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Bolivia Has Won. Will Trump Win Too?
It seems that Elon Musk has lost the election in Bolivia:
Even Morales’ nemesis, the rightwing interim president, Jeanine Áñez, conceded the left had come out on top. “We do not yet have the official count, but the data we do have shows that Mr Arce [has] … won the election. I congratulate the winners and ask them to govern thinking of Bolivia and of democracy,” Áñez tweeted.
Congratulation to the Movimiento al Socialismo, its candidate Luis Arce and the people of Bolivia who withstood the onslaught of intimidation and violence from the right and the military. Even as democracy is now restored in Bolivia it would be wrong to let the right and the military get away with what they have done. They will otherwise try to do it again. The coup leaders should be hauled in front of a court. Bolivia should ask Venezuela for advice on how to coup proof its military forces.
As the U.S. regime change operation in Caracas has failed, Washington will now revert to other measures to dispose of the leaders of that country. Sanctions for this or that bullshit reason are just around the corner. Bolivia must integrate itself with other socialist and 'resistance' nations and seek autonomy from imperialist imports.
Now onto the other election that is on peoples' mind.
While most polls show that Joe Biden will win the U.S. election my gut is telling me that Donald Trump will have a second term. The election might well become a repeat of 2016 when Trump won even though most media had predicted that Hillary Clinton would win.
There are two main reasons for this. The local ground game and enthusiasm for the candidates.
The Democrats have neglected the ground game. Their get out the vote efforts seem minimal. Meanwhile the Republicans are going from door to door and have registered large number of voters:
Republican registration has ticked up in key states at the same time Democratic field operations were in hibernation. Democratic turnout is surging in the early vote. But it’s unclear whether it will be enough to overcome an expected rush of ballots that Republicans, leerier of mail voting, will cast in person on Election Day.
There is uncertainty about the accuracy of polling in certain swing states, the efficacy of GOP voter suppression efforts and even the number of mail-in ballots that for one reason or another will be disqualified.
Biden has collected more donations than Trump but money can only buy him advertisement. Trump gets media attention for free due to the constant outrage the Democrats project on him.
The second reason for predicting a Trump win is the enthusiasm of his supporters. Video shows thousands of people standing at the streets to wave at a passing Trump convoy in California. Meanwhile Biden goes out to read from giant teleprompters to empty parking lots.
While Trump will be campaigning all week Biden decided to stay at home to prepare for the next debate. How can he defend himself against the serious corruption accusations that his son's emails seem to support?
The Democrats under Biden have shunned the progressive policies who brought the most enthusiasm to the primaries. Everyone presumes that the center-right Biden is just a stand in who will be removed soon to be replaced by the center-right Kamala Harris. Harris has been Hillary Clinton's choice since at least mid 2017. During the primaries she never polled higher than 2%. Politically she is not an attractive candidate.
The other people behind the Biden/Harris campaigns are just the same warmongers who wreaked havoc all over the world during the Obama administration.
Max Abrahms @MaxAbrahms – 22:14 UTC · Oct 18, 2020
I’m expecting America to get needlessly involved in more conflicts in the name of democracy, freedom, credibility, resolve & leadership. Just listen to folks like Michèle Flournoy, Mayor Pete, Susan Rice. Non-intervention has been branded as a Putin gift. We live in stupid times.
Patrick Porter @PatPorter76 · 5h
I'm skeptical of whether a Biden presidency will significantly draw down US military presence in ME. As well as the general forces that favour inertia, there will always be more pressing things for a new Democrat president to do.
Trump has botched the response to the pandemic. But would a Democratic president have done better against the resistance of many states against harsher control measures? The reasons the U.S. was hit so hard are in my view ingrained in its society. A different president would have prepared somewhat better but the outcome would likely not have been much different.
On most domestic issues Trump is only slightly to the right of a Biden/Harris administration. His foreign policy is less warmongering but more chaotic than a Democratic administration would likely be. That makes him in total more preferable to me.
