Given the Decline, Where Next?

Published at 17:47 on 23 January 2023

So, given the advanced state of democratic decline in the USA, where next? What is the way out?

It is obvious that a political class which does essentially nothing about a coup attempt that is more serious than the one that happened at Munich in 1923 stands atop a political edifice so thoroughly rotten that it will probably soon collapse of its own weight. The inevitability of such a democratic collapse can be understood even more when one considers that the Beer Hall Putsch, despite its far less serious nature, was treated far more seriously by the Weimar Republic (see previous link) than the USA has treated the 2021 putsch at the Capitol, yet the Weimar response to the 1923 putsch is now almost universally seen in retrospect as having been insufficiently robust. Future historians will doubtless struggle to explain today’s American political elite, and how they could be so feckless in response to such clear signs of danger.

Since change cannot come from within, it must come from without. Reform being impossible, the only choice will be revolution. Such it has always been: societies that have revolutions tend to have them as a result of having become failed societies.

The coming revolution will of necessity have a bourgeois character. The radical left is simply too small, and too politically ineffective, and the vast majority too ignorant, for it to be any other way. In today’s USA, the principle that one should have a society of laws and not of men is in and of itself a radical notion that the status quo is incapable of accommodating, and therefore it will be this general precept that motivates the coming revolution.

What should the response of those of us on the radical left be?

First, the response should not be to dismiss the revolution as useless or irrelevant. It will offer a very real hope of substantial improvement, even though the degree of immediate improvement will fall short of what we would like to see. In fact, it’s the only thing that can offer such hope, there being no possible alternate revolution. A bourgeois democracy is a far better environment in which to struggle for a better world than a fascist dictatorship. The perfect must not be allowed to become the enemy of the distinctly better.

Second, it was capitalism that got us into this mess. This should become the watchword of the radical left. We should say this phrase over and over until people become sick of hearing it. It was capitalism that created a society in awe of capitalists like Trump, and preached that the authoritarianism of the capitalist was a virtue. It was capitalism that built the media empires that degraded dialog to soundbites and kept the public stupid and indoctrinated. It was capitalism that created a political process so grotesquely beholden to wealth. It was capitalism that led the attack on the unions that created such inequality and resentment amongst blue collar workers. And so on.

Capitalism was, after all, the cause. The masses may simply want democracy, but unless, to paraphrase W.D. Haywood, we push back, pull out, or break off the fangs of capitalism, we cannot have lasting democracy. Capitalism was the midwife of fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain and Chile. It almost was the midwife of fascism in the USA once already, and will soon be again. Capitalism is an enemy of democracy. Make that sufficiently clear and there will be a chance for real change to start happening.

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