Miriam,
If I begin to ponder an answer to this note of yours, I will probably
hunt down that bottle of rum. I begin thinking, and suddenly it's
like I'm in a maze of looking glasses. Or maybe i'm in a rubber room.
We seem to have even fewer options than Americans had back in the
1890's. I keep telling myself that I have faith in the working class.
But then I look around and find that many of them are living under the
bridges.
I just don't see Pence making things better.
And I don't see a Democratic Party holding the line.
The good news is that Cathy is brewing up a Turkey Noodle Soup. Some
things never change!
Carl Jarvis
On 12/29/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
That may be true. But I have this feeling that even though the system would
remain the same, it would be a very good idea, for several reasons, if it
were possible, to remove this particular madman from the Presidency. The
author of this article, is basically saying what Chris Hedges says, which is
what you just said. But I think that the longer Trump stays in office, the
more power he will have, the more danger he will bring to all of us, and the
harder it will be to return to any kind of sanity in this country.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2018 11:50 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Could This Be Our Best Hope of Removing Trump
From Office?
Removing Donald Trump is like removing a Thorn, but failing to clean out the
Pus.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/27/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Could This Be Our Best Hope of Removing Trump From Office?
President Donald Trump. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
The dog whistle couldn’t have been any clearer. When Donald Trump said
two weeks ago that “the people would revolt” if he were impeached, his
extremist base of neo-Nazis, Klan members, right-wing militias and
sympathetic service members likely heard the following: “Feel free to
attack Democrats, liberals, leftists and progressives if the coming
Democratic Party-run House of Representatives acts on its
constitutional right to impeach me.”
Impeachment alone probably wouldn’t trigger a right-wing uprising. But
impeachment followed by the unlikely prospect of removal, which
requires 67 votes in the Republican-majority U.S. Senate, might well
make it happen. So too could invoking the 25th Amendment on the
grounds that Trump is incapable of performing his presidential duties.
Officially, the Democratic Party—led by corporate allies like Chuck
Schumer and Nancy Pelosi—isn’t interested in moving ahead with either
of these constitutionally available processes. That could change,
however, if and when the report from special counsel Robert Mueller
directly implicates Trump. But even if the party’s efforts proved
successful, America would be left with President Mike Pence—an
honest-to-goodness Christian fascist.
The case for Trump’s ouster grows stronger by the week. Beyond his
possible obstruction of justice, criminal acceptance of foreign
emoluments while in office and felonious campaign finance
violations—any one of which could provide grounds for legal
proceedings against him—the president has routinely embraced
authoritarian rulers around the world and engaged in obvious appeals
to violence. He has, at every turn, revealed himself to be entirely unfit
for office.
Ironically, the most effective means of achieving his removal may be
to revolt, albeit in a fashion radically different from the one the
president has envisioned. America must instead engage in civil unrest
that targets not just the current inhabitant of the Oval Office but
the entire bipartisan ruling class that birthed his monstrous
presidency. Forget Watergate; think sit-down strikes and the march
from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.
The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in France have given us a taste of
what’s required. Among their list of demands is a real and functioning
democracy—popular self-rule. Further to that, they have called for a
referendum whereby 700,000 citizen signatories would force the French
Parliament to debate and vote on a given law within one year. Evoking
the French Revolution of 1789, there have even been calls for a
Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution meant to create a new
French government—a Sixth Republic based on popular sovereignty and
majority rule rather than the demands of a de facto corporo-financial
dictatorship.
Imagine!
That Trump has never had a functioning democracy to overthrow is
evidence enough that this kind of activism is long overdue. Released
in the early spring of 2008, Sheldon Wolin’s classic study “Democracy
Incorporated:
Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism”
revealed that the U.S. was no longer a “democracy,” if it ever had
been. America, Wolin found, had mutated into a new sort of
totalitarian regime wherein economic power and state power were
conjoined and virtually unchecked by a demobilized, atomized and
politically disinterested populace, conditioned to stay that way. “At
best,” Wolin determined, “the nation has become a ‘managed democracy’
where the public is shepherded, not sovereign.”
“Should Democrats somehow be elected,” he prophesied, they would do
nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or
“substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a
Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial
fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and
anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.”
Sure enough, a nominal Democrat was elected president along with
Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. What
followed under Barack Obama (as under the prior Democratic
administration of Bill Clinton) was standard-issue neoliberal rule in
the service of big-money bankrollers and their global empire. The
nation’s first black president implemented the preferred policies of
Wall Street and the Pentagon more effectively than wealthy white
Republicans like John McCain or Mitt Romney could have ever hoped to.
America’s “inverted totalitarianism” was rebranded, to deadly effect.
Fed by a widespread and easily exploited sense of abandonment and
betrayal, the country’s rightward shift grew more pronounced, as the
Democrats depressed and demobilized their purported base. Over a
period of eight years, the party lost more than 1,000 elected offices
nationwide, including the U.S. presidency.
Along the way, its power brokers managed to stamp out a progressive
insurgency from Bernie Sanders through dubious means, clearing the
field for a deeply unpopular candidate in Hillary Clinton. And in so
doing, they handed the populist torch to a far-right reactionary in a
change election.
We should expect a similar outcome from the Democrats’ presidential
nomination process in 2020. The smart money is on anti-populist Joe
Biden or the telegenic faux-progressive Beto O’Rourke—this despite the
continued popularity of Sanders and his progressive agenda.
One year after Hillary’s ignominious defeat, the distinguished liberal
political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens
(Princeton) published their expertly researched book “Democracy in
America?”
The volume’s key finding: “The best evidence indicates that the wishes
of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the
making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized
interest groups—especially business corporations—have had much more
political clout.
When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general
public has been virtually powerless. …”
Whether we vote or not, Mammon reigns in the United States, where, as
Page and Gilens note, “government policy … reflects the wishes of
those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens
who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved,
money-vetted candidates for federal office” (emphasis added). Plus ça
change, plus c’est la même chose.
(“The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”)
Perhaps our only hope is a mass movement for “the radical
reconstruction of society itself”—what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
called “the real issue to be faced”—and the replacement of the
unelected and interrelated dictatorships of capital and empire by
popular sovereignty and workers’ control. As Chris Hedges wrote
earlier this year:
“The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a
half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process
of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed
democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a
functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around
him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the
next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is
not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and
the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t
count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the
corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil
disobedience. … If we do not stand up, we will enter a new dark age.”
(Emphasis added.)
“A new dark age” may ultimately prove euphemistic. The original Dark
Ages concluded with the planet still habitable. Humanity now faces the
near-term historical threat of extinction thanks to the grave “ecological
rifts”
generated by a global profit system upheld by both ruling parties that
is turning earth into a great, big Greenhouse Gas Chamber. “The
uncomfortable truth,” philosopher Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 17
years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement
in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.”
Sustained civil disobedience in the United States could provoke a
response far bloodier than anything seen in France. But while the
human costs of revolution are great, none can compare with the ecocidal
rule of capital.
Paul Street
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University.
He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago
Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous