Repost - "Terminal Stupidity"

By Daniel Lazare
04.09.2025

(Permanent Revolution: Terminal Stupidity)

“It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.”  If ever Talleyrand’s famous aphorism applied to anyone, it’s to Hamas. 

Aftermath of an Israeli strike on the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City on April 13, 2025. Omar al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images.

The so-called Islamic Resistance’s misdeeds are legion.  Crushing “We want to live” labor demonstrations against poverty and unemployment that erupted in Gaza in March 2019 was one of them, and responding with equal brutality to similar protests that broke out in July-August 2023 was another.  Slaughtering 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, most of them innocent civilians, was a third, while executing six Palestinians for taking part in anti-Hamas protests that began on Mar. 25 is a fourth. 

Vicious as such acts are, they are exceeded by the sheer blind stupidity behind them.  Hamas blunders would take even a Talleyrand aback.  Members were reportedly surprised by the Zionist response to “Al Aqsa Flood” even though a child could have told them that it would be furious and overwhelming.  The group expected Oct. 7 to ignite a region-wide holy war even though it was obvious that the Arab masses were too exhausted and demoralized after decades of war, poverty, and corruption to engage in any such misadventure. 

Then there was Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, who, in an Oct. 24, 2023, interview on Beirut TV, taunted Zionists by declaring that “Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight.”  What was the purpose of such language other than to goad Israel into ramping up the onslaught even more?  “We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Yahya Sinwar added in June 2024, which was equally perplexing since it was in fact the Israelis who had him cornered.  (Sinwar would die three months later in an IDF firefight.) 

Finally, there was Hamas’s belief that some 250 hostages would serve as an insurance policy against Israeli retaliation.  But with fewer than 25 hostages left alive after a year and a half of captivity, the strategy has backfired.  If Hamas gives the remaining hostages up, Israel will have less reason than ever to hold back.  If it doesn’t release them, it will follow up with an even greater offensive culminating in mass ethnic cleansing.  Either way, Hamas will be destroyed, and more than two million Palestinians could wind up in exile. 

Hamas has thus painted itself into a corner thanks to absurd policies that are without parallel in modern politics.  But it’s not only the “resistance” that has blundered – vast sections of the international left have too.  There’s the Socialist Workers Party, the largest self-proclaimed Marxist organization in the UK, whose newspaper welcomed Al Aqsa Flood with the words, “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel.”  There’s Cosmonaut.org, the pseudo-Marxist website, which, a week after Al Aqsa Flood, responded with a ludicrous chest-thumping editorial “affirm[ing] our unconditional support of the movement for Palestinian liberation, no matter the form their struggle may take.  We’ll keep the red flag flying here.”  

There are also individuals such as Norman Finkelstein, perhaps Hamas’s best-known western apologist, who wrote on Oct. 7 that the offensive “warms every fiber of my soul”; Columbia professor Joseph Massad who, a day later, hailed “the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” and predicted that the flight of Israeli kibbutz residents “may prove to be a permanent exodus”; and Jodi Dean, who teaches politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York and who wrote on a New Left Review website that “images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating.”  

Dean, a self-described Stalinist, went on: 

The struggle for Palestinian liberation today is led by the Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas.  Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left.  One might have expected that the left in the imperial core would follow the leadership of the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas.  More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine.  In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation. 

We must support Hamas or else the good professor will denounce us as counter-revolutionaries.  But what is Dean’s message for the starving and brutalized people of Gaza who are at last rising up against Hamas – that they’re counter-revolutionaries too?  

Finally, there’s the World Socialist Web Site, which hailed the Oct. 7 offensive within hours as “an uprising of the Palestinian people,” comparing it to the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising and suggesting that murderous gunmen should be “hailed as heroes.”  As if that wasn’t bad enough, the site recently followed up with an article disparaging recent anti-Hamas protests as “small [and] politically heterogeneous” and blasting Jacobin magazine for not only reporting them but for describing the Zionist assault on Gaza as “Israel’s vengeance for October 7.”  

Why is this bad?  Because, the WSWS hotly replies, it means that

had there been no armed resistance to the illegal Israeli occupation on October 7, there would be no Israeli war in Gaza.  In making this statement, Jacobin is echoing the official position of the Netanyahu government, the Biden administration and the Trump administration, all of whom have claimed that Israel’s current war is a ‘response’ to October 7. 

What is the WSWS suggesting – that Israel would have sent thousands of troops to level Gaza even if there had been no Oct. 7 massacre?  This is like saying that FDR would have declared war on Japan even if there had been no Pearl Harbor, a proposition that no serious historian would entertain for a minute.  The sole purpose of such nonsense is to get Hamas off the hook by declaring that its actions on Oct. 7 are irrelevant because Israel was intent on war regardless – and to get the WSWS off the hook for supporting an outfit as rancid as Hamas. 

More than a blunder, the result is a debacle that has spelled disaster for the Palestinians while shattering what little remains of middle-class radicalism.  So why did Hamas foul up so badly and why did broad sectors of the left insist on following it over a cliff? 

Hamas’s failure 

The first question is easy.  While one can argue over whether or not Hamas fits the definition of fascist, there is no doubt as to its profoundly reactionary politics.  The slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s parent organization, says it all:

Allah is our objective, the prophet is our leader, the Qur’an is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. 

