{"id":291519,"date":"2017-01-24T15:32:01","date_gmt":"2017-01-24T14:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/dawn-of-the-resistance\/"},"modified":"2017-01-24T15:32:01","modified_gmt":"2017-01-24T14:32:01","slug":"dawn-of-the-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/dawn-of-the-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"Dawn of the Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

As someone once said, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its boots on. In the 2016 presidential election, right-wing billionaire Donald Trump\u2019s lies may have carried him as far as the White House, but with this past weekend\u2019s global Women\u2019s March on Washington the truth put its marching boots on.<\/p>\n

The mass outpouring of opposition to the Trump presidency was a remarkable and unprecedented global event. Certainly the liberal gloom prevailing in the United States since Trump\u2019s victory was given a much-needed jolt of spiritual fortitude. From Washington, D.C. to Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City, Portland, and across Europe, Australia and elsewhere millions of women and men sent the message that the reactionary, authoritarian dreams of an ultra-wealthy capitalist and his cabinet of generals and billionaires will be resisted. The message of January 21 was clear, loud, and uncompromising: women\u2019s rights and human rights will be defended.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The moment cries out for new political leadership, for grassroots working-class activism, and for a way out of the stagnant swamp of the corporate two-party system.”<\/p>\n

There is deep popular opposition to the legitimacy of a presidency occupied by this toxic, twittering\u00a0human smokestack of polluted right-wing demagoguery. Indeed,\u00a0Trump faces widespread antipathy for his racist border wall plan, proposed Muslim registry, and planned attacks on health care rights. His history of demeaning women as some sort of patriarchal birthright, coupled with an entitled silver spoon mentality that he thinks gives him free rein to insult, threaten, and bully anyone who challenges him, evoke for many only public revulsion. For many Trump is now perceived\u00a0as the ultimate concierge of corrupt capitalism, a man whose economic orientation in office will translate into\u00a0angling for every possible \u201cdeal\u201d to further enrich the super-wealthy corporate class.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unlike former president Obama or candidate Clinton, many tens of millions of ordinary Americans are not asking everyone to give Trump a chance or wishing him \u201csuccess.\u201d They\u2019re not talking about how as Americans we\u2019re \u201call on the same team.\u201d Nor are they clamoring to assist Trump\u2019s advisory Strategic and Policy Forum on economic issues, as many of\u00a0Clinton\u2019s most influential corporate supporters<\/a>\u00a0are doing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We have to \u201cthrow sand in the gears of everything,\u201d instead declares Frances Moore Lappe in a recent\u00a0Nation<\/a><\/em>\u00a0essay. Good idea. That means escalating the defiance, escalating the resistance, stoking the fires of mass protest everywhere they smolder. The moment cries out for new political leadership, for grassroots working-class activism, and for a way out of the stagnant swamp of the corporate two-party system.<\/p>\n

Night of the Living Election Cycle\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

If there is one positive consequence of the Trump presidency, it is that it signals the birth of a new era of grassroots activism and mass social protest. Where it will go remains to be seen, but when masses of people are in motion everything is possible. But what is also possible is that the very same Democratic Party \u201copposition\u201d that set the stage for Trump\u2019s victory will limit the Anti-Trump Resistance to the goal of merely reinstalling the same-old, same-old Obama-Clinton brand of neoliberal corporate politics in the next elections.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is indeed the thinking at the top of the Democratic Party.\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t think people want a new direction,\u201d\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0newly selected House minority leader Nancy Pelosi\u00a0(D-CA)\u00a0after the election. As she explained, \u201cWhen President Clinton was elected, Republicans came in big in the next election. When President Bush was president, we came in big in the subsequent election. When President Obama became president, the Republicans came in big in the next election.\u201d<\/p>\n

“The gates to right-wing authoritarianism are now thrust wide open with Trump\u2019s election.”<\/p>\n

