International Socialism Project

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.

Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, but he continued to propagate the Big Lie anyway. But the challenges to the election were only a part of a multi-pronged strategy to stop the congressional certification of Biden’s election, and to keep himself in power by hook or by crook.

Today, liberals are hoping that the shocks of overturning of Roe, the revelations from the January 6 commission, and the GOP’s nominations of some truly awful candidates might provide some margin for hope that the Democrats won’t suffer the expected drubbing.

Until Donald Trump became president in 2017, former president Richard Nixon—the only president in U.S. history to resign from office—was widely regarded as setting the high-water mark for abusing the power of the U.S. presidency.

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.

It’s not just that the decision goes against the will of, according to opinion polls, seven out of 10 or more Americans, or that it will devastate and worsen the lives of millions. It’s the result of a government system set up in the Eighteenth Century that is increasingly anachronistic in the Twenty First Century.

Even if the U.S.’s main conservative party manages to distance itself from the chaos and corruption that Trump exudes, its Trumpiness will persist. That’s because it exists in an era of economic instability and political polarization that pushes it to make ever-more extreme positions a “new normal” in U.S. politics.

The real “strategic impasse” is that of those socialists who, finding themselves adrift and without serious organization, joined DSA in a vain hope that it could be influenced to become something it was never been set up to be.

Some commentators thought that Joe Biden as president would mean a Keynesian turn in the US. The same hopes and illusions had developed in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2009.

The Jacobin effort is not a project designed for socialists to understand how better to recruit workers to socialist organizations. It’s a project designed to advise progressive Democrats about how to win more elections to the U.S. House and state legislatures.

The mainstream media are full of interpretations on the deep meanings of the vote and the long-term prospects of the two ruling-class parties. Yet, the explanation for the November results is pretty simple, and it starts with last November’s national election.

“The idea that Manchin is to blame for killing the billionaires’ tax is too convenient,” argued a journalist who spoke with party aides about the moribund proposal.

The war, based on a lie that Iraq harbored “weapons of mass destruction”—of which none were found—killed hundreds of thousands. For that, Powell and the other architects of the war should have found themselves in the dock at a war crimes tribunal, rather than being hailed as elder statespersons.