Taking a Closer Look at Vivek Ramaswamy's Supposed Anti-War Record

By Jon Reynolds

With a stiff drink, a heavy heart, and a strong sense of masochism, I recently subjected myself to the first round of Republican presidential debates. While the clown show lived up to expectations of being a tragic showcase of democracy gone wrong, the aftermath has been even more disturbing, particularly the flood of pundits and news stories claiming that Vivek Ramaswamy is anti-war.

Ramaswamy himself has even adopted the title, telling Israeli media in late August that “Israel needs to be in a strong position to defend itself. And the United States will be at Israel’s back. But I think that that’s a very different thing from automatically sleepwalking ourselves into war. I’m an anti-war president. And the way I’m going to do it is by deterring war, be it ending the war in Ukraine and deterring China.”

And yet, as is often the case with supposedly “anti-war” politicians operating in the two major political parties, there is more to the story, and Ramaswamy, like every other Republican on the GOP debate stage — and every other Democrat currently running for president — is far from anti-war.

IRAN AND CUTTING AID TO ISRAEL

During the debates — which were hosted by Fox News — Goddess of War, Nikki Haley, worked eagerly to out-hawk Ramaswamy on foreign policy:

“You want to go and defund Israel. You want to give Taiwan to China. You want to go and give Ukraine to Russia. You will make America less safe.”

Like clockwork, Ramaswamy played right into it:

“I will lead Abraham Accords 2.0,” he said. “I will partner with Israel to make sure Iran never is nuclear armed.”

Nevermind that politicians have been fearmongering about Iran building a bomb for decades, or that Iran has said it does not want to build a bomb, or the consensus of US intelligence agencies, which have repeatedly stated Iran is not pursuing nukes.

Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, Ramaswamy doesn’t actually want to flat-out cut aid to Israel.

First, Ramaswamy said Israel should not get more aid than its other neighbors after the year 2028, when the current US aid package of $38 billion expires. But secondly, and perhaps most crucial to his comments about Israel, is that it’s questionable if he actually wants to cut aid to the country at all. Shortly after the Republican debate, Ramaswamy appeared on Israeli TV and offered a very different view:

“I said that if Israel was so strong that it would not need our assistance anymore, it would be a sign of success for inter-country companies. I want to be clear: we will never stop aid to Israel until Israel says it is ready for it. Relations between Israel and the US will be stronger at the end of my term than they have ever been, and more than they will be under the other contestants.”

In other words: don't count on Ramaswamy to break the decades-long, bipartisan tradition of arming Israel to the teeth.

“I love [Israel’s] border policies,” Ramaswamy said during the GOP debate. “I love their tough on crime policies. I love that they have a national identity and an Iron Dome to protect their homeland."

Or, put another way, the border policies which routinely cost Palestinians their lives are the same border policies “anti-war” Ramaswamy admires.

And if that's the case, just imagine the horrors awaiting Mexican people living along the southern border of the United States.

RAIDING MEXICO

“A lot of what he [Trump] did makes total sense to me," Ramaswamy told Russel Brand in early August. “I’m saying a lot of the same things.” But, in some cases, “I’m going further than he ever did. I said I’d use the military on our southern border."

Ramaswamy’s proposal apparently involves exploiting the fentanyl crisis and using it as justification to launch drone strikes into Mexico to “eliminate” drug cartels.

As reported by Politico in April, Ramaswamy said using military force on cartels without permission from Mexico “would not be the preferred option” but we would “absolutely” be willing to do it, adding that what the cartels are doing “is a form of attack” on the United States. “If those cartels meet the test for qualifying as a domestic terrorist organization for the purpose of freezing their assets, I think that qualifies them for the US president to view them as an eligible target for the use of authorized military force.”

And what could possibly go wrong considering how much success the US has endured trying to kill its way to victory in the decades-long failure known as the drug war.

Perhaps it would be more surprising that Ramaswamy wants to take Trump’s border policies to the “next level” if he wasn't so utterly infatuated with the former president and obsessed with strengthening his legacy.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY

TRUMP "THE SINGLE GREATEST" PRESIDENT IN MY LIFETIME

During an August News Nation Town Hall, Ramaswamy referred to Trump as “the single greatest president” in his lifetime.

However, the problem with Ramaswamy’s love for Trump — and a seriously gigantic red flag — is that Trump is not anti-war.

While in office, Trump amped up Obama's drone wars, boosted military spending, bombed Syria and pledged to “keep” their oil, cut up the Iran nuclear deal, and dropped the largest non nuclear bomb in America's arsenal on Afghanistan.

Trump also mulled killing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whereas Ramaswamy claims he wants to pardon him, and they both share the same views on Chelsea Manning, who shared classified info with Wikileaks exposing US war crimes in Iraq:

“I will pardon Julian Assange because his prosecution was fundamentally unjust,” Ramaswamy tweeted in June. “Chelsea Manning, the government officer who actually leaked the information to Assange, had ‘her’ sentence commuted by President Obama because ‘she’ was part of a politically favored class: she’s trans — yet Assange now sits in a foreign prison for doing what the DC press corps does every day. This is wrong & I will fix it. We can’t have two tiers of justice: one for trans people, one for everyone else; one for violent Antifa/BLM rioters, one for everyone else; one for Trump on government document retention, another for Biden.”

COLD WARRIOR

It’s in our “vital interest” to make sure China “doesn't control the global semi-conductor supply chain in Taiwan,” Ramaswamy said in June, adding: “until we achieve semi-conductor independence, we will ensure Taiwan is not invaded by China” by ending the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

This should be good news, right? Ramaswamy wants to end the war in Ukraine. But how, you ask? By convincing Russia to break their alliance with “our enemy” China:

“The Russia-China military partnership outmatches the US on nuclear capabilities, on hypersonic missiles, on China’s naval capacities,” Ramaswamy said, later adding: “Worst of all, through the Ukraine war, we’re actually pushing Russia further into China’s hands. So, I will end that war.”

“The top military threat we face is the Russia-China alliance,” he said during an early August interview with PBS. “Our top adversary today is communist China.”

