A watershed election for U.S. ruling class

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Below are major excerpts from Lynn Henderson’s article. Readers can find the full text at www.socialistaction.org. T concluded with the improbable he 2016 presidential election election of real estate billionaire and reality show celebrity Donald Trump. In this historic 2016 election the dual parties of U.S. capitalism ended up presenting the American electorate with the choice between two individu­ als who were universally recognized as the most unpopular, distrusted can­ didates in the history of U.S. presiden­ tial politics. How did this happen? Was it just a fluke? Was it just the acciden­ tal luck of the draw?

A large army of professional media commentators, pundits, and political gurus continue to struggle mightily to explain the election and ponder its re­ sults. Initially, the best they could do was to comment that “people were an­ gry.” While true, this was hardly an ad­ equate explanation. People have been angry for quite some time now. Con­ tinued anger alone is an insufficient explanation.

The American “middle-class” (a more accurate label would be “working class”) have seen their standard of liv­ ing and future prospects not only stag­ nate but steadily decline for well over three decades. Until recently, most hoped—and half convinced them­ selves that this situation was tempo­ rary—that there would be a reversal in this long downturn for the “middle class” and a re­ turn to more “normal” times.

This election cycle, however, was faced with a dra­ matic new shift in sentiment. In the main, the “middle-class” concluded that the steady deterioration in their prospects was not temporary but permanent. Not the function of some recurring business cycle, which would eventually be reversed, but rather something much more sweeping and fundamental.

And increasingly, they correctly concluded that the existing political parties and the entire body of politi­ cians that make them up, not only had no solutions, but no desire or self-interest in challenging this. They also knew, of course, that not everybody was hurt­ ing. Under the joint leadership and policies of both these capitalist parties, the “one percent” has been doing fabulously well, even outstripping in concen­ trated wealth the fabled “one percent” of the notori­ ous “Gilded Age.” This then was the reality in which the nation’s two party system approached the 2016 presidential elections.

Despite all this, in smug and blind confidence, these two parties then marched ahead with their original plans to present the U.S. electorate with the “demo­ cratic” privilege of choosing between another Bush and another Clinton as the nation’s 45th president. Their arrogance stunned much of the American elec­ torate and opened the door for the improbable can­ didacies of two “outsiders” with no real support in the official two-party system. One was the billionaire reality TV host Donald Trump, the other a self-pro­ claimed “socialist” Bernie Sanders. Their candidacies were universally written off with derision and ridi­ cule by all the political experts and commentators.

Donald Trump became the official candidate of the Republican Party, and Bernie Sanders came within a hair’s breadth of being the Democratic Party candi­ date despite an organized conspiracy by virtually the entire Democratic National Committee to secretly smear and sabotage his candidacy in favor of their anointed, Hillary Clinton.

The seemingly bizarre unfolding of the 2016 presi­ dential election is not the product of some unfathom­ able accident or fluke. On one hand, much of the U.S.

6 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 2017 middle-class/working class, for the first time, lost all confidence in the ability of either wing of America’s two-party monopoly to address and reverse their long decline. In their desperate search for some alter­ native, we had the completely unforeseen emergence of the Trump and Sanders candidacies. But even more fundamentally, the election represents the confused, disruptive reaction of America’s ruling elite to the painful ending of an almost century-long era of U.S. global domination.

The present two party system and its political ac­ tors have been thrown into complete disarray by this new reality. Whatever name they may have used in the past to describe it—“American Exceptionalism”— “Leader of the Free World”—they certainly never contemplated its demise. Despite their growing con­ fusion and deepening internal dissent, the U.S. ruling elite are determined that the costs of this new reality will be borne not by them but by America’s increas­ ingly hard pressed middle class/working class. U.S. middle-class and the American century The mass U.S. middle class of today is a relatively recent development. It was primarily created through World War II and its aftermath. Prior to that, what was then called the middle class was a much smaller and narrower phenomenon consisting primarily of professionals, small businessmen, managers, etc.

The United States won WWII. It won WWII big. It won WWII not just against the Axis powers but against its own allies as well. With the exception of the United States, the entire capitalist world came out of WWII in a shambles. Europe’s industrial plants were destroyed or in decay, its working classes were reduced, dispersed, and demoralized, its political structures in turmoil, and its national economies for the most part flat broke.