Political science thus stopped in the seventh century, warfare is the answer to all problems, and martyrdom is ennobling.  As a top Hamas leader named Ismail Haniyeh told a mass rally in Gaza in 2014: “We are a people who value death, just like our enemies value life.”[1]  Or as Ghazi Hamad insisted in his notorious Beirut interview: “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”  Added Yahya Sinwar six months later: Palestinian deaths “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.” 

Life is death, and defeat is victory.  According to such upside-down logic, Gaza should be brimming with vitality thanks to the bloodshed Hamas helped unleash.  But it’s not.  Rather, it’s a dead zone filled with misery and destruction. 

Tareq Baconi, the Palestinian-American author of Hamas Contained (2018), an essential guide to what such logic leads to, notes that “success was thought to be predestined” by Hamas because it believes that God is on its side.  The upshot was decades of faith-based arguments in which every new military setback had to be hailed as proof that jihad was working.  When Israel called off military intervention in southern Lebanon in May 2000 in the face of unexpected Hezbollah resistance, Hamas seized on the “‘Lebanese model’ as proof that resistance was the only way to liberate Palestine,” according to Baconi, and that suicide bombings were therefore the way to go.  When Israel responded to Hamas rocket barrages with weaponry that was far deadlier and more sophisticated, the organization concluded that jihad was more effective than ever because Hamas was “achieving liberation step by step ... through the accumulation of accomplishments and the draining of the enemy’s security, economy, and morale.”[2]  

And when sending suicide bombers onto crowded buses triggered worldwide horror and revulsion, Hamas concluded that it must be on the right track because Israel was trapped between the “jaws of resistance.”[3]  All it would take was a few more mangled bodies for the Jewish state to crack. 

But it was Gaza that started to crack instead as the economy sank under the impact of a deepening Israeli blockade and complaints about Hamas corruption began to multiply.  Baconi notes that Hamas’s religious fundamentalism “restricted any ideological maneuverability for the movement’s leaders” by making “concessions appear blasphemous.”  Hamas was trapped by its own jihadist rhetoric.  Baconi added: 

Hamas’s reliance on jihad has had devastating implications for the Palestinian people.  Aside from the moral bankruptcy and the corrosive effect of targeting and killing civilians, dedication to armed resistance against a superb foe like Israel has led to the disintegration of the Palestinian struggle.  Strategically, this approach has not only failed; it has also threatened to erode the very social fabric of the Palestinian community under occupation.[4] 

But jihad is good because the Muslim Brotherhood says so, and that’s all Hamas needed to know.  Al Aqsa Flood can be seen as the culmination of years of mindless escalation in which fighters concluded that a failed policy would finally succeed if members believed in its strongly enough and implemented it on a grand enough scale.  Yet the only result was failure of unprecedented proportions. 

A general who allows his army to be destroyed through sheer incompetence should be court-martialed.  A government that allows its people to be destroyed for the same reason should be turned out of office.  This is what protesters in Gaza are demanding as they chant “barra, barra” (“out, out”).  The silence from the ranks of supposedly pro-Palestinian protesters means that they effectively side with the Palestinians’ oppressors. 

Protest against Hamas in Northern Gaza

A hollowed-out left 

Which leads to the second question: why have vast sectors of the international left gone along with such madness? 

The answer has to do with deep decay caused by decades of isolation, confusion, and retreat.  Not only have leftwing numbers collapsed in terms of union members or votes racked up by social democrats, communists, and other working-class parties, but ideology has collapsed too.  Class politics have disintegrated as middle-class radicalism has risen to take their place.  Everyone knows the horrors that ensued as bourgeois liberalism drifted to the right: identity politics, cancel culture, “lean-in” corporate feminism, etc.  It’s a sickening brew, but the results are especially unfortunate when it comes to the Middle East.  Legitimately outraged by the war that the Jewish state is waging against the Palestinian people, protesters followed a seemingly simple chain of logic.  Since Israel is bad, Hamas must be good, or at least less bad than Zionist propaganda maintains.  Civilian deaths on Oct. 7 therefore had to be written off as collateral damage, the result of a Zionist false-flag operation, or perhaps legitimate payback for the crime of living in an oppressor state.  “A propaganda deluge has inundated the mainstream US media sphere with pornographic descriptions of horrendous actions allegedly carried out by Hamas, the leading organization of Gazan armed resistance,” complained Cosmonaut on Oct. 15, 2023.  Allegedly?  Rather than “pornographic,” the violence carried out on Oct. 7 was as real as the violence carried out on 9/11, which Al Aqsa Flood all too closely resembles. 

This is how petty-bourgeois radicalism works.  Flighty, unstable, a middle force forever vacillating between left and right, the working class and the bourgeoisie, it is incapable of confronting reality head on and must instead tailor the facts to fit its own needs.  Protesters turned a blind eye to Hamas’s reactionary politics – its sectarianism, know-nothing fundamentalism, jihadism, and deep anti-Semitism – because they don't fit their blinkered worldview.  Since Hamas is a “resistance” organization, the atrocities of Oct. 7 must be Israeli propaganda or an outright lie.  The problem of Hamas’s pre-modern politics was thus wished away. 

