The Paul Street Report, 1.19.2023
Have you heard? Joe Biden’s Antifa armed militia units have just entered Washington DC.
Subcommadante Kamala Harris has ordered new elections for the US House of Representatives.
John “Break’n the Law” Eastman, Michael “Deep State” Flynn, Steve “All Hell is Going to Break Loose Tomorrow” Bannon and Paul “Kill AOC” Gosar have been spotted in Belarus.
Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump, Ron “Kidnapper” DeSantis, Scott “Putsch Me” Perry, Marjorie “Q Curious” Taylor-Greene, Jim “Looks the Other Way” Jordan, and Greg “No Tip” Abbott are on the run, their whereabouts unknown.
Having fled the USA, the white nationalist Tucker “Hungary Shows the Way” Carlson will broadcast from Budapest via far-right Rumble (frequent Carlson guest and Carlson defender and former Matt Hale lawyer Glenn Greenwald’s new home) from now on.
Amerikaner Fascism has been defeated!
Indivisible Claims Triumph Over Fascists
Pardon my satire.
There’s a real point here: beware of middle and professional class liberals who tell you that things are going well for democracy and the common good when they aren’t.
Beware of Indivisible, the centrist Democratic Party electoral arm that masquerades as a progressive social movement.
In a December 28, 2022 email titled “Cheers to Fascists Losing in 2022,” Indivisible co-executive director Ezra Levin absurdly boasted of Indivisible’s supposed responsibility for impeaching Trump twice, for un-electing Donald Trump, and for blocking a “MAGA red wave” in last November’s mid-term elections. Levin claimed that “we’re going to codify Roe, pass democracy reform, and consign these MAGAs to their rightful place in history as a cautionary tale for future would-be fascists.”
So, the Republi-fascists – with no “would-be” about their Christian white nationalist neofascism – lost and the people won in 2022.
Seriously?
The Republi-fascist Court’s Triumphant 2022
Let’s dig into Indivisible and the Democrats’ great victory over fascism in 2022. The Christian fascist Supreme Court last year:
· Ended women’s constitutional right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson (June 24, 2022), creating misery and horrendous medical, moral and legal confusion for women, girls, transgender people, doctors, other health care workers, hospitals across a vast swath of the nation.
· Significantly curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to regulate carbon emissions amidst a deepening climate catastrophe.
· Loosened states’ rights to restrict the nation’s insane bloody runaway gun violence amidst an ongoing national pandemic of insane bloody runaway gun violence.
· Weakened Indian Country’s right to prosecute crimes committed against Native Americans by non-Indigenous people on Native American land.
· Eroded the barrier between church and state by upholding prayer in public schools and the use of public funds for religious schools.
· Agreed to hear and listened to oral arguments (in Moore v. Harper) in support of the insane right-wing “independent state legislature theory” (ISLT), which could grant red state legislatures the right to nullify the popular US presidential vote within their states. (The Republicans will not require the presence of fascists in state-level governor, secretary of state or attorney general offices in order to cancel the popular presidential vote in their states under the ISLT.)
(The Trump-made Handmaid Court is expected to end affirmative action in college admissions and effectively criminalize workers’ right to strike this year.)
Sorry, that’s called real life/ no “would-be” Republi-fascists winning atop the absurdly powerful and reactionary US judiciary.
The Republifascists Took the U.S. House
Stop a red wave, did Indivisible? Well, it could have been worse. The Democrats contained some of the damage by cynically exploiting the Dobbs decision, which they purposefully did nothing to prevent.
Still, the madness evident already in the lower chamber of the national representative branch and certain to escalate there in coming days and months might lead one to question the extent of the fascists’ defeat. The Republi-fascists took the gavel in the US House of Representatives in the mid-term elections – no small thing. This is a party that last year officially declared the January 6th attack on the very US Congress in which they hold half the members to be “legitimate political discourse,” meaning that they consider violent coup attempts a justifiable way to advance their political aims.
