A troubled summer in US politics

This article is an edited version of a report given to an International Socialism Project meeting on June 26.

The purpose of this report is to look at the current economic situation, developments in bourgeois politics, the general social crisis, and finally the state of the working-class and social movements.

A tepid economy

Most commentators predict a period of tepid economic activity. Forecasts of Second Quarter GDP hover in the 1-2 percent range. For example, The Conference Board sees 1.8 percent growth. There has been much speculation of the possibility of a recession in the second half of this year or early next year. At least some decline in economic activity seems likely, and runaway inflation has severely impacted the working class and the poor trying to meet their basic needs.

Looking at the situation in more detail, we see that there has been a sharp decline in unemployment, which is down to 3.6 percent. Help Wanted signs are common. About nine million jobs were lost during the Covid crisis. It appears that 8.7 million of those slots are now filled. Labor force participation was at 62.7 percent before Covid hit. It’s now only 0.4 percent less than that, at 62.3 percent. The contraction is mainly due to four reasons. People close to retirement age are deciding not to wait until 65 or 68 but deciding to leave in their early 60s.

In fact, since the pandemic there have been 2.6 million more retirees than there would have been if ordinary trends had continued. The reasons for this are quite straightforward. Older workers do not want to face the health risks and stress of the contemporary workplace. If they are financially able to retire early, that seems a better option to many.

Some parents, especially women, are staying home for childcare reasons with the continuing turmoil in K-12 education. There is a lingering fear of Covid infection. Importantly, there is a sense of exhaustion and burnout in frontline and essential workers. This is particularly true in healthcare, education, and hospitality.

The supply bottleneck leading to shortages in everything from automobile parts to baby formula may have abated somewhat but is not over. The bottleneck has combined with pent-up demand from the Covid period, the effects of the war in the Ukraine, increases in protectionism, and some good old-fashioned price-gouging and speculation, to create a marked rise in inflation. Inflation, now at 8.5%, is most clearly felt at the gas pump and at the grocery store. Price rises are now greater than wage increases, leading to a decline in working class living standards. This in turn has led to a real decline in consumer confidence.

The main ruling-class response to this situation was pressuring Jay Powell and the Fed to increase interest rates. The hope is that an interest rate raise will lead to a general contraction of economic activity, which will then create a decline in inflation and a “soft landing” for the economy. Ruling class strategists hope that by making money more expensive to borrow, there will be less possibility of new or expanded business projects. This will, hopefully, lead to less goods on the market and increased unemployment. According to their theories, this will, in turn, lead to a decline in inflation. At least, that’s the plan!

The Republican Party moves further right

If the Democratic Party remains unwilling to wage a serious fight for the values it purports to stand for—like abortion rights and voting rights—the Republicans can show how much they have accomplished in imposing their own despicable agenda.The Republican Party continues to be beholden to Trump and his supporters. For example, two-thirds of Republican voters in Illinois believe that the election was stolen.

To advance in the Republican primaries and internal party structure, it’s still necessary to pander to the Trumpist base. This gives the populist right a lock on the party. The traditional Republican establishment, linked to some of the most important forces in the ruling class, is not in the driver’s seat. Many of its figures, for purely opportunist electoral reasons, repeat much of Trump’s mantra. This process has been exemplified by leading Republicans Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy. They were both very critical of Trump after January 6^th. However, in the following months they have dropped their anti-Trump positions and attempted to ride the Trump wave. They know which side their bread is buttered on!

There may be some signs of a slight lightening of Trump’s grasp. A minority of more mainstream Republicans have won in primaries. For example, in Georgia, candidates opposed by Trump such as Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defeated their primary opponents. Similarly, on the Hill, Mitch McConnell did support some limited gun control measures. However, these events are not enough to change the overall picture.

When Biden was first elected, he had a clear, semi-Keynesian, policy to address the economic situation caused by Covid. Build Back Better and his infrastructure proposals made perfect sense from a ruling class point of view. However, right from the start, Democratic senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) torpedoed his plans. They essentially ended his legislative agenda because they refuse to vote with other Democrats on key issues—including to end the filibuster. Since the Democrats hold a bare majority in the Senate, this has led to an administration that is currently dead in the water.

The general expectation is that the Republicans will do well in the November. The Democrats may make some gains in November if voters outraged by the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and other reactionary rulings turn out in large numbers. The January 6th hearings will probably have very little effect on Trump’s base but might increase Democratic turnout.

Supreme Court on the offensive

Beyond the Republican Party’s current role, the Supreme Court has clearly been decisive in attacking basic civil liberties at virtually every level. Three examples make this point clear. First and foremost is the Supreme Court ruling on Roe vs. Wade. (For a detailed discussion of this, see the excellent article by Sharon Smith, “Abortion rights: turning back the clock—way, way back” on this website.)

Secondly, Clarence Thomas’s opinion on the ruling is extremely important. Thomas wrote, “In future cases, we should reconsider all of the court’s substantive due process precedents.” He spelt out exactly what he had in mind: Griswold vs Connecticut on contraception,Lawrence vs Texason gay sex, and Obergefell vs Hodges on same sex marriages. The fact that Thomas could even muse openly about this is a real sign of the times.

Thirdly, restrictions on Black voting rights in the South have the real possibility of reversing the gains of the 1960s. Nineteen predominantly Republican states in the South have enacted 34 laws which will make it more difficult to vote.