None of which is to say that pro-Palestinian protests were wrong.  To the contrary, they performed a vital service by demonstrating that a growing portion of the public is finally saying no to Zionist brutality.  But the failure to say no to Hamas brutality was a crippling flaw.  Even if Trump had not launched his crackdown, protesters would still have found themselves isolated due to their inability to acknowledge the massacre that set the latest violence off in the first place.  Professional activists tried to cover up such crimes in order to promote a stereotypical view of Palestinians as helpless victims of Zionist terror.  But the effort strikes others as evasive and dishonest.  As we have seen, it does nothing to benefit Palestinians themselves. 

Self-induced amnesia 

When WSWS describes Oct. 7 as “an uprising of the Palestinian people,” it advances the dangerous proposition that Hamas and the Palestinian masses are one and the same, which is precisely the rationale that Israel uses to justify its mass bombings in the face of 50,000-plus civilian deaths.  When it compares Al Aqsa Flood to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, it slanders World War II partisans who did not have the slightest intention of engaging in mass reprisals and instead hoped that Polish civilians would join in the anti-Nazi revolt.  Headlines expressing glee over Israel’s humiliation were a betrayal because they failed to warn Palestinians of mass reprisals that were already on the way.  

What makes the International Committee for the Fourth International and the Socialist Equality Party, the parent organizations that puts out the WSWS, even more bizarre is that it was not long ago that they were saying the opposite.  In July 2002, while Hamas was sending out suicide bombers to target buses and discos, a top WSWS writer named Jean Shaoul published a three-part series describing the attacks as 

...desperate and horrific acts by young people influenced by political tendencies that have no progressive perspective upon which to base their opposition to Israeli oppression.  Designed to slaughter innocent civilians, they do not advance the interests and aspirations of the Palestinian people one iota.

“Nothing illustrates more clearly its utterly repugnant and ultimately bankrupt perspective,” she said of Hamas, “than the dispatch of its youth cadre, with bombs strapped to their bodies, to blow up their targets and themselves as martyrs for their cause.  With reputed payments to their families of $US30,000 for their martyrdom, these young men were worth more dead than alive.” Shaoul added that Hamas “…blended nationalism with religion and naked anti-Semitism” and that its founding charter, published in 1988, 

...called for an exclusively Islamic Palestinian state, repudiating the PLO’s formulation of a democratic secular state as anti-Islamic, and made territorial nationalism, previously a form of idolatry, into a religious mission or jihad.  It called for the destruction of the state of Israel and falsely equated political Zionism with the Jewish people, both within Israel and beyond.  The Jews were denounced as the secret architects of both the French Revolution and the Communist revolution, of two World Wars, of creating the League of Nations and the United Nations as secret organs of world domination and, above all, of being the destroyers of the Islamic Caliphate. 

All of which is entirely accurate, as anyone who has perused Hamas’s 1988 covenant will agree.  The only thing Shaoul got wrong, in fact, was her prediction that Hamas would not “advance the interests and aspirations of the Palestinian people one iota.”  Today, the organization’s misbegotten policies are sending them sharply into reverse.

So why say one thing in 2002 and another in 2025?  Even though the ICFI has been politically disoriented for decades it was still capable of writing about Hamas in a way that was honest and smart.  Two decades later, any such capacity is gone – vanished, kaput.  Instead, the heirs of Healy’s legacy are indistinguishable from thousands of other mixed-up radicals eager to whitewash Hamas’ crimes in the belief that it will somehow bring about Palestinian liberation.  But it won’t. 

A socialist response 

In addition to mass destruction, Palestinians now face the horrifying prospect of mass expulsion.  Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz is warning that the next phase of warfare will be “significantly worse” and that the goal will be to “seize large areas” of Gaza and annex them to the Jewish state.  “We will implement the Trump Plan, the voluntary migration plan,” Netanyahu informed his cabinet on Mar. 30. 

If so, the effect will be to raise the Palestinian nightmare to near-impossible levels.  If Israel drives millions of people into the Sinai, who will feed them – the United States?  Rather than overthrowing the Hamas dictatorship, herding millions of Palestinians into miserable desert refugee camps will provide it with an effective monopoly.  The Egyptian military regime will impose a cordon sanitaire to prevent Muslim Brotherhood influence from spreading to the nation at large while Israel will send in F-16s to periodically bomb and strafe Hamas strongholds.  But it will only strengthen it vis-à-vis the captive Palestinian masses.

And what about the West Bank, which is also under siege?  Will Israel expel millions there too?  If so, what will it mean for the Jordanian monarchy?  Amman is so unstable that King Hussein has placed his own son under arrest because he represents a threat to the throne.  Yet an influx of three million refugees will destabilize it all the more.

If Israel succeeds in stamping out the flames in the Occupied Territories, it will thus be at the cost of spreading them abroad.  The Jewish state will be surrounded by a no-man’s-land of hopelessness and destruction.  This is good news for Netanyahu and Trump since both are forever on the lookout for new ways of grinding the Muslim masses into dust.  But it is bad news for the Israeli working class, Jewish or Arab, which will find itself increasingly a prisoner of a fascist garrison state.

