The news today is all about someone shooting at Trump, to which I can only observe two things:
- It’s a miracle it took this long for someone to try this. As many have already observed, killing a cult leader will only make him a martyr and might ultimately strengthen the cult, but anyone who would attempt such a thing is already far beyond rational cost/benefit analysis.
- Related: “If you come at the king, you best not miss.” — Omar Little (Not to suggest any parallel between Trump and kings, despite what the SCOTUS says.)
But while the media and punditocracy spin endlessly about this and about the ongoing uncertainty of “will Biden do the right thing and step aside?” — leave it to Cory Doctorow to remind us that what really matters is changing things so that the cult will die.
Doctorow does this via an analysis of Project 2025 in which he argues that what makes Project 2025 so significant is that the 900-page report is a blueprint of the faultlines in the reactionary/GOP coalition. To combat that coalition, the left must drive wedges into those faultlines and split the coalition apart. The way to do that is from the bottom up, strengthening the coalition on the left with the power of workers:
Being a worker – that is, paying your bills from wages, instead of profits – isn’t an ideology you can change, it’s a fact. A Christian nationalist can change their beliefs and then they will no longer be a Christian nationalist. But no matter what a worker believes, they are still a worker – they still have a irreconcilable conflict with people whose money comes from profits, speculation, or rents. There is no objectively fair way to divide the profits a worker’s labor generates – your boss will always pay you as little of that surplus as he can. The more wages you take home, the less profit there is for your boss, the fewer dividends there are for his shareholders, and the less there is to pay to rentiers.
There’s no arguing with that. And what’s been so completely frustrating about the endless agonizing over the leadership of the Democratic Party since the debate is the feeling of helplessness that comes from a system where it seems like there are a handful of elites in control and the millions of us who care about and depend upon what those elites do have virtually no voice or mechanism for influencing the process. This means that whatever those elites do, many are going to see it as illegitimate:
Jettisoning Biden because George Clooney (or Nancy Pelosi) told us to is never going to feel legitimate to his supporters in the party. But if the movement for an open convention came from grassroots-dominated unions who themselves dominated the party – as was the case, until the Reagan revolution – then there’d be a sense that the party had constituents, and it was acting on its behalf.
Reviving the labor movement after 40 years of Reaganomic war on workers may sound like a tall order, but we are living through a labor renaissance, and the long-banked embers of labor radicalism are reigniting. What’s more, repelling fascism is what workers’ movements do. The business community will always sell you out to the Nazis in exchange for low taxes, cheap labor and loose regulation.
But workers, organized around their class interests, stand strong.
There’s no simple or magic way for organized labor to suddenly stand up and assert power over this process, but at least the thought that it’s possible creates a bit of light shining. As Studs Terkel (and others) have said: Hope dies last.