America's Two-Party Dictatorship

Head of the statue of liberty, Paris Exhibition, 1883.

Source: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com

The war against the Iranian people, and the work of the ICE brownshirts are not the work of Trump alone

I’m going to pick up from a question that Sidney raised. What would regime change in the USA look like?

To do that, I’m going to go back in history, which is a very important thing: as the philosopher Santayana once said, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. One of the things I want to pick up on is that this has all happened before.

Speakers have said this is a new phase, that it is a new initiative. But it’s only new in relation to the world that came out of the victory of the anti-fascist forces in 1945, above all the Chinese revolution and the victory of the Soviet Union. That forced imperialism to step back from what it had previously been doing. If we go back and look at what it has previously been doing, we get some insights into what’s happening now.

I want to emphasize something that other speakers have said: that the war against the Iranian people and the thuggery of the US state on the streets that we’ve seen in Minneapolis and the work of the ICE brownshirts are not the work of Trump alone. We should not forget the template for Trump’s war was the ruination of Libya by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

We should also not forget that Joe Biden was Capitol Hill’s self-proclaimed most ardent neocon. He cheerled the destruction of Yugoslavia and he started the war in Ukraine. The problem, in short, is not a Trump problem. It’s an American problem.

In parenthesis I must make an excuse to all my Latin American friends for using the word American to describe what’s happening in the USA. But it’s shorter and more graphic and it’s the word that Trump uses.

This problem has now become acute because America is losing the war that really does end all others. And that’s the economic war. And this is a war that has been waged by its own business class against its own economy.

America is losing the war that really does end all others. And that's the economic war. And this is a war that has been waged by its own business class against its own economy

In this respect, just one little fact will help get a grip on what is new about today. I’ve published lots of stuff on this which you can currently find on www.movingfinger.org. This fact is that if the USA had kept up the growth rate it enjoyed until the early 1970s, it would equal China’s today.

The decline that has happened is entirely homegrown. It’s entirely the product of the way the U.S. economy has grown. But the classes that rule it cannot accept that. They’re blinded by an Epsteinian superiority complex. They blame everybody except themselves for their own failure. And U.S. history says they only have one response: war abroad and repression at home.

I call that one response because they go together. In short, the USA is a failed state which has gone rogue. There are three causes. First of all, the USA is not a democracy. It is a two-party dictatorship. Its electoral system is not even democratic in the so-called normal sense of a representative legislature controlling an appointed executive. It does not represent the people of America. It rules them. Neither the war of extermination against the Iranian people, nor the thuggery of its ICE brownshirts, are the work of Trump alone.

The USA is a failed state which has gone rogue

Let us not forget that the template for Trump’s war was the ruination of Libya by Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton or that Joe Biden, Capitol Hill’s most ardent neocon, cheerled the destruction of Yugoslavia and started the war in Ukraine.

The problem, in short, is an American problem.

The USA is a failed state which has gone rogue. This has three causes. First, the USA is a two-party dictatorship; its electoral system is not even democratic in the so-called ‘normal’ sense of a representative legislature controlling an appointed executive.

It does not represent the people of America; it rules them.

Since 1912 no US third party has won a single vote in the electoral college. Since 1915, excepting two single-state parties, no third-party candidate has become a lawmaker. America’s routine and massive voter suppression originated in the Jim Crow practices of the Southern slaveocracy. After 1901, no Black person was elected to Congress from any Confederate State for seventy years.

Neither repression nor suppression are anything new in US politics.

In 1916 the racist Southern Democrat Woodrow Wilson, elected with an all-time low vote share of 41.8%, created the Alien Enemy Act whose practice of arresting and jailing disloyal foreigners without trial was institutionalised by the 1917 Espionage Act. The ideological glue for surveillance and victimisation was the potent idea that the USA faces foreign threats so perilous it must protect itself by arbitrary means, up to and including torture, extralegal abduction, indefinite imprisonment without trial, and murder.

It bore fruit in the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 with J. Edgar Hoover at its head. Hoover’s national blacklist grew to over 100,000 people. The climate of fear he created rules to this day, subjecting citizens designated as enemies to persecution well beyond due process. The word ‘McCarthyism’ became a worldwide synonym for this phenomenon.

This climate gave us Guantanamo, special rendition, Julian Assange, and the mass expulsion from institutions of learning of thousands of courageous young people who dare to speak out against genocide. And Police killings should come as no surprise when assassination has become the standard method of resolving difficult political disputes.

