Andy Beckett: The left urgently needs to lose its inferiority complex // Owen Jones: Even if Biden wins, the world will pay the price for the Democrats' failures

By Dilip -

This week Joe Biden – few people’s idea of an outstanding candidate – won the biggest presidential vote in United States history. Seven times in the last eight such contests, the Democrats have got more votes than the Republicans. You could see this latest popular-vote victory as further confirmation of a theory that’s been promoted by some political scientists and journalists for a quarter of a century, most notably in The Emerging Democratic Majority, a 2002 book by John B Judis and Ruy Teixeira. The theory says that American social trends, which are making much of the country more diverse, urban and better educated – all characteristics associated with voting Democrat – are slowly but inexorably shifting the US away from the Republicans.

This might sound like liberal wishful thinking, but it’s a view that has also been held by senior Republicans. In 2012, Senator Lindsey Graham warned his party: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Combined with the horror that many Americans feel at Donald Trump and how disastrously he has governed, this long-term leftward drift was widely expected this week to become an irresistible electoral force.

Instead, it met a series of seemingly immovable objects. First, Trump’s infamous aversion to ever being “a loser”. Second, his immense and again underrated appeal to conservative voters. Third, his party’s reluctance, which has intensified dramatically since the early 1990s, to accept any Democratic president as legitimate. Fourth, the Republicans’ willingness to use gerrymandering and voter suppression to tilt elections in their favour. And finally, the US’s rickety old election system itself..

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/06/left-inferiority-complex-pessimism-conservative-rule

Mohammed Hanif: The rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise

Trump should have lost in a landslide. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes

Even if Biden wins, the world will pay the price for the Democrats' failures

When Bill Clinton’s administration backed trade agreements that devastated industrial jobs in the rust belt, here was another grievance waiting to be mined. And it was, by the most unlikely figurehead, the former host of the Apprentice. Trumpism has exploited racism, and fury at economic grievances, successfully welding both forces together. In the aftermath of the financial crash, Obama’s presidential campaign appeared to offer a break with the failures of successive Republican and Democratic administrations. But while he rescued the banks and let financial executives off the hook for their role in the 2008 crash, wages for millions of Americans stagnated or declined. 

While the slice of national income belonging to middle Americans fell from 62% to 43% between 1970 and 2018, the number of billionaires has surged: from 66 in 1990 with a combined wealth of $240bn, to 614 today, with a total fortune of nearly $3tn. America is now a society in which one in every 11 black adult is either in prison, or on parole or probation – racial injustices that Black Lives Matter has urgently underlined. The Democratic establishment has proved itself politically bankrupt and unable to meet these challenges. ..

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/05/biden-democrats-democratic-trump

George Monbiot: Ayn Rand - A Manifesto for Psychopaths

Tom McTague: The Decline of the American World

Donald Trump: Democracy’s mirror image? By Philip Manow / David A. Bell - Fascism or Caesarism?

Jonathan Freedland - Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break America apart

Debt: The first five thousand years. By DAVID GRAEBER

HARRY BLAIN: America’s Wars always Come Home

Jill Lepore  A History of America’s military spending

Jonathan Freedland: Trump is destroying democracy in broad daylight // Chauncey DeVega: Vigilantes are preparing ‘to launch a coup’

Chauncey DeVega: Trump is mentally ill but our real sickness runs much deeper

America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick

Black and Unarmed and Killed by the Police…an incomplete list…This is America….

Houston Police chief to Trump: Please, keep your mouth shut if you can't be constructive

Donald Trump and American carnage // Will Urban Uprisings Help Trump?

May 1968 - June 1989. It's been five decades since 1968, and things are somehow worse

Justice in America: Authorities are Cracking down Hard on Black Protesters while Treating White Supremacist Reopeners with Kid Gloves

Protests in USA over the death of unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of police - 25 cities have imposed curfews

Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global equalization of awfulness

Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America; 1865

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Speech on the American Military Industrial Complex, January 17, 1961

Simi Mehta - Martin Luther King: Changing The World With Love

Adam Lusher - Story of the last survivor of the last slave ship to travel from Africa to US is published after 87 years

Michael Roberts: The top 1% own 45% of all global personal wealth; the bottom 50% own less than 1% // Global Economic Volatility and Socio Political Reactions

SUBMARINE STATE

Dismantling democracy? Virus used as excuse to quell dissent...

Sam Kriss: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality

Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)

Book review: Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology

Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?

George Monbiot: ‘Try to stop me’ – the mantra of our leaders who are now ruling with impunity

Is Donald Trump the Second 9/11? Or Is He the Third? By Tom Engelhardt


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