The Early Cold War and the Two-Party System

The Brexit vote and new wave of racist police murder in the U.S.

During the week leading up to the June 23 Brexit referendum, media representing the largest capitalists that benefit from the U.S.-dominated world empire pulled all the tricks out their bag to ensure that the proposal for Britain to leave the European Union was defeated. They claimed that Brexit would bring financial panic and a deep new world recession that would otherwise be avoided.

The leaders of all the major parties in Britain, including the Conservative leader and prime minister David Cameron, Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was lukewarm in his opposition to Brexit, and the leadership of the liberal Social-Democratic Party, were united on their opposition to Brexit. Only the far-right racist United Kingdom Independence Party and a few small leftist groups supported it.

What was the Brexit vote about?

The Brexit movement was dominated by the racist anti-immigrant right with neo-fascist components, much like the Trump campaign is in the United States. There was a much smaller left-wing movement that also favored Brexit. The problem was there was no way to distinguish between votes for anti-immigrant, racist Brexit and the leftish “lexit” movement.

Unfortunately, there are many on the left who echo Brexit by explaining that there has to be some limit on immigration, since otherwise wages in Britain and other “white” European countries will plummet. Such people are not thinking like working-class revolutionaries but like bourgeois trade unionists who want to assure high wages for “our British Workers” at the expense of “foreign workers” who are not “white” or are from Poland. (Polish workers in Britain these days do not qualify as “white.”)

Voters were given two choices. One was to vote for the British nationalist “Trumpist” movement’s position based on nostalgia for the days when “Britannia ruled” and everybody in Britain was English, Welsh, Scottish, or “at worst” Irish, and there were many relatively good paying jobs in industry and mining. In bygone days in industrial Britain, the high demand for the commodity labor power made it possible to organize powerful trade unions that limited the competition among the sellers of that commodity, resulting in relatively high wages for British workers.

The other choice was to vote for the order that has “given the world 70 years of peace”—among the imperialist robber countries, that is—but has also led to the progressive decay of the industrial economies of the imperialist core countries—especially Britain. In U.S. terms, it was comparable to voting for Hillary Clinton—the status-quo presidential candidate—or the anti-immigrant, racist, fascist-infested Donald Trump candidacy.

As the day of the vote approached, the “establishment” prepared to celebrate. Polls under the weight of the media campaign were shifting toward the “anti-Brexit” position. The assassination of Jo Cox, a strong Brexit opponent and Labor MP, by a neo-Nazi a short time before the referendum seemed to put wind in the sails of the anti-Brexit camp. In anticipation of another great victory for the “pro-European Union position”—which really means pro-U.S. world empire—world stock markets climbed relentlessly while U.S. government bonds and the dollar price of gold slumped.

Or, as the financial press likes to say, with Brexit headed for defeat the appetite for risk was increasing. The defeat of Brexit in Britain would then signal the coming victory of the pro-status quo, conservative Hillary Clinton in the November U.S. presidential election over her anti-immigrant, nationalist-racist challenger Donald Trump.

Just before the polls closed, the media reported that a last-minute poll showed a further swing toward the anti-Brexit position. It was, it seemed, a done deal, and the anti-Brexit supporters prepared to celebrate their great victory! But that was before the votes began to be counted. As the returns came in, the mood of victory among the conservative supporters of the status quo turned to horror. Against all expectations, Brexit was victorious at the polls.

What happened? It seems that many young people—comparable to Bernie Sanders supporters in the U.S., though they most certainly didn’t support the racist Brexit campaign—couldn’t get themselves to vote for the status quo by voting against Brexit. Many of these young people disgusted with what was being offered to them by both the pro- and anti-Brexit positions simply stayed home. Could something like that happen in November in the U.S. causing the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency?

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The U.S. Two-Party System and Proto-Fascist Trends in the 1930s

Much to the relief of the U.S. ruling class, Wall Street favorite Hillary Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders in the June 7 California primary. In the wake of Clinton’s victory, President Obama formally endorsed Clinton for the office of president of the United States, as did the “progressive” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, considered a major leader on the left wing of the Democratic Party.

This makes it all but official that the Democratic nominee will be the pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street, and very hawkish former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wife of former President Bill Clinton. Clinton will be the first female to be nominated by one of the two ruling parties to the presidency and if elected will be the first female president of the U.S.

The media made it appear that Clinton won by an unexpectedly large margin, though Sanders got more than 40 percent of the vote. Before the election, most polls had shown Clinton well ahead of Sanders. But that was before Sanders staged a series of rallies that drew thousands of enthusiastic young people, in sharp contrast to the tepid support for Clinton. Clinton’s lead in the polls began to evaporate and it looked as though Sanders might have the momentum to pull off an upset in California like he had done earlier in Michigan and some other states.

In the end, Clinton prevailed frustrating the hopes of Sanders’ newly politicized young supporters. One factor was that on the eve of the California primary, the Associated Press, quickly echoed by other media, announced that Clinton had clinched the Democratic nomination. In reality, Clinton lacked, and still lacks despite her victory in the California primary, enough elected delegates to win the Democratic nomination. However, she is assured of the great majority of the unelected “super-delegates.” Indeed, weeks before the AP announcement it had become clear that Clinton would almost certainly be the Democratic nominee thanks to the un-elected super-delegates.

Sanders had kept alive the hope among his young supporters that he would be able to convince the super-delegates to shift their support to him, but this never seemed likely. However, it would have been far more costly politically for the Democratic establishment if Clinton had been nominated after losing the primary in the U.S.’s biggest state. The timing of the AP announcement just before the election had all the markings of a corporate move to save Clinton from an embarrassing loss.