But the United States, on the other hand, came out of WWII immeasurably stronger in every way than when it entered the war. U.S. industrial capacity had dramatically expanded, incorporating all the new technologies in manufacturing, electronics, chemi­ cals, etc., developed during the war. The U.S. working class was intact with better skills and education than prior to the war. The U.S. was politically, militarily and drawing by dvdgroup.deviantart.com financially the completely domi­ nant capitalist nation in the world.

The war ushered in what Time/ Life founder and publisher Henry Luce, triumphantly proclaimed as the coming “American Century.”

The usual laws of capitalist interna­ tional competition were temporar­ ily in suspension. The dollar, freed from any monetary gold backing, was enthroned as the reserve cur­ rency for the entire capitalist world replacing the pound sterling. This gave the dollar and U.S. capital­ ism a uniquely advantageous po­ sition—the exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign bills in its own currency, which it could just print.

This status lasted for decades. But not for a century.

This utterly unique and yet pre­ dictably unsustainable hegemony provided U.S. capitalism with the opportunity for an extended peri­ od of prosperity and astoundingly large profits. Faced with a strong trade-union movement which had emerged out of the “Great Depres­ sion,” U.S. capitalism concluded that its best course was to concede some wage concessions where nec­ essary, rather than disrupt the im­ mense profit opportunities avail­ able to them by avoidable class conflicts. For now there were big­ ger fish to fry.

But this new era provided for more than just a general rise in wages. To take maximum advan­ tage of these unique opportunities required a more skilled and educated workforce. For the first time, university and college education was made available and affordable to large sections of the working class through the GI Bill and other subsidies. Between 1944 and 1971 the U.S. government spent $95 billion on the G.I. Bill. The general prosperity created in this era also sustained a new consumer economy, primarily benefiting but not entirely lim­ ited to the white working class. This was marked by increased home ownership, widespread automobile ownership, leisure time activities, etc.

Continued class struggle While this unique period of prosperity allowed for some tactical concessions to America’s middle-class/ working class it did not mean the class struggle was suspended. U.S. capitalism also used the combination of post WWII prosperity and its long reactionary cold war with the Soviet Union to housebreak the Ameri­ can labor movement. Through red baiting, the Taft Hartley Act, and support for “right-to-work” legisla­ tion, they cleansed the labor movement of the class-struggle radicals who were central to revitalizing the union movement coming out of the 1930s.

They were able to reshape the trade-union leader­ ship into a conservatized bureaucracy utterly tied to the capitalist two-party system, converting it into little more than an adjunct to the Democratic Party. Because the Democratic Party was never a working-class party, it never initiated unions. However, once unions were formed, the Democrats became quite good at absorbing them into their political machines.

To their immense advantage they also used their world hegemony to create a series of international institutions, which were utterly dominated and con­ trolled by U.S. capitalism. Among these was the al­ ready mentioned reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar. Equally important was the World Bank, the In­ ternational Monetary Fund, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union.

With the inevitable reemergence of intense inter­ national capitalist competition, the hegemony of the “American Century” began to come to an end. How (continued on page 7)

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has U.S. capitalism responded to this new global reality? For one, in response to growing global competition in manufacturing, it shifted its prof­ it-making focus. It concluded that the quickest, largest, and easiest profits were now to be made not in the making and selling of products, but in the so-called financial sector. Between 1973 and 1985, the U.S. financial sector accounted for about 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In the 1990s, it ranged from 21 percent to 30 per­ cent. In the recent decades, it soared to as high as 41 percent of all U.S. domestic corporate profits.

With the closing of this long post-WWII prosper­ ity, U.S. capitalism also returned to the unavoid­ able necessity to cut wages and working condi­ tions for the U.S. middle-class/working class. One typically revealing example as documented by Stephanie Coontz in her excellent article: “Why the White Working Class Ditched Clinton—be­ tween 1947 and 1979, real wages for an average meatpacking worker, adjusted for inflation, in­ creased by around 80 percent, reaching almost $40,000-per-year, a salary that could support a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. But between 1979 and 2012 the average meat packer’s wage declined by nearly 30 percent, to about $27,000.

