Gilbert announced her exit from the State Department by email. She explained that she was leaving because the administration lied and continues to lie in its official findings about whether zionists are deliberately obstructing the flow of food and aid into Gaza. The regime’s control over its personnel and the narrative is slipping drastically. Not only is the public no longer convinced, but even the regime’s own stalwarts have rejected its narrative. Josh Paul, the first official to resign from the government, warned that “[T]here are other resignations pending in the near future from officials with similar concerns in their own areas of work.”

USAID is often used as a cover for the most cynical and depraved U.S. spycraft. The State Department carries the sword and shield of U.S. imperial foreign policy all over the world. For members of these departments and agencies to publicly throw up their hands and depart from their own government over the degree of hypocrisy now being exhibited by the bloodthirsty war planners and politicos in Washington is a high-water mark for the weakness of the current administration.

Biden’s support among fellow Democrats and the public has collapsed. We warned earlier this year that the Democrats were so afraid of public opinion that they would attempt to crown Biden in a fait accomplis ceremony at the DNC Convention. They have lived down to our expectations: the Democrats are not even going to nominate him at the convention. They’ll do it by zoom call, beforehand. The official justification the DNC is giving is that, if they don’t nominate their candidates prior to Ohio’s August 7 ballot deadline, he won’t appear on the Ohio presidential ballot. We can speculate about their real reasons. Perhaps they want to forestall massive protests in Chicago and a potential outbreak of violence when the people, long lied to about the weight their voice carries in politics, make themselves heard.

When the zionist genocide began, the White House was dragged along with it. Today, we can no longer say that is the case. Biden himself is personally culpable, not only as a passive bystander, but as an active architect. As this becomes more and more clear to more and more people, all but the cruelest and most heartless of political hacks must abandon him. This isn’t international political inertia — it’s the forging of a new, even more right-wing Democratic Party. From all evidence, the Biden clique’s plan is to out-fascist the right.

We must do more than sit and wait to watch the fireworks of public opinion when the Biden clique seizes the nomination this summer. We must be prepared for Chicago; the voice of the people, muzzled for so long, must sound in the halls of privilege.

Onward, to revolution!

War. Pollution. Famine. Death.

The Biden-Harris campaign website doesn’t have a single policy on it. Go and look. It urges you to donate, and nothing more. “Why should we tell you what our policies are?” they ask, their dead eyes mocking. “You know what our policies are: we’re not Trump.”

The political horizons of the Democratic Party have narrowed down to a single point. Once the party of “progressive” labor and struggles for racial recognition, the Democrats have jettisoned the last of their betrayed allies and have adopted a blank and stony face. They refuse to make the case for their administration, because they are no longer capable of doing so. As their policies and inaction increasingly alienate and repulse the masses, the only people still arguing on behalf of the Democratic Party are the so-called socialist parties of the United States Empire: the Democratic Socialists of America and CPUSA.

Why is this the case? Surely, there must have been a time when the Democratic Party had something to offer someone other than their ruling-class donors?

There was.

To understand what’s become of the Democrats, and why they have increasingly tacked toward war abroad and law and order at home, you have to understand the history of the 20th century from the point of view of the ruling class. Of course, we’re told one story — the one that we all learn in high school history — but the truth is quite something else.

The story we learn is one about Roosevelt and the New Deal, the incredible progressive dream of equality and freedom for all. We’re told that basically only racists opposed the New Deal programs, that FDR brought about an era of prosperity never-before-seen by the United States, and that he “saved” the country from the Great Depression. This isn’t just the story told by the Democrats, it’s also the one told by the so-called Communists of the U.S. The problem is, none of it is true.

The New Deal With the Devil

To understand the limits of the Democratic Party, we need to begin with the historical composition of the so-called Democratic coalition and how the party realigned at the beginning of the 1930s. Labor unrest had rocked the young settler-republic: in 1877, workers established the brief but influential St. Louis Commune during the 1877 General Strike; nine years later,  in 1886, the Haymarket Affair shook the country. In 1894, the Pullman Strike affected the railroads country-wide. The Coal Wars saw brutal repression of strikers by government troops and Pinkerton agents. In 1919, what came to be called the Red Summer reached  near revolutionary fervor in the major cities, spurred primarily by class consciousness in the Black Belt and returning Black soldiers amidst the shadow of World War I. Acts of white supremacist terror and lynchings, meant to maintain the status quo, were confronted with fierce resistance from Black communities. Hundreds died. Nascent Black liberation movements, such as the African Blood Brotherhood were born from the ashes. This was followed by the 1921 Tulsa Massacre in Greenwood as white supremacist capitalism asserted itself over the wealthiest Black neighborhood in America by razing it and killing between 75 and 300 people.

