Trump isn't Hitler, but he plays him on TV. The last few weeks the performance has been getting more realistic and his incitements to violence have increasingly resulted in real violence. Today he argued that the U.S. military should fire on unarmed refugee peasants and their children, if they should reach the U.S. border and a rock is thrown. This is not a joke. So yes, damn it, I want YOU to fight the threat of fascism every day. As a small part of that, it won't kill you to spend 20 minutes or a couple of hours voting on Tuesday, in whatever way is likeliest to help flip the House and the Republican states in play. That's not enough to change the world for the better, but it's a tactical necessity to allow the struggle to continue.
In my observation the GOP has never been this extreme-right, this cozy with fascism, or held this much unconditional power. They have also never been this desperate. Their increased extremism is being propelled by the inevitable demographic decline of their traditional "white" and Christian base. This is why they want to finish off any hope of democracy and find new ways to deny the vote by race and class. This election presents the best opportunity for them to do that. Redistricting happens in 2021, after the 2020 census, so the state elections now are the last major chance of affecting the gerrymandering through 2032. Thirty-six states are in play, including 9 of the 10 biggest, and a whole bunch of these are Republican and flippable: Florida, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio and Maine are all likely flips, while many others are conceivable including the crucial election in Georgia -- under a cloud of voter suppression -- as well as even Kansas and Alaska.
If the GOP wins, the voter suppression will have been rewarded and it will be escalated. It will become near-irreversible. And woe if the atrocities of the first two Trump years appear to receive an endorsement. There will be a triple-down, no limits. Just to stick with the latest -- every week of course has brought new outrages -- when he says he wants to end birthright citizenship, the right reaction is not to be smug and say it's unconstitutional. He's telling you he wants to fuck your constitution and be your dictator, and that is exactly what he will continue trying in every way he can.
I believe honest endorsements work better with the sort of people who read my stuff. Like this, from Allan Nairn yesterday: "You have to, at this moment, vote in the warmongers who will preserve democracy to block the warmongers who would abolish it..." Nairn also points out that there are more than a few decent people among the Democratic candidates: "And there are many good Democratic candidates in this election, people who, in one way or another, will represent a breakthrough for social justice, who all have essentially pledged to support Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid, when the Republicans would abolish it." And if you vote in the DWS district you can vote for the independent leftist Tim Canova, who is actually the favorite to win.
Some of you [not on RI!] can't stand dissonance on this matter, and need a clear dichotomy in which you aren't supporting an evil just because it's the lesser evil. If you need to hear some bullshit about how Obama and the Clintons are unfairly maligned great progressives, you should have stopped reading above. You can find what you need to keep yourself motivated elsewhere. Some of you don't vote, on principle rather than because of ignorance. It's okay, you are falsely and rather outrageously blamed by the pro-voting fanatics and naive believers that we actually live in some kind of just system of democracy. They should leave you alone and focus instead on motivating the far larger majority of non-voters, and get out and protest all the ways in which the vote is suppressed by the GOP. For a start.
But for the growing minority of existential realists, once again you have a sad choice in this very messed-up system in which the win almost always must necessarily go to one of the two crooked, Wall Street-owned, imperialist, neoliberal, militarist parties. You should vote for the one that has NOT pledged itself to open racism, misogyny, theocracy, and the termination of democracy and your rights to protest or even to vote, and that IS susceptible to a progressive-socialist grassroots transformation going forward. You should vote for the one that is NOT inciting retail fascists to grab a gun and murder you. I get that successful Republican atrocities are rarely reversed under Democrats, that the war crimes of the Bush regime were not even investigated but continued by the successor, that the Clintons and Obamas dance with the Bushes, and that most bad things in the system continue identically under either party. But full fascism in the United States has to be avoided, if political revolution is going to have a chance. However minimal the difference between the two parties in many areas, it is still going to mean immediate escalation of suffering for millions of people if limits cannot be imposed on GOP power now.
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Allan Nairn: The U.S. Is Facing Incipient Domestic Fascism, But Rightist Revolution Can Be Stopped
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/1/ ... _is_facing
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, all sorts of things—voter suppression, gerrymandering—the tactics that the Republican rightist revolution is using to maintain its hold in power, even though they can’t win a straight-up vote.
Secondly, there is the element that Trump personally has brought to power. When he dragged the Koch brothers and the Paul Ryans and the American oligarchs to power, he did it with a two-pronged platform. One was punching the elites in the nose, as the banker Jamie Dimon put it. The other was racism. Without the element of punching the elites in the nose, the Republicans could never have won the election. Romney tried running on the elitist platform of giving tax breaks to the rich, getting rid of Social Security, Medicare. He lost. They can’t win with that. But Trump presented himself as someone who, A, will support social justice and who, B, had the capacity to unleash the beast within white America.
And so he dragged the American rich into power. They came with a preprogrammed plan to make an even more massive shift of government resources and taxpayers’ money to the richest people in the country. You know, there are just three individuals now whose wealth is equal to that of the bottom 50 percent of the American population. I mean, it’s already insane, but the Republican core value is to make it worse. And, secondly, he did it by unleashing these fascistic forces in the American population, in the American grassroots.
And there are many good Democratic candidates in this election, people who, in one way or another, will represent a breakthrough for social justice, who all have essentially pledged to support Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid, when the Republicans would abolish it. But also, many of these, or a substantial number of these, Democrats are arguably war criminals—not as big as the war criminals on the Republican side, but still war criminals. And they belong in prison.
But we are facing such a crisis in this country at this moment that you have to use your head. You have to be tactical. You have to, at this moment, vote in the warmongers who will preserve democracy to block the warmongers who would abolish it—and then, the day after the election, go back to the deeper work of creating real, better, more constructive political alternatives and also helping the base of the Democratic Party take back the party from the consultants, from the rich donors. But that’s for the day after the election is completed, and maybe the runoffs in Georgia and Mississippi, if they happen, after those are completed. Right now, the task is to stop the incipient fascism that Trump and the rightist revolution represents. And you can’t really say that you were working toward an anti-fascist goal if you’re not mobilizing for the Democrats right now. That’s the urgent reality that we’re living.
