We can’t afford a new party. More specifically poor people cannot have a new party. Why? Because Donald John Trump is uniquely evil, a threat to the planet and its people so singular, and so unprecedented that he must be stopped at any cost, even if it means replacement by an only slightly better lying neoliberal warmonger. And we hve to do this for the really poor among us. I’m not buying it.
I will concede that Trump is definitely evil, but that’s been making the rounds a long time now. Nixon and Reagan were evil. The Bush dynasty was nothing if not evil, and so are Bill and Hillary Clinton. Christian Bale, accepting an award for his starring role in the movie “Vice” thanked Satan for his inspiration on how to play the role of Dick Cheney. Arguably, what’s uniquely evil here isn’t Donald John Trump, it’s the centuries old US ruling class. It’s hard to find much of anything unique about Trump beyond his balls to the wall vulgarity.
I know it’s a low bar because before he came into office the US already had fleets in every ocean and troops in about 120 or more countries, but uniquely evil Trump hasn’t found any new countries to invade or bomb, though he has instituted a US Space Force, presumably to bomb other planets, but he doesn’t get extra evil points for that, because it’s merely aspirational, something he would do if only he could.
The truth is that Trump is only marginally worse than other Republicans and Democrats. Obama extended US special ops troops and drone bases to every nation on the African continent except Zimbabwe and Eritrea abroad and saved the banks while hundreds of thousands of black mortgage holders were evicted, something a Republican president could never get away with. Bill Clinton jacked the black prison population up to an all time high of a million.
Nonetheless we hear a lot of chatter from people like our leftish friends at DSA about how Trump is soooo bad, soooo evil and sooo awful that absolutely any Democrat would be better, for the good of the planet and especially for the good of the people at the very bottom of North America’s economic and social pyramid. Those are real people, the argument goes, and we owe them a vote for any Democrat because they just cannot afford to be hurt any more than they’re already being hurt.
Therefore, the argument holds that poor people building a third party with their own votes, their own labor and financed by their own membership dues like poor people do in every other nation on this planet is a bad idea, something that the poor and oppressed here cannot and should not even try. After all, the ballot access portion of such an effort alone would take a million signatures and might split the Democratic party, electing a Republican to the presidency.
It’s hard to miss the reeking racism and classism of this nonsensical proposition. Aren’t poor people smart enough to make their own choices, not just for this year, but for years ahead, if that’s what it takes? The old heads like Charles Hamilton Houston were not afraid to map out a strategy for tackling Jim Crow that took decades. Why was this wise for these law school grads but unwise for poor people today?
The left will never become a mass phenomenon in this country until it finds raises up its own voices, and funds its own independent political party. Despite what our friends at DSA tell us, and tell each other, that will not happen inside either one of the billionaires parties, and it won’t be funded by the people who fund those parties.
This week’s featured author is Karen Jaime. Jaime is Assistant Professor of Performing and Media Arts and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. Jaime’s book is The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized…
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