The new Republi-fascist House majority will unleash no small fiscal and economic chaos and wreak considerable havoc on the citizenry’s already badly frayed faith in democracy over the next two years. As I write on this morning of Thursday, January 19, it is refusing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, provoking a possible fiscal crisis for the federal government, unless Biden and the Democrats agree to vicious cuts in Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.
The 2023 Republi-fascist-controlled House is already starting up a paranoid-style neo-McCarthyite inquisition into supposed liberal and left plots to crush “conservative” free speech and “weaponize the federal government” against “great Americans” like the neofascist putschists Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump, Flynn, Eastman, Roger “F*ck the Voting Let’s Get Straight to the Violence” Stone, Mark Meadows, Rudy “Four Seasons” Giuliani, and the international fascist leader Bannon. The new Republi-fascist House Speaker Joe, I mean Kevin “Tail Between My Legs” McCarthy (Rf-CA) has agreed to load up the House investigative committee with some of the most fascistic MAGAts in the chamber. As The New York Times reports:
“They were deeply involved in President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. They have come to the defense of people being prosecuted for participating in the deadly storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Some have called for violence against their political enemies online, embraced conspiracy theories or associated with white supremacists…Several of the most extreme Republicans in Congress and those most closely allied with Mr. Trump have landed seats on the Oversight and Accountability Committee, the main investigative organ in the House. From that perch, they are poised to shape inquiries into the Biden administration and to serve as agents of Mr. Trump in litigating his grievances as he plots his re-election campaign.”
“Their appointments are the latest evidence that the new Republican majority is driven by a hard-right faction that has modeled itself in Mr. Trump’s image, shares his penchant for dealing in incendiary statements and misinformation, and is bent on using its newfound power to exact revenge on Democrats and President Biden…Many of the panel’s new Republican members — including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania — are among Mr. Trump’s most devoted allies in Congress. Their appointments underscore that, while the former president may be a shrunken presence in the current political landscape, he still exerts much control over the base of his party.
They are also an unmistakable signal from Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won his post after an excruciating battle with hard-right rebels, that he plans to reward such lawmakers — even some who led the opposition to his election — with high-profile roles…Ms. Greene, who is pressing to impeach Mr. Biden and has demanded an investigation of the treatment of Jan. 6 defendants, had listed the Oversight panel as her first choice. She recently said that if she had led the Jan. 6 attack, ‘we would have won’ and that people would have been ‘armed.’… Mr. Gosar has referred to members of the mob that stormed the Capitol as ‘peaceful patriots’..Joining them on the panel will be Mr. Perry, who was one of the key figures in Mr. Trump’s effort to subvert the election results, and Ms. Boebert, who has repeated Mr. Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen and came under fire for posting about Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s location on Twitter during the Capitol riot (emphasis added).”
But, hey, Ezra Levin: “Cheers to Fascists Losing in 2022!”
We Shall Overcome…Someday
I wonder what Levin thought of last Sunday’s New York Times report on how completely his party and president Joe Biden failed when it came to delivering on Biden’s fake-passionate, vote-seeking promise of voting reform to Black Americans in Atlanta, Georgia, one year ago:
“When he came to the capital of the South to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. last year, President Biden delivered a call to nonviolent arms for voting rights, equating opponents to segregationists and vowing to rewrite Senate rules to defeat them. ‘I will not yield,’ he declared. ‘I will not flinch.’ …A year later, Mr. Biden returned to Atlanta on Sunday with little to show for it… None of the sweeping voting rights measures he championed passed the Democratic-controlled Congress last year, and the prospects of any passing a newly elected Republican-controlled House seem vanishingly small. And so a leader who arguably owes his presidency to the critical and timely support of Black voters in 2020 was left to offer only vague exhortations of hope and no concrete policy plans or legislative strategies. He assured an audience at Dr. King’s fabled Ebenezer Baptist Church that its side in the struggle would, indeed, overcome someday… He pointed to the Catholic rosary on his wrist that he said his son Beau wore the night he died of brain cancer in 2015. ‘There’s always hope,’ Mr. Biden said. ‘We have to believe’” (emphasis added).
Nice.
“Hope” for “change” someday. Sound familiar?
How pathetic.
