The Crisis of the Democratic Party and the Civil War Elections
Following the debate between Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump on June 27, and just four months before the US presidential election, calls are growing in the political establishment and the media for Biden to step down as the Democratic Party candidate and perhaps even resign from office.
On Sunday, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries convened an online conference with senior committee members. It was reported that Representatives Jerry Nadler (New York Judiciary Committee), Mark Takano (California Veterans Affairs Committee), Don Beyer (Virginia Administration Committee) and Adam Smith (Washington Armed Services Committee) had called on Biden to withdraw.
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California noted on “Meet the Press” that Biden’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday “did not address concerns.” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia is assembling a group of senators with the goal of pushing Biden out of the race. The role of Schiff, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Warner, the current chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, underscores the close involvement of the intelligence community in these discussions.
Whether or not Biden drops out of the presidential race – a prospect that is becoming increasingly likely – a significant portion of the ruling class has clearly lost confidence in him.
Biden’s performance in the debate sparked these maneuvers, but there are more fundamental issues at stake. In fact, the fact that Biden’s cognitive abilities are significantly impaired has been known for some time. However, the debate fiasco made it impossible to continue to publicly deny this fact.
There are several reasons why some Democratic-aligned factions of the ruling class fear that Biden might lose a race against Trump.
First of all, there are the consequences for US foreign policy. This week, the heads of state of the NATO powers are meeting in Washington to plan the next escalation stage in the war against Russia, including preparing to directly send thousands of NATO soldiers. The large number of “CIA Democrats” who act as direct agents of the military and intelligence apparatus in Congress distrust Trump and fear that his unpredictable foreign policy could thwart the well-advanced war plans of American imperialism in Ukraine and in the Middle and Far East.
Biden has emphasized this theme in his defense speeches as the Democratic candidate. He boasted to Stephanopoulos: “I am the man who built NATO, the future. Nobody thought I could expand it. I am the man who stopped Putin. Nobody thought that could happen. I am the man who set up a South Pacific initiative with the AUKUS military alliance.”
A second and even more fundamental consideration of the ruling class concerns the consequences of a Trump victory for the social and political stability of the United States.
The Supreme Court’s decision last week in Trump against the United States declared the president immune from prosecution for any crime committed under the guise of an “official” act. This not only legitimizes Trump’s January 6 coup, it also places the president above the law and turns the head of government and “commander in chief” into a dictator.
As the judges who dissented in this case themselves noted, the ruling grants immunity for all presidential activities, from assassinating political opponents to carrying out a military coup. This unprecedented decision heralds a collapse of the constitutional provisions governing the entire state-federal structure of the country.
The WSWS analyzed the Supreme Court ruling and called it the counterrevolution of July 1, 2024, noting: “The occupant of the White House is surrounded by a permanent state of dictatorial rule, comparable to the authority that the fascist states of the last century concentrated in Mussolini and Hitler.”
The ruling effectively suspended the Constitution and the core democratic principles of the American Revolution and Civil War, and exacerbated the highly unstable social and political conditions in the United States. Sections of the ruling class are aware that Trump’s rise to power under these conditions will fuel explosive social discontent and a process of irreversible political radicalization.
While the media largely refrained from reporting on the verdict, the well-known historian Sean Wilentz of Princeton University wrote in New York Book Reviewunderlined its far-reaching significance. The decision, wrote Wilentz,
radically changed the structure of American government and paved the way for MAGA authoritarianism, just as the Taney Court attempted to pave the way for the entrenchment of the slave power. All of this makes Trump against the United States The Dr Scott Of our time.
Dred Scott is a reference to the 1857 Supreme Court ruling by Chief Justice Roger Taney that cemented the “slave power” and made civil war virtually inevitable. Even though Wilentz doesn’t say so explicitly, the implications are clear: The United States is on the brink of another civil war.
It is not just because of Trump’s character or the particular composition of the Supreme Court, which has made a series of deeply reactionary decisions that undermine core democratic principles. It is the culmination of a decades-long process that has accelerated over the past quarter century.
At the time of the 2000 election fraud, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North wrote in a lecture entitled “Lessons from History: The 2000 Election and the New ‘Indomitable Conflict’” that a Supreme Court decision to award Bush the election would demonstrate “how far the American ruling class is willing to break with traditional bourgeois democratic and constitutional norms.” North asked:
Is the government willing to sanction election fraud and voter suppression and bring to the White House a candidate who obtained that office through blatantly illegal and undemocratic methods?
A significant portion of the bourgeoisie and perhaps even a majority of the US Supreme Court are prepared to do so. There is a dramatic decline in support for traditional forms of bourgeois democracy within the ruling elites in the United States.
Nine days later, the Supreme Court majority issued its infamous Bush vs. Gore Decision, electoral fraud, and transfer of power to Bush, which Gore and the Democratic Party accepted. The 2000 election was followed by a never-ending and escalating attack on democratic rights, among both Democrats and Republicans, which included unlimited surveillance of the country, the endorsement of torture as state policy, indefinite detention without due process, and drone assassinations, including of US citizens.
There are two fundamental objective causes underlying the collapse of democratic forms of government: 1) never-ending and escalating wars and 2) the extreme growth of social inequality.
The 2000 election was followed by the “war on terror,” which included the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq under Bush and a series of wars throughout the Middle East under Obama, which has now escalated into an open conflict between the NATO powers and Russia. The Biden administration and American imperialism have fully supported the genocide in Gaza, which, according to a report released on Friday in The Lancethas led to the deaths of about 186,000 people, or almost 8 percent of the total population.
The capitalist oligarchy controls the entire state apparatus, which represents a permanent conspiracy against the interests of the vast majority of the population, the working class. Media commentary on Biden’s fate constantly refers to the “donors,” that is, the corporate and financial oligarchs who pump billions of dollars into the campaign coffers of both Democrats and Republicans. It is taken for granted that the final decision will be made by the handful of billionaires who finance the election campaigns of both capitalist parties.
Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joseph Kishore commented on the deepening crisis of American democracy on X:
For the working class, the crucial question is how to intervene in the crisis with its own program. Democracy cannot be preserved within the framework of capitalism. The defense and expansion of democratic rights requires the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchs, an end to the dictatorship of the corporate and financial elite, the establishment of a workers’ state in the United States and internationally, and the socialist transformation of social and economic life.
On July 24 World Socialist Website and the Socialist Equality Party will be holding a demonstration and rally in Washington DC aimed at building a working class movement against imperialism and capitalism and in defense of democratic rights. We urge our readers and supporters to plan their participation and help organize the demonstration by filling out the form below.
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