The Democratic Socialists of America, Communist Party and other Stalinist currents in the U.S. are telling workers Donald Trump is so dangerous they have to back Joseph Biden, the candidate of the Democratic Party, one of the capitalist rulers’ two main parties. It exists in tandem with the Republicans to front for the rulers’ assaults on workers at home and their imperialist policies and wars abroad.
These socialists are looking to exercise greater weight within the Democratic Party and push it to the left. At the same time, they say the choice in 2024 is Biden or what they call fascism, that is Trump and his “deplorable” working-class backers. They’re doing all they can to advance Democrats’ assaults on constitutional freedoms in the name of preventing him from getting into office.
Congress has “far more strong progressives than have existed in the modern history of this country,” socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders boasted at a conference of 80 elected democratic socialist officials in Washington, D.C., last June. “Nothing like it,” existed in 1991, he said, when he was first elected. The retreat was attended by congressional representatives, state legislators, mayors and city council officials.
Sanders had mounted a strong primary challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democrats’ 2016 presidential nomination — while playing down his socialist credentials — before his campaign was quashed by the party’s upper echelons at its convention.
His campaign helped expand the socialist wing of the party. It’s using its new-found weight to pressure Biden and party leaders to adopt its policies.
The group’s strongest push is to try and get the party to back organizations who support Hamas’ reactionary goal of driving Jews out of the Middle East.
Our Revolution, a group set up by Sanders, urged a vote for “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democratic primary Feb. 27, rather than for Biden. It says it’s trying to push Biden to demand that Israel agree to a cease-fire in Gaza, something that would leave Hamas free to carry out new massacres of Jews like Oct. 7.
If Biden doesn’t do this, the group insists, Democratic voters will stay home in November, allowing Trump to come out on top in a key swing state.
“I’m really strong for Joe Biden on Nov. 5,” said former Congressman Andrew Levin, who supports the “uncommitted” campaign to pressure Biden. “This will hopefully send him a message.”
The course presented by the socialist wing of the Democrats traps workers into looking to the capitalist parties for social progress and is also a serious danger to the political rights needed by the working class.
As these forces have advanced inside the Democratic Party, they provide a radical cover for its long record of allegiance to the ruling capitalist class. They don’t pretend to offer a road for workers to organize ourselves to take political power into our own hands. Instead, they present schemes they say will make things better for “all the people.” The fact is the U.S. — like all capitalist powers — is sharply class divided, to the advantage of the dog-eat-dog ruling families.
‘Defeat fascist Trump!’
“The struggle to defeat the fascist right is the main issue before the country today,” says a resolution that the Communist Party’s National Committee is presenting to its upcoming convention, printed in its online paper Peoples World. By “fascism” it means, the “fascist trajectory of wide swaths of the Republican Party.” It says the CP will run some of its own candidates in 2024, but makes clear they’ll campaign for support for Democrats, especially for president. It insists, “The Republican Party is arguably the most dangerous political party in history.”
Defeating Trump at all costs is the latest version of the popular front course pursued for decades by the CP. It subordinates workers’ interests to getting Democrats elected, rather than organizing working people to use the power of our class to fight for the things we need, independent of both the bosses’ parties.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation, another Stalinist outfit, says it aims to get its candidate for president, Claudia de la Cruz, on the ballot in at least 30 states. A Jan. 6 article in its online Liberation News says Biden is no different from the Republicans. But, like the CP, the article reserves the balance of its condemnation for Trump.
It points to the “role of racism, sexism, homophobia and all other forms of bigotry in igniting the far right.” The article says, “The Democratic Party is correct in its analysis that Trump has played a major role in stoking, fanning and normalizing dangerous bigoted violence.”
Democrats, including their left flank, are trying to get judges to jail the former president, Biden’s main rival for the White House, ruin his family and businesses and get him barred from the ballot. Every time the capitalist government assaults the rights of anyone, including a capitalist politician like Trump, it sets a precedent for the same and far worse being done to the working class and vanguard fighters like the Socialist Workers Party.
New York Judge Arthur Engoron hit Trump with a $355 million fine for business fraud Feb. 16. The Democratic judge had handed down a ruling finding the Republican front-runner guilty before the trial had even begun. Charges were brought by state Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who had pledged to “focus on Donald Trump” if elected in her 2018 election campaign, and find a crime to pin on him.
The middle-class socialists in the Democratic Party are among the most vociferous backers of the attacks on political rights. DSA member and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Biden “one of the most successful presidents in modern American history” Feb. 13 on CNN. When she was asked if Biden’s age would deter people from voting for him, she shot back, “Donald Trump is around the same age.”
Then she pointed to the fruits of Democratic prosecutors’ witch hunt against the former president, saying, “And beyond that Donald Trump has 91 indictments.” She repeated smears that Trump “tried to overturn the results of the presidential election by force.”
This is the basis for a slew of lawsuits aimed at barring Trump from the ballot, preventing tens of millions from having the right to vote for the candidate of their choice. As Democratic leftists have shown in their malice toward anyone who speaks out in defense of Israel as a refuge for Jews, they’re happy to crush the rights of those they disagree with. This has included physical attacks, like the assault by a group of masked pro-Hamas thugs on demonstrators defending Israel’s right to exist in El Cerrito, California, Jan. 6.
Socialist Workers Party candidates are presenting a sharply different political course. They explain that out of today’s union and other working-class struggles, workers can build the party our class needs, a party that is working class in program and composition with the audacity to organize working people in our millions to take political power.
Crucial to this course is the Constitution’s protection of free speech and other political freedoms that are under attack today. These rights are needed whenever workers stand up to the bosses and organize independently of their Democratic and Republican parties.