American election
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As in Georgia, people are waiting for hours to vote in Ohio. A quarter mile line.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/ohio-us-election-voter-suppression
One reason for early polling figures to be record high are the concerns on mail-in voting and the reduction in polling stations. Some forecast chaos on November 3 hence some are taking no chances.
All polls agree that Biden will win and have margins far above those mistaken ones that wrongly gave Clinton in 2016 a win.
Some observers still have questions about the Electoral College but it looks like that Biden has the numbers too in the core states.
We will then see if Chomsky et al are correct and the liberals and progressives mobilises to push Biden left and that he will shift and not follow history’s precedent and break promises and water down proposals
Will there be mass M4A and GND marches? And just what is lesser evil strategy…do as we want or we will support for next president ….errr…somebody less awful and much nicer …someone like Sanders again…who will prevail unlike Sanders…is that is the recipe of success for the left?
Already informed guesses about Biden appointees is that they will be ex-Obama conservatives and definitely not any the radicals.
Did Chomsky really say that that’s what should happen — vote Biden and then put pressure on him to adopt “progressive” policies? I didn’t think he was that bad or politically ignorant.
In his reply to your article in the Lesser Awful he said that voting Biden was just a costless gesture. The test would have been whether he would be prepared to stand in a queue for an hour or so to do it. He probably doesn’t need to as presumably he lives in Massachusetts where there is no chance of the members of Electoral College from there being delegated to vote for Trump. He just wants voters in swing states to do that.
It is the repeat message of 2016 that he gave to Green Party supporters…in safe states vote with your conscience but in the swing states vote Hillary.
This year he is a signatory of an open letter
“So, it comes down to this. Dump Trump, Then Battle Biden…And then get on with building grassroots movements for ongoing fundamental change.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/09/23/open-letter-dump-trump-then-battle-biden
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<i>”For the left, politics is activism, daily. .. if it is, does so, and the goes back to work.”</i>
I think he does a typo…and it should read “..he goes back to work” or “then goes back to work”, i.e. activism
Maybe i am putting the words of others such as the Justice Democrats into Chomsky’s mouth
But he tell The Intercept:
“Failure to vote for Biden in this election in a swing state amounts to voting for Trump. Takes one vote away from the opposition, same as adding one vote to Trump. So, if you decide you want to vote for the destruction of organized human life on Earth. . . then do it openly. . . . But that’s the meaning of ‘Never Biden’”.
And to think you call me a catastrophist, ALB!!!
Thanks. You’ve convinced me. He is that bad. Just a common or garden left wing poseur who came up with a dodgy theory of language and wrote boring books on US foreign policy. Ok, he did write one decent book about manufacturing consent.
The case made for pushing Biden left with Lincoln and FDR as precedents.
“.Bernie’s ideas have outlived his campaign; coupled with the deeply disruptive impact of the pandemic, they have pushed candidate Biden further to the left than any of us might have thought possible…A vote for Joe Biden will deal the deadliest blow against Trumpism, authoritarianism, racism, and reaction. Our second obligation is to organize social movements that will force President Biden and a Democratic Congress to take long overdue steps toward fundamental social and economic reform…”
And the optimism of a stronger left Democratic Party
https://inthesetimes.com/article/justice-democrats-2020-squad-house-movement-election
“…This progressive upsurge has pressured other Democratic elected officials to adopt more left-leaning positions…Joe Biden is running on a more left-wing platform than Clinton did just four years ago, including more extensive public funding for healthcare and climate change mitigation.”
The counter-argument
A Biden victory would reinforce the belief that winning over “moderate” Democrats and Republicans is the way to win elections.
If Biden loses, it would send the message that the DNC party machine who delivered Clinton and Biden are not the right people to be picking the candidates. So Chomsky and the other liberals really need Biden to lose if they want increase the opportunity of the left Democrats to influence the Party to the Left.
That last paragraph is not your view I hope ! We know from the Corbyn experiment here that you don’t win elections — and that’s the primary if not the only aim of capitalist political parties— if you have a candidate considered extreme. If Sanders had been the Democrat’s candidate Trump would probably walk it.