Also the need to quickly upgrade the education­ al level of the domestic workforce was no longer required or “cost effective” for U.S. capitalism. Policies were put in place to return affordable college and university training to the province of the relatively wealthy.

As U.S. hegemony began to weaken, the interna­ tional institutions it created and dominated since the close of WWII began to unravel. Despite U.S. capitalism’s increasingly frantic attempts to shore them up, this unraveling has significantly impaired their former ability to direct and control events. Last June’s “Brexit” vote by Britain, one of U.S. imperial­ ism’s most loyal and reliable postwar allies, to leave the European Union was almost as big a shock then as the November Trump election was later on. … Political damage inflicted by 2016 campaign For the ruling elite of U.S. capitalism there has been no more essential and valuable political institution than its stable two party monopoly. This has been true for more than 150 years, ever since the smash­ ing of the slavocracy in America’s great Civil War. But even prior to the election popular confidence in both the Democratic and Republican parties were at all time historical lows. The election itself has now re­ sulted in a further dramatic deterioration.

On one hand, the Republican Party is captured by an extreme right-wing, rogue billionaire, an open rac­ ist, who brags about his successful sexual assaults on women, banning individuals from entering the country on the basis of their religious affiliation, and among other things, promises to launch a global-wide trade war.

The ruling class itself sees Trump as a loose cannon, dangerous and unstable—the kind of president that in this threatening new era for U.S. capitalism, dem­ onstrates every potential for making things dramati­ cally worse. For the first time in history every ma­ jor newspaper in the nation opposed his candidacy. Yet despite the overwhelming opposition within its ranks, the U.S. capitalist class was unable to stop his On the other hand, decade after decade of “lesser evil” politics made it easy to shift its entire two-party monopoly further and further to the right. But this also has a downside for the U.S. capitalist class. The Democratic wing of their dual party system became less and less able to even demagogically present itself as a populist party posing to defend middle-class/ working-class Americans from an ever more auster­ ity-driven capitalism.

The term “populism” even becomes pejorative among liberal commentators and Democratic Party functionaries. The Hillary Clinton candidacy was the perfect reflection of this right-wing evolution. The “super” capitalist Trump successfully claims to speak for an increasingly desperate blue-collar work­ ing class as the “change” candidate—“Make America Great Again.” Hillary spoke for the status quo—with her campaign theme of portraying America as “Still Great.”

The unchecked and un-checkable rightward evolu­ tion of the Democratic Party is reflected not only in the candidate but its entire electoral strategy. Espe­ cially after Trump’s capture of the Republican Party, the Democrats embraced a strategy built around a superficial turn to “diversity,” while promoting their pro-business policies in an attempt to win votes in traditional Republican bases in the white suburbs.

New York’s Wall Street Senator Charles Schumer, who more and more emerges as the chief political strategist and spokesperson for the Democrats, pre­ dicted: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

In addition, no other potential Democratic Party candidate was more closely tied to the disastrous re­ sults of “lesser-evil” politics than Hillary Clinton. She was an enthusiastic supporter of the Clinton adminis­ tration’s 1994 $30 billion crime bill that created doz­ ens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sen­ tences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces.

In her full throated support of the legislation, as Michelle Alexander documented in “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” she used racially coded rhetoric to cast Black children as ani­ mals. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.” By the time Bill Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Hillary supported the Clinton administration wel­ fare-reform legislation, which under the slogan of “ending welfare as we know it,” shredded the fed­ eral safety net for poor families. The legislation also barred undocumented immigrants from licensed pro­ fessions, and initially slashed overall public welfare funding by $54 billion. As late as 2008 she continued to defend the legislation as a success. She also sup­ ported bank deregulation during the Clinton adminis­ tration and the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act.

Her most famous political act was her vote as Sena­ tor for the Iraq war. As the disastrous results of that war became more and more obvious she attempted to take her distance from it by claiming she was deceived by faulty intelligence. However, this did not prevent her continued attraction for an aggressive policy of military-imposed regime change. She enthusiastically supported the Libya military adventure, with again disastrous results. She then became the most vocal proponent for a “no fly zone” in Syria, which like the “no fly zone” originally declared in Iraq, would have been nothing less than a conscious precursor to yet another regime-change war.

