MIDTERM ELECTIONS : WILL AMERICA VEER SHARPLY RIGHT?

Attacking the Republican Party as 'semi-fascist' may not be enough to save Joe Biden and the Democratic Party from defeat in the next week's midterm elections. The result will have a profound impact on the political direction of the United States.

'To call a person who endorses violence against the duly elected government a ‘Republican’ is itself Orwellian. More accurate words exist for such a person. One of them is ‘fascist.’” Dana Milbank, Washington Post, February 2021.

JACK LONDON is best known for his novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang. But London was also a socialist and in his book The Iron Heel, first published in 1908, he charts the rise of a mass socialist movement in America which threatens the status quo. In order to prevent a socialist government taking office, an authoritarian regime seizes power. A few years after its publication another socialist writer, George Orwell, wrote that The Iron Heel provided a 'remarkable' insight into the rise of fascism. And in Orwell's 1984 we read:

‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

President Joe Biden could well have been channeling both Jack London and George Orwell when, in an extraordinary speech last week, he condemned the Republican Party as neo-fascist:

'What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

And at another event Biden said that the Trump controlled Republican Party 'doesn’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security…They’re a threat to our very democracy. They embrace…political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.'

While the Republican Party immediately condemned Biden's comments as 'despicable' and compared them to Hillary Clinton's notorious comments about 'a basket of deplorables', it's difficult to know how else to describe the Republican Party in 2022. 

The Republican Party has abandoned traditional conservatism for something more sinister and dangerous. The Republican Party, both locally as well as on the state level, is trying to put people into office who have little regard for traditional democratic values. It’s a form of politics that America hasn't seen before and it means the Republican Party has allied itself with antidemocratic values, violence, and racism. And it is ultimately anti-working class. 

This is a Republican Party that, in February 2021, saw its National Committee on February 4 declare the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol as 'legitimate political discourse.'

Biden and the Democratic Party will be hoping that his comments will convince enough people not to vote Republican in the midterm elections and prevent the Republican Party seizing control of Congress. 

Socialist congresswoman Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, so often at odds with Biden, has also emphasised the importance of the midterm elections:

'If Republicans take the House, they have stated in no unclear terms that they intend to support a national, criminal, abortion ban, that they want to hold the United States economy hostage in order to gut Social Security and Medicare. And I mean, like the list goes on: climate change, criminalization of everything, all this stuff....We need to work really, really hard because we are still very much at this very critical precipice of fascism in this country and that's very, very real.'

But AOC is also well aware that Biden's plodding centrism has opened the door to the very real possibility of a Republican victory. She has constently warned that Joe Biden's low polling and lacklustre support for the Democratic Party has largely been the result of Biden's failure to fulfil his commitment to real and fundamental change. In April she said:

'We need to acknowledge that this isn't about the middle of the road. This is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, who are feeling that they worked overtime to get this president elected and aren't basically being seen'. 

Part of the problem is that the Democratic Party viewed Biden's victory as the final defeat of Donald Trump. But it might have meant the eventual removal of Trump from the Oval Office but it didn't spell the end of Trumpism. That has its roots in the continuing malaise of a capitalist system that has failed to deliver for ordinary Americans. It's of little surprise that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party face the prospect of defeat in both the House and Senate when inflation is at a forty year high, with the price of housing, food and healthcare all rising sharply. 

At the very start of the Biden presidency AOC observed that if the lives of ordinary Americans didn't substantially improve under Biden, then the Democratic Party was in trouble: 

'If people's lives don't feel different under President Biden, we're done. You know how many Trumps there are in waiting? I'm tired of incremental change - bullshit little ten percent tax cuts. I think, honestly, a lot of my dissent within the Democratic party comes from my lived experience. It’s not just that we can be better, it’s that we have to be better. We’re not good enough right now.'

The midterm election results will indicate whether or not the American people think their lives have improved under the Biden administration. And whether what Joe Biden calls 'semi-fascism' will be defeated.