Elections 2024 and white supremacy in the United States

Introduction from Oaklandsocialist: A debate is under way within the left about whether or not to vote for the Democrats. Some on the left oppose voting for the Democrats’ and use the the Democrats’ support for Israel’s genocide as the reason. The truth is that most of those people opposed voting for any Democrats any time, including before this present genocidal war by Israel started. But even for those for whom this war is genuinely their reason for not voting for the Democrats, there are other issues to be considered. Here, Clay Claiborne explains. He starts by making a point about whether Palestinians or black Americans are “suffering the most”. Clay writes:

It’s not about who’s suffering the most. It’s about the role of various struggles in the US election. While the outcome of this election will no doubt have a great effect on the people of Gaza – and I’m willing to wager they will fare much worse if the Christian nationalists win the election – it won’t be decided on the basis of the Gaza question unless the white left artfully uses the issue to throw the election to the Republicans.

principal contradiction in US “bourgeois democracy”
The principal contradiction in the US 2024 election is its particular derivative of the principal contradiction in the US since its founding and embodied in its Constitution, namely the contradiction between bourgeois democracy and the use of African slave labor as its engine of primitive accumulation. A great civil war was waged to end this period of capitalist accumulation, and a victory for bourgeois democracy was won in the balance. The struggle to complete that work was greatly stifled when black reconstruction was overthrown ~1876. Since then, progress on this front has been slow and halting, but progress has been made nonetheless, and it has brought in its wake, progress on a number of other fronts that seek to fulfill the promise of bourgeois democracy.

Now, a powerful reactionary movement, a resurgence of white supremacy, has risen under the leadership of Donald Trump. Its aim is to re-establish white supremacy to its position of unchallenged dominance (“Make America Great Again”). It has a mass base and a fascist leadership.  It was able to capture state power for the first time in 2016, with a significant assist from the white left, but it failed to consolidate state power, and was forced out by the masses in 2020. Now, they plan to use the 2024 election to seize state power again, one way or another, and keep it!

The opposition to this fascist takeover has very quickly rallied around the new leader of the Democrats, a black-Asian woman—Kamala Harris. This is how what has always been the historic principal contradiction for US bourgeois democracy is playing out in the next 6 mos. in the US. And while issue of Israel’s genocide in Gaza will play little role in the election, the outcome of this election is likely to have an incredibly powerful effect on the course of that conflict, with the difficulties the Palestinians face being much worse if this resurgence of white supremacy is successful in the US.

Many both inside and outside the “Uncommitted” movement see its utility as a vehicle for attacking Harris. These include white supremacists both in the GOP and the Kremlin. Already Fox News is giving the most coverage to the “Uncommitted” protests at the DNC. and Chris Stirewalt of the AEI writes in The Dispatch “GOP Rooting for Chaos in Chicago.” They understand that the “Uncommitted” attacks on Harris help Trump. [Oaklandsocialist will be publishing an article documenting the links between Putin, the  Republicans and the Jill Stein for president and Cornel West for president campaigns. Stay tuned.]

As far as I’m concerned it also includes that broad cohort of leftists that were silent about the Assad and Putin assaults on Palestinians and others living in Syria who refused to submit to his rule. These “lefts” supported Assad when he massacred over 1300, including ~400 children with sarin. Now, these same “lefts” are hypocritically using Gaza as an excuse to oppose Harris when they would have opposed her anyway.

I find it funny that those that claim both parties are the same, justify their focus on Biden/Harris by saying they are the one’s supporting/committing genocide now. So, according to them, on the one hand, both parties represent US imperialism, but it’s not US imperialism that is supporting/committing genocide, it’s just the party in power now. So, the other party, with the most extreme Zionists, get a pass.

But the election isn’t about who’s in power now, it’s about who will be in power after the election.

I fear the white Left will use Israel’s genocide in Gaza in the 2024 election the way it used the Standing Rock protests in 2016 as a way of seizing the moral high ground while ceding the field to the white supremacist insurgents.

Clay’s blog site can be found here.