“I’m a George Washington America First conservative,” he tweeted on August 21. “Just as Nixon opened China to win the Cold War against Russia, the next president must open Russia to defeat China, starting with a peace settlement in Ukraine.”

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

“We talk about nation building,” Ramaswamy said during the early August News Nation Town Hall. “We have a nation to build right here back at home.”

But 23 years ago, another politician running for president also made this promise:

“I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations,” George W. Bush said during the 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore. “Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”

Three years later, he was nation-building in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

While on the campaign trail, Obama promised to end the US war in Iraq:

“I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”

In early 2008, Obama reiterated that he was “opposed to this war in 2002. I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009.”

Well, the war in Iraq didn’t end. In fact, Obama added more conflicts to the tally while his other anti-war campaign promises slowly fizzled out, such as investigating torture under the Bush administration or closing down Guantanamo Bay.

Trump was a deviation from Obama and Bush in the way that he campaigned and the things he campaigned on. Unlike Obama and Bush, Trump made comments about “loving” torture and wanting to “bomb the hell” out of ISIS. Trump’s campaign — and his presidency — was US imperialism with the mask off.

And still, the bulk of his campaigning had less to do with promoting actual policy and more to do with promoting his own image as a businessman, a non-politician, and most importantly, as an “outsider” to the establishment. Yet once elected, Trump’s promises of “draining the swamp” came to an abrupt halt as he spent his first term adding Bush-era neocons like John Bolton to his cabinet while dutifully continuing all of the wars started by Bush and Obama since 9/11.

Ramaswamy, like Bush, claims he is against nation building. Like Obama, he makes comments that are passable on a surface level as anti-war. And like Trump, he is marketing himself as a businessman, a non politician, and an outsider.

With recent polling showing a majority of Americans turning against the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and general burnout from other wars such as the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s not at all surprising that so many of us desperately latch on to any politician who even remotely seems to promote a message of peace.

Unfortunately, between parroting neocon talking points about Iran, praising Israel’s oppressive border policies, regurgitating cold war propaganda about China and Russia, pledging to launch drone strikes inside Mexico, and praising hawkish presidents such as Trump, Ramaswamy hardly deserves to be called anti-war.

Voting Doesn't Beat the Far Right

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

The Far Right, emboldened and egged on by Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol Building yesterday with little resistance from the police. Their occupation of the Capitol — which came while Congress was in session ratifying the electoral college vote — is a far cry from the tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests which took place during the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But, this isn’t too surprising: we’ve always known that the cops will treat the Right with kid gloves and even aid and abet them, just like we saw during last year’s anti-lockdown protests and in Charlottesville. What these mobilizations reveal is, once again, that voting and elections won’t defeat the Far Right — especially not when the alternative is the Democratic Party, a capitalist party that helped fuel its rise. 

During the 2020 presidential election, figures from Barack Obama to Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis were telling everyone who would listen that voting for Joe Biden was necessary because it would defeat the Far Right forces that Trump has been stoking for more than four years. Many members of the Left bought into this argument and voted for Biden against their better judgement because they wanted to put a stop to Trump’s authoritarian and right-wing tendencies. In some sense, this is understandable — after all, if Trump is the one emboldening this right-wing movement, why wouldn’t getting rid of him help kill it? The events that transpired over the last few days clearly show that this is mistaken thinking. Whether in the White House or out of it, Donald Trump and his far right-wing base will continue to mobilize and play a role on the political stage. In fact, a staggering 75 percent of Republicans believe that the elections were rigged, highlighting the widespread influence of Trumpism. It is naïve to believe that these folks will just go home on January 20th.

Further, the idea that elections can defeat Trumpism misses  that politicians can’t create movements in a vacuum — they tap into existing sentiments and give political expression to them. The global rise in right-wing extremism is a response to the dire conditions created by the economic crisis. The current spike is a more direct result of the decline in living conditions for ordinary Americans over the past few decades, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, which the capitalists resolved by implementing devastating austerity that robbed millions of social services, education, job opportunities, and health care. This created a deep polarization which had left- and right-wing populist expressions. 

In this context, right-wing extremism emerged because it spoke to the despair of (typically) white men. By tapping into the racism that capitalism is built on, right-wing extremism channels anger at the establishment and converts material struggles into xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism. And Donald Trump was the political expression of this right-wing polarization, strengthening, giving voice to it, and, now, mobilizing it on a larger scale. This movement rallied around Trump because it believed that he represented a challenge to the established order and, now that he has been defeated by yet another neoliberal, it is mobilizing to defend him. 

But we should be clear: this rise in right-wing radicalization is a product of the Obama years as well as the escalation in the Trump years. Given this, it is not only incorrect but deeply dangerous to think that Biden’s warmed-over neoliberalism in the midst of a devastating economic crisis will do anything but escalate the problem.

Indeed, the escalations from the right that we saw on Wednesday come less than 24 hours after the Democrats won both senate elections in Georgia and took control of Congress. Trump was defeated at the ballot box in November and then again in January, but the social base of Trumpism is emboldened, not diminished. With Trump out of office, it provides him with a bigger platform to speak to this right-wing base, not smaller, because he will no longer be held back by having to work within the established structures. The “adults in the room” are gone, and full-fledged right-wing populism can reign at Trump rallies, on Trump’s Twitter feed, and the vast network of right-wing media outlets. 

So if the solution to defeating the Right isn’t voting for the Democrats, what is? 

The way to defeat the organized Right is with an organized Left independent of all capitalist parties. There are no shortcuts, no substitutes for the organizing we need to do. We need to build powerful and militant worker organizations in our workplaces and in the streets that can resist the Far Right, all the politicians who cater to them, and the neoliberal austerity that creates them. This resistance will involve both openly confronting the Far Right in the streets but also using our power as workers to resist them. For example, workers in DC could go on strike to protest the Far Right occupation of the Capitol building, forcing the government to evict them from the streets.

