are strong supporters of the racist state and the violence necessary to maintain it.
You seriously don't see a difference here? Are you blind? Mere days after we hit one million deaths from Covid-19, neither candidate has any policies to actually combat the spread of the virus other than vague overtures about how we should have been more anti-China, or that individuals need to wear masks,
Are you seriously claiming that both have the same view on the importance of wearing masks? Trump's clear anti-mask attitude, including the refusal to make N95 masks widely available even after six months, has costs tens of thousands of lives. Not a small thing. Look at today's reporting about how Trump nixed mask wearing because "it wasn't a good look."
or that we should bail out more big businesses. The truth of the matter is that Biden, Trump, and the entire undemocratic system of American “democracy” offer nothing for the working class except austerity, death, and misery.
So, I guess that means African-Americans should stop fighting for the right to vote. Perhaps we were wrong even to demand it in the first place. BTW, this view also supports Trump's voter suppression program.
Trump’s strategy for the debate was to back Biden into a corner and use this position to control the debate. The most effective deployment of this strategy came near the beginning of the debate when Trump accused Biden of giving concessions to the “radical socialists” Bernie Sanders and AOC. Biden fought back, rejecting universal healthcare. Trump triumphantly crowed, “you just lost the left.”
Putting Biden in these positions helped establish both Trump’s control of the debate itself and the efficiency with which he is able to poke holes in Biden. As another example, when the subject of race was brought up, Trump expertly used Biden’s writing of the Crime Bill and his statements around it against him.
Trump "expertly" lied. Biden never used the term "super predators," that was Hillary Clinton. But rather than call out his lie, you endorse and propagate his lie.
It is, of course, hypocrisy in the highest degree for Donald Trump of all people to attack someone about race. After all, only a few minutes later he refused to tell white supremacists to stand down.Again, he did more than refuse to tell white supremacists to stand down. He called them to arms.
However, the moment still stood out as a very clear and direct attack on Biden. While Biden struggled to find his footing, Trump was able to control the narrative and put Biden in several uncomfortable positions.Sounds like you really thought Trump "won" the debate. What he did was destroy any narrative. That was his plan. Don't you see this? Instead you award him "control" points!
This ability comes both from — as the mainstream media was quick to point out — Trump’s utter shamelessness and lack of respect for the procedure of debates but also from his total lack of actual politics.Like I said, he has no narrative.
He interrupted both Biden and moderator Chris Wallace all night in an attempt to show himself as a strongman. Whether or not that will work remains to be seen,
We must work out why this does so often work with many workers.
but Trump, as a total opportunist, is able to tack left or right as needed in order to appeal to the voters he’s speaking to. In a single response to Biden on race, he attacked him from the left (on his support of the crime bill) and from the right (that he doesn’t support “law and order” enough).
One area in which Trump was able to point to something true was in his characterization of the “recovery” of 2008. While Biden — like Clinton in 2016 — tried to insist that everything was sunshine and roses under Obama, Trump correctly criticized how slow the recovery was.
Correctly? In the sense that the first black president managed the capitalist crisis he inherited from Bush worst than Trump or other [white] bourgeois politician could have handled it? That was Trump's point, not that such crises are inherent in capitalism. Was that true?
The truth is that many never recovered from the 2008 crisis, as an entire generation was forced to take on precarious labor and millions of dollars of student debt. Biden and the Democrats’ insistence on pretending that the crisis was resolved is totally out of touch with the realities of the real economy under Obama. This current economic crisis is not new but, rather, a deepening of the unresolved crisis of 2008. Trump, of course, has no solutions to add to this analysis other than a continuation of capitalist domination. Trump is interested only in enriching himself and his capitalist cronies. As we’ve seen since the beginning of the crisis, the only solutions that any of the capitalists have is to force us to pay for their crisis. Trump and the Republicans gave billions in bailouts to big businesses while only leaving crumbs for the working class, and when those crumbs ran out, they have been dragging their feet to extend them. Trump is nothing if not a sworn enemy of the working class.Joe Biden spent the first debate trying to seem like the adult in the room. This took the form of trying to make emotional appeals to the “average voter” in the audience instead of getting down in the mud with Trump. This essentially meant that Trump was left to argue with the moderator, interrupt, and make a scene, with Biden standing aside. While Trump’s antics eventually made a refusal to engage impossible, the strategy is still interesting because it shows that Biden has made the political calculation to appeal to moderates who may agree with some of Trump’s politics but dislike his demeanor. The goal of appealing to the moderate suburban white voter that was seen at the DNC continued through the first debate.
That may be because so many white voters are so backwards they support Trump's program, and unlike the Green Party and the white Left, Biden actually wants to defeat Trump.
This strategy led Biden to tack even more to the right than he has previously. He said complimentary things about Amy Coney-Barrett,I guess he should have trashed her & family all the way, that would've won him votes and made the political issues around her nomination all the more clear.
Trump’s ultra-right religious extremist nominee for the Supreme Court, and said that he would support Trump if he won the election.He didn't say he would support Trump. He said he would support the outcome, even if the vote favored Trump. Again you "misspeak." I always thought that was the basic ground rules for participation in any election, to support the outcome even if it goes against you. You think he should take the same stand as Trump?
In addition, Biden stated explicitly that he is in favor of private insurance and that he doesn’t support the Green New Deal. Biden even bragged about how he had to defeat the progressive wing of the Democratic party in order to become the nominee, going so far as to say “The party is me. Right now, I am the Democratic Party… I am the Democratic Party right now. The platform of the Democratic Party is what I, in fact, have approved of.”
