JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: WHERE DOES ANYONE SEE DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA? – GIVING PEOPLE A CHOICE BETWEEN TWO POOR CANDIDATES NEITHER OF WHOM OPPOSES ANY OF THE FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS AFFLICTING THE COUNTRY IS ANYTHING BUT DEMOCRACY – TRUMP’S EMERGING LUKEWARM FASCISM – EVEN IF TRUMP IS NOT RE-ELECTED, HIS PEOPLE AREN’T GOING ANYWHERE, AND THE COUNTRY FACES HUGE ADJUSTMENTS AHEAD, ADJUSTMENTS IT IS NOT PREPARED TO MAKE – NANCY PELOSI’S SECRET HAIR-SETTING STUNT SAYS ALL THERE IS TO SAY ABOUT THE COUNTRY’S LACK OF LEADERSHIP

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALEXANDER PANETTA IN CBC NEWS


"A democracy at a boiling point: The view from a U.S. swing county"

"In a sharply divided Michigan county, residents agree on one thing: fear of what comes after Nov. 3"


"Boiling point" I can agree with.

But no one who is looking closely sees "democracy" in America.

You have two poor candidates, one poorer than the other.

Neither, if elected, will question militarism or wars of empire or plutocracy.

Biden's very candidacy is owing to Democrats suppression of opponents like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard.

Remember, $1,000,000,000,000 a year to support the military and security agencies to keep an empire going and growing.

Ever hear of a democratic empire?  The phrase is an oxymoron. Same for a democratic plutocracy.

With Trump, there is an ominous sense of a kind of lukewarm American fascism taking hold. It is his temperament and language and scofflaw character combined with the abundantly clear nature of his followers.

But even without Trump, hatreds and resentments and fears will keep bubbling to the surface in America. There is nothing to drive them away because America’s deepest structural flaws as a society clash with an emerging new world where America no longer holds an absolutely central place. America, at all levels from ordinary workers to high establishment mandarins, is going to experience a painful transition to no longer being “exceptional.”

Trump’s P.T. Barnum medicine show, “MAGA,” could not possibly change the world’s emerging new realities, but then neither can anything else. There’s no taste in America for getting down to the hard, basic work of creating a better, more competitive and just society, and there is no leadership for it either. God, Nancy Pelosi’s disgraceful stunt of secretly breaking the pandemic rules in getting her hair done says it all, “I want mine, and I want it now!” But the world that permitted that kind of arrogant attitude to be widespread in America for decades is simply dissolving away.

With Biden, there will be a temporary breath of relief at having avoided something awful, but it will be unwarranted. America’s underlying divisions and major structural problems will remain, and Trump’s ugly ranks of followers aren’t going anywhere. They make up nearly half the American adult population. And all of the weak American institutions which made Trump possible remain unchanged.