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Writer's pictureMichael Laxer

The streets will not push Biden left, only an organized Left party will do that

What many progressives and leftists seem to fail to understand is that fascism in the US is a process more than an ideology and the Democrats contribute to it when in office. Biden will in all likelihood too.


Every Yank election for my entire adult life -- before and after the victor is announced -- I have heard leftists saying "we have to mobilize now to push (whichever Democrat) to the left" if the Democrat is winning or they think they are winning. And every single time this has been after being told that "if we don't back the right wing Democrat in this election...fascism!"


The earnestness is always almost endearing until you realize that it is utter bullshit.


Before my time they were unquestionably saying this about Nixon in 68 / 72 -- which saw the Watergate scandal -- and Reagan in 1980 (who, one might add, were in many respects two of the greatest existential threats to the world's survival ever in a way Trump never was).


Anyway, suffice to say, it never worked then, and there is no reason to think it will work now even assuming Biden wins.


What many progressives and leftists seem to fail to understand is that fascism in the US is a process more than an ideology and the Democrats contribute to it when in office. Biden will in all likelihood too.


That process has been building for a very long time but accelerated rapidly after the fall of the Soviet Union with the rise of the far right Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton and Al Gore that was literally built on the death penalty, destroying welfare, an agenda of mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of Black people (ironically Biden would already be confirmed as President-elect were it not for this) and aggressive imperialist foreign policy that included rigging "elections" from Russia to wherever else they felt like it.


The disillusion sowed by the liberal Clinton and Obama administrations was destructive in ways that are hard to overstate.


And in both those presidencies the "influence" of the left was a joke.


The left will have virtually no influence on Biden and much of it will demobilize after his "victory" over "fascism", just like when Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama won over "fascism" in 2008, and proceeded to absolve Wall St. of its crimes, deport countless migrants and kill with drones with impunity wherever he felt like it around the world.


Occupy Wall Street broke out "in the streets" on his watch and he made sure it went nowhere and that the police cracked down on it, but that didn't stop mainstream leftists getting on board with his reelection in 2012 like lemmings. Mitt Romney -- a "good guy" now just like the second war criminal George Bush has been rehabilitated by liberals -- was the "fascist" then.


The notion that Bernie Sanders, for example, will make a difference now is wishful thinking at best.


Just check out these two classic Jacobin Bernie Sanders "moments".




He will be a "very good secretary of nothing" in all probability, and like Robert Reich before him will get nothing done either way.


At this point it seems Biden is likely to win. Will "the streets" push him to the left? If history is any guide, no. And that is because movements also need an actual organized political manifestation or expression that is not just Jacobin live streams or lefty tweets. Despite this fake "activism" somehow it always seems nothing has really happened until the next apparent existential crisis four years down the road.


I am pretty certain. barring serious political organizing in a way that threatens the Democrats from the left in elections on multiple levels across the USA (something that is not even close to being organized yet...though the signs that it could be are there), that Biden's feet are going to be feeling very cool in the White House.


And, also, that this internet "leftism" of posting inspiring statuses as a version of activism will lead where it always has, which is nowhere right back to insisting "we have to vote Democrat to stop fascism" all over again in 2024.

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