With this proclamation, Biden makes explicit the theoretical and strategic bankruptcy of lesser evilism. He is totally uninterested in moving to the left, and as more and more leftists throw tactical support behind him, he is still only moving to the right. As the crisis deepens, whoever is elected to administer that capitalist state will have to unleash some of the most devastating austerity in generations. Biden isn’t even pretending that he won’t do this. He’s promising to continue private insurance, even as hundreds of thousands die of a virus, and he won’t even support the largely symbolic reforms of the Green New Deal. If elected, Biden will mean more of the same for working people except without any opposition on the streets, since much of the masses who have been protesting Trump are being led to support Biden.
Now we touch upon the real basis of your support for Trump. You think his brand of fascism will be good for the class struggle, even if it means hundreds of thousands more will die of COVID19 in the US, and the suppression of people of color will be particularly cruel. But I think you are wrong. I think you will find that the vast majority of those fighting for black lives will vote for Biden, and if he wins, will keep on fighting for black lives.
“Proud Boys… Stand By”I thought this should be headline coming out of this debate, not the "squabbles." "Squabbling" was the headline the Washington Post went with. Of course they didn't mention "capital," but that word is a very thin separation from what most of the capitalist press went with. That's good for Trump, if the debate is just boiled down to "squabbling," even if it is blamed on "capital," just so it isn't blamed on Trump.
One of the most ominous parts of the debate was when Trump was called on by Wallace and Biden to condemn white supremacist militias. Trump hemmed and hawed and finally said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” This was immediately understood by many to be a clear message to the far-right to prepare to unleash violence if the election doesn’t go Trump’s way. This was only added to later on in the debate when Trump called for his supporters to be poll watchers.You think this is a small matter? That doesn't make him a "greater evil" worth defeating at the polls?
The history of poll watchers is, of course, one of racism and voter suppression. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan intimidated Black voters by flying over Black neighborhoods and dropping cards emblazoned with white hoods that read “do not attempt to vote” in Oklahoma City and congregated at polling places across Texas to “take careful note of polling procedure.” Even earlier, in 1871, Congress passed the “Second Enforcement Act,” better known as the KKK Act, to explicitly prohibit trying to prevent someone from voting via “force, intimidation, or threat.” In 1964, Operation Eagle Eye recruited poll watchers to question and intimidate minority voters in Arizona. More recently, members of various white supremacist groups plotted to “monitor” thousands of polling places during the 2016 election, and there were plans to hand out liquor and marijuana in predominantly-Black neighborhoods in hopes of tricking people into staying home.Trump spent the debate — as he has spent much of the past few weeks — preparing to contest the election at every level.
He won't even have to do that, if you have your way, and enough progressives fail to play the "lesser evil" game, and refuse to vote against him by voting for Biden.
He has all but promised to dispute the election results, and last night on the debate stage he refused to promise to accept the results. Additionally, Trump is pushing through a Supreme Court Justice to contest the election in the courts, he’s sowing doubt about the validity of mail-in ballots to contest it in the press, he’s escalating voter suppression to contest it at the polls, and he’s asking his supporters to contest it in the streets. This will mean a likely escalation of violence from the far-right. As he has done for his entire tenure as a politician, Trump is sounding dog whistles to white supremacists.More than "dog whistles," he is calling them to arms.
We must understand that the entire system of American “democracy” is a fraud. The system was designed by slave owners to defend their right to own human beings, and that system has put two out of the last three presidents in the White House after losing the popular vote. From the electoral college, to voter ID laws, to the Presidency itself, the U.S. is not — and never has been — democratic.But was in more democratic when African Americans got the vote? Was it more democratic when women got the vote? Is it less democratic when voter suppression techniques are employed? Bourgeois democracy is not - and can never be complete. It must always be a matter of degrees. To proclaim "U.S. is not — and never has been — democratic" when we are in such danger of losing what little democracy we do have, plays right into Trump's "What have you got to lose?" speel.
We need to fight back this advance of the right and attacks on our democratic rights at every turn. But we won’t do it by voting for Joe Biden,Actually, at this time in history, voting for Biden is an essential part of the struggle to retain even our existing democratic rights. I appreciate your description of the danger Trump poses. But he won't even have to try to maintain power through a coup, if we hand him four more years on a silver platter by staying home or voting Green.
who promises us oppression with a kinder face. Biden showed us who he was and what he stood for on Tuesday night, and we have to believe him. He offers us nothing, and we won’t protect ourselves by supporting him. We will do it by organizing the might of the working class to defend our interests and lives.Do you really believe that pro-Trump statement? Do you really think Biden's management of the Covid-19 crisis will be as incompetent, and anti-science, as Trump's. True, neither will end imperialism, but the difference may save hundreds of thousands of working class lives. There are significant differences between these two bourgois candidates, but your propaganda must enviably veer towards pro-Trump, because to make your case you must amplify Biden's sins while minimizing Trump's.
We need to reject the dead-end of lesser evilism and organize now to fight back the right and defend ourselves. The presidential debate showed how little both candidates have to offer us. Despite their squabbles and theatrical blow-ups, Biden and Trump are on the same side: the side of capitalism. This will always put them into conflict with the working class, and we can’t ever expect them to do anything different. They offer us nothing, and we must reject them.Trump is threatening what little democracy and the few rights we already have. After Trump is defeated at the polls, a pre-condition, the main battle will be to stop him from staying in office by extra-legal, and violent means. Only a mass movement can stop that. You will be in a piss poor position to help organize that after you advise against stopping him at the polls (again) and in fact, helped him win.
Clay Claiborne
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