Por Paul Street
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This above is a real sign, not made-up AI, that one can now see on well-kept upper middle-class lawns in bright blue Iowa City.
Which Unmentionably Capitalist MESS?
The deepening climate catastrophe and broader crisis of livable ecology of which global warming is part?
The massive racist-nativist ethnic cleansing, torture, and concentration camp program being imposed through ICE and Border Patrol?
The savage racial oppression, apartheid, and inequality that traps much of the nation’s nonwhite population in poverty and the clutches of the world’s leading mass incarceration and criminal branding system?
The brutish patriarchy and misogyny that subject women to rampant sexual assault, inferior wages, excessive work burdens, domestic violence, forced motherhood, and disrespect?
The mass-murderous imperialism that wages arch-criminal wars and slaughters civilians in Latin America and the Middle East while increasing the ever-present threat of global nuclear war?
The brutal exploitation of workers at home and (most horrifically) abroad, fueling savage inequality so extreme that the top tenth of the upper US 1% owns more wealth the nation’s bottom 90% while “fewer than 60,000 people – 0.001% of the world’s population – control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity”?
The “oligarchic”/plutocratic control of politics, policy, and society by the wealthy Few?
The looming threat of mass technical displacement, drastically heightened surveillance, military/weapons automation, and environmental destruction posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
The rise of fascism to power atop and across the United States government and in half of that nation’s states, under the cultish command of the demented, deranged, depraved, and debased, Hitler-admiring arch-narcissist and putschist Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump?
Well, here’s a harsh reality: None of these messes — ecocide, nativism, patriarchy, racism, economic exploitation, savage inequality, oligarchy/plutocracy, imperialism/militarism, reckless automation, and fascism — can be truly stopped under the anarchic and sociopathic class dictatorship that is capitalism, the profits system, which depends on the ruthless and ever-escalating exploitation of human beings and nature. Each of these messes can perhaps receive momentary partial defeats and rollbacks but none of them can be remotely eliminated under capitalism. Struggles against and around these problems should always be undertaken with this understanding and with the goal not just of momentarily alleviating a small degree of suffering and menace under the prevailing system but rather of freeing humanity and the planet from the pathology and cancer of class rule and from all exploitation and oppression.
The Dismal Weimar Dems
The Democrats may not be a fascist party, but they are a mainstream capitalist-imperialist/bourgeois party that is deeply committed to the system that has produced these messes. As such, the Democratic Party is not merely unwilling but unable to take up a meaningful permanent struggle against any of these messes. While it is not impossible that they could be pressed by events and system imperatives to move against the Trump fascist faction of the ruling and political class to some significant degree in coming days, months, and years, this is NOT what they have demonstrated to date. Enough people did what the lawn sign recommends for Dems to take back the federal executive and legislative branches in 2021 and what all-too predictably followed was a pathetic Weimarian surrender that included keeping the Hitlerian January 6 Dear Leader Mein Trumpf out of jail and lamely handing power back to the Reichmost party, the fascists, in 2024-25, leading to the horrific “mess” (to put it mildly) that is the Trump47 regime. Even if the Dems somehow regain elected office in coming years, they will never under any circumstances take up anything remotely like the struggle required to extirpate the systemic roots of fascism, a topic to which I will return in a future commentary.
“We Know Too Much By Now to Rule Out No-Limit Constitutional Nightmares”
On top of which, it should be abundantly clear that the MAGA Trump regime and party is using the considerable means at its disposal thanks to its power atop the federal government and half of the nation’s state governments to eliminate any chance that voting can halt their fascist project. In a recent chilling, must-read Washington Spectator essay, the veteran Washington insiders Mark Medish and Joel McCleary lay out ten key interrelated weapons in the Trump forces’ war on the 2026 midterm elections and previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy more broadly: “shrink the electorate;” “poison the well in advance” (“delegitimize the electoral process and thus the results in advance, just in case”); “criminalize the machinery of elections;” use domestic military force to intimidate and perhaps suspend or cancel elections; demonize and criminalize the other major party and all opponents and critics of the regime as the radical “enemy within;” provoke protests that be can be used as a pretext for declaring local and/or national emergencies; use the executive branch’s war (“commander-in-chief”) powers to interfere with elections; challenge vote counts, vote certifications, and the seating of new Congresspersons; activate super-secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) to suspend any and/or all previously normal constitutional processes; send propaganda providing fake-credible evidence justifying a coup to “the few hundreds American who hold binding authority over the events of November through early January such as county canvassing-board members, secretaries of state and their counsel, judges, the Clerk of the House.”