In the face of this labor agitation came the Great Depression. The threat of the final and total overthrow of the capitalist order loomed large as the world capitalist economy melted down and threw twelve million people out of work. The capitalists scrambled to craft a policy reply to the crisis. It finally came in the form of European style social democracy. Thus was born the New Deal. In the words of conservative think-tank the Hoover Institute, the revolution never came because the “man in the White House co-opted the left.”

But the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression. For white workers (and European workers aspiring to whiteness), it mitigated the worst harms of the economic collapse that we call the Great Depression, but it was only the outbreak of World War II that stopped the bleeding. Communists in the CPUSA went from accurately assessing FDR as a kind of fascist at the beginning of the ‘30s to openly embracing him by the end of the decade. In the process, they abandoned the revolutionary struggle and contented themselves with economic gains for the working class. The New Deal became the basis of an unsteady alliance between the officers of organized labor — the AFL and other unions, primarily — and the old Democratic party machine.

Government control of the centralized war production industry supercharged the U.S. economy and helped propel the settler-republic into the position of world hegemon. The U.S. stayed out of World War II as long as it could, letting the older empires slug out the fight, hoping that the USSR would be debilitated by their conflict with fascism. As a result, the ruined capitalist world was dominated in the post-war period by the U.S. Control over the complicated machinery of empire meant the U.S. imperial managers could funnel profits back into the domestic U.S. market — and keep funding the social democratic project FDR had promised.

“The traditional colonialist powers represented by Britain, France, Holland and Belgium labored heavily under the War burdens, while Germany, Italy and Japan labored heavily under the burdens of defeat, a situation that enabled U.S. capital to extend and penetrate into all these countries through the reconstruction process,” wrote the Marxist-Leninist People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine in its 1968 analysis of the world-imperialist bloc.

Breakdown

President Carter repudiated the deal between the Democrats and organized labor as the U.S. economy stalled and stagnated in the 1970s. This tack to the right was fully realized by Bill Clinton and the “Third Way” Democrats of the 1990s. The Clintonite period is where we get the term neoliberalism. Like neoconservativism, neoliberalism was a rejection of the traditional left-wing policies the Democrats embraced between 1932 and 1970.

It’s easy to call policies neoliberal, but what does it mean? In content, neoliberalism is the shifting of state-sponsored programs into private hands so they can make a profit. The U.S. Empire never developed a strong welfare state like Europe — despite Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to do so, the security state and the military industrial complex demanded too much money and attention. Instead, it was always somewhat neoliberal, relying on private corporations to recognize their interests in forestalling revolutionary consciousness. These corporations invested in pensions, healthcare, programs, etc. for their employees… until Carter signaled the Democrats’ willingness to turn on their one-time partners, the officers and bureaucrats of the labor unions.

Between Carter and Clinton, the Republican Party became the main vehicle for ruling-class action. Having repudiated the old progressive deal, the Democrats no longer had anything to offer the ruling class in terms of mass mobilization. Carter and Clinton, the bookends to Democratic control, were both indistinguishable from Republicans in their economic policy; Clinton, in fact, ran to the right of former CIA director H.W. Bush in 1992 on almost every economic issue.

The Obama Administration, despite its pretensions to restoring the voided social contract of the 1950s and 1960s, increased the party’s commitment to neoliberalism and the degradation of unions. A financial catastrophe comparable to the stock market crash of 1929 put the Obama White House in a position quite similar to that of the FDR White House. However, since 1929, there had been major developments in the state’s repressive machinery. No one was afraid of labor unrest or a looming revolution; the Occupy movement was easily disarmed and countered. What was the answer of the 21st century Democratic Party to the New Deal? FDR provided relief to the working class. Obama provided relief to the owning class.

