As “resistance”-obsessed liberals struggle to find ways to oust President Donald Trump, they are pushing to limit the political rights of millions of working people. A Dec. 20 New York Times headline described the problem they face as “The Tyranny of the 63 Million,” targeting working people who voted for the president. These workers, as well as those who decided not to vote for either ruling-class party, were disgusted with the disdain in Washington for the carnage they face under today’s crisis of capitalism.
David Leonhardt laments in the same paper that if the Democrats can’t oust Trump before next November, they are fielding an “unnecessarily weak presidential field” in 2020.
His solution? Impose “the judgment of experts” in place of that of “ordinary citizens,” who he and fellow meritocrats seek to block from affecting government decisions.
What he’s really describing is the deepening crisis of the capitalist rulers’ two-party system, which has served their class interests well since the rise of Washington as an imperialist power. Today it has led to the Democrats’ “impeachment” assault on the Trump administration and working-class rights.
Despite calling 17 witnesses, submitting 8,000 pages of testimony, organizing over 100 House staff members full time to dig up dirt on the president, and forcing through a partisan vote to impeach, Democrats now refuse to present their motions to the Senate. With no hope of winning in the upper house, they hope to milk political advantage from their stage-managed “trial,” while they desperately fret over whether any of their 2020 candidates can defeat the president.
Working-class road forward
From the point of view of working people, it is necessary to expose and fight all efforts by the rulers to restrict our rights, whether they come from this liberal crusade or any other source.
There is a road forward amid the capitalist attacks workers face today, in Washington and in labor battles like Asarco bosses’ union-busting assault on copper miners in Arizona and Texas.
The Socialist Workers Party is presenting a working-class alternative, urging fellow workers to join to advance all efforts to unite and strengthen struggles against the rulers’ attacks along a course to break with both the Democrats and Republicans and build our own labor party. In the years ahead the crisis of capitalism will result in revolutionary struggles by working people in which we can gain the confidence and class-consciousness to take political power into our own hands.
Liberals target workers’ rights
Anti-Trump FBI agent Peter Strzok was a staffer for former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s failed crusade to oust the president on Democrats’ ginned-up charges he colluded with Moscow to swing the 2016 vote. Strzok sent texts to FBI lawyer Lisa Page describing working people in Loudoun County, Virginia, as “ignorant hillbillys [sic].” And he claimed he could “smell” Trump supporters at Walmart stores.
Paul Krugman, a columnist for the New York Times, says if you look at pictures of a crowd watching the lynching of African Americans decades ago it’s like areas of “Republican support in places like eastern Kentucky,” a hard hit coal-mining center.
In his Dec. 29 op-ed, Leonhardt points to some of the changes he’d like to see imposed to restrict workers’ ability to affect politics. “When voters are given the dominant role in choosing a nominee,” he says, “only an unrepresentative subset tends to participate, which skews the process.” What kind of process does he prefer? Give “party leaders a larger role in selecting nominees.”
The liberal impeachment party’s attacks on the Trump administration — and on workers’ rights — cross many fronts.
In response to the continuing crisis of the imperialist “world order” spawning and feeding wars across the Mideast, the Democrats demand more robust military interventions by Washington.
To buttress their attacks on the Trump administration, they seek to rely on and bolster the authority and reach of the U.S. rulers’ political police. They tout cooperative “heroic Americans” like former FBI chiefs Mueller and James Comey and ex-FBI and CIA Director William Webster. This aims to strengthen spy and disruption agencies with decades of dirty tricks against the struggles and rights of working people.
And they try to chip away at crucial rights for working people to discuss, debate and vote.