The 2024 Elections: Where Americans Will Vote on How They Want Nothing to Happen. By: Haz Al-Din

8/22/2024

The 2024 Elections: Where Americans Will Vote on How They Want Nothing to Happen. By: Haz Al-Din

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What is remarkable about the 2024 American presidential elections is the way in which the two candidates now aggressively compete over how much they plan on delivering nothing to the electorate. Effectively, what is certain is that regardless of the outcome, nothing will happen. Nothing that deviates from the overall tendency of the American government and its foreign policy. But what defines the different presidential campaigns is precisely how they plan on delivering nothing:

What Trump is now promising is the defeat of a Communist threat that never even existed in the first place. What Kamala is promising is to defend consumeristic cultural freedoms that there are no plans to curtail in the first place.

They both promise to defeat non-existent bogeymen, and through this charade, make gullible Americans feel like they will somehow make a difference through voting, and will somehow have made a difference when the election is over. If voting made a difference, they'd make it illegal. But they especially wouldn't need to go to such great lengths to convince people it does. Further, the ridiculous attempts by the Trump campaign to depict Kamala as a "communist" have a dual significance. On the one hand, it associates Kamala Harris with a scary bogeyman (in the eyes of most boomers who grew up during the cold war). But on the other hand, it serves the purpose of preempting the possibility for there to arise pro-worker, pro-people, and anti-capitalistic politics.

There is no major presidential candidate who can be regarded as Left-Wing, or 'communist.' There is no equivalent at all to the Left-Wing populism of Bernie Sanders in 2015. So why has the Trump campaign made this 'Communist' presence its bogeyman? Because it's clearly felt that Communism, even taken as a broad Left-Wing populism, is precisely what is missing in today's American politics - both the Democrats and Republicans are playing hot-potato, taking turns in their attempts to beat the dead horse. Trump is safe to demonize Kamala as a "communist." This won't offend his ruling class backers; in the way they were offended by his populist rhetoric in 2016. The implicit agreement is shared between both Republicans and Democrats, that Left-Wing populism is the true enemy, the true spectre that must be excised.

The real choice in 2024 is not between Kamala and Trump. The real choice is between the US political system itself and its Communist bogeyman. Both Kamala and Trump are projecting this bogeyman upon the other. Whereas Trump is more explicit, Kamala's popularity hinges upon upper-middle class, white collar, professional, urban liberal, and suburban anxieties about Trump's blue-collar working class base. Although he is a con-man, these fears are especially projected upon J.D. Vance, who is seen as a voice of the Midwestern working class base that won Trump the elections in 2016. Of course, Vance is no more a genuine working class representative than Kamala is a communist: He is not the bogeyman they paint him out to be, but they are still painting him that way, regardless. In the case of Trump, the Communist bogeyman is explicit. This bogeyman is being projected by the minds of the neoliberal elite of the Republican party, in other words, Trump's own donors and backers.

They are enthused about the way Javier Milei managed to put a 'populist' spin on the most pro-elite, pro-capitalist, pro-corporate political agenda in the history of Argentina - and are clearly inspired by it. In the case of Kamala, there is no overtly Communist bogeyman. Rather, its 'communist' nature is implicit - in the class anxieties of her electoral base, which associate Trump with a wild and aggressive class populism (of vulgar 'deplorables'). In fact, such an association is not totally historically groundless. In 2015-16, Trump did not campaign on traditional Republican 'free-market' orthodoxy. Much of his blue collar base voted for Obama. A significant portion supported Bernie Sanders. The class element of the actual MAGA phenomena was then and even now clear - with a primary focus on rejecting NAFTA, 'free-market' trade, industrial policy and neoliberal institutional expertise. But where in 2015-2016, his campaign could be broadly characterized as populistic, it is now under the full control of the Republican establishment.

