The
Bipartisan Neoliberal Regime Is No Alternative to Trumpism and the
Far-Right
The
first reason for this crisis is that the US political system is not a
"democracy" at all, but rather an oligarchy run by the
unchecked power of corporate bribery.
An excerpt from this article;
The
left has portrayed Trump's attempt to undermine the election as an
aberration from the norms of American democracy. His claims of
mail-in voter fraud have been widely debunked as false.
Taken in isolation, Trump's actions seem to be a deranged
conspiracy designed
to undermine the will of the people. However, Trump's actions did not
occur in a vacuum. Rather, they are a symptom of a deeper crisis in
electoral politics that has been growing for several years.
The
first reason for this crisis is that the US political system is not a
"democracy" at all, but rather an oligarchy run by the
unchecked power of corporate bribery. A 2014
Princeton study,
for example, found that ordinary working people have virtually no say
in government decisions.
A
second reason for the political crisis is the Electoral College,
which violates the basic democratic principle of "one person,
one vote," and is deeply
unpopular.
In the past 20 years alone, the Electoral College resulted in two
presidential candidates being elected despite losing
the popular vote.
Trump's
attempts to overturn the election, then, cannot be divorced from the
broader crisis of the US political system and the Democratic
establishment's subtle (but more successful!) efforts at undermining
democracy.
But
perhaps the most salient reason for the crisis is the electoral
fraud committed
by the Democratic Party establishment in recent primary campaigns.
In
2016, the Clinton campaign relied on "Super
Delegates"
and other undemocratic
maneuvers to
rig the election against her opponent: Bernie Sanders. Then, the
Democrats further undermined the general election by peddling the
conspiracy that Trump was "installed" into power by Russia.
The dirty tricks continued in the 2020 primaries, where the
establishment candidates orchestrated
a coup on
Super Tuesday to secure the nomination for Biden. This was followed
by the removal
of Green Party candidatesfrom
the ballots in several key states.
Trump's
attempts to overturn the election, then, cannot be divorced from the
broader crisis of the US political system and the Democratic
establishment's subtle (but more successful!) efforts at undermining
democracy.
Democrats
can remove Trump from office. Big Tech can ban him from their
platforms. And Trump's supporters can be arrested on domestic
terrorism charges. But these actions only address the symptoms and
leave the underlying disease unchecked.
As
long as the bipartisan neoliberal consensus remains in place,
far-right political violence and instability will continue to
fester.”
Jonathan
Rich is a PhD student in Sociology at University of California,
Riverside. He teaches at Grossmont Community College in San Diego,
and he is a member of the American Federation of Teachers local
1931.
Our
work is licensed under a Creative Co
From
Penqin books
ABOUT THE SYSTEM
From the bestselling author of Saving
Capitalism and The Common Good,
comes an urgent analysis of how the “rigged” systems of
American politics and power operate, how this status quo came to
be, and how average citizens can enact change.
Millions
of Americans have lost confidence in our political and economic
system. With the characteristic clarity and passion that has made
him a central civil voice, Robert B. Reich shows how wealth and
power have interacted to install an elite oligarchy, eviscerate the
middle class, and undermine democracy. Using Jamie Dimon, the
chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase as an example, Reich exposes how
those at the top propagate myths about meritocracy, national
competitiveness, corporate social responsibility, and the “free
market” to distract most Americans from their accumulation of
extraordinary wealth and power. They have chosen to uphold
self-serving policies that line their own pockets and benefit their
bottom line. Reich’s objective is not to foster cynicism, but
rather to demystify the system so that we might instill fundamental
change and demand that democracy works for the majority once again.
Video
of Reich discussing The System
ABOUT DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS\
Robert Reich
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of
the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
The
Nation‘s “Most Valuable Book”
“[A]
vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The
Atlantic
“This sixty-year campaign to
make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government
itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains.
. . . If you’re worried about what all this means for America’s
future, you should be.”—NPR
An explosive exposé of
the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress
voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change,
and alter the Constitution.
Behind today’s
headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive
political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The
capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who
rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of
democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement;
a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy
in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel
Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and
dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six
decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the
majority.
In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy
MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a
last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake
of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the
widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if
diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its
numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and
the rest of us.
Corporate donors and their right-wing
foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in
teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.”
And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the
social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered
Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to
carry out Buchanan’s strategy.
Without Buchanan’s
ideas and Koch’s money, the libertarian right would not have
succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a
delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause
has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx
of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state
governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan
includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything
from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many
of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique
research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling
story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory
work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the
achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
Graphic of Koch's money far-reaching network: KOCHTTOPOLUS
