The Editors
WITH WAR AND genocide spreading from Palestine to Lebanon and Iran, with southern states inundated by the biggest climate-change flood disaster in U.S. history, and people’s general insecurity about their own and the country’s future, the United States lurches toward what’s called “the most consequential election in our lifetime” that may in the end resolve little or nothing.
We won’t speculate here on possible results. Rather, we’ll look at the confluence of factors that go into making such a volatile moment in U.S. politics. But we will note that unless they’re unexpectedly decisive, they might be rejected as illegitimate by close to half the country, with a looming potential for constitutional crisis and chaos.
1) The presidential election rides on likely razor-thin margins in seven or so “swing states,” so that a few tens of thousands of votes either way outweigh 150 or 160 million cast nationwide — the product of the United States’ uniquely ridiculous Electoral College system.
The latter is not only grotesquely undemocratic but vulnerable to all kinds of voter-suppression and other schemes at state levels, including a threat that election results might not be certified by local officials or hopelessly delayed by bureaucratic obstruction (such as a new Georgia ballot hand-count requirement, voter roll purges and barriers to registration).
The MAGA-run Republican Party in particular is openly putting in place the mechanics for a multi-front Grand Theft Election game to be rolled out in vote counts and certification battles — procedural, legal and potentially physical. And while these GOP (Gangster Ops) moves are pretty well publicized, the Democrats are contributing their share to voter suppression through various pretexts to exclude the Green Party from state ballots.
Arsenal of Genocide
2) U.S. elections conventionally don’t hinge on international issues, which tend to attract the attention of pundits and elites more than the tens of millions of voters concerned with the severe problems of their daily lives. In 2024, however, it’s impossible to overlook the explosion in the Middle East — where the United States plays the central role as the arsenal of genocide.
Throughout Israel’s year-long destruction of Gaza, the Biden administration has pontificated about Israel’s right to “defend itself,” while bleating about its own “round the clock” brokering negotiations for ceasefire and hostage release deals. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu, driven both by his own need to stay in power and by the goal of continuing the war, and expanding it, has blatantly sabotaged these efforts. For all practical purposes it has also abandoned the Israeli hostages to their fate in the Gaza tunnels.
Beside those objectives, it’s entirely clear that Netanyahu intends to boost the chances of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Yet faced with Netanyahu’s open contempt, the pathetic U.S. president responds with more and more weapons transfers to Israel — in essence, pouring gasoline on the fire he claims to be trying to put out, with predictable results.
The Gaza massacre continues — now mass murder for its own sake with the real death toll by now almost surely well into six figures — while the Israeli military and heavily armed settlers rampage with impunity in West Bank Palestinian villages.
Then came the stunning sequence of events, beginning with Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh in Tehran, detonation of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, followed by continual bombing assassinations of its leadership, carried out by Israel with U.S.-supplied weaponry — without any regard whatsoever for civilian death and destruction in densely populated neighborhoods. A million desperate Lebanese civilians are displaced not only from the south of the country but districts of Beirut as well.
It’s the height of delusion to think that somehow these atrocities wouldn’t feed back into U.S. politics, from the November election to events well into the future. The impact on the Arab-American vote in November is just for openers, to say nothing of the alienation of sectors of the Democrats’ progressive voter base and the bitter polarization on university campuses and punitive repression of pro-Palestinian activism.
As these lines are written, Israel’s ground assault on Lebanon has commenced – the “incursion” which no sane observer expects to remain “limited” — and Netanyahu’s ultimate dream, to bring the United States into a war with Iran, may be changing from fantasy to reality.
A few things are clear. Although Israel’s military and intelligence services were so blindly unprepared for the October 7, 2023 Hamas raid that touched off this historic catastrophe, for the past 18 years they’ve been preparing the war to destroy Hezbollah – ever since the inconclusive end of the 2006 33-day war —and inevitably also a war against Lebanon itself that may lead to the total collapse of that fragile state.
Undoubtedly U.S. and probably other allies’ intelligence agencies assisted Israel in the astounding penetration of Hezbollah’s security infrastructure. Furthermore Hezbollah’s leader Hasan Nasrallah apparently believed, along with most commentators and probably Washington and Tehran too, that its rocket exchanges with Israel would remain within bounds short of “all-out war.”
That was a fatal miscalculation: Whatever happens next, Israel has torn an enormous hole in the strategic capacity and fearsome image of what’s called the “axis of resistance.” This “axis” included of course Hezbollah and the Houthi movement in Yemen, as well as forces allied to Iran inside Iraq.
Contrary to rightwing and Israeli propaganda, these forces are not puppets responding to Iran’s orders. They are actors with their local interests and initiative, and despite their rhetoric and the illusions of some activists, Palestinian freedom is not the top of their agendas. But they — especially Hezbollah — are or at least had been a kind of insurance policy for Iran against the threat of a direct Israeli-U.S. attack.
It’s no longer evident that the shield still exists. The Iranian rulers, already facing a very weak economy and openly at war with their own population, may be forced to pursue closer protective relations with Russia and China. That has potential implications for other conflicts, including Russia’s annexationist invasion of Ukraine which Iran has supported, that are difficult to predict.
U.S. imperialism is inextricably front and center in these events, whatever the intentions of the Biden team to “prevent a wider war” may have been and whatever may be the electoral impact of a morass in which the majority of the American populace does not wish to be entangled. And the transition period between the November 5 election and the January 20 presidential inauguration could be even more ominous.
In the end, “Genocide Joe” Biden’s presidential legacy may be not only the destruction of Gaza and the new Palestinian catastrophe, but the resurrection of Donald Trump.
Political System in Decay
3) Back on the home front, whatever the ultimate result, the U.S. electoral cycle has revealed the stench of decay in the country’s supposedly sacred institutions. It’s not just that the system of elections is vulnerable to voter suppression and manipulation, in ways we discussed at the outset and more.
What were supposed to be safeguards of “stability,” if not democracy – the absurdly unrepresentative Senate, the autonomous powers assigned to the states, the supposedly above-partisanship of a Supreme Court whose nearly uncontrollable majority is now both white-supremacist and semi-monarchist, in the name of “originalism” no less — are now enablers of instability and potential chaos
Even more than that, the elimination of any meaningful campaign finance regulation in our politics has turned the twin Republican and Democratic parties into money-vacuuming apparatuses with no accountability to anyone but the corporate powers megadonors (let alone the parties’ nonexistent “memberships”). That domination in turn makes the capitalist parties, and the political system, essentially impervious to the popular will or the massive crises that affect the society.
A partial counterweight is available in the form of ballot initiatives in some states, notably right now as a vehicle for defending reproductive and abortion rights against the vicious attacks from the right wing. But those generally don’t touch fundamental issues that should be at the core of political discussion.
We repeatedly emphasized that the obscene inequalities of wealth and opportunity in the United States are at the heart of the stresses afflicting millions of Americans from inflation, poor access to medical care, miserable housing and working conditions. Because both capitalist parties address the core issues and consequences of inequality, their quarrels about economic policy are mainly empty noise, or in Donald Trump’s case, “concepts.”
Within the next few years, the United States along with the whole world will confront climate-change disasters of magnitudes we can barely imagine now. The incredible devastation in southern states wrought by Hurricane Helene, estimated at $100 billion or even more, is only a foretaste.
As we await the outcome of the Harris-Trump and congressional contests, and the strength of state abortion referenda, another open question is whether a big opening for the Green Party will emerge from progressive revulsion over Biden’s role in the Middle East slaughter and broader disaffection from the capitalist parties’ destructive duopoly. That prospect will be part of an urgent ongoing discussion.