Strong Left organizations are also important because they can fight back the ideological advance of the Right. Many young people are drawn to the Far Right because they believe that it offers solutions to their struggles. If there were Left organizations that were putting forward a strong message against both the Far Right and neoliberalism, it could help to prevent some of these people from being drawn into right-wing extremism, thus preventing these movements from growing. It is vital in the fight to defeat the Right that we provide a real and meaningful alternative. And for people who become fascists, we agree with Trotsky when he said, “If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.”

In this, the failure of leftist leaders like Chomsky and Davis becomes clear: not only were they wrong that defeating Trump at the polls would defeat the Far Right, but they also sewed false illusions in Biden. Chomsky and the other leftist leaders who asked us to support Biden told us that he could keep us safe from the Far Right. He can’t — and he won’t. By funneling the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement into support for Biden, these leaders intentionally or not worked to undermine what could have been the foundations of the type of mass social movement we need to protect against the Far Right. Voting for Biden got us further away from defeating the Right, not closer.

History is littered with examples of this. From Franco in Spain to Hitler in Germany, the liberals always choose to side with the fascists over the socialists because fascism is less of a threat to the capitalist order than socialism is. So we can’t be fooled when liberal politicians wring their hands about the rise of the Far Right — they aren’t on our side, and we cannot support them in their elections, even when they are running against a representative of the Far Right. Liberal victories at the voting booth will not defeat the Right — but class struggle and worker organizing will. And given the right-wing mobilization yesterday, it’s clear that we need independent organizing in the current moment. 

Dear Black America, Don't Let Them Fool You: We Cannot Vote Ourselves Out Of This Problem

By Christian Gines

Voting is not the way to solve anything for black people, oppressed people. First, reform does not work in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Every issue we hear talked about on the news, "this [issue] disproportionately affects people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, etc." This statement shouldn't be that mind-boggling. This system isn't made to benefit us in the first place, so why would a change in that system work in the first place. When a car breaks down, you put in new parts. If you continue to put new parts in a car, it will eventually break down. That is all these reformist polices are doing. If you're not abolishing the system, then you're just allowing the car to keep on going with new parts that will enable the car to run on fumes until it breaks down. Calls to abolish and defund the police are already being coopted into reformist policies to appease the ruling class. It shouldn't be that radical to call for an abolishment of a system that kills over 1,000 people a year despite being "reformed."

Second, voting is to subdue the masses to choosing between two evils and allowing them to decide what's acceptable and what's not acceptable in the realm of discussion. As Noam Chomsky eloquently put it, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that they have free thought, but the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." As a people, we have been taught and sold that voting is the only way to make a change in society. From talking to my parents, family members, and community members doing the peak of the 2020 Democratic primary, and now they are sold on voting as our only means of creating change. Saying we have to make the change within the system. Their stance on voting has been fed to them for so long that they will fight you to the grave on this, but it is so ahistorical that we need to disprove it today. Our ancestors didn't have the right to vote, and they achieved the abolition of slavery, end of segregation, right to citizenship, right to work, right to own property, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the removal of Jim Crow Legislation, the right to vote.

When you look at any change that has happened within the The US, the change has come from outside the system, not within. As James Connolly Said, "Governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class." When we vote, we are voting for whoever the ruling class has told us to vote for. Whether through endless spending with SuperPAC's or "black faces in high places," telling us who to vote for, we have no say in Democracy. As Malcolm X said, "Democracy is Hypocrisy." Voting is the way that the empire can keep us under control and keep themselves in power. The Black Panther Party couldn't vote, yet they had a Free Food, Free Housing, Free Medical Care, Free Busing, Free Clothes, and 50 other programs that we hear white liberals advocate for today. They were doing that within their community, and that's why Herbert Hoover fought to get rid of them. The BPP's initial government surveillance started because of their Free Breakfast Program. The settlers have taught us that's their way of governance is the best way, and we have fallen for that. We believe that we, the masses, and oppressed people can vote and change the system that was set up with the thought that either we weren't citizens, we weren't humans, or that we were too dumb, so there should be a safeguard.

The ruling class had a chance to maybe postpone a revolution in our lifetime with the compromise candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Sanders, running on a political revolution, had a tremendous amount of support from young people in general, but especially young black people. With his calls for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other social democratic policies, they had a chance to satisfy the short term wants of most Americans. They had an opportunity to assuage the masses for a while, as they did with FDR's candidacy. The ruling class, though, was so caught up with their money and profits that they failed to see that Bernie Sanders was offering them. They were so scared that he would tax them that they colluded against him as they did in 2016 to ensure that their establishment candidate won. Now we are stuck choosing between the lesser of two evils again. We have one person who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault, an architect of mass incarceration (who refuses to apologize for it), and full of blunders. On the other hand, we have Donald Trump. I remember when people were saying that they will vote for Joe Biden over Trump because at least we can push him left. Now, this isn't an essay on whether you should vote or not, but I will say that we have had weeks of protest worldwide, and Joe Biden has not even inched to the left. He doesn't support abolishing or defunding the police department. Even Bernie Sanders said that he doesn't support defunding the police and says that they need more funding. This was the candidate who claimed that he was for the people, and he doesn't even support our demands. The Democratic Party has sold out black people for so long that it shouldn't be controversial not to support them, but we continuously have for decades. 

The façade that we can vote our problems away is one that we cannot fall victim to today. We have tried that time and time again, and what happens? The politicians run on something, go in there and don't do anything for our community. Black and white politicians alike have sold us out time and time again. To get real change, we must stay in the streets. As you see in Minneapolis, with protesting, burning, rioting, and looting, the change will come. If you support non-violent or violent protest is your prerogative. If you support the liberation of the black community and think that we must vote to get Trump out of office, that is your choice. But one thing is for sure. We cannot vote ourselves out of this situation because if we think that is the way to solve our problems, we will end up in the same place we started.

Christian Gines is a published student writer, poet, and activist whose writings discuss race within the black community and its effect on black youth.