That does not mean that I would vote for Trump. If I had a vote in the upcoming election it would likely go to where it does the least harm – to some third party candidate who argues for more peaceful and more socialist policies.
Posted by: _K_C_ | Oct 20 2020 6:20 utc | 150
OK, I just read this analysis of the likely situation around the election, repeating the link here:
Preparing for Electoral Unrest and a Right-Wing Power Grab – An Analysis
In my view, this is the best analysis of the situation and the possible and probable actions of the various conflicting parties that I’ve seen so far. This is the document that should be thoroughly discussed here by anyone interested in considering what the outcomes of this election might be and how they might be obtained. The author, by the way, is Peter Gelderloos, who has a short Wikipedia entry here. I’m not familiar with any of his previous work. He was arrested in Spain during a protest with which he had little to do, according to this Washington Times article. Regardless, I find his analysis in this article compelling.
Some points the author makes:
1) He assesses that a military coup is not likely and that the military are likely to stand down:
They will prefer to view any unrest arising in the sensitive period of an election as a civic demand for a properly functioning democracy that obeys its own rules. An uprising, in their eyes, will be when the crowds decide to kick out their current rulers by any means necessary.
However, he does assess a military intervention against civic unrest as a possibility:
In the most violent scenario, the military take action in the streets to squelch an incipient civil war and restore the constitutional order, which in effect would mean defending the prerogative of the courts and legislatures to decide a contested election (a legal contest Trump has an advantage in). This action would set a dangerous precedent and most of the casualties would be radicals and people on the far left. However, it is unlikely that this would change the military and political culture enough for Trump to stay in power beyond the legally limited eight years. We might recall that the military has been used against the US population multiple times over the last half century without changing the constitutional order.
2) He assesses fascist movements, militias and “lone wolves” are a bigger threat, which can escalate the civil unrest without necessarily being confronted by the military as compared to the anti-racist movement because, frankly, blacks and minorities have less legitimacy in the eyes of the government system.
3) The police will be a problem (duh):
Results will vary from city to city. In some places, police brutality will pacify the movement, but elsewhere it will provoke more people to come out into the streets, or to move from protest to revolt. In general, police will help create an impasse that cannot be resolved by police action alone.
4) Trump will likely use the Customs and Border Patrol and the DHS as his weapons on the street, as he has already:
Going beyond his authoritarian personality to questions of strategy, Trump is most intelligent—and this is one of the few regards in which that word can be applied to him—at working the media spectacle. His recipe for victory has always relied on having an extremely motivated base, even though that base has always been a minority. Unleashing extreme police violence against the anti-racist movement is guaranteed crowd pleaser for his voters, especially the millions of cops who will see the repressive campaigns as an inspiring call of duty, a nod to the paramilitary mobilizations that resolve the crisis of whiteness, as I describe in Diagnostic of the Future.
5) The capitalists in charge don’t like Trump, but the situation may cause them to swing either way:
The capitalists who support the right-wing populism that has taken hold in several of the world’s most powerful countries are a small minority. Most capitalists, especially those who are significantly higher up the ladder than mid-grade investors and real estate developers, are strongly opposed to a second Trump term.
However, they know they can profit under either president, and the global capitalist economy is currently in a situation that favors short-term strategies, due to the grave uncertainties around long-term growth. Far from being a president who has increased government interventionism, Trump has represented a politics of extreme deregulation that has provided a windfall to capitalists in extractive and financial industries.
6)
The Republican Party is attempting to win the election through legal, semi-legal, and extralegal means. Donald Trump is not preparing a coup attempt in any traditional understanding of the term. This needs to be emphasized so we can prepare effective strategies for November and beyond. In the previous section, we have seen the fruits of an effectively deployed anti-fascist strategy. Every strategy has its advantages and disadvantages, and one of the risks of focusing chiefly on fighting fascism is that it can reinforce democracy—and with it, capitalism and the state.
