BY ED FELIEN
I think it’s worth it.
It’s a gamble and it will probably end badly. But I like the idea of Bernie and Elizabeth in the Senate and Keith and Tulsi in the House. I want to support their leadership. Hillary can have the presidency if we can set the domestic agenda in Congress.
That means, of course, that we’re all part of the antiwar movement immediately after the election.
Right now we are part of the Popular Front against Fascism. But we know how that ended last time. As soon as the Fascists and Nazis were defeated, The Popular Front, the collection of socialist and bourgeois liberal parties, began to split apart. The liberals united with the reactionaries and blocked the left. The political leaders of the American bourgeois class (led by Prescott Bush, Averell Harriman, Allen and John Foster Dulles) set the foreign policy. They started the anti-communism of the Cold War in post World War II America to defend the property rights of American colonials in foreign lands. They overthrew the elected government in Guatemala in 1954 and ushered in 50 years of military dictatorship that committed genocide against the native Mayan people.
The Old Left had made a bargain with the ruling class. The unions agreed to cooperate in an anti-communist foreign policy, but they should have known that would inevitably lead to an anti-communist domestic policy and to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and that meant that left-wing labor unions like United Electrical would get purged from the AFL-CIO.
The New Left was anti-imperialist and occasionally Marxist. It was wildly popular in the Sixties and Seventies until they eliminated the draft. Then everybody thought the New Left was dead, and then Bernie ran for President, and a sleeping giant rose up. And Bernie spoke for millions and a new generation.
We will join the Popular Front against Fascism knowing we will be betrayed. We know they will look for an opportunity to do us in. But we know we can get some things done. Working people made good progress after World War II: the G I Bill, highway construction, union protection. We’re hoping for something like that again. But we know as soon as the liberals see our backside, they’ll put a knife in it.
And that’s the optimistic version.
The pessimistic version of the unfolding saga of the 2016 election cycle is that Trump could turn it into the Apocalypse.
Trump has said he might not honor the results of the election. He has also said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” What if he did that? What if the person he shot was Hillary Clinton, or Bill DeBlasio, or Andrew Cuomo? Would the NYPD support Trump? The FBI warned in 2006 that municipal police departments have been thoroughly infiltrated by neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Would they be loyal to Trump or to the rule of law? Three white supremacist terrorists in Liberal, Kan., were planning a bloodbath to indiscriminately murder their Somali neighbors, until they were exposed by an angry ex-girlfriend. How many more groups are there out there like them? How well organized are they? Are we prepared for civil war? What would we do when the Minneapolis police cooperated with ICE and rounded up Latinos to send them down to Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s detention camps in Maricopa County? What would we do when Black Lives Matter activists started getting rounded up and detained indefinitely? What would we do when antiwar protestors got detained because their protests were a threat to public order?
We know the dawn of Nov. 9 will bring a new crisis. We don’t know which one and we don’t know how severe. We know the history that brought us to this point. We are calm. We have our eyes wide open.