To prevent total economic meltdown, the federal government infused the economy with new money; it “bailed out” banks. Not one of the criminal bankers responsible for the crisis was ever held accountable. The banking system itself was put on life support as federal regulators eased restrictions on lending that have remained in this “foot on the gas” position until this very day. Interest rates were cut, reserve requirements were overturned, and the U.S. (and thus the global) economy was puffed up on “aid” while still remaining fundamentally unsound.

Bidenomics and the Working Class

The economy is unsound because the rate of profit is in decline. Despite its sharp recovery after the life-support system installed by the Obama regime, it once again began to tumble and continues to fall to this day. This is the law of capitalism: the concentration of capital leads to declining rates of profit worldwide.

In the chart above, we can see the sharp spike in the rate of profit when the U.S. destruction of the Soviet Union brought markets back into the capitalist world, but even with this shot in the arm, the rate of profit continues to fall over time.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the rate of profit was appreciably higher than it is today.  The rate of profit began to decline in the middle 1960s. It was at this time that the social-democratic program of the Democrats gave way to Carter in the early 1970s, and the breakup of union power with the failed Chrysler strike and culminating in the PATCO strike of the air traffic controllers. PATCO — the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization — was a trade union operating from 1968 until it was decertified in 1981. Just like the railroad workers that Biden forced back to work, PATCO demanded a shorter work-week to increase safety. Carter instructed the Federal Aviation Agency not to give in to the demand to provoke a strike he knew was in the offing. Reagan took up Carter’s torch and, even though he had supported PATCO vocally during his election campaign, he followed the ruling-class line shared by Democrats and Republicans: the PATCO strike was declared illegal and the union was decertified.

The fact is that, as of Biden’s assumption of power, the progressive potential of the Democratic Party has been completely exhausted. The chair of the party is Jaime Harrison, a “former” lobbyist for the Podesta Group where he represented Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Berkshire Hathaway, numerous pharmaceutical corporations, and Walmart. The main funding arm of the Democratic Party is run by the board member of a CIA cut-out, the National Democratic Institute, which often works with the infamous National Endowment for Democracy to instigate regime change in socialist or nationalist countries in order to make them palatable to American business interests.

This leads us to the Bidenomics of today: massive debt relief and loan programs for private businesses while the working class see only the steep climb of inflation. Prices have climbed 20% since the 2020 implementation of Biden’s relief plan for the rich. Wages have risen, but only roughly 10% in that time. That means every dollar in 2024 can buy what 80 cents could buy in 2020 — a devaluation that is now almost the equivalent of having robbed every working person in the United States of a quarter of their income. Getting paid an additional 10 cents on the dollar doesn’t make that much better.

There is no appetite among the Democratic Party’s ruling class supporters to budgeon any economic issue. We have seen Biden break rail strikes even when the rail workers repeatedly warned that the health and safety of the entire country was on the line. His administration is only interested in offering relief to one class: the ruling class. Since 2020, the concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires has increased 70%. This is under Biden’s watch.

What about social issues? These, too, have been surrendered by the Democrats. The Biden regime has failed to codify abortion at the federal level, failed to protect trans rights, which are under assault in the right-reactionary stronghold states of the South, failed to even try to hold the police accountable for violence doled out on oppressed communities (he’s worked hard to increase police funding and presence in the wake of George Floyd’s death), failed to stop the creeping entrenchment of crisis-fascism amongst the Republicans, and failed to step down from an aggressive, hawkish foreign policy that sees all countries and all realms of the earth as the prerogative of the U.S. Empire’s intervention.

There Is Nothing Left

The last of the progressive elements in the Democratic Party were sacrificed to the profit drive long ago. Social democrats are merely chum in the water for fascist retrenchment. Today, they serve as seductive sheepdogs, struggling to lead the working people away from the realization that the entire system is corrupt.

The bargain is a raw one!

For too long, we have been induced to trade our economic freedom in exchange for economic security. Now, even the lure of security has been taken away. All that remains is the threatened cudgel of Trump. For this, it is clear, the Democrats love him. Oh, not the rank and file, not the Democratic voter, for whom Trump is the expression of every foul and carnal urge, but for the Democratic politician there could be no more effective whip to mobilize those disaffected portions of their former electorate.

“We have nothing to offer you. Don’t look for us to offer you anything other than this: we aren’t Trump.”

That’s not enough, Mr. Biden. We must not stand by and allow the Democrats to bully us into another unholy bargain. We must stand up against them.