Stealing elections is how democracy works. It’s how it has always worked. If you legitimize a monopoly on coercive force and authority by claiming to represent the will of the people, then obviously subsequent power struggles will focus on defining which people constitute “the People,” giving a bullhorn to the ones in your camp and silencing the others. When we discuss the specific ways the Republicans are planning to steal this election, let’s not encourage the ahistorical naïveté that this is somehow shocking or unprecedented.
7) I find this view of Trump compelling:
As a real estate magnate, Trump prefers and understands the battlefield of lawsuits and legal loopholes. It is also abundantly clear that Trump is a cowardly person, and though flirting with a fascist fan base stokes his authoritarian ego, in questions of policy he avoids open conflict and militaristic disputes.
And this:
Trump is probably too much of an amoral opportunist to be understood as an ideologue, but he is undoubtedly an enthusiastic white supremacist—and as such, he has been instrumental to an ideological shift in the Republican Party from genteel good ol’ boys to avowed white nationalists like Stephen Miller. These are both modes of reactionary white supremacists (as opposed to the progressive white supremacists of the Democratic Party), but Trump’s violating of taboos has enabled white nationalists to gain ground and move in the open. One of the ways they are doing this is to encourage white militias and spread the conspiracy theory that the left wants to start a civil war, so that when the right carries out paramilitary actions, they can pretend to be victims acting in self-defense.
As to the above, I can testify that a lot of the gun and prepper Youtubers I follow are definitely in the camp of “the left is going to start a civil war, we need to be prepared. Get your armor plate carrier and AR-15 ready!”
8) He assesses that this is not uncommon in US history:
An article in the Intercept argues that Trump is enacting a fascistic pattern, starting out by calling attention to an external danger—immigrants—and then turning on an internal enemy, antifascists and anarchists. While this is certainly true, what his team is aiming for is a common occurrence in US history, contrary to the progressives who see Trump as an aberration. We can call it patrician democracy: the longstanding, classical idea that only the “right sort” of people ought to vote, including their loyal dependents if necessary.
9) The Democrats push for mail-in voting will be a God-send to the Republican Party vote-disenfranchise efforts. I hadn’t bother thinking about that, except for Trump’s tweets about “vote fraud”, but he’s probably right. Due to the numbers of votes thrown out, he assesses that “The Democrats have voluntarily created a situation in which they have to win battleground states by margins of 2-5%.”
10) It’s the Democrats who are the biggest threat because of their historic duplicity with regards to “progressive” movements:
Democrats will do everything they can to foreclose all these possible connections. By calling for a peaceful protest movement, they will attempt to leave people exposed to far-right attacks and police violence, and they will blame anarchists for the disturbances, leaving us exposed to repression and vigilante attacks. If things go poorly for them, they may try to blame anarchists for giving Trump another four years, and they will spend those years trying to discipline social movements and impose authoritarian control over the ideas and practices of anti-racism, climate activism, housing struggle, and other points of mobilization…The significant growth of authoritarian left groups under the umbrella of anti-fascism only facilitates this trend, as authoritarian leftists, in such moments, tend to attack anarchists and the anti-authoritarian left, lining up in a facile popular front with the forces of moderation.
Remember, it was not the far right that finally tamped down the George Floyd rebellion or the Ferguson uprising in 2014. It was the left, working in an unbroken chain from the center to the activist margin.
To pull a victory out of this election, the Democrats probably have to win back the Senate—which will give them a decisive advantage in the final stage for resolving electoral disputes—but this only matters so much. They have already made abundantly clear their support for the police and antagonism to social movements. Whatever happens, democracy will not resolve its crisis of legitimacy. Society will remain polarized.
11) He expects the Democrats to win the popular vote, and if the unrest is bad enough, the Supreme Court might back them in order to restore stability.
Bottom line: I’d like everyone to read the whole thing and tell us your take here. Hopefully it will be a more fruitful discussion than “Trump bad” vs “Trump good.”
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Oct 20 2020 9:50 utc | 163
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