The cause is not the deep state: it is the US state itself

The second cause is the state. Not the deep state: the state itself.

The House does not control the state; the state controls the House, through the institution of the Presidency. And the Presidency is controlled by the people that Mohammad Marandi rightly calls ‘the Epstein Class’

This began with the unholy compromise between Republicans and Democrats which overturned all the gains of the Civil War except the formal abolition of slavery. As the Miller Institute explains:

Does this sound familiar?

Under Wilson, executive power passed directly to the Business Class. He suffered a severe ischaemic stroke on October 2, 1919. Its severity was concealed from the public until his term ended in March 1921, and an informal cabinet took decisions in his name with his wife shuttling between financiers and the sick President.

Roosevelt having created an executive so he could stand over Congress, Wilson’s advisors now stood over the President. All that remained was to unite these instruments against the people.

The third cause of the present crisis is the valiant resistance of the American people. This did not start in the American Revolution but in the Civil War

The third cause of the present crisis is the valiant resistance of the American people, starting with the Civil War, one of the 19th Century’s great revolutionary wars in which Marx’s publisher Weydemeyer rose to Colonel in the ranks of the North.

The US state is the bastard child of its betrayal. It is because the American people have no stake in this state that American history is punctuated by acts of popular resistance. These recreate the alliance which defeated the Slaveocracy in 1871, in which white workers were drawn, by the courage of America’s oppressed African-Americans, women and immigrants, to stand by their side against the common threat from their own state.

These uprisings repeat regularly: the General Strikes of 1936, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the country-wide mobilizations which followed George Floyd’s murder.

The Epstein classes have only two responses: bribery and repression. Hence the third problem, which is that they can no longer afford the bribes. All that remains is repression. The reason is the source of the bribes, namely armed robbery. Roosevelt converted the technology of mass destruction into America’s export staple. By 1918 the USA was already the world’s chief war supplier. By 1945 the War Production Board had, in three years, overseen the output of 40 percent of world output of munitions. One fourth of US output was warplanes; another fourth was warships.

American-built tank “America”, designed by Professor E.F. Miller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Photographed in July of 1918. Source:rarehistoricalphotos.com

But war was not just an export business; it was the mechanism for the USA’s failed attempt at world domination. Roosevelt, in essence, invented neocolonialism.

He oversaw the US Marine Corps’s interventions into Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. He acted in single-minded support of US growers and importers like the United Fruit Company to convert these fertile lands into plantation economies. The next time you hear someone dissing a ‘Banana Republic’, remember who grows the bananas.

The excuse was the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ which said the United States should intervene in unstable Caribbean and Central American countries to forestall European intervention. This converted the Monroe Doctrine from opposition to European meddling into a model for US domination.

US rulers had learnt, the hard way, the costs of actually colonising the countries they ruled. Instead, they created and upheld corrupt and dictatorial, but above all loyal governments; when this failed, they terrorised the resistance into passivity. The wealth of the Epstein classes hence derives from their robbery of the world, which they justify by a mythical vision of racial superiority I call the ‘Colombian World View’

The wealth of the Epstein classes derives from robbery, which they justify by a mythical vision of racial superiority. I call this the ‘Colombian World View’

This is the idea that the Colonial Conquest founded a superior civilization, entitled to seize the territories of North American, genocidally exterminate the people living there, populate it with slaves, and convert South America and the Pacific Rim into colonial hunting grounds from which to create a New World Order in which the Europeans would bow to the will of an enlightened American will .

The Soviet and Chinese revolutions put paid to this madness, whereupon the Epstein classes appointed themselves leaders of the Free World. America’s Manifest Destiny was to roll back, and ruthlessly extirpate, the threat to civilization from the hordes of inferior peoples that populate the Eurasian continent. This thinly-disguised Nazi doctrine rolled up colonialism, racism and anti-Communism into a seamless warmongering whole.

Their problem, however, is straightforward; if you only rob, and you do not produce, you can only destroy. The ultimate victim of America’s gangster past is its economic future.

Trump is not the problem. He is the voice of this doomsday project, the true face of the failed rogue state that the American Dream has become.

The solution was spelt out by Malcolm X. It is an alliance between this state’s victims from Iran to Minneapolis, to rid the world of its domination so that the American people can create a new America, an America they have dreamed of and fought for, but has never yet been, in which they can be safe, prosperous, and at last a free people in a truly free world.