Other Reasons for Republi-Fascist Confidence
There’s plenty more for fascists to celebrate about and after 2022. The Democrats can’t blame the loss of the House to not-so “would-be” fascists just on gerrymandering. Ezra Levin’s neoliberal appeasement party (a corporate party even in its New Deal heyday) lost the national popular House election tally to the MAGA party by more than three million votes. The Republi-fascists Levin says his group defeated last year control at least half the nation’s state governments. They enjoy overwhelming support from a rabid Amerikaner base that is down with Herr Trump’s Nazi-inspired Big Stolen Election Lie – a remarkably durable brazen falsehood that would Third Reich propaganda chief Goebbels green with envy.
Two vicious Florida fascists, the still un-incarcerated/un-prosecuted Trump and the arguably more dangerous authoritarian Ron DeSantis, are by far and away the leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Both of those two neofascist reptiles have a very good chance of beating the nation’s leading strikebreaker Joe “Sleeping Car” Biden (with or without the Trump-made/Handmaid Court fully signing off on the arch-reactionary ISLT) in 2024, especially after a recession kicks in (the House Republi-fascists are trying to help set one off with their debt ceiling shenanigans).
The deeply conservative Dems will likely lose their current (bare) majority in the US Senate to the Republi-fascists in early 2025. The Democrats are far more vulnerable than the Christian white nationalist MAGA party in the 2024 elections for the absurdly powerful and badly malapportioned, right-tilted upper chamber of Congress.
But even with continued Democratic control of the Senate, however unlikely, the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats wouldn’t have anything remotely close to the sixty Senate votes required to “pass democracy reform” and “codify Roe.” Ezra Levin’s promises on both counts are of course totally empty.
The first bills advanced by the Republi-fascists after taking the House in not-so “Roevember”? Legislation calling for new national abortion restrictions. If the rightmost party takes the Senate along with the presidency in 2024-25, look for them to engineer a national abortion ban. Nationalizing Dobbs seems a more likely outcome than “codifyng Roe,” something the Democrats have refused to seriously undertake for more even have they have regularly campaigned on saving Roe for more than four decades.
Meanwhile, the US “Shining City on a Hill is full of fascists” (as the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian says), including many enrolled in armed militias that are drawing membership and energy from mass white nationalist anger at the presence of a supposedly “radical left socialist” (a laughable description of Biden that reflects the moronic madness of fascist ideology) in the White House.
And, oh, by the way, another year went by without the malignant fascist Donald “I Don’t Fucking Care That They Have Weapons [cuz] They’re Not Here to Hurt Me” Trump being prosecuted, much less convicted and incarcerated for trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law. Every day that the orange reptile walks free after January 6th, 2021 is a victory for fascist impunity.
Judas Goats
It was nice to see Levin semi-publicly use the all-too rarely voiced and accurate “F-word” (fascism/fascist[s]). Still, it’s hard not to see Indivisible’s December 28th fundraising e-mail as an unduly self-congratulatory and dangerously sanguine if not cynically disingenuous exercise in self-promotional gaslighting.
It’s going to take a mass movement in the streets beneath and beyond the major party big money-corporate media-candidate-centered biennial and quadrennial electoral extravaganzas – beyond the killing confines of the badly right-tilted US party and electoral system – to defeat fascism. This is what Levin and his organization, and the rest of the Democratic Party establishment have never understood and will never understand. They function as electoralist sheep dogs or – better – as Judas Goats, herding citizens like doomed sheep up to the big anti-democratic slaughterhouse that is late bourgeois democracy, American Style, replete with its openly anti-democratic presidential Electoral College, its absurdly powerful and lifetime-appointed Supreme Court, its brazenly plutocratic campaign finance rules and corporate-imperial media, its rampant voter suppression and racist disenfranchisement, its extensive gerrymandering of legislative districts, its ridiculously powerful and reactionary US Senate (which vastly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions and states), and its deeply reactionary states’ rights tradition.
It’s all quite disgraceful, consistent with the late political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s description of the Democrats – the real force behind Levin’s pretend social movement – as “the inauthentic opposition” and with others’ description of the Democrats as the Hollow Resistance.