On Mar. 25, the same day that anti-Hamas protests broke out in Gaza, Israel saw an intensification of mass protests against plans for a crackdown on the Israeli judiciary.  The protests are entirely justified since the prospects of Trump-style authoritarianism inside Israel itself are quite real.  As Netanyahu tweeted on Elon Musk’s X: 

In America and in Israel, when a strong rightwing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people's will.  They won't win in either place!  We stand strong together.

Not that the Israeli protests are beyond criticism – they’re not, and neither, for that matter, are anti-Hamas protests in Gaza.  But the symmetry is striking.  While nationalists on both sides tell us that the differences between Israeli and Palestinian workers are irreconcilable, the demonstrations suggest something different – that not only are Palestinians and Israelis “interpenetrated peoples” grappling for the same slice of territory, but that their politics are interpenetrated too.  While one group battles authoritarianism that is already in place, another battles dictatorship that is just beginning to crystallize.  Both are locked in combat with theocratic oppression – with Hamas on one hand and with followers of the American-Israeli rabbi Meir Kahane whose goals and ideology are virtually identical to those of Hamas and whose influence is spreading throughout Israeli politics.

For all their enmity, Hamas and Netanyahu stand for essentially the same thing – intercommunal slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and a growing lurch toward fascism.  Israel-Palestine is ground zero for Mideast socialist revolution because it is where national conflict is most incendiary and where workers must battle most fiercely in order to overcome ethno-religious hatred and division.  This – not slaughtering neighbors in their bed – is the only way forward.

 

---

[1] Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2018), xix.

[2] Ibid., 28, 35. 51.

[3] Ibid., 117.

[4] Ibid., 228, 243.

Repost - "Defend democracy, not the Constitution"

Daniel Lazare

02.03.25

(Permanent Revolution: Defend democracy, not the Constitution

The World Socialist Web Site has posted an article accusing Donald Trump of seeking to “overturn the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.”[1] The second part of the statement is correct. The first is not.

The reason is simple: you can’t overturn something that is already in a state of collapse. Rather than an enemy of the Constitution, Trump is the very constitutional product of an increasingly undemocratic structure rife with contradictions that are growing more explosive by the day.

Protest against Musk/DOGE

Not that the constitutional breakdown is the sole reason for Trump’s rise. After all, capitalism is a multi-dimensional system whose crisis is multi-dimensional as well. While the falling rate of profit is the ultimate driver, the global meltdown is taking on a multitude of forms involving imperialism, war, climate, disease, and so forth. But this doesn’t make the constitutional aspect any less critical. In fact, it makes it more so since the crisis is erupting in the heart of the global hegemon.

Behind the battle over the Constitution lurks a fundamental split over strategy within the American bourgeoisie. This is the background behind the contentious struggle over the Constitution.

It’s basically a faction fight within the American bourgeoisie over how best to insure the global dominance of American capitalism that takes on the appearance, in a highly distorted form, of a struggle over the Constitution.

We must analyze America’s ancient Constitution in order to understand why it is self-destructing so rapidly and what it means for international capitalism in general.

So how bad is it? Plenty. The US Constitution barely had a shred of democracy left before Trump entered the scene and now has even less. Well into its mid-third century, the document dates from the age of silk knee britches and slavery, yet has never been subject to a comprehensive democratic overhaul. Its most outstanding features include:

• A senate based on equal state representation that allows the 54 percent of the country that lives in just 10 states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other 40;
• An Electoral College that more than triples the clout of states like Wyoming and Vermont who have a tiny, mostly rural population, whose demographics in no way reflect that of the country as a whole.
• A gerrymandered House;
• And a rightwing Supreme Court that is wholly unaccountable to the general public.

What’s more, such features are growing worse. Not only is the Senate more unequal than at any point since the early 19th century, it will grow even more so by the year 2050 according to population projections, when a majority of the population will be concentrated in just nine states instead of ten.[2] The Electoral College is also growing more unequal over the same period while the portion of the population capable of blocking a constitutional amendment under Article V will continue shrinking below even today’s minuscule levels.[3]

This is the system’s Catch-22. Something must be done to reform an aging political structure that is long past its sell-by date. Yet nothing can be done because a broken amending process blocks all efforts at constitutional reform before they can even get off the ground.

Thus the older and more undemocratic the structure grows, the more change-averse it becomes. Given such an immovable structure, is it any surprise that frustrated voters are turning to a strong man who promises to break the Washington logjam using force and intimidation?

Hardly. Yet the Socialist Equality Party, publisher of WSWS, consistently plays down the problem of constitutional decline. Instead of zeroing in on the document itself, it prefers to dwell on a Republican Party that has emerged as “the instrument of the most ruthless and anti-democratic sections of the ruling class,” as a recent article put it.[4] It disparages the struggle for a democratic constitution in Chile on the grounds that the capitalist state cannot “be reformed, refounded, or ‘democratized,’ but “must be overthrown by the working class in the fight to establish a new state based on workers’ control” – as if workers in either Latin America or the US must not fight for democratic reforms while at the same time fighting for power.[5]

In yet another article, it speaks glibly of “constitutional rule, legality and democratic rights” as if they were one and the same; attacks the Supreme Court for undermining “the democratic rule-of-law traditions of American constitutionalism” as if the court were not the product of those same traditions, and blames “four administrations since 2000 ... [for] the disassembling of the Constitutional framework of government” as if the framework was not crumbling under its own weight. It assails Democrats for “not fight[ing] to defend constitutional rule against fascist attacks” without asking how Dems can shore up constitutionalism at all when they are part and parcel of the same process of constitutional degeneration.[6]

