In a letter to the Militant reader Virginia Wilkinson says she started reading the paper for its good labor coverage, but cannot “sympathize with your support for Donald Trump, who has shown no signs of genuine support for working people.”
But the Militant has never offered one ounce of support to the president. For 90 years since it first came out, the Militant has never backed any Democrat, Republican or other capitalist politician. And there is no question Donald Trump — a real estate mogul — rules for the propertied class.
The Militant campaigned in every 2016 issue for Alyson Kennedy, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, and urged workers to break from the two parties of capitalist rule, the Democrats and Republicans, no matter who they nominated.
The paper’s headline that Wilkinson cites — “Liberals Drive to Oust Trump Built on Fear of Working Class” — accompanies an article that explains, “All wings of the Democratic Party, like Trump and all the Republicans, defend the interests of the country’s capitalist rulers at home and stand ready to wield Washington’s military might to advance their interests abroad.” And the Militant champions battles by labor and all those oppressed and exploited against the bosses, their politicians and the government in power that serves them, including Trump’s.
But there are crucial questions for working people in opposing the campaign of the liberals and their craven media that seek to overturn the 2016 election. Their real target is the working people who voted for Trump, or who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for any of the bosses’ candidates.
This includes millions of workers Hillary Clinton called “deplorable,” who were looking for a change from what successive Democratic and Republican administrations have done to aid the bosses in their assaults on workers. These attacks have not let up during the so-called economic recovery that followed the 2007 financial crisis. Millions were drawn to vote for someone like Trump, who stood outside the factions of both bourgeois parties, and who demagogically claimed he would halt the carnage facing working people and “drain the swamp” in Washington.
The liberals — who have backed the capitalist rulers’ drive to boost profits whenever they’ve been in office — think they’re entitled to “regulate” and control the lives of the rest of us, especially those who don’t vote the way they think we should. Democratic Congressman Al Green says the reason Trump must be impeached is to prevent people from reelecting him.
Rising fear of working people
Liberals along with the ruling rich have a rising fear of working people. They fear us because growing numbers of working people recognize that the bosses and their parties have no solution to the crisis of their system that doesn’t involve making workers pay. This has made more workers open to fighting declining living and working conditions and to discussing an independent working-class political road forward.
The capitalist rulers fear coming working-class struggles — battles in which our confidence in our own capacities will grow, as we acquire consciousness of ourselves as a fighting class with interests in common with other workers worldwide.
The Militant tells the truth about the methods used by the liberals in their witch hunt of the president that are dangerous for the working class.
These include using and praising Washington’s political police, the FBI and CIA; grand juries and secret star chamber “hearings”; and hearsay claims from secret witnesses you have no chance to confront or refute. All these are features of the capitalist “justice” system that’s regularly used against workers. But in this case it involves an effort to impeach and indict a capitalist politician who was elected to the presidency. They’re taking steps to limit the franchise to prevent us “voting the wrong way.”
They trample on constitutional protections working people have fought for— from the Bill of Rights to the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution conquered in the second American Revolution. These are crucial to protect our ability to discuss and act in our own class interests without government disruption. The anti-Trump “resistance” sets precedents to be used against fighting workers and opponents of Washington’s wars as the crisis of capitalism deepens, as the rulers have done time and time again.
Opposing the liberals’ drive to oust the president can’t be equated with giving him one iota of political support. Working people have nothing to gain from relying on the bosses, their parties or their government, and everything to win by organizing ourselves independently of them to fight for our own class interests. Jealously guarding our hard-won rights is a cornerstone of working people’s line of march forward.