Talk about Night of the Living Election Cycle! What an exhaustingly lifeless view of the dynamics of social and political change.\u00a0This is a vision that reduces American politics to an eternal tug of war between elite Republicans and Democrats, that can\u2019t see beyond the glare of Beltway politics, and stands mute before society\u2019s historic challenges. But what should we expect from a Democratic National Committee (DNC) that apparently feared Vermont Senator\u2019s Bernie Sanders reformist version of \u201csocialism\u201d more than Trump, who were more interested in anointing Clinton party nominee than even allowing a fair primary in their own party?\u00a0<\/p>\n

This DNC scenario for opposing Trump could signal short-term victories for the Democrats, in two or four years, but also a longer-term slide into even more threatening versions of right-wing \u201cpopulist\u201d authoritarianism. The problem now for the clueless Pelosi and company is this: Without political leadership that can genuinely challenge all the attendant evils of neoliberal capitalism, some far right-wing \u201cstrongman\u201d of one kind or another could very likely dominate, define, or otherwise play a major role in U.S. politics for the indeterminate future. For the gates to right-wing authoritarianism are now thrust wide open with Trump\u2019s election. They will be hard to close if the only alternative is one version or another of corporate neoliberal politics in power.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The larger question that lingers over the political landscape is why exactly\u00a0the worst major party candidate in years\u2014a vulgar, chauvinistic, thin-skinned, impulsive, lying right-wing incompetent (there\u2019s more!)\u2014had even the most remote chance of winning the presidency? Obviously, Clinton\u2019s tepid center-right politics offered little to inspire American voters. Even more Clinton was seen by many voters as the tired continuation of a quarter century of the Democratic Party\u2019s contribution to deteriorating working-class living standards.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The more astute among Clinton\u2019s supporters understand this. In a\u00a0column<\/a>\u00a0just prior to the election, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich reminds us that Democratic presidents have been in power for 16 of the last 24 years, controlling both houses of the U.S. Congress for four of those years. These were years characterized by political accommodation to a growing concentration of corporate power and wealth in the United States. Indeed, as Reich notes, both presidents Clinton and Obama failed in any meaningful way to halt the long-term decline in working-class jobs, wages, and benefits. Instead they promoted free trade agreements that accelerated the loss of manufacturing jobs, while offering displaced blue-collar workers, who once earned union wages, little in return. Nor did either do much of anything to protect the democratic right to unionize, under assault, despite campaign propaganda to the contrary. Consequently, union membership dropped from\u00a022 percent<\/a>\u00a0of all workers in the early years of the Clinton administration to less than 12 percent today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for all those celebratory Facebook memes liberals like to post about how unemployment declined under Obama,\u00a0Reich acknowledges in a Facebook\u00a0commentary<\/a>\u00a0(Dec. 2<\/span>) that the current official 4.6% unemployment rate is essentially meaningless. \u201cCounting everyone who would prefer to work, a more accurate measure would be closer to 10 percent real unemployment,\u201d he says. Here\u2019s something else to note. The\u00a0overwhelming bulk of the new jobs created in the last decade fall under the category of what a recent Harvard-Princeton\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0describes as \u201calternative work arrangements,\u201d a euphemism for temp workers, part-time employees, and contractors (without benefits).\u00a0These have been invariably low or modest-paying jobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tellingly, early in his first term Obama rejected advisory proposals for a far more ambitious economic stimulus initiative, lest he fail to appease right-wing Congressional Republicans. \u201cObama\u2019s cautiousness, however, proved to be his undoing,\u201d\u00a0observed<\/a>\u00a0Walden Bello, analyst for Focus on the Global South, back in 2012. \u201cThe $787 stimulus compromise created what would become Obama\u2019s \u2018Bridge too Far\u2019: it was enough to prevent the situation from getting worse but not enough to trigger a healthy recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the great political capital Obama rode into office, with majority Democratic support in Congress in his first two years, there would be no confrontation with Wall Street or their Republican defenders. There would be no attempt to emulate even the limited jobs programs of the New Deal era. Nor would much be done to adequately rescue foreclosed homeowners. The nation\u2019s first Black president would prove himself in the end to be just another compromising politician content to play around the edges of the status quo. He was the man who kept Wall Street from the people\u2019s pitchforks, as he himself once admitted, but finally couldn\u2019t keep a racist billionaire from storming the gates of power to plant his upper-class boots on the desk in the oval office.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What to make of all this? \u201cThe unsurprising result has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class,\u201d concludes Reich of Clinton and Obama\u2019s impotence before the historic trend of advancing corporate power. \u201cThat created an opening for demagoguery, in the form of Trump. Donald Trump has poisoned America, but he didn\u2019t do it alone. He had help from opportunists in the GOP, the media and at the highest reaches of the Democratic Party.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, Democratic administrations were not entirely responsible for the quarter-century decline of working-class living standards. Give credit also to the Republicans under George W. Bush\u2019s two-term presidency. But that\u2019s the point. The relentless corporate neoliberal assault on the living standards of American workers is the result of\u00a0bipartisan\u00a0policies. No matter which major party is in power, the concentration of growing corporate wealth and wealth inequality continues its dystopian march forward.<\/p>\n