For those who have eyes to see, the constitutional breakdown has been central to the growth of authoritarianism at least since the 1990s when infighting on Capitol Hill turned increasingly bitter. But 2016 marked a turning point. This is when the Constitution spat out a split decision, the second since 2000, with Trump winning the Electoral College and Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. Since the EC was growing more and more dangerous, the logical solution would have been to fix the Constitution so as to remove an increasingly dangerous provision. But since America’s holy of holies is all but set in stone, Democrats didn’t bother. Instead, they opted for what they thought was next best, an anti-Trump destabilization campaign based on the theme of Russian interference. According to one campaign account:

“That strategy had been set within 24 hours of her [Hillary Clinton’s] concession speech. [Campaign manager Robby] Mook and [campaign chairman John] Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”[7]

Six months later, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe would secretly discuss wearing a wire when meeting with now-President Trump and using the 25th Amendment to force him out of office.[8] For the next two years, Russia, Russia, Russia would be virtually all Americans would hear about as the as the campaign intensified.

The result was akin to a constitutional cage fight in which the two sides wailed away at one another amid deteriorating conditions overall. When Russiagate didn’t work – the conspiracy theory was as flimsy as any other – Democrats tried impeachment. When that didn’t work, Trump struck back with a coup attempt on January 6, 2021. Democrats countered with a second impeachment trial and then a “lawfare” campaign aimed at putting him behind bars. One Democratic prosecutor charged him with fraud because he had hyped the dimensions of an apartment he was selling, while another charged him with federal election-law violations because he had paid hush money to a porn star. But they backfired by making Trump seem like the victim of a weaponized criminal-justice system. After a plurality voted him in, he paid Democrats back by pardoning some 1,500 “J6” defendants – thereby legalizing the original coup – and issuing a blitzkrieg of executive orders aimed at eliminating immigrant rights, abolishing birthright citizenship, pulling the plug on climate measures, withdrawing from the World Health Organization and wiping out DEI.

Trump was less a winning political candidate than a military leader bent on revenge. His strategy was to “flood the zone,” as ultra-rightist Steve Bannon put it in 2018, by firing officials, dismantling entire offices, freezing trillions in federal grants and loans, starting trade wars, and sending in Elon Musk to virtually take over the government.

He embarked on such a strategy because he thought he could get away with it – and so far he’s been right. As far as congressional Republicans are concerned, the man can walk on water since, with the exception of Bush II in 2004, he is the first GOP presidential candidate to win the popular vote in more than 30 years. The courts lean in his favor thanks to the 234 federal judges he appointed during his first four years in office, twice as many as Barack Obama appointed in eight. With its unbreakable 6-3 conservative majority, the Supreme Court leans in his favor as well. As a New York Times piece notes, the Trump administration is counting on “the Supremes” to back his drive for a “unitary executive” in which all congressional restraints are removed.[9] If they do, it will be a giant step toward rule by fiat.

But is all this unconstitutional as the SEP maintains? Only if you believe in liberal fairy tales about a constitutionally-enforced “delicate balance” that keeps the three branches in perfect equipoise. In reality, Congress is exhausted after three decades of gridlock and public opinion polls showing a disapproval rating of better than 2.5 to one.[10] The legislative branch is filled with empty-headed show-offs preening for the TV cameras as the recent Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmation hearings make clear. The upshot is a power vacuum that Trump can’t help but fill.

Besides, if the Supreme Court backs Trump’s power grab, it means it’s constitutional after all. This is the standard law-school view, so Congress will likely go along with it, as will the bourgeois press. If so, Trump will have the field to himself. By filling the federal bureaucracy with militant conservatives and placing rightwing loyalists like Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe in key positions as heads of the Justice Department, Pentagon, FBI, and CIA respectively, he’ll be able to turn the entire executive into an ultra-right steamroller.

The system is hurtling toward dictatorship as a consequence. But it will not be despite the Constitution. The sclerotic Constitution provides no brakes to the drives towards dictatorship which is being pushed by the realignment of class forces. In fact the Constitution encourages it as it is itself a fundamentally anti-democratic document. The only way to defend freedom is by overthrowing an 18th-century government that is degenerating into one of the most obscene oligarchies in modern history and replacing it with a workers’ democracy. But democracy is not something workers can put off until after the revolution, but something they must struggle for in the here-and-now in the process of seizing power.

[1] “Trump’s first 7 days: The framework for presidential dictatorship,” Jan. 27, 2025, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/28/rlxj-j28.html.

[2] Frances E. Lee and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 11; Demographics Research Group, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia, https://www.coopercenter.org/national-population-projections.

[3] Demographics Research Group, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia, https://www.coopercenter.org/national-population-projections.

[4] Patrick Martin, “As Trump assembles dictatorial regime, Biden offers ‘smoothest’ transition,” Nov. 14, 2024, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/14/hciq-n14.html.

[5] Mauricio Saavedra, Chile’s ruling right wing suffers crushing defeat in election of Constitutional Convention,” May 21, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/22/chil-m22.html.