The New White Moderate: Liberalism, Political Coercion, and the Failed Electoral Strategy

(Illustration by Nat Thomas/St. Louis Public Radio)

By Joshua Briond

There’s a Jacobin article circling around titled, “Where Do We Go After Last Night’s Defeat?”  published a day after Bernie Sanders’ defeat on March 11th, 2020. The author writes, “the bad news is that the Democratic Party isn’t going anywhere. The good news is that today’s common-sense political demands are, almost unthinkably, democratic socialist ones.” The overarching theme of the article is that the almost undefeatable nature of the Democratic Establishment, in an historical context, is not a reason to move beyond bourgeois politics, but rather justification for being reluctant to look outside of the realm of the two-party system for solutions to our current reality. According to the author, this argument is supported by the fact that the Sanders’ movement, or rather moment, has won the “battle of ideas,” as if that’s something worthy of boasting. As if winning the “battle of ideas” within this arena has ever fed an empty stomach or liberated anyone. The article displays a lack of understanding of what socialism entails, far beyond mild liberal reforms, further proving Sanders’ moment has widely led to a miseducation of socialist ideals. In the end, the author provides the perfect encapsulation of self-congratulatory American chauvinism, symbolism, and unearned arrogance, largely present on all sides of the electoral political spectrum.

To begin, the article credits what is referred to as “five years of “Sandersism” for the “genuine leap forward in politics in the United States, a leap that dwarfs the past half-century of liberal stupidity and backwardness,” unknowingly and unapologetically depicting the vast disconnect present between Sanders’ moment (electoral canvassing) and colonized people (and our organizing and movement efforts). Which precisely demonstrates why national electoral canvassing, specifically as it relates to bourgeois elections, cannot be categorized as “working-class” organizing or movements when it is systematically disconnected from, and neglects the, most marginalized among us. For example, the article takes a braggadocious tone to make a note about how “in five years, we’ve moved forward fifty,” entirely neglecting to mention how state political repression and mass media’s anti-communist smearing following Black radical movements and uprisings in the last 60 years or so affected the political psyche of millions of people. And also how movements and moments, such as Black Lives Matter, #NoDAPL, and others, took place within the last five years and were instrumental in the shift in public discourse and moving politicians, including Bernie Sanders, further left (even if only performatively), with regard to racial and economic justice and state violence. 

The article, in true social-democrat fashion, reeks of liberal idealism and exceptionalism while complacently lecturing us on how our material reality is bad, but not so bad that we can’t endure our continued social and political subjugation with patience while waiting to vote for the next seemingly progressive politician(s) during the next election cycle. There is no emphasis on the local grassroots organizing (beyond campaigning among the electorate) that is already being done by non-white people who receive little-to-no support from the white moderates masquerading as “allies” and “progressives,” who chronically neglect organizers until it’s time to convince us to vote for their preferred candidate. The author tells us we should “reject” the “fantasy that now is the time we all throw ourselves into third-party work or militant protest activity” and that “there is nowhere for us to go.” Which prompts a question: who is this “us” he speaks of? C.L.R. James once wrote, “What Negro, particularly below the Mason-Dixon line, believes that the bourgeois state is a state above all classes, serving the needs of all the people? They may not formulate their belief in Marxist terms, but their experience drives them to reject this shibboleth [principle] of bourgeois democracy.” The entire article reflects an approach that is not only a product of a widespread culture that lacks political imagination beyond liberal idealizations but has not intellectually or politically struggled with persons of the Black race before, at least not ones who are poor. The author is clearly not from the same hue as the colonized and oppressed people, in desperate material need of far more than even what his beloved Democratic Party is willing to offer, on their best day. But what’s fascinating is just how confident the author is throughout the entirety of the piece with his shit-eating and ramming the politics of electoralism down our throats. And all of this despite the disappointing losses by the most popular progressive politician in the US in back-to-back elections to morally and politically inferior candidates. I pondered on the possibility that maybe this article wasn’t written for me, or us, as in non-white people—but its “colorblind” and race-neutral approach clearly depicts otherwise. However, even the worst of what the white-American community has to offer is undeserving of such a disturbingly bleak and imperious political outlook. 

In his famous letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. writes about the white moderate who will constantly say, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action" and who “paternalistically feels [he] can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a more convenient season." And I ask, how is this descriptor laid out by the late great MLK, regarding the white moderate in the 1960s, any different than the rhetoric displayed by liberal reformists masquerading as “leftists” in the article? By telling us we need to remain patient for the US political stratosphere to miraculously adopt a conscience and allow moderate and largely temporary reforms through the electoral approach and the Democratic establishment. This is telling the most oppressed people that you can paternalistically set the timetable for our liberation.

The author writes that there are 12 million members of the Democratic Party, the largest membership number of all parties in the US—as a means of emphasizing an unfounded and irrelevant point about the American people’s reliance on the party—while failing to connect the dots to the lack of alternative political options being presented for people to resort to, which leads to a coerced “support” for millions of people who consistently “vote blue.” The author deliberately fails to recognize that the US has a population of over 300 million, and it doesn’t take a mathematician to understand that there are millions upon millions of people who are not members of the establishment and/or simply do not vote—due to disenfranchisement, socio-political status, and/or strategic disinvestment. Millions of people, largely made up of the colonized and/or racialized, who are disinvested and have long rejected the two-party system and are desperately looking for an alternative to their current social, political, and economic material realities. Instead of defeatism under the guise of electoral hopefulness within the Democratic Party, we should be proving to them that socialism, beyond the electoral and welfare statist approach that Bernie offers, could serve as that alternative. 

We, in America, never truly “choose” our political representatives—the ruling class does—even with the largely performative and symbolic facade of allowing some of us to cast votes every couple of years. Sure, we’re granted the opportunity to emblematically “choose” our next plantation owner or subjector-in-chief, but only after having our beliefs filtered and heavily influenced by the stranglehold that mainstream media, or rather mass propaganda machine, has on our psyche. With that, the electoral college stands as a means of allowing ruling elites to have the last say of who they want as their figurehead of empire run by corporations—oftentimes regardless of the popular-vote results. This, along with the fact that we’re constantly forced to choose between possibly slightly improving our material reality and the continued brutalization of those in third-world and global-south countries. It’s nothing more than constant political coercion. A democracy is not just being “allowed” to “choose” your representatives but having representatives that actually politically and morally align with its peoples’ material interests, with a fighting shot to win. If we can understand this illegitimate process and American hypocrisy, as the often “transporter” of democracy, we have to understand how the game is rigged from the jump—and we end up losing every time regardless of who is occupying office, as the ones with the most power and influence are oligarchs and corporations, and their financial interests. So how can you, as a self-proclaimed leftist, progressive, or radical, advocate for the continued reliance on a system that is inherently rigged against us? 