“In normal circumstances,” Medish and McCleary write, imagining the use of military force, martial law, and PEADs to subvert standard bourgeois electoral democracy would be to dream up “exotic and remote scenarios clearly cutting against the spirit of the Constitution and the rule of law. By now,” however:
“we know far too much about the stated intent and patterns of behavior of the chief executive to discount the risk of such no-limit constitutional nightmares… the planning assumption must now be as wide as the conduct: a president who will gamble the Persian Gulf will gamble the republic. We must be prepared for almost anything —a frightening sentence to write about one’s own government, and one we write deliberately.”
Yes, indeed. We should never forget that Trump and his openly Christian fascist “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth ordered 800-plus US military commanders that the nation’s top adversary wasn’t China, Iran, or Russia but rather “the enemy within,” meaning domestic opposition to the Trump agenda, concentrated in majority nonwhite cities whose resistance to MAGA constitutes a “war too” — a war Hegseth wants fought without quaint rules of engagement.
What was the point of Trump’s truly bizarre July 10 national television address claiming without evidence that US elections were vulnerable to foreign interference and voter fraud other than to set the stage and make an advance case for future regime moves against mid-term outcomes that don’t go Trump’s way?
“The Barbarians Are Inside the Gates”
Three days ago, Mike Johnson, the Christian Fascist on the down low Trumpist Speaker of the US House of Representatives, held a press briefing in which he preposterously claimed that the 2026 midterms are the most consequential elections in history because “the radical Left Democrats” are seeking to “turn the greatest nation in the history of the world over to communism, big government socialism…This is common sense versus communism….Rs vs. Ds and now the Ds are being taken over by communism,” Johnson intoned. “The barbarians,” Johnson added, “are now inside the gates,” claiming that “by our count there are almost 40 openly avowed Marxists, communists, socialists” on the Democratic Congression ballot this year…”a serious threat..”
Yes, and I have just signed on as the regular designated hitter for the Chicago White Sox for the remainder of the 2026 season. Here Johnson and his fascist party are wielding the fifth tool discussed in the aforementioned Washington Spectator essay: demonizing the other major establishment capitalist political party and all opponents of the regime as the radical “enemy within.” At the same time, paranoid anti-Marxism/-socialism/-communism is so critically central to fascist ideology that fascists like the top Trump advisor Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller, Trump, and Speaker Johnson feel compelled to wield it in the absence of credible evidence of a significant Marxist/socialist/communist movement.(Mamdani et al are about cheaper public transit and more affordable groceries and health care, not state ownership of the means of production followed by cultural revolution and people’s struggle to transition humanity from the dictatorship of the proletariat to emancipation from all exploitation and oppression – to communism, that is).
The Courts Can’t Keep Up
Looking for courts to save “democracy”? Look again. The New York Times reported Wednesday that “the courts cannot keep up with Trump….In cases on immigration, spending, mass firings and restructuring agencies, the administration has barreled ahead in the face of slow-moving legal challenges. If Mr. Trump loses when those lawsuits are finally resolved, it may be too late as a practical matter to undo what he has achieved.”
No shit. The Trump regime is counting on this speed difference in its war on the midterms elections. As Medish and McCleary note in the Washington Spectator: “Many of [the regimes] tactics [against the midterms} can be challenged in court—and must be—but courts may not always move promptly enough to block the damaging executive actions, undo the damage to the process, restore normalcy and prevent a stolen or failed election.”
The Trump high court’s fascist majority last week gave the regime a green light to roll out its attack on mail-in ballots in abject violation of the longstanding judicial Purcell Principle, which bans significant changes in election procedure and law close to elections.
Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).
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