The 2016 election and the Trump presidency pose a dangerous threat to two opposite and opposing con­ stituencies, on one side the U.S. capitalist class, on the other side America’s middle-class/working class. For the U.S. capitalist class the immediate question be­ comes how best to spin the election to insulate their two-party system from the disastrous results and at the same time restore some level of confidence in the Democratic and Republican parties.

Their solution was the launching of a massive pro­ paganda campaign absolving their two-party monop­ oly from any responsibility in the bizarre unfolding of the election and the dangerous Trump victory. The Trump success, they wish to assure us, is not because of any fundamental failings on the part of the Demo­ Pat Eaton / AP cratic and Republican parties or U.S. capitalism or even Trump’s inept electoral opponent Hillary Clin­ ton. Rather, we are to believe the Trump victory is the product of a diabolical, foreign conspiracy engineered by the evil Russians. The prominent, liberal, New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, even seriously pro­ claims, in a word play on the 1962 conspiratorial and reactionary film The Manchurian Candidate, that Trump is the “Siberian” candidate.

During the campaign the organization WikiLeaks released a series of documents damaging to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Among these were speeches Clinton gave to Wall Street fund-raising groups, the text of which she re­ peatedly refused to make public. In one she tried to assure her Wall Street backers not to worry about statements she might have to make on the campaign trail because, as a politician, you: “need both a public and a private position.” In another speech to wealthy campaign donors she wrote off working-class voters attracted to Trump’s promise of change as “… the bas­ ket of deplorables. They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”

DNC documents also released by WikiLeaks revealed that the committee staff through scheduling, secret smears, and other maneuvers had been engaged in a conspiracy to sabotage the Sanders campaign in fa­ vor of Clinton. As a result, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign her position as chair of the DNC. A few weeks later, her replacement, Donna Brazile, also had to resign when other WikiLeaks documents showed she had secretly provided debate questions to the Clinton campaign prior to at least some of the Clinton-Sanders primary debates. CNN also had no choice but to fire Brazile from her lucrative and valu­ able position as a Democratic political commentator as her stunningly unethical activities were revealed.

No one challenges the authenticity and accuracy of these damning WikiLeaks documents. But the increas­ ingly frantic campaign charging Russia with hijacking the U.S. election wants to pretend their authenticity is irrelevant. Pay no attention, they say, to Clinton’s secret speeches, to the actions of Wasserman, Brazile, and others. Rather, focus on the claim that WikiLeaks obtained these documents from Russian hackers.

That said, WikiLeaks denies their source was Russia. U.S. intelligence officials back up the claim of a Rus­ sian source “with high confidence.” WikiLeaks past re­ cord for veracity is excellent, for the U.S. intelligence community, not so much. It wasn’t that long ago that U.S. intelligence guaranteed the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a “slam dunk.” In real­ ity, the dispute over the WikiLeaks source is an irrel­ evant “red herring.” The undisputed authenticity and accuracy of the WikiLeaks documents, and what they reveal, are not irrelevant.

The most cynical aspect of this entire campaign is the portrayal of the U.S. as an innocent victim of un­ precedented foreign interference in the election. A Dec. 23, 2016, article in the Washington Post by Lind­ sey A. O’Rourke documents that since 1947 the U.S. has tried to change other nations’ governments 72 times. Sixty-six times by covert actions, six by overt means. The article reports that 26 of the covert ac­ tions succeeded; apparently, all six of the overt ac­ tions were successful.

Often when U.S. intelligence services meddle in for­ eign elections it doesn’t hack—it murders. In 1963 the CIA organized a coup against their supposed South Vietnam ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem, in which he was killed. In 1973 the CIA organized a coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in which he was killed. In truth no (continued on page 9, in “Leon Trotsky’s 1917 stay in New York City”)

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The super-capitalist Trump successfully claimed to speak for the blue-collar working class, while Hillary Clinton spoke for the status quo.