Circumscribed Politics, Dulled Imaginations\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The circumscribed nature of bipartisan politics, feet planted firmly in the slop and muck of the status quo, has a way of dulling the social imagination, making it difficult for many to even imagine what significant or even revolutionary social progress might look like.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The relentless corporate neoliberal assault on the living standards of American workers is the result of\u00a0bipartisan\u00a0policies.”<\/p>\n

Imagine if Obama as president had used his political power to fight for a vision of a new, single-payer public health system to guarantee every person\u2019s right to health care? If such a system were now in place, with free public access at the point of care, how many ordinary Americans would have rushed to support a Republican know-nothing\u2019s \u201cplan\u201d to return to a full-out for-profit system that turns human health into just another exploitable commodity? How many now would be complaining about the injustice of removing private insurance companies and investors from the health care system? Or, for that matter, complaining about rising premiums under the complicated mess of the Affordable Care Act?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Imagine if the president had in 2009 declared his intent to create a new federal jobs program to put many tens of millions of unemployed Americans to work, rebuilding the nation\u2019s infrastructure at union wages? Or if the nation\u2019s leader had actually walked picket lines with workers under siege, such as in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011, as Obama once promised to do during his first presidential bid? Imagine if he had provided decisive financial relief to the millions of distressed homeowners at risk of losing their homes because of unfair banking mortgage practices? Or if the president had pledged to fight for a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, using his White House pulpit to encourage grass-roots organizing for higher wages among all private sector workers?\u00a0<\/p>\n

What if the president had used the power of his office to resist a political climate where private corporations can routinely threaten to move to cheaper labor markets if they don\u2019t get every damn tax break they want from state and local legislators? Imagine if Obama had used his office to educate and mobilize mass public resistance to this sociopathic example of the \u201ccost of doing business\u201d under capitalism?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Imagine also instead of bombing seven countries, organizing global military drone assassinations, and vigorously persecuting whistleblowers who expose war crimes, the president had declared his intention to close U.S. military bases across the world, to end the era of U.S. imperial global military power, and to earmark military expenditures for expanded social programs to benefit working people?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Such vision might sound like pie in the sky, but at this historic juncture isn\u2019t it even more utopian to believe peace, social justice, and democracy is possible within the narrow limits of pro-capitalist politics? Of course, no individual president alone could implement such far-reaching social change simply by taking office. It will take independent social and political action, rooted in popular mass struggles, to ever decisively defeat Wall Street capitalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Utopian? Maybe. But is it less utopian to imagine Sanders and his progressive supporters taking over a thoroughly corporatized Democratic Party, revamping the party along the lines of the Senator\u2019s more or less social democratic platform? More to the point: Is it less utopian to imagine a just, democratic society under a reformed, kinder and gentler version of capitalism, as Sanders envisions?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Considering that the Democratic Party has never actually been a working-class party (except in rhetoric), coupled with the entrenched, stagnant force of the corporatized party leadership, Sanders\u2019 Our Revolution organization faces a decidedly uphill and most likely impossible battle. Admittedly, it\u2019s long been hard for many to even imagine a mass third party\u2014a labor or socialist party\u2014emerging in the United Sates. But is there another option that offers a way forward? Isn\u2019t it time now to initiate a wide-ranging popular discussion of these issues among the grassroots anti-Trump resistance?<\/p>\n

