A reply to "Election: chaos and dictatorship come closer" I write for Tempest, so I'll start with the part of this piece I can't dismiss. The socialist press has said too little about the machinery of November: the Postal Service rule, the Missouri maps, and the possibility that Mike Johnson installs a loyalist as House clerk before January 3. The clerk scenario in particular deserves far more attention than it has gotten anywhere on the left. The charge of silence has some basis, and I would rather concede it than argue about word counts.
The analysis still has to meet the facts, and several of these facts moved before the ink dried. On Monday night the Supreme Court kept Judge Talwani's freeze in place and blocked the USPS rule for this election. Only Alito and Thomas dissented. Kavanaugh concurred on timing grounds, writing that election officials could not reasonably implement the rule before November. The article predicted the six conservatives would likely side with Trump. Four of them didn't. (Talwani, for the record, sits on the district court in Boston, not an appeals court.) Missouri runs the other way from how it is described. The state supreme court struck the 2025 gerrymander on September 3 because the referendum against it was valid. Kavanaugh then turned away the Republican appeal. The confusion that followed came from a federal district judge ordering the gerrymandered map back into use, and the full court resolved it on September 10 in favor of the 2022 map. It was no longer up in the air when the piece ran. The oath quotation drops four words. Trump said he would "cheat like hell like they do." That framing is a smear of Democrats, and it does not make the spectacle any less ugly. But a quote with the qualifier cut out is a gift to anyone looking for a reason to ignore everything else in the article. None of this refutes the danger. It relocates it. The author's own class analysis explains Monday's ruling better than the conclusion does. The piece says the majority of the capitalist class sees no advantage in a formal dictatorship and prefers to rule through the old forms. The Republican secretaries of state who filed against the rule, the county clerks, and four conservative justices behaved exactly as that analysis would predict. The fight so far has run through the state apparatus and inside the ruling class, and Trump lost this round there. That is why I don't think the Reconstruction-era analogy or the language of approaching dictatorship quite fits. Look at what the Dallas oath asked for. The crowd did not swear to a party program or a nation. It swore to "the greatest president in the history of the United States." That is loyalty to a person, extracted in public, and it is the signature of what I have called patrimonial Bonapartism: rule through personal retainers (ICE, a pliant clerk, a Commerce Secretary hunting for Chinese parts in voting machines) laid over a state whose permanent institutions keep reasserting themselves. The danger is real because the retainers are armed and the institutions are slow. It is a different danger from a consolidated dictatorship, and it calls for different tactics. On tactics I agree with the author more than this reply may suggest. If the House is stolen in January, courts will not save it, and marches that disrupt nothing will not either. The union leadership's silence is the real scandal here. But a call to shut down the country is a slogan until someone can say which workplaces, organized by whom, and with what committees are already in place. Dismissing No Kings does not build that. The millions who turned out are the only material a general strike could be made from, and I would rather argue with them than write them off. So I accept part of the rebuke. The left press should cover the mechanics of a stolen election with the seriousness the author does. It should also get them right, and it should be clear about what kind of regime it is fighting. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43416): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43416 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121053097/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
