The socialist alternative to ‘lesser-evil’ politics

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T didate, multi-billionaire Donald Trump, is a full- hat the leading Republican Party presidential can­ blown reactionary caricature of a capitalist politician is now the common parlance of most major media outlets. Even the relatively conservative Washington Post featured a Dec. 1 Dana Milibank column entitled, “Donald Trump Racist Bigot.”

Milibank, reflecting the general unease at Trump’s virulently racist, misogynist, and xenophobic out­ bursts, wrote: “Let’s not mince words: Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist. … There is a great imperative not to be silent in the face of demagoguery. Trump in this campaign has gone after African Americans, im­ migrants, Latinos, Asians, women, Muslims and now the disabled...

“It might be possible to explain away any one of Trump’s outrages as a mistake or a misunderstand­ ing. But at some point you’re not merely saying things that could be construed as bigoted: You are a bigot.

“It has been more than a quarter century since Trump took out ads in New York newspapers calling for the death penalty for “criminals of every age” af­ ter five black and Latino teens were implicated in the Central Park jogger case. The young men, convicted and imprisoned, were later cleared by DNA evidence and the confession of a serial rapist—and Trump called their wrongful-conviction settlement a ‘dis­ grace.’”

“Since then,” Milibank continued, “Trump led the ‘birther’ movement challenging President Obama’s standing as a natural-born American; used various vulgar expressions to refer to women; spoke of Mexi­ co sending rapists and other criminals across the bor­ der; called for rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal immigrants; had high-profile spats with promi­ nent Latino journalists and news outlets; mocked Asian accents; let stand a charge made in his pres­ ence that Obama is a Muslim and that Muslims are a ‘problem’ in America; embraced the notion of forc­ ing Muslims to register in a database; falsely claimed thousands of Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey; tweeted bogus statistics asserting that most killings of whites are done by blacks; approved of the roughing up of a black demonstrator at one of his events; and publicly mocked the [physical] move­ ments of New York Times (and former Washington Post) journalist Serge Kovaleski, who has a chronic condition limiting mobility.”

What is perhaps a bit different in today’s virtually year-round election hyperbole is the fact that virtu­ ally every one of the dozen or so Republican presi­ dential contenders have remained all but silent as 6 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2015 Virtually all of the other his noxious diatribes.

Patrick Sison / AP (Left) Nov. 7 protest outside studios where Trump appeared on “Saturday Night Live.”

Trump is the American reflec­ tion of overtly racist and neo-fas­ cist ideology— if not a conscious experiment with it. His racist rants in some instances have en­ couraged the use of violent physi­ cal attacks by his disaffected fol­ lowers, who find his scapegoating of the oppressed to their liking.

Democratic Party charade On the Democratic Party side of capitalism’s electoral charade, this ruling-class party’s lead can­ didates take the opposite tack, portraying themselves as the font of progressive values.

In their first nationally televised debate, all five of the original Democratic Party contenders, led by “socialist” Bernie Sanders and matched by Hillary Clinton, en­ thusiastically decried the “casino capitalism” of Wall Street.

Their purported vision of the future society is one in which the U.S. “returns” to the moral val­ ues of its much fantasized “small business” and “hard-working little man” roots, where prosperity awaits all who conscientiously put in the effort. References to America’s slave-labor and rob­ ber-baron origins are absent in this scenario.

Given President Obama’s significantly declining poll ratings, none of the present Democratic Party con­ tenders sought his overt political support. “Mums the word” with regard to Obama’s record of leading the nation in implementing each and every corporate assault against unions, workers, and the poor. None chose to identify with Obama’s unprecedented corpo­ rate largess in the form of multi-trillion-dollar bail­ outs to the richest sectors of the U.S. ruling class.

Rhetoric aside, Sanders’ Democratic Party voting record stands at 98 percent, while Hillary Clinton’s financial support from corporate America’s giants, as with Obama before her and Bill Clinton earlier, topped all contributions to her Republican opponents.

We might add that former Secretary of State Clinton backed to the hilt every imperialist war effort of the Obama administration from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya to today’s U.S. war efforts in Syria. Obama’s countless covert and drone wars abroad murdered millions while stuffing the coffers of the military-in­ dustrial complex at home. But virtually no comment from Bernie or Hillary!

Meanwhile, Obama’s hard-working “legacy” promot­ ers struggle today to posture the president as a keen environmental advocate, an ally of immigrant com­ munities, a champion of health care for all, a friend of the working class, a champion of democratic rights, and a man who is reluctant to send more troops to fight in the interests of U.S. imperialism.

Obama has become the media-promoted rational champion of climate science, currently partaking in the UN-sponsored Paris talks as the chief “defender” of the earth against the ravages of global warming. Yet, Obama’s administration holds the modern-day record for increasing the use of fossil fuels, opening the floodgates to corporate off-shore drilling, and maintaining the obnoxiously high government tax breaks for the leading Big Oil polluters.

Obama’s recent squelching of the infamous Keystone XL pipeline provided his administration a momentary fig leaf of credibility that immediately vanishes when contrasted to the massive increase of environmen­ tally destructive pipeline complexes in place or under construction across the country.

Obama, the “Great Deporter,” with a record two mil­ lion immigrants brutally forced out of the country to his credit, gifted $13 trillion in bailouts over the past seven years to the corporate elite. He presided over (continued on page 7, in “Republican contenders for president have remained silent as Trump spews out”)