[6] Richard Hoffman, “Trump putsch was the outcome of a two-decade attack on constitutional rule and legality,” Oct. 14, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/15/2fea-o15.html.

[7] Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (New York: Crown, 2017), 395.

[8] Pamela Brown and Jeremy Herb, “The frantic scramble before Mueller got the job,” CNN, Dec. 7, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/politics/rosenstein-comey-firing-obstruction-probe/index.html.

[9] Charlie Savage, “Defying Legal Limits, trump Firings Set Up Tests That Could Expand His Power,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/politics/trump-firings-officials-legal-test.html?searchResultPosition=1.

[10] “Latest Polls,” Jan. 31, 2025, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/congress/.

Repost - "Meltdown"

By Daniel Lazare
12.08.24
(Permanent Revolution: Meltdown)

More than four weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, it is increasingly clear where America is heading: toward militarization and authoritarian rule.

Trump’s strong-man tendencies have long been evident.  Although largely forgotten, he repeatedly accused Democrats of rigging the vote during the 2016 presidential campaign, warning that he might not concede even if the official tally went against him.  Such threats grew more and more ominous in 2020 until Trump finally sent his forces crashing across Capitol Hill in early 2021 in a last-ditch attempt to block Joe Biden’s victory and force Congress to name him the winner.  If Trump had lost in 2024, there would have been every reason to expect more of the same, i.e. more violence, more phony accusations of electoral theft, and more attempts to overturn the results. 

But now that he has won, Trumpian authoritarianism is in full view.  Examples include:

--  His ultra-confrontational cabinet picks;

--  His plans to force the Senate to adjourn so he can bypass the confirmation process and appoint cabinet members on his own;

-- His vow to use the military to round up as many as 11 million illegal aliens;

-- His promise to pardon hundreds of January 6 insurgents the moment he takes office;

 -- And his close ties to the authors of Project 2025, the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s proposal for a sweeping purge of the federal bureaucracy and a “unitary executive” that will infuse the government with Christian nationalist values.

Trump’s cabinet choices run the gamut from ultra-right to centrist.  They include Marco Rubio, one of the most rightwing members of the Senate, who is his pick for secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, his choice for defense secretary, who is a Christian nationalist who believes that “just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today.”  But they also include relative moderates such as Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and the ever-cranky Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of health and human services, who, despite his anti-vax views, is not otherwise illiberal.  Scott Bessent, his choice for treasury secretary, is openly gay while Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary, is a former Democrat -- as, of course, is Trump.

They're an eclectic mix that only have one thing in common: each in his or her own way is an affront to the Washington establishment, whether it's the “intelligence community” up in arms over Gabbard,  the healthcare industry terrified by the accession of RFK , or homophobic sectors of the Trump coalition .  The result is a take-it-or-leave-it approach in which Trump fairly dares the old guard on Capitol Hill to just say no.

If they do, the next step is plain: a constitutional showdown.  With the help of Mike Johnson, the ultra-conservative speaker of the House, Trump is bruiting plans to force the Senate to adjourn against its will so he can use his recess powers to ram through \ appointments on his own.  The strategy, based on an obscure constitutional clause in Article II, section three, is setting off alarms throughout official Washington, with even the libertarian Cato Institute describing it as a “norm-defying abuse” that would trigger “a full-blown constitutional crisis.”

But that is what Trump wants.  With the Supreme Court likely on his side, Trump wants a crisis so he can cow Congress into submission and stretch the Constitution to the limits so as to accommodate his authoritarian designs.  If the maneuver works, the upshot result will be a giant step toward Argentine-style neo-Peronism in which the chief executive casts off constitutional restraints and rules on his own by decree.   

Using the military to round up illegal aliens would cement authoritarianism even more firmly in place.  Article I, section nine, gives the president emergency powers to suspend habeas corpus “in cases of rebellion or invasion [as] the public safety may require it.”  So it's a perfect opportunity for a president armed with unilateral powers to denounce illegal immigration as a foreign invasion and announce that he is suspending judicial review so that he can round up millions of people and place them in special detention camps.  And if Trump rounds up millions of immigrants, then it's not too difficult to imagine other roundups that might follow, e.g. leftwing activists who defend immigrants and their interests, anti-Zionists, etc.

As for Project 2025, it is a 1,000-page plan whose ultimate goal is to turn the federal bureaucracy into a conservative battering ram.  Among the goals is banishing DEI, i.e. diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and other such “woke” initiatives and prosecuting “anti-white racism” instead.  Project 2025 also calls for barring the National Institutes of Health from engaging in stem cell research, rejiggering environmental regulations so as to favor fossil fuels, and criminalizing pornography.  Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts is explicit about Project 2025's goals.  “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” he writes in the introduction.  “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”  

“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right,” he adds.  “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error.”  

Then there are Trump’s plans to enlist Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in a Javier Milei-like assault on the federal workforce along with his refusal to cooperate with federal agencies like the General Services Administration that traditionally oversee the transition process.  The plan is to decimate a government apparatus that he views as little more than enemy territory while elevating himself high it. 

“He should not trust the politicized and weaponized intelligence and law enforcement agencies that hobbled his presidency the first time,” declares Mike Davis, the leader of another pro-Trump outfit called the Article III Project.  “It’s a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people.”