To be clear, my certainty was not based on any notion that the Democratic Party would choose a candidate for whom I could, in good conscience, vote. Any belief I may have once had in either the Democratic Party or in “lesser evil” politics vanished long ago. On the contrary, my decision to wait out the 2024 election cycle came from a growing sense that the Left, such as it is in the U.S., was incapable of a presidential campaign that would be worth an ounce of my energy. The 2020 Howie Hawkins Green Party campaign left a bitter taste, and confirmed my belief that an awful lot of otherwise good people who advocate for an independent Left political party are thoroughly out of touch with working and poor people — so much so that the presidential election has become for them a sort of escape valve, a place to promote their ideas, with no responsibility to organize locally around them.

Naturally, the announcement of an independent presidential run by one of this country’s foremost Black intellectuals grabbed my attention and captured my imagination. Several of Dr. West’s subsequent interviews did more: made me believe that he understands something critically important about where we stand in history.

Anyone who sees and listens to the world around them should be able to see and hear the level of discontent and desperation that so many people feel, as well as the deep cynicism and disgust they feel toward the existing political parties and the entire realm of public affairs in this country.

The moment of hope and sense of at least temporary relief many experienced with the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 only made the reality of this administration so much more horrible. If you were encouraged by a presidential candidate who invoked the memory of George Floyd, a Black man publicly lynched by police, how could you not feel nauseous when, once in office, that same president spent billions putting thousands more police on the street? If you felt relieved that the Democrats had at last come to understand the urgency of rapid climate change in November 2020, in the few years since you have certainly shaken with rage as Biden ushers in new drillings and pipelines and giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. If you had deplored Trump’s militarism and believed that at least “our” government was reorienting to diplomacy, how could you not be sickened by the Democrats allocating billions of dollars to fund a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, while promoting and gearing up for a new cold war against China?

The sudden entry of a widely respected voice like Dr. West’s into the cacophony of what has come to pass for political discourse in this country naturally compels attention. No matter the how or the why or the how well, it is certain that Dr. West’s run, his contribution to political discourse, stands to bring clarity on a wide range of political issues to millions of working-poor people, and might very well spark a consciousness-raising that in turn inspires a genuine working-class movement for a better world.

Dr. West is criticized by some people on the Left because he has supported and even campaigned for Democrats in the past, from Jesse Jackson to Bill Bradley to Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders. So it is important to hear him now when he declares that there are two major parties and political forces in the U.S. One is the neo-fascist Republican Party. The other is what Dr. West refers to as the “milquetoast neoliberal” Democratic Party. And a significant part of Dr. West’s motivation for running for president in 2024 is simply this: neoliberalism cannot forestall the triumph of fascism. If the Democrats refuse to articulate a compelling working and poor people’s agenda, millions in the U.S. will turn or acquiesce to a fascist government — no matter which party dominates it.

There is much, much more to say about the Democratic Party — including that its owners, the ruling capitalist class, keep it on a short leash, using it precisely to restrain the emergence of an independent working-class movement that combines organized labor with campaigns against oppression and imperialism. Some of it Dr. West says and some of it he does not say, or does not say clearly. But that is another discussion.

Dr. West is successfully articulating that only a broad, multi-racial, working-class movement can stave off the rise of fascism — as well as combat existential issues like rapid climate change and the U.S. war machine. Dr. West grasps this essential fact, and has the unique ability to explain it to millions of people who feel this reality in their bones, but do not yet have the words to express it.

2024 could be a turning point in U.S. history. It could be the year that millions of people rally around a political campaign that prioritizes radical demands for social equality, that recognizes and validates the experiences of oppressed people who want control over their own bodies, their own communities, and their own destinies. It could be the year that millions rally around a political agenda that reflects the interests of working-poor people — socialized housing, healthcare, and education; the right to organize in unions; world peace; a habitable future for our planet — and unconditionally puts those interests front and center.

Dr. Cornel West is not a messiah. He does not have all the answers. He will not — certainly not by himself — embody every change we need. In many respects, he is only a very eloquent figurehead. But he has appeared on the scene at a time, and in a manner, and with a message that could light a spark. And that spark, fanned by social movements into a flame, might grow into a fire that even fascism cannot extinguish.

Republished with revisions from the author’s blog, Tell No Lies. Claim No Easy Victories… We thank the author for his kind open-ended offer of republication.