The fact of the matter is: Bernie Sanders is losing. And unless something drastic happens in the coming weeks, he will not be the democratic nominee. The electoral strategy has proved, once again, to be largely ineffective as a legitimate threat to capitalist exploitation and imperialism. So, you would think the most obvious solution would be to align ourselves with organizers, movements, and ideologies that can bring about the radical shift that marginalized people need to survive, right? But no, the new white moderates, leeching onto a party that has proven time and time again that those of us who want something radically different than milquetoast neoliberal establishment candidates and politics, are not welcomed. And honestly, it’s about time we listen. This conception asserted by the author, that somehow “we’ll get ‘em next time,” despite not offering much of a historical context or substantial answer as to why we should be optimistic about this approach or how we could achieve such a thing, is not just politically naive but downright potentially fatal—especially as we approach pending human-induced climate doom and deteriorating material conditions. It’s leading people into a burning building indiscriminately with little care for the lives that’ll be harmed and/or lost, in the meantime. 

Bernie Sanders should be seen as the compromise candidate that he truly represents. A physical embodiment of capitalism’s last hope, the “peaceful” alternative to sustain capitalism, imperialism, and pending climate doom, beyond its life expectancy and to avoid addressing the actualities of what this country is, at its roots, for a couple years longer. Instead, it’s clear that these self-proclaimed “progressive” political figures are considered end-goal saviors to many of these white moderates who claim that the Bernie Sanders’ or Elizabeth Warren’s of the world are merely a means to an end. And, as we’ve seen time and time again, their work will be finished if and when they succeed in electing them to the most powerful office in the world. If the DNC will not accept the mild reforms that Bernie Sanders is offering then that should tell us all we need to know about the reality in which these gains will not be attained through the ballot.

The new white moderate bombards us with disingenuous questions such as, “what’s your solution then?” when they encounter those of us who do not vote, as if opting not to engage in the coercive nature of lesser evils every election cycle, or refusing to vote for and electing the next terrorist-in-chief, is somehow more morally repugnant than the contrary. As if divesting from national electoral politics and not electing imperialists who are sure to enact terror on colonized people globally isn’t a substantial alternative, in and of itself. The new white moderate is desperately clinging on to the glimmer of hope that the Democratic Party and the United States of America, in their entirety, are not beyond redemption. They constantly tell themselves this because believing in the contrary would force them to reckon with not only their sense of identity, which they’ll find is inextricable with Americanism, but also with the reality that everything they think they know about their beloved country, and all of its institutions and global affairs, is categorically false. The claims implied in the article, that the Democratic Party is just simply incompetent, are not true. But minimizing their structural issues to something like incompetence largely lets their existence as a for-profit-over-all-else political party off the hook for its crimes while implying that these issues can be fixed with a slight overhaul in leadership. Democrats heavily rely on the lesser-of-two-evils approach that we see every election cycle. It is all they know and is very much deliberate; it’s not incompetence. As the author notes, they are perfectly fine with masquerading as the “opposition” party to Republicans, even in the Donald Trump regime era—while resisting little-to-none of their fascist policies or acts—as long as it means disallowing even the most mildest of reforms that could potentially come from a Bernie Sanders presidency. 

White moderates are no longer just raging, traditional centrists intent on maintaining the capitalist, white-supremacist status quo, but instead are also self-proclaimed “progressives” and “leftists” telling colonized, racialized, and oppressed people to wait our turn to begin building something revolutionary, something bigger than us all, while they continue underperforming and flat-out losing their electoral strategies. These new white moderates, masquerading as “progressives,” “leftists,” and oftentimes even “radicals,'' are very much keen on allowing the US—with their beloved Democratic Party at the forefront—to maintain its status as the unjust global police of the world, as long as they’re reaping the benefits of such a position through minimal “domestic” progress through welfare statism. And this is why they can so easily advocate for the continued dependence on the liberal establishment. With a condescending smugness, the author writes: “And, of course, there will be some wacky proposals that promise us a shortcut to power. Sectarians will encourage everyone to funnel their rage into ill-fated third-party efforts, and some will demand an insurrection at the Democratic National Convention.” But what’s more “wacky” or “ill-fated” than proposing to reconcile oneself to age-old tactics that are bound to continue to fail—with little-to-no evidence that a different outcome is even remotely possible? What is more doomed than sitting on your hands while people continue dying, and allowing the rage derived from the disappointing defeat of the most well-known progressive politician since FDR to funnel into more electoral opportunities coming along in the future instead of taking said rage and strategically and politically putting it toward building a sustainable movement toward people power, on the ground and in the streets? This failed electoral strategy, while disguised as being optimistic and pragmatic, is nothing more than a politically-naive and deliberately-obtuse attempt at preserving the dead end that is the Democratic Party, an organization that has historically served as a hindrance to radical movements because of its subservience to capital. It justifies futility. Because god forbid we do something beyond gathering signatures, door knocking, and bar-hopping between book clubs.

Exposing the American Okie-Doke: Russiagate, Corporate Propaganda, and the Historical Obstruction of Class Consciousness

By Colin Jenkins

The "founding fathers" deliberately arranged a system of governance that would protect the wealthy minority from the majority. Over time, as it fused with capitalism, this arrangement transformed the US government into a market. Railroad tycoons and robber barons forced their way into this market during the Gilded Age. Big business controlled the "public agenda" throughout the 20th century, with multinational firms taking root in the 1980s and 90s. Ronald Reagan ushered in the neoliberal era, which amounted to an all-out corporate coup of American politics. And, in 2010, the Supreme Court placed its stamp of approval on this system with its Citizens United decision, allowing anonymous donors unlimited access to politics through Political Action Committees (PACs).