It is not clear that there is even a rivalry or division among the actual American ruling class this time around. It seems that the ruling class, as a united bloc, has already secured its victory, regardless of the outcome. And the 'bogeyman' projected by both campaigns is proof of that. Here, we have two birds chirping that the other is a cat. Both are affirming a shared consensus precisely in the way they demonize each other: They prove they are birds of the same feather. If Trump wins, he will have "defeated communism," ruthlessly implementing a pro-elite economic agenda which, as with Milei, will be spun as somehow 'cutting edge.' He now attempts to already preempt any populistic backlash to such an unpopular agenda, by falsely associating it with the detestable elitism of the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris. Trump is attempting to safely bury his own past populist pretentions, pursuing an exit from any association with them. The 'Communist bogeyman' he is conjuring up, is precisely the guilty conscience of MAGA itself, whose underlying aspirations failed to materialize under Trump. If Kamala wins, she will implement the exact same agenda. It will just be branded differently. Kamala's 'communism' amounts to rhetoric of promising that the 'government' will provide 'welfare' and 'relief' to the masses - in exchange for the trust lost by them in the past decade.

Kamala promises to mend the wounds between the American people and their government, by effectively attempting to woo them with an illusory siren-song of economic relief - where the hegemony will 'take care of everything' and 'take care of them.' Her campaign is attempting to prey on the desperation of the American people, hoping that their suffering is great enough to overpower their dignity, and their capacity to think about their own long-term debt. Kamala is promising that she can keep Americans 'hooked' on their addiction, the addiction to debt and borrowed time imposed on them by the American capitalist class, without even entertaining the possibility of radical systemic change. If she wins - Americans will continue to fall deeper into debt and economic immiseration, and Kamala will insist that she and her administration are 'doing their best' - much like Biden is now. Nothing will change: Only the ideological form by which the ruling system attempts to legitimate itself. On the other hand, if Trump's wins, the phony matrices of America's current 'polarization' will also be inevitably revealed. 'We defeated and are defeating the Communists!' will not be an effective way of coping with the inevitable deepening of the crisis, especially when, in fact, there is not yet any significant Communist presence in American politics to begin with. Nobody cares about a 'Communist bogeyman' unless you can consistently and reliably blame it for America's deepening problems.

That won't be easy to do if Trump wins, having already 'defeated' them. It is doubtful a Trump administration will be given the same hard time by the establishment and the media that it was during his first presidency. He has now given and conceded to them everything. The Democrats will not be mounting any significant 'resistance.' What is certain is that whoever wins will be tasked with 'uniting the country' amidst a new world war. The war agenda is clear for both Democrats and Republicans. Trump may be promising to stop WW3, but we now live in a different world than the one he took office in. A world of accelerated multi-polarity, and newfound geopolitical courage by Russia, China, Iran, and others. He will not have the upper hand in negotiations he used to. Just as Democrats used to 'spin' their 'entirely inconvenient' neoliberal concessions on economic policy as the result of necessary 'compromise' with Republicans, Trump might have to spin his 'entirely inconvenient' geopolitical concessions to Neocons as the result of 'forces beyond his control.' Regardless of who wins, the outcome is the same: Nothing will change.

These elections serve the purpose only of legitimating the bankrupt US political system. Voting inspires a false sense of responsibility among the electorate - even though they had no say in the choices presented to them in the first place. In elections that are about how nothing will happen, the most effective thing one can do politically is nothing at all. By abstaining from voting, one successfully votes for the Communist bogeyman being attacked by both sides. For all that is certain is the victory of this bogeyman, no matter how much the loudest political voices now attempt to preempt it. Communism will inevitably be victorious - or nothing at all will. Nothing but the ruins of a devastated civilization, and an annihilated humanity.

Author

Haz Al-Din, usually referred to shorthand as Haz, is an entertainer, political theorist, and Marxist-Leninist who features as the most public representative of the Infrared Collective. He is a founding member of the American Communist Party, serving as the Executive Chairman of the Executive Board.

The 2024 Elections: Where Americans Will Vote on How They Want Nothing to Happen. By: Haz Al-Din

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