Capitalist political machines know how to win elections. Generally speaking they know what they are doing. It’s the leftwing progressives and reformists who don’t. And even if they sometimes win we know that the operation of capitalism is going to impose its priorities in the end and their government will fail to deliver on its promises and programme.
We should leave capitalist politicians do their dirty vote-catching work without trying to second guess them. It’s not our concern anyway. Capitalist politics is a side show that can sometimes provide us with some amusement perhaps but nothing else.
Actually the polls show that Sanders had a better chance of victory against Trump than either Clinton and Biden. Here one example
He had more popularity in the rust states that Trump won from the Democrats which gave him his victory because unlike Clinton, Sanders was and still is against NAFTA. Sanders was very protectionist.
He was not viewed as part of Wall St. and part of the reason many workers went for Trump was his false claim that he was financially independent of the corporations. Sanders was also viewed as independent of Wall St influence. Many Sanders supporters jumped to Trump when he lost to Clinton in the nominations for that reason.
The real weakness of Sanders was not that he would not have won, but as President with a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, he would have been unable to effectively implement any policies. And would be a one-term president unable to achieve anything.
If Sanders had been the nominee, the question would be, what would the media do? We have evidence that they were already biased against his campaign, would that have been maintained in Sanders V. Trump contest? We saw our own media manage to transform the adulatory chants of Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury to cynicism, by promoting the views of Labour rebels. (i see Starmer has many rebels on the spycops bill but the media isn’t making that a big leadership issue for him.) I suppose the US media could have discredited Sanders, but is the Biden-friendly Democrat media, having success at alienating the Trump support?
Should we just treat the political circus as entertainment? Well, our fellow-workers don’t and they fall for the fake issues and the personality cults.
Our position has to be to urge class struggle to defend what we’ve got and to gain what we have not got, regardless of who forms the government and for the unions and other movements to separate themselves from the Democrats so to.
That being said, the WSPUS need to place actual socialism and social change on the agenda by exposing the weaknesses of those “friends of labor” on the left as in voting for the lesser evil and suffering from the unintended consequences. Granted its voice is a very feeble one but all efforts should be made to have it heard where it might resonate – the progressive, liberal websites and social media.
The article i linked to may well choose a few selective precedents (which are challengeable) but it fails to highlight the very more frequent occasions where the newly elected government reneges on campaign promises and shifts to the right. Both Biden and Harris already shown how easy they blow with the wind. Pelosi has demonstrated that for political gamesmanship she is willing to sacrifice workers by refusing compromise on the stimulus. Actually, Trump would be in favour of even a much bigger one than the Democrats but knows he can’t get it passed his Republicans in Congress.
I know what is going to happen…Biden’s Democrat opponents will be telling us, give him a chance…don’t rock the boat…don’t undermine him…his compromises are pragmatic…etc. etc. etc.
But again i must add my predictive powers and prophetic fore-sight is very questionable. As you know , i’ve been shown to be wrong on many occasions when i guess about the future.
Chevron and Exxon have increased their share of campaign donations to Democrats this year.
Nevertheless, 85% of all oil and gas donations this election, have flowed to Trump, other Republican candidates and conservative causes.
Chevron’s $4.9 million in spending is to “support the election of candidates who believe, like we do, in the value of responsible oil and natural gas development and organizations and measures that are aligned with our business interests,” said spokesman Sean Comey.
U.S. oil and gas companies have poured $87 million into political spending.
Chomsky compares Trump with Hitler
“Has Trump committed vastly more serious crimes? That is hardly debatable. What might be debatable is whether he is indeed the most dangerous criminal in human history (which happens to be my personal view). Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other “deviants,” along with tens of millions of Slav “Untermenschen.” But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species).”
Noam Chomsky: Sanders Threatens the Establishment by Inspiring Popular Movements
More than 17 million Americans have already voted, roughly 10 times as many people have voted compared with this point in 2016, that’s 12% of all the votes cast in 2016.
Democrats outvoting Republicans by a 2-1 ratio in the 42 states
The mail ballots already returned in several states dwarf the entire total in prior elections. In Wisconsin, more than five times as many mail ballots have been cast compared with the entire number in 2016. North Carolina has seen nearly triple the number so far.
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