Finally, there is Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s decision to drop charges related to the Capitol Hill insurrection and Trump’s promise to pardon hundreds of “J6’ers.”  Together, they show how the federal government has given up holding Trump to account for the most serious constitutional breach since the Civil War and how the uprising itself is well on its way to being officially vindicated.  The very idea of free elections is coming under assault.  Henceforth, the only elections Republicans regard as valid will be elections they win.

What does it all add up to -- authoritarianism, Bonapartism, or out-and-out fascism?  With ostensible Marxist organizations all over the map with regard precisely what Trumpism at this stage represents, the answer in this writer's view is the first.  One reason is structural.  Broadly speaking, authoritarianism (or hyper-presidentialism to use the academic term) operates within existing constitutional guidelines.  Both Juan Perón of Argentina and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines submitted to regular elections, for instance, and even January 6 would have ended on a constitutional note even if Trump had succeeded in throwing the election into the House since Republicans would no doubt have followed the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the letter.

This is not to say that those constitutional procedures are anything other than obsolete, arcane, and undemocratic.  Considering that the Twelfth Amendment dates from 1803 and has never been updated, they are all those and more.  But what's important is that America’s weak and decrepit constitutional structure would have remained formally intact.  By contrast, Napoleon III, the subject of Marx’s famous study, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, overthrew the existing constitution after launching a coup d’état in 1851 so that he could draft a new constitution from scratch, one that allowed him to serve an unlimited number of ten-year terms and gave him have total authority to declare war, sign treaties, form alliances, and initiate laws.  The result was not authoritarianism under the existing constitution but dictatorship over it.  As for fascism, it dispenses with constitutionalism entirely by positing a mystical union between führer and volk that is above the law, one characterized by “unconditional authority downwards, highest responsibility upwards.”  Goebbels thus described Hitler as “the greater German, the führer, the prophet, the fighter, that last hope of the masses, the shining symbol of the German will to freedom” – anything, that is, except a mundane politician or officeholder.

Class relations are also key.  Trotsky described fascism as an attempt to resolve the contradictions of capitalism within the confines of the bourgeois state.  Since “[t]he productive forces are in irreconcilable contradiction not only with private property but also with national state boundaries,” the result is an effort “to solve this contradiction through an extension of boundaries, seizure of new territories, and so on.  The totalitarian state, subjecting all aspects of economic, political and cultural life to finance capital, is the instrument for creating a super-nationalist state, an imperialist empire, the rule over continents, the rule over the whole world.”

But Trump is not remotely there yet.  He is not a military expansionist, for example, and indeed attacked neocon hawk Liz Cheney during the campaign for launching “forever wars” from the comfort of Washington.  His choice of middle-of-the-road Wall Streeters like Lutnik and Bessent to head up negotiations with China indicates that, for now at least, he is intent on using financial rather than military means in dealing with the “threat” posed by the PRC.  

Bonapartism is meanwhile classically associated with a high pitch of class conflict in which the would-be ruler plays off the warring elements against one another so as to maintain himself in power.  Yet the current period is marked by working-class quiescence in which strikes, despite a recent uptick, are still running at a rate 75 percent or more below that of the late 1960s and early 70s.  

None of which is to say that Trump will not “graduate” to Bonapartism in the event of an economic or foreign-policy crisis or other disruption.  In fact, with the world in growing turmoil, such crises are more likely than not, which is why Bonapartism, i.e. outright political dictatorship, is plainly on the agenda.  Fascism, similarly, cannot be ruled out either although it will take political breakdown and a massive upsurge in revolutionary class struggle before it advances to the fore.

To sum up: Trumpism has not yet reached the Bonapartist stage, much less the fascist.  Nonetheless, constitutional constraints have been cast aside so forcibly.  The reason is the political breakdown of the last 30 years or so, which has been unprecedented.  The legislative branch is paralyzed, corruption is soaring, economic polarization is out of control, while ordinary citizens have rarely been more pessimistic.  An eighteenth-century constitution that is increasingly at odds with the needs of modern society is making a mockery of anything resembling democratic self-government.  If we toss in global warming, imperial overstretch, economic instability, and an increasingly powerful drive to war, then it is evident that capitalism is entering into the greatest crisis in history, a perfect multi-dimensional storm involving everything from high finance and the environment to political structure.  With its limits and contradictions, American democracy was never more than a crude facsimile.  But even that it is collapsing under the strain of a growing capitalist breakdown.

As far as the US is concerned, this means that mass repression, cultural reaction, and crude expressions of racism, sexism, and homophobia will all follow.  Life in America is changing rapidly, and there is nothing that middle-class radicals, “progressive” journalists, or the washed-up liberals who constitute the Democratic Party’s left wing can do to return it to anything resembling normalcy.

The only force capable of combatting such tendencies is the proletariat.  But it can do so not by restoring the old pseudo-democracy but by replacing it with a real democracy in the form of a [Global] (Correction - IC'53) workers’ state.  The more repressive and unstable the Trump administration grows, the more the working class must take the lead.  Five programmatic elements are absolutely crucial:

-- No to one-man rule.

-- No to mass deportations.

-- No to war.

-- Yes to workers’ solidarity on both sides of the US-Mexican border.

-- Yes to a democratic constituent assembly elected on the basis of strict proportional representation whose task will be to reconstruct America’s broken system of government from the ground up.  