In other words, the US government has been a traded commodity for a long time, in many ways since the beginning of the country's founding. Wealth determines elections (over 90% of the time the campaign with the most money wins). Politicians are commodities that are bought by capitalists. Legislation is a commodity that is bought by lobbyists (employed by capitalists). This is the case for both parties and all politicians (because it is built into the system).

The point : If you still believe your 5th-grade textbook and think you have a say in determining public policy in the US, you are furious right now. Because you believe democracy exists and that it was hijacked by a foreign government. However, if you realize democracy (or a republic) does not exist, the Russia/Trump revelations mean only one thing: the traded commodity known as the US government has gone global, following all of the other capitalist markets that have been globalized over the past 40 years.

The bottom line : We, the working-class majority, have never had a say in our political system. Whether it's the Koch brothers, George Soros, Goldman Sachs, the Israel Lobby, the Saudi royal family, some anonymous hedge fund manager on Wall St, or a dozen Russian oligarchs, "foreign" entities have always controlled our government. Our problems are wholly internal, created by our founders, intensified by capitalism and both capitalist parties, and solidified by Congress and the Supreme Court. Our everyday ills - poverty, debt, unemployment, underemployment, eroding safety nets, homelessness, inadequate housing, inadequate healthcare, inadequate education, debt-to-live scenarios, war, police brutality, campaign financing, corporate lobbying, corporate subsidies, etc.. - are homegrown. The systems that smother us in our everyday lives - capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy - are purely homemade.

The solution : The cries of Russia "interfering with our democracy" are both a distraction and a product of a system that intentionally obstructs critical thought. As working-class Americans, our enemies are the capitalist system, the dictatorship of capital, and the wealthy interests that dominate and control our lives, regardless of their supposed citizenship. This truth can only be realized through an embrace of class consciousness, something that has been stripped from us for the good part of the last century. Corporate "news" plays a crucial role in this process.

Today, when republican/conservative ignorance is met with informed, structural analysis, it is quickly deemed "fake news." When democrat/liberal ignorance is met with informed, structural analysis, it is immediately met with screams of "Russian trolls." Despite the cognitive dissonance that is sparked, ignorance usually prevails in both cases because Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are incredibly skilled at packaging entertainment as information and analysis. The production value is top notch, and the range of "experts" who are trotted out every night gives the illusion that they are presenting "all sides" of the matter, leaving nothing to be questioned beyond agreeing or disagreeing with each side. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky broke it down like this:

"The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda."

Our time, or lack thereof, is used against us. Capitalism smothers us from all angles by placing us on that proverbial hamster wheel, forcing us to run ourselves ragged in the pursuit of a paycheck. We live our lives one or two weeks at a time, spending half of our waking hours in a place we do not want to be, doing something we do not want to be doing, struggling to keep our lives and those of our families afloat, scraping by as best we can for that next piece of paper that allows us to eat. In this smothering environment, regurgitating corporate-propagandized talking points becomes the default mode because it takes much less time and effort than actually learning (reading a variety of sources, building historical context, discussing, engaging in the reciprocal process of praxis and theory, and deploying structural and systemic analysis).

Nuance is important, but class analysis is vital. With it, we understand that our problems are systemic, our immediate enemies are domestic, and our struggle against power cannot be sidetracked by a feud between global elites. In the end, our allegiance must lie with the oppressed of the world. And when our own oppressors begin to stir up a patriotic fervor, calling on us to pledge our loyalties to them, consider this advice from human rights activist Ajamu Baraka: "What does the working class have to do with a struggle between capitalists in the US and capitalists in Russia? That is not our fight. Our interests are not the same as their interests… Black, Brown, and white working-class and poor folks have nothing to do with the US capitalist elite."

For all intents and purposes, Donald Trump is an enemy of the people. As is Vladimir Putin. As are the Clintons, the Bushs, Barack Obama, and any individual that fills the power structure which has smothered us since the country's founding. Their allegiance is not to us; it is to global capital. It is to the system that was deliberately arranged by our founders with the purpose of protecting wealth and power from "the mob" (us). As such, our allegiance should be to the poor, oppressed, and working people of the world. Through its media channels, US/capitalist propaganda tells us otherwise, packaging its elite interests into some vague form of "national interest," while tugging on our emotional strings with primetime spectacles. The power structure relies on these propagandized, emotional triggers to override any potential shift toward rational and critical thinking. This is why organic/working-class intellectualism is so desperately needed. It is the key to revolutionary change. And we all have it. But, for many, it is obstructed by layers of conditioning. It is the duty of radicals to chip away at these layers without accidentally fortifying them. A delicate task, indeed.

Safe States, Inside-Outside, and Other Liberal Illusions

By Howie Hawkins

Bernie Sanders is on his way to an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the candidate of War, Wall Street, and Wal-Mart. Sanders ran as a New Deal Democrat, but he will soon be campaigning for a plain old corporate New Democrat.

To keep his troops engaged through this transition, Sanders will stage a few rules and platform fights at the convention. But rule changes are irrelevant to the real party power structure of candidate organizations and their corporate investors. Any platform planks won will be irrelevant as well. No corporate Democrat will feel bound by them.

Faced with that demoralizing prospect, some Sanders supporters are recycling failed old strategies in an attempt to salvage Sanders' "political revolution" without opposing the Democratic Party.

Safe States

Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant and her Socialist Alternativecomrades have called on Sanders to continue running as an independent, but only in non-competitive "safe states."

The Green Party tried this in 2004. After a controversial decision to nominate the safe states candidate, David Cobb, it quickly became clear that the approach was impractical. I compiled and contributed to a book about this experience where you can see the debate between safe states and independent politics evolve as the case for safe states collapses in the face of political realities. Cobb had to convert from "safe states" to "smart states," which meant running wherever local Greens wanted him to. That turned out to be every state, safe or battleground, with a Green Party. Cobb did not want alienate Greens in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania who were knocking themselves out to overcome difficult ballot petitioning requirements and hoping for sufficient Green presidential votes to secure ballot access for local candidates in future elections.

