R. Nesbitt | Red Phoenix guest contributor | Maryland —

The Supreme Court of the United States sat last week to preside over the case brought forward by the legal team of Donald Trump to challenge the legality of his exclusion from the ballot in the State of Colorado for the 2024 presidential election. This comes as Trump is still bogged down in the federal charges brought against him for, among other things, inciting insurrection against the government in the putsch of Jan. 6, 2021.

Colorado has based its exclusion of Trump from the ballot on the weight of the evidence against him in his incitement of rebellion. With Trump leading in split races for the Republican primary, weaponizing Biden’s immigration policy and waging several legal battles at the same time, there are high stakes in Trump retaining any shred of legitimacy and innocence he can have as he goes up against the meek and absent Executive under Biden and Harris. In this era of crisis, of Democratic stagnation and flimsiness and Republican reaction and populist posturing, the conservative “middle class” of America will buck even its hallowed constitutionalism in favor of a political celebrity, as shown in their public outcry against the election of 2020, the presidency of Biden, and the federal prosecution of Trump.

Mara Gay, an Editorial Board member for the New York Times declared on Feb. 5, “Donald Trump has tested every norm of American democracy.” The question must be posed, has he? Is Trump an unfortunate aberration of a stable and developing democracy or is he the product of a system that has been inherently undemocratic from its inception, as it can only be in the largest capitalist empire yet made in human history?

The long and sordid history of the exclusion of women, the landless citizenry (the proletariat), African-Americans, immigrants, and the youth from suffrage and the chipping away at this elite edifice needs no recitation here. But what, crucially, can not go untold are the stunning advances made by these groups, and the masses as a whole, in establishing that bare minimum of political participation. From the movements of the Suffragettes, Civil Rights, immigrants’ and Indigenous people’s for equality and political freedom, the American working masses have a library of unopened epics in class struggle and it is a struggle that continues and must intensify to this day.

At the same time as communities, states and more sensible federal legislators like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren assert broader democracy with reforms such as initiatives for ranked-choice voting, ending felony disenfranchisement (as in Maryland), opposing the Electoral College, abolishing legalized bribery (lobbying) and voter ID laws, there now arrives on the field a vanguard for the reaction, embodied by Donald Trump and his movement, who see any single advance in democracy as “anarchy” and “revolution.” Trump’s support for voter ID laws, his suppression of mail-in voting and his various legal, practical and “allegedly” militant attempts to overthrow the 2020 election are enough to expose him as not truly representative of the interests of the vast majority of the people in the United States. Is it not enough that this man has not won the popular vote in either of his elections? The entire history of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party is one for the restriction of democracy even in its systematically skewed forms. It lashes out against the most meager of reforms meant to empower the masses, never mind revolutionary means, and that is the very definition of reaction. 

Now, Trump and his minority screech and howl about some great injustice to democracy, a democracy which has not existed for millions of Americans from July 4, 1776, to this very day. 

Marxist-Leninists find themselves in the unique position of simultaneously opposing the foundation of bourgeois “democracy” while also resisting any attempts to sink deeper into the chasm of an open dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This work must be done in analysis and agitation for the people to demonstrate, vocalize, write and — in the greatest moments of crisis — vote, even to the extent where independent electoral bodies and coalitions for the working class can be formed. But chiefly in exposing this beast, the people must refuse to accept this as normal, and must not consider these events to be symptomatic of some unfortunate medical diagnosis for American democracy as the liberal pundits claim. 

The legal basis of Trump’s prosecution, “inciting insurrection against the federal government,” is itself dangerous. As established in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution after the Civil War, if the proletariat should be compelled to do just that, its leadership and organizations will be prosecuted on the same basis, and in no doubt in quicker procession than the three years it has taken Trump to find himself on trial. Yet the judicial attempts to strike him from the ballot must be supported with full force by revolutionary and progressive forces in this nation, as they will provide a legal basis for his further prosecution and disqualification from any campaign whatsoever. The MAGA movement has shown us it will not end with one man, but they have demonstrated a militant and anarchistic defiance in the defense of this leader. It should not even be a question of Trump’s guilt as he stood outside the White House urging his rabble to “take back [their] country” mere minutes before the putsch commenced, but again, in this unrepresentative democracy we find ourselves in, everything is up in the air.

What then shall we do? Nothing? Vote for Trump as an act of suicidal accelerationism just to watch it all burn? Or support whatever campaigns can restrict his neofascist movement in its infancy to buy time for a revolutionary movement of the working classes to be built? The history of struggle against fascism has shown us the latter course is the most successful route for revolutionaries, progressives and the people en masse. Pay attention to the SCOTUS, prepare yourselves for the potential striking of Colorado’s disenfranchisement of Trump or his possible victory in this trial, not in a masochistic sense, but to know, definitively, that a government that opens the door for tyranny will never be called democracy. 

Regardless of this or that trial, this or that election, we must organize all the same. We must unionize our workplaces, we must flood channels with independent political media, we must continue to demonstrate against all manifestations of reaction — on the US-Mexico border, in Palestine, and in this protracted, uncertain test for bourgeois shamocracy in the United States. 

Earlier, the bourgeoisie presented themselves as liberal. They were for bourgeois democratic freedom and in that way gained popularity with the people. Now there is not one remaining trace of liberalism. There is no such thing as “freedom of personality” any more. Personal rights are now only acknowledged by them, the owners of capital — all the other citizens are regarded as raw materials, that are only for exploitation. The principle of equal rights for people and nations is trodden in the dust and it is replaced by the principle of full rights for the exploiting minority and the lack of rights of the exploited majority of the citizens.

The banner of bourgeois democratic freedom has been flung overboard. I think that you, the representatives of communist and democratic parties, must pick up this banner and carry it forward if you want to gain the majority of the people. There is nobody else to raise it.

J. V. Stalin, Speech of the 19th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Oct. 14 1952.

Categories: Elections, Government, U.S. News