Resist the Darkness<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Writing for the\u00a0Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal\u00a0<\/em>(affiliated with Green Left Weekly) in Australia, U.S. socialist Barry Sheppard describes Trump as a\u00a0\u201cwould be Bonaparte,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0a cunning manipulator whose political power left unchecked threatens to move into outright authoritarian rule. This is a distinct possibility. Yet, paradoxically, there would have been no justice or progress either in Clinton\u2019s election. The latter conclusion speaks to the stone-hard reality that U.S. democracy is now more form than content, a wobbly propped-up fa\u00e7ade hiding class contradictions, social inequality, and dominant corporate power. This is capitalism in the modern age. The rights of people will never be secure as long as these contradictions remain unresolved and the power of capital unabated.<\/p>\n

“Trump is the barbarian who is now no longer at the gate.”<\/p>\n

As for Trump, if he were a fictional film character created by Orson Welles or Oliver Stone to satirize modern politics, the critics would probably say he was too crude a caricature, too broadly drawn, a vulgar, cartoonish exaggeration of the modern political personality. But Trump is all too real. He is the barbarian who is now no longer at the gate. Not that barbarism is anything new in this world of ours. But in the United States it is coming home to roost now in a new way.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe lights are going out and the time to wake up from this nightmare is today,\u201d declared scholar\u00a0Henry Giroux<\/a>\u00a0in the days following the election. \u201cForget depression, look ahead, get energized, read, build alternative public spheres, become guerrilla fighters. There are no guarantees in politics, but there is no politics that matters without hope, that is, educated hope.\u201d\u00a0There are indeed grounds for such hope, educated and resilient and determined to fight on. We saw such hope in brilliant display this past weekend on the world\u2019s streets, led by determined, visionary women.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Think about it. Eight billionaires (five of them U.S. citizens) own as much wealth as half the world. Is that a social system that makes sense, or serves democracy? The overwhelming majority of the people are not capitalists or elitists. They are not privileged. They are ordinary people and they work for a living. Yet they are also extraordinary. Because they are the majority. They have no intrinsic interest in taking over the world or starting wars, exploiting others or using violence to protect their privileges. They also hold the key to the survival of human society, if it is to survive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his 1967 Riverside Church\u00a0speech<\/a>\u00a0opposing the Vietnam War, \u201cWhen machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.\u201d In that speech King also called his own government \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world.\u201d It was an assessment that remains essentially as true today as it was 50 years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a sense, the global Women\u2019s March on Washington represents an almost primal assertion of the people\u2019s democratic spirit, rising from roots deeply planted in the culture and psyche of millions.\u00a0The weekend protests were a profound reminder that there is one thing the world\u2019s elites\u00a0can never take away\u2014the power of the majority to change the world. If you think this is just some Pollyannaish stab at optimism in a dark time, you are welcome to your cynicism. But history is made by those who refuse to accept social oppression and injustice, who resist adversity at all costs, and who keep fighting for justice until they\u2019ve swept away every obstacle to the realization of the age-old dream of a world without war, economic exploitation, and social classes. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Via Common Dreams<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As someone once said, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its boots on. In the 2016 presidential election, right-wing billionaire Donald Trump\u2019s lies may have carried him as far as the White House, but with this past weekend\u2019s global Women\u2019s March on Washington the truth put its marching boots […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-291519","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}