Last fall, a Gallup Poll reported that 63 percent of U.S. adults said a third party was needed because the major parties do such a “poor job of representing the American people.” While this was the highest level of support for a third party that Gallup found in the 20 years it has conducted the survey, support for a third party has remained at roughly that level since 2013.
Even though major business organizations issued statements condemning January 6 and worked with major media and non-governmental organizations to assure a “peaceful transition” from Trump to Biden, it was always a farrago to trust big business to champion democracy. As always with U.S. politics, following the money is the best way to understand what happened.
Get ready for an ugly and interminable election season. As of right now, polls showed that Biden and Trump are essential tied with support in the low-to-mid 40s nationally. But because of the ridiculous and undemocratic Electoral College, the election will come down to how each fare in a small number of “swing states,” where the electorate is more closely divided between the candidates and their parties.
Chicago represents a test case for how a “sanctuary” city can welcome an influx of migrants, when as many as 2.4 million asylum seekers have crossed the southern border in the last year. Hundreds of migrants arrive weekly on buses dispatched by the right-wing governors of Texas and Florida.
The ISP has collated a list of sources that readers seeking to understand what is happening in Palestine—and why—can consult.
The Democrats campaigned against Trump’s cruelty and capitalized on outrage towards his racist policies to win elections in 2018 and 2020. But once in office, the Democrats deliver not the sharp break with these policies their supporters expect, but a “lesser evil” that shaves off the roughest edges, applies some liberal rhetoric, and ends up normalizing the policies it claimed to oppose.
McCallum’s book well illustrates how the pandemic revealed what Gramsci called capitalism’s “morbid symptoms” (a phrase McCallum borrows). But Essential is equally a cautionary tale about how capitalists can shift the cost of their crises onto workers if workers aren’t strong enough to resist.
Trump is the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election. For him, winning the presidency is his existential goal. Lose, and any conviction he receives will subject him to financial ruin and prison time.
2024 will become, as every national election since 2016 has, a referendum on Trump and MAGA. In that circumstance, Joe Biden—despite holding the support of only about 40 percent of the public—will have to be favored by the Democratic Party for reelection, assuming a health crisis doesn’t derail the octogenarian president.
The previous installment of this two-part series covered the emergence of independent working-class politics in the era of Marx and Engels. This article takes the history up to contemporary times to show how different conceptions of a working-class party reflect different conceptions of its ultimate aim.
When we say that the Democratic Party is a bourgeois party, it’s because no matter who votes for it—and the majority of Democratic voters are workers—the party apparatus itself is set up to reflect, and to some extent, organize, the political interests of the capitalist class.
This “new machine” is supposed to press the corporations to pay their fair share. But given the dynamics of electoral politics—where there is always another election to plan for—and where Johnson will be looking to shore up his support, that “new machine” can become the vehicle by which Johnson’s wing of the Democratic Party co-opts another generation of activists.
Whatever happens in this one-party Democratic Party city—the third largest in the country and one of its leading transportation, manufacturing, and technology hubs—will have national implications.
The progressives, with the Squad in tow, followed a well-worn path: set out a “progressive” position; pledge to hold fast to it; compromise with their mainstream opponents; vote for the mainstream “compromise” which drops the progressive position; then, after it passes with their votes, claim that’s what they wanted all along.
The results of the U.S. midterm election broke a well-established historical pattern of the “out” party scoring a victory over the president’s party. In the process, the results made fools of the right-wing politicians and pundits who had proclaimed that a “red wave” would wipe out the Democrats and, possibly, put President Biden on the road to impeachment.