Crisis of Democracy

By Daniel Lazare

The one safe prediction we can make about the upcoming presidential election is that it can only result in a further intensification of the crisis of US democracy.

This is not Marxist boiler-plate in which bourgeois democracy is always bankrupt and capitalism is always in its death throes.   This is the real thing.  A lot of concerns are weighing on voters’ minds as Election Day nears, the economy, the climate crisis, inflation, and housing prices, to name just a few.  But among the most pressing is an across-the-board constitutional breakdown that is rapidly accelerating.  For example:

-- The Electoral College, which nearly quadruples the clout of voters in lily-white Wyoming versus those in minority-majority California, is playing an increasingly outsized role.  In the first two centuries of the American republic, the EC overturned the popular vote on only three occasions: in 1824, 1876, and 1888.  But it has already done so twice since November 2000 and may well do it a third time next month.

-- The Senate is more imbalanced than at any point since 1820.[1]  Thanks to equal state representation, it allows the 54 percent of the population that lives in just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty.  A majority can be gleaned from senators representing just 17 percent of the country while a filibuster can be gleaned from 41 senators representing as little as eleven.

-- The House is so heavily gerrymandered that Republicans next month may enjoy as much as a 16-seat advantage according to estimates by the Brennan Center for Justice. 

-- The Supreme Court is increasingly undemocratic not just in terms of decision making but structure.  Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote (i.e. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barret), while four were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas).  Given that Clarence Thomas, the oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship will likely continue well into the mid-2030s.  If Trump wins a second term, it will continue even longer.

-- Federalism is in shambles.  Since January, Texas has seized control of a portion of the US-Mexican border in the town of Eagle Pass, 140 miles west of San Antonio.  This is outright insurrection, yet the White House is paralyzed.

-- Racial imbalances are growing.  More than 80 percent of racial minorities live in the ten biggest states that are outvoted in the Senate while states that are rural and white tend to benefit most from the Electoral College.  The multi-racial urban majority thus finds itself more and more disenfranchised.

-- What makes this even worse is that reform is essentially impossible thanks to the dysfunctional amending clause laid out in Article V, which stipulates that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as a comma in America’s holy of holies.  Thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural change, no matter how modest.  The US is as frozen as the Celestial Empire on the eve of the 1911 revolution.

The upshot is a perfect impasse.  All advanced capitalist states are under growing strain due to the post-2008 “long recession” and a host of problems that go along with it.  But since no country is saddled with a constitution that is as ancient, dysfunctional, and all-encompassing as the US version, no one faces a mechanical breakdown of anywhere near the same magnitude.  It is the equivalent of a car with a missing headlight, a missing wheel, and a sputtering engine.  But even if it leaves Americans stranded by the side of the road, there is nothing they can do because Article V renders them powerless.  Even a constitutional convention is a non-starter since Article V stipulates that its decisions are merely recommendations subject to the same two-thirds, three-fourths rule.  Wealthy minority interests are using the breakdown to impose an increasingly rightwing agenda.  Yet the democratic majority is powerless to respond.  

Powerless under the existing system, that is, but not under a new one of its own making.

There is a way out -- not a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, but a constituent assembly along the lines of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917.  The difference is crucial.  Where one takes place under the Constitution, which describes how it may be called and what it can do, the other takes place over the Constitution since it is a gathering of the constituent elements – “we the people” and all that – who created it in the first place.  It is therefore free to operate on the Constitution as a whole, not according to the document’s rules, but according to its own, which is to say those of direct democracy.  If the assembly votes to ditch the Second Amendment, then out it goes.  If it votes to drop the Constitution in toto and draw up a new plan of government to take its place, then out it goes too.  

This is not a constitutional solution, since no such solution exists.  Rather, it is a revolutionary solution whose goal is either to create a new state or re-found the existing state on an entirely new basis.  Hence, it is one that only the industrial proletariat can implement.  

The US thus faces a classic choice between breakdown and revolution, between decay, authoritarianism, and a deepening social crisis on one hand and socialist democracy on the other.  The founding fathers have done us the favor of closing off all other escape routes.

As for the individual candidates running in 2024, they are an expression of the political crisis rather than in any sense an answer to it.

Kamala Harris is the candidate of the center-right status quo.  While she claims to stand for change, she has made it crystal clear that she will continue White House policies based on war, repression, economic royalism, and inaction in the face of accelerating climate change.  She represents the politics of muddling through, of doing whatever it takes to make it from day to day without regard to long-term considerations.  When vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz recently suggested that the Electoral College should go, the Harris campaign forced him to recant.  Even mentioning the structural crisis was more than Harris could bear.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is the candidate of lower-income voters who are “mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore,” to quote the 1976 movie “Network.”  They support him not despite the fact that he is a bull in a china shop, but because of it.  In their blind fury, they can think of no solution other than smashing stuff up and are therefore counting on him to do it.  His authoritarianism and destructiveness flow from a political structure that is broken, irrational, and increasingly undemocratic.  

For what it’s worth, this writer rates Trump’s chances at 41 percent and Harris’s at 39, with a 20-percent chance of January 6-style chaos instead.  But regardless of who wins, the great American breakdown will continue unabated.

[1] Frances E. Lee and Bruce L. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10-11.