It also became clear that few voters or reporters would take a candidate seriously in a non-competitive safe state who didn't believe his or her own third-party candidacy was important enough to carry into the competitive battleground states as well.

A hypothetical Sanders safe states run would face the same problems Cobb did on a larger scale. His supporters in battleground states would feel abandoned. That would split his base. And he would not be taken seriously by voters or the press because he would not be taking himself seriously enough to run in the battleground states and try to beat both Trump and Clinton.

Inside-Outside

Another liberal illusion is the inside-outside strategy toward the Democratic Party. The logic of an inside-outside approach leads increasingly inside in the party. To be accepted inside one must disavow outside options. Bernie Sanders conceded to this logic from the start of his campaign when he said would support the Democratic nominee and not run as an independent.

If Sanders had not made that pledge, he would not have been allowed on to Democratic ballots or debate stages. Soon after he pledged his Democratic loyalty, Sanders was signing fundraising letters on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Before long Sanders will be campaigning for Clinton.

When I wrote a critique of this idea in the Summer 1989 issue of New Politics, I was addressing the left wing of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, which proposed an inside-outside strategy of supporting progressives inside the Democratic Party and running progressive independents against corporate Democrats. By the time the next iteration of the inside-outside strategy was promulgated by the Progressive Democrats of America, which grew out of the Kucinich campaign in 2004, outside was now reduced to lobbying the Democrats for progressive reforms. Running independent progressives against corporate Democrats was not part of the outside strategy anymore.

The inside-outside proponents from the Rainbow Coalition believed their strategy would heighten the contradictions between progressive and corporate Democrats, leading to a split where either the progressives took over the Democrats or the progressives broke away to form a viable left third party with a mass base among labor, minorities, environmentalists, and the peace movement. But the logic of working inside meant forswearing any outside options in order to be allowed to inside Democratic committees, campaigns, primary ballots, and debates. Many of the Rainbow veterans became Democratic Party operatives and politicians whose careers depend on Democratic loyalty. Meanwhile, the corporate New Democrats consolidated their control of the policy agenda. And today the "outside" of the inside-outside strategy has been scaled down to pathetic attempts at political ventriloquism - clicking, lobbying, and demonstrating to try to get corporate Democrats to utter messages and enact polices that are progressive.

Party within the Party

The most longstanding liberal illusion is the party-within-the-party approach, an organized movement to take the Democratic brand away from its corporate sponsors. Some leaders of Labor for Bernie have beenexplicit about this. It is what Sanders has indicated he has in mind.

This approach is has been tried repeatedly by the liberal left since the 1930s and always failed. The inside path of "taking over" the Democratic Party has been tried by labor's PACs, waves of reform Democratic clubs, McGovern's new politics, Harrington's Democratic Socialists of America, Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Dean's Democracy for America, Kucinich's Progressive Democrats of America, and many, many others, including the fusion parties in New York State over the decades that functioned as a second ballot lines for Democrats: American Labor, Liberal, and Working Families.

In every case, they failed. Worse, many of the reform Democrats went over to the other side and became career Democratic regulars. McGovern lieutenants like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton became leaders of the neoliberal New Democrats. The Jackson legacy is a Congressional Black Caucus stuffed with corporate money and almost universally in the Clinton camp.

The operatives and the pols backed by the fusion parties in New York State have not only become embedded in corporate-financed Democratic politicians' organizations, many have been corrupted. By the time it lost its ballot line in 2002, the Liberal Party had become the crassest of patronage machines, brazenly selling endorsements to the Democrats and Republicans alike in return for jobs and contracts. Its successor, the Working Families Party, kept backing Sheldon Silver, the fallen Speaker of the state Assembly (and Clinton Superdelegate), even after he was indicted for corruption. Silver was just sentenced to 12 years for selling his office for financial kickbacks and sexual favors. A top political aide to New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and former Working Families Party campaign manager, Emma Wolfe, has just been subpoenaed in a federal investigation of a scheme to skirt around New York State's campaign contribution limits. No doubt we'll be reading in the future about Sanders activists who became careerists and corrupt in corporate Democratic organizations.

Many are going to believe that this time it's different because the Sandernistas are stronger than earlier reform Democratic movements. Sanders is winning over 40% of the Democratic primary votes. These folks are going to pursue the party-within-the-party. Since it is inevitable that some large fraction of the Sandernistas are going to choose this path, the independent left should work with them in fighting for reforms like Improved Medicare for All even if we oppose their Democrats in elections. If they are smart, they will recognize that the independent left is their strategic ally. Without independent candidates giving progressive voters somewhere else to go, the reform Democrats will be taken for granted and lose their political leverage against the corporate Democrats.

Also if the reform Democrats are smart, they will fight for a membership-controlled party-within-the-party. The top-down mailing list left is the debilitating scourge of progressive politics today. Non-profits staffed by salaried professionals paid for by philanthropic capitalists decide what to mobilize people for, but don't help people organize to educate and make decisions themselves. If the mass base of small donors that the Sanders campaign has amassed is going to fund this reform effort, those same small donors should be organized into local clubs with membership rights to make decisions and elect and hold leaders accountable. For this to happen, Sanders will have to release his 2 million plus small donor list for local organizing. A party-within-the-party will have to demand that Sanders "Free the Lists!"

Vote for the Lesser Evil

The illusion of last resort for liberals is lesser evilism. They call on us to vote for the lesser evil Democrat to defeat the greater evil Republican.

Here is where Ralph Nader is invoked for "spoiling" the 2000 presidential election. In fact, as a major media consortium found in a thorough $1 million recount, Gore won Florida despite computerized racial profiling by the GOP that disenfranchised tens of thousands of black Democratic voters. The GOP stole the election and consolidated the coup by stopping the recount in a party line Supreme Court vote. But, like GOP climate change deniers, Democratic lesser evil proponents don't let facts get in their way. Instead of fighting the Republicans, they blame Nader.