There were other factors in Clinton’s victory. Under the bizarre electoral rules of California’s so-called open primary system, persons can vote in the primaries regardless of their stated political party preference. However, this rule does not apply to the office of U.S. president. Who exactly can vote in the presidential primary is different for the Democratic Party than for the Republican Party.

Only registered Republicans can vote in the Republican presidential primary. However, in the Democratic primary it is possible for persons registered as neither Democrats nor Republicans to request a special ballot that enables them to vote in the Democratic presidential primary. Of course, many young people—and indeed even older people—were awakened to politics for the first time by the Sanders campaign and were not registered Democrat. They simply didn’t know that they could actually vote in the Democratic primary for the office of president. Or even if they did know this, they might not have known where or how they could obtain the special ballot. This undoubtedly cost Sanders many votes.

In addition, many poor people have felony convictions. Convicted felons who have passed their probation are “out of the system” and under California law can vote in elections. But many such people believe that once you are convicted of a felony you can never vote again—which is indeed the case in some U.S. states.

Yet another factor that tends to depress the votes of anybody who has to work for a living is that U.S. elections are held on a working day. In virtually every other country, elections are held on holidays or weekends giving voters several days to vote. To be sure, in the California primary people did have the possibility of voting by mail, but to do this you had to be signed up beforehand. It is also possible to vote at a polling place, but you have to know where to go to vote if you follow this route, and there are often long lines.

All these factors work strongly in favor of corporate-backed machine candidates such as Hillary Clinton. These machine voters know their polling places or are signed up to vote by mail.

Perhaps most important was the alliance between the leaders of trade unions, including unions made up mostly of immigrant low-wage workers, and the Democratic Party machine. This close alliance between trade-union leaders and the corporate-backed Democrats, now led by Hillary Clinton, dates back to New Deal days. If the union leaders had backed Sanders (1), the result would have been quite different. This illustrates the truth, if in this case negatively, that in present-day capitalist society no major progressive social and political change can happen without the support of the organized working class.

Clinton’s victory, however, does not change the fact that about 40 percent of those who voted in the Democratic Party, and far more than half of the younger voters, preferred the avowed “democratic socialist” to the pro-corporate, pro-war Hillary Clinton.

While Sanders and Clinton were campaigning in California, Donald Trump actively campaigned up and down the state as though he, too, was in a tight race. In reality, Trump faced no opposition in the California Republican primary. Indeed, Trump’s last standing opponents, Ohio Governor John Kasick and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, had withdrawn from the race weeks before. Nor is the racist Trump given a realistic chance of winning the state in the general election where white people are a minority and Latinos are now the largest single ethnic group.

Therefore, unlike the case with Clinton and Sanders, Trump should have had no real interest in the California primary if we judge by normal electoral criteria. What then was Trump up to in California?

 

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Origins of the U.S. Two-Party System

A few months ago, I watched an Internet video that explored the attitudes of Americans toward present-day Germany. Germany has a history of at least a thousand years, going back to the medieval Holy Roman Empire. However, movies and TV shows Americans are exposed to focus only on Nazi Germany. Indeed, the popular U.S. entertainment media focus even more narrowly on the years 1944-1945, when heroic American soldiers defeated German Nazis alternatively shown as evil, comic or stupid.

This particular video showed a modern young German woman visiting the U.S. and meeting a young man. The American man, whose education in German history is of the type described above, asked the German woman whether her grandfather had been a Nazi. The German woman put the young man in his place by asking whether his ancestors had been slave owners. And herein lies a tale.

Today in Germany, with the exception of neo-Nazis, nobody honors the Nazis. There are no Adolf Hitler Platz’s and no cities or buildings named for Hitler or other Nazi leaders. Herman Goering’s prediction to his jailers at Nuremberg that in 50 years there would be statues of Hitler throughout Germany did not come true.

Perhaps textbooks in modern Germany don’t explore the deeper roots of what made the Nazis and their crimes possible. That would require an understanding of the imperialism that gave birth to the Nazis and the capitalism that inevitably developed into imperialism. And since Germany remains a capitalist as well as an imperialist country—all of Germany has been ruled by capitalists since 1989—it is unlikely that German textbooks would explain the contradictions of capitalism that made Nazism possible in the first place. But at least the Nazis are pictured as the band of criminals they were.

But what about the U.S. slaveholders and their “slaveholders’ rebellion” of 1861-1865, as it was called by Karl Marx? That rebellion—which formed the Confederate States of America—is pretty much viewed around the world as at least the moral equivalent of the Third Reich. Not identical to the Third Reich but no less evil.

It is not only left-of-center progressives who see it that way. Today’s fascists also see it that way. At fascist meetings throughout the world, the swastika, or symbols that look like the swastika, are displayed side by side with the stripes and bars of the Confederacy, the flag of slavery.

Are the leaders of the slaveholders’ rebellion in U.S. textbooks described as the band of criminals they were, like the Nazis are pictured in German textbooks? Not at all. The leaders of the slaveholders’ rebellion are generally pictured as honorable leaders of a “lost cause”—and as great American patriots—though the emphasis has shifted over the years reflecting the flows and ebbs of the struggle for African American liberation.

For example, in the years immediately after the war ended, it was called the “war of the rebellion.” But soon after, it was renamed the Civil War, a polite and neutral term that makes no distinction between those who fought and in many cases died in the war against the slaveholders’ rebellion and those who fought on the side of the slave owners.

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