Measuring popular consciousness

We must accept the fact that right-wing ideas have a large base in this country today—even if only a minority of the population still supports Trump.

Two things need to be distinguished here. The far right, groups such as the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Patriot Front, still remain very small—although this does not diminish their capacity for violence and inflicting harm.

But a variety of right-wing ideas, such as believing that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, have a broad audience, as noted above. Another example can also help explain this point. The “Great Replacement” theory is a centerpiece of rightwing thinking, often espoused on Fox News. This theory holds that recent demographic changes in the U.S. population, leading to an increase in the proportion of people of color, are the result of a conscious plan to suppress the votes of conservative white voters. According to an AP-NORC poll, 32 percent of Americans believe that immigrants are being brought in as part of a deliberate electoral strategy. This figure goes up to 54 percent for Republicans and up to 61 percent for Trump voters, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

At the same time, it is also important to recognize that popular consciousness is not by any means uniformly shifting rightward. There is also an increase in ideological resistance to the most appalling actions by Republicans and the Supreme Court.

For example, the Brookings Institution, the thinktank of the Democratic Party establishment, concluded about the results of an Economist/YouGov poll from late June, “79 percent of Americans now believe that Donald Trump was involved in a wide-ranging effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a belief shared by 49 percent of Republicans and an equal share of those who voted for him in 2020. At the end of the day, the former president may stand convicted in the court of public opinion if not in a court of law.”

The results of a Gallup Poll released on July 1^st showed that the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval rate plummeted to just 25 percent after it overturned Roe v Wade, compared with 59 percent in January 2001.

Throughout the population, moreover, there’s a general sense of being overwhelmed in this country at the moment. There are broad feelings of anxiety and unease among large section of the population. There are a number of causes for this:

The continuing effects of the pandemic, particularly fears of new variants of the virus.
The storm of social issues exacerbated by the time of isolation. There seems to be a real increase in incidents and anger in public places. Frontline workers in transport, hospitality, and healthcare tells horrifying stories of customer or patient belligerence and hostility.
The many negative carry-overs from shutdowns and virtual learning creating disorder in K-12 education.
A perceived sense that crime is forever rising.
The frequency of mass shootings.
The proliferation of extreme weather events.
The opioid crisis.
The increase in “deaths of despair:” Suicides decreased slightly during the pandemic, but remain at unacceptably high levels; drug overdoses, deaths by alcohol abuse and alcoholic liver disease all increased significantly.

We should recognize some regional and occupational variations here. For many frontline workers in education and healthcare, the exhaustion and burnout of the pandemic is still very strong. On the other hand, in many parts of the country daily life has returned to its pre-Covid rhythms.

However, these variations do not change the general sense of broad sections of the population that society is chaotic, hostile, and dysfunctional.

Prospects for Resistance

We should conclude by looking at the prospects for fightback today. The immigrants’ rights movement has been in a lull despite Biden’s border policies. The situation in the Black movement is more complicated. There have been many well publicized recent shootings and killings of Black people by the police. The death of Patrick Lyoya, a Congolese immigrant in Grand Rapids, Michigan is one of the most recent examples of this. Yet, the responses have been minimal compared to the movement after George Floyd was killed.

However, a real success was recorded with Reverend Lionel Barber’s Poor Peoples Campaign march in Washington on June 18th. This demonstration was modeled on Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign. While it had a general civil and economic rights agenda, the disenfranchisement of Black people in southern elections was at center stage. There were an estimated 40,000 people in the heavily working-class crowd.

The situation of the women’s movement has changed greatly. The leak of the Alito draft decision led to some respectable but modest demonstrations. By early July, the flood gates opened with the final ruling being made. Since then, frequent demonstrations, primarily made up of young women, have occurred all over the country.

It’s far too early to make an assessment of a movement that is only a few weeks old. However, the first demonstrations give us great cause for optimism. The big challenge is to prevent this very promising movement from being derailed into the Democratic Party cul-de-sac of “We’ll remember in November” and “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.”

Contradictory situation for the left in labor

The state of affairs in the labor movement is contradictory. This can be seen by looking at the two biggest strikes taking place today. At CNH Industrial, which manufactures agricultural equipment, the UAW has been on strike for two months. The strikers’ main demand is that union plants come up to wage parity with non-union plants. The other big strike is the fifteen-month long UMWA strike at WarriorMet in Alabama. These are long bitter strikes, not an exuberant upsurge.

However, the situation in new organizing is much better. We have seen Amazon on Staten Island, over 160 Starbucks locations, and now an Apple store in Maryland recently unionizing. The militant wing of the labor movement has seen four big successes in inner-union politics: the victory of the Sean O’Brien/Fred Zuckerman slate in the Teamsters, the success of the Unite All Workers for Democracy campaign for the direct election of main officers in the UAW, the victory of Stacey Davis Gates and the reelection of the CORE slate in the Chicago Teachers Union, and finally the huge success of the Labor Notes conference. (For a full report on the conference, see the article on this website, “Labor Notes conference: a force to be reckoned with.) There has been, therefore, forward movement on new organizing drives and in the fight for union democracy and militancy. But this has not yet been accompanied by victories on the crucial strike front.

These points are the main elements of the situation in which we conduct our political work today.