Of course, a left third-party candidate could well be the margin of difference. The argument against lesser evilism is that voting for the lesser evil paves the way for greater evils. The classic example is the Social Democrats of Germany supporting the conservative Paul von Hindenberg in order to the defeat the Nazi Adoph Hitler in the 1932 German presidential elections. Von Hindenberg won and then appointed Hitler as Chancellor.

Hillary Clinton is the von Hindenberg of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Clintonite prevarication and triangulation will accommodate the right and bring us the greater evils we were afraid of. Hillary the Hawk trumps Trump for the neocons swarming to her campaign. She doesn't need the left to beat Trump. She's got the militarists and the corporate elites - and the lesser evil liberals - in a grand coalition for the status quo.

The lesser evilists call it strategic voting. It's really strategic suicide. The corporate center-right personified by Clinton will not defeat the hard right. She will use it to scare the liberal left into accepting her corporate and militarist agenda as the lesser evil. The most effective way to defeat the right is with a left that builds support and power by organizing and campaigning for its own distinct alternative.

Write In Bernie

The Bernie or Bust movement has raised another illusion. If Sanders doesn't win the nomination, then give him a write-in vote in the general election.

At least in this approach they do not lower their flag and disappear into the Democratic Party. But it has its own problems. A write-in vote for Bernie is a vote for Hillary Trump. It's a vote for Hillary because Bernie supports Hillary. It's a vote for Trump because it could be the margin of difference in a battleground state.

Fortunately, Bernie or Bust recently changed its pledge to "write-in Bernie Sanders or vote Green" and the number of pledgers quickly doubled to nearly 100,000.

A Left Third Party Without Illusions

Jill Stein's Green Party campaign for president ought to be the first stop for Sandernistas who refuse to vote for corporate Clinton. Stein will give voice to popular demands and movements and help shape political debate during the election. But more than anything, the Stein campaign is a party-building campaign. It's about securing ballot lines that can be used in future local elections for municipal, state legislative, and congressional seats. It's about creating campaign committees that continue after the election as local Green parties.

Local independent left candidates can win. Kshama Sawant has shown that in her Seattle city council races. Over 150 Greens have shown that in cities and towns across the country. These wins can be replicated all over the country.

Many states have non-partisan local elections where independents are not so hampered by partisan loyalties in the two-party system. Due to the gerrymandering of safe seats, most partisan election districts are in practice one-party districts where the other major party does not seriously compete. A left third party can very quickly become the second party in these districts on the road to becoming the first party. Running serious local election campaigns ought to be the second stop for independent Sandernistas.

Ballot access barriers, winner-take-all elections, private campaign financing, and inherited two-party loyalties are real obstacles to building a left third party. But the idea that they are insurmountable is just wrong because viable third parties have been built and independent candidates have won. The abolitionist, populist, and socialist parties from the 1840s to the 1930s garnered enough support to really affect American politics. Greens, socialists, and independent progressives, including Bernie Sanders himself, have won office in recent decades. What's been missing since the 1930s is a left that understands that independent politics is the road to power and change. Most of the self-described left today practices dependent politics. It depends on the corporate-sponsored Democrats to enact changes.

Sanders' campaign has revealed there is a mass base for left party that is ready to be organized. His campaign shows that millions are ready to vote for what public opinion polling has shown for decades - that there is majority support for progressive economic reforms like single-payer, progressive taxation, tuition-free public higher education, and climate action. Sanders' campaign also shows that millions will fund a campaign for these reforms with small donations at a level that can compete with the candidates of the corporate rich.

If the Greens are going to be the vehicle for an independent left political insurgency, they will need to reorganize as a mass-membership party with membership dues and local branches for sustainable self-financing, democratic accountability, and grassroots dynamism. The Greens will remain underfunded, weakly organized, and politically marginal if they continue to be organized like the Democrats and Republicans with an atomized base of voters who only have the right to vote in primaries, with no locally organized base to elect and hold leaders accountable, and with minimal funding from intermittent fund appeals.

It is no surprise that so many liberal illusions are being proposed in the wake of Sanders' campaign. The campaign itself was a liberal illusion that conflated liberal New Deal type reforms of capitalism with democratic socialism. It implied that the social, economic, and environmental crises we face are not systemic, but simply the result of bad leaders and policies that we can replace. Socialism means a radical restructuring of society that socializes and democratizes economic and political institutions. Without an independent left to articulate this socialist vision, "progressive" has come to mean a coalition of liberals and socialists behind a liberal program. The socialist left disappeared as an alternative voice and vision.

Working class independence has been the first principle of socialist politics since the pro-democracy uprisings of 1848 erupted across Europe and Latin America. Workers found they could not count on the professional and business classes to support their right to the franchise. They would have to fight for their rights themselves. Exiled "Red 48ers" were among the core of the American abolitionist and populist parties in the latter half of the 19th century.

The mass-membership working-class party was an invention of the labor left in the second half of the 19th century. It was how working people organized democratically to compete politically with the older top-down parties of the propertied elites, which had grown out of their competing legislative caucuses. In the U.S., the Greenback Labor and People's parties of the farmer-labor populist movement won hundreds of offices at all levels up to governors and U.S. senators. They forced their program - from greenback monetary reform and progressive income taxation to labor rights, cooperatives, and public ownership of railroad, telegraph, and telephone utilities - into the center of political debate. The Debsian Socialists, many of them former populists like Debs himself, continued this effective third-party tradition in the 20thcentury until 1936, when most of labor and the left collapsed into the New Deal Democrats' coalition. The left has yet to re-emerge as a distinct and visible voice that matters in American politics.

There is no shortcut through the Democratic Party to building a mass party on the left. That shortcut is a dead end. Hopefully, many new activists energized by the Sanders campaign will come to the realization that road to "political revolution" for "democratic socialism" lies not inside the Democratic Party but in an independent left party that is opposed to and starts beating the Democrats.

This piece was originally published at Counterpunch.