Even by the standards of American “political culture,” Thursday night’s presidential debate between President Joseph Biden and former President Donald Trump was a spectacle of decadence, reactionary behavior and stupidity.
This is not just a question of Biden’s dementia, which can no longer be denied, nor of Trump’s violent personality, which has never been questioned before, but the far more advanced decadence of the entire ruling class that was laid bare for the whole world on the night of June 27, 2024.
American capitalism has put on the stage its two leading spokesmen: Biden, an aging warmonger whose first policy priority is unlimited war against Russia, and Trump, a fascist bombast, who used the debates to defend the coup attempt of January 6, 2021.
This is the choice that American politics will present in 2024.
The media has focused almost unanimously on Biden’s dismal debate performance, with several major media outlets reporting: The New York Times“I’m not sure what to say,” he said, and asked him to step aside. Words like “incomprehensible,” “unintelligible,” “stumbling,” and “incoherent” were all over the coverage. Biden was struggling to speak in coherent sentences, to form a coherent thought, to make a thematic connection, to present a single new idea — adjectives that are appropriate for American liberalism as a whole.
Biden is indeed the perfect embodiment of the decaying American political system. The president certainly can’t speak clearly. Mental disordersbut, Times What should he say? What policies should he spell out? What record should he have? Where does he intend to lead the country as president and the self-proclaimed “Leader of the Free World”? The answer to each question is the same: war.
Biden’s brief moments of clarity revealed him to be, as he always has been, a product of military intelligence. Like a bedridden patient who wakes when the nurse brings his medicine, Biden finally managed to speak intelligibly when, prompted by the CNN debate moderator, he reaffirmed his unstinting support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
“We are giving Israel the weapons it needs, when it needs them,” Biden declared.
The policy led to the massacre of some 40,000 civilians in nine months of relentless bombing, but Biden’s “clarity” on the issue is unlikely to win him much support from workers and young people who abhor genocide.
Biden was similarly clear when calling for an escalation of NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine, which is threatening nuclear war on Earth. Of the Russian president, Biden said:
Putin has made one thing very clear: he wants to reconstruct what was part of the Soviet empire. He wants the whole of Ukraine, not just a part of it. That’s what he wants. So do you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop after he takes Ukraine? What do you think will happen with Poland? What do you think about Belarus? What do you think will happen with NATO countries?
Biden’s position, as he has stated many times, is that Russia must be defeated militarily “no matter how long it takes” and “no matter how much it costs.” This warmongering threat is a matter of immediate urgency for everyone on the planet. It is clear to anyone with eyes that Washington, along with its NATO allies, is already deep in an undeclared war with a nuclear-armed Russia.
Unfortunately, CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash offered no follow-up on this crucial question.Similarly, the hosts did not ask about the COVID-19 pandemic, whose unchecked spread has been encouraged by both Trump and Biden, claiming millions of lives despite the desperate warnings of epidemiologists and public health experts.The “fourth estate,” the media, is also far gone.
It’s not just age and infirmity that has prevented Biden from effectively responding to any of Trump’s fascist threats, much less moonshot lies, but because, fundamentally, he offers no alternative to the Republican front-runner.
Trump spent much of the debate railing against immigrants, repeating the demonstrably false claim that migrant workers are the cause of rising crime (data shows that immigrants are few Trump said immigrants are “more likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans” and warned that they are “taking over our schools, taking over our hospitals, taking over Social Security.” (Immigrants are net contributors to the U.S. tax base, as recently made clear by the Congressional Budget Office; it’s Trump’s fellow citizens among the super-rich who are draining the country.)
Trump dodged Tapper’s question, the only challenging one of the night.
President Trump, on immigration, you said you would launch “the largest domestic deportation campaign in American history.” Does this mean you would deport every illegal immigrant in the United States, even those who have jobs, whose spouses are American citizens, and those who have lived in the United States for decades? If so, how would you do it?
Trump did not explain how he would wipe out millions of immigrants, including working-class men, women, and children. But it is clear that he could only carry out such large-scale deportations through violent police-state means, which would soon be directed against the entire working class. Such a policy would entail the destruction of what remains of American democracy and a complete reversal of the national creed that America is a nation of immigrants and a “refuge for mankind,” as Tom Paine put it.
Biden did not, or could not, challenge Trump on immigration, perhaps because he and his predecessor, Barack Obama, are responsible for building the police state infrastructure that Trump is now threatening to mobilize. The Biden administration has openly boasted that, in the words of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, “we have deported more people than the previous administration in all four years.” Meanwhile, Obama deported more immigrants than all his predecessors combined. Just last week, Biden won a Supreme Court case that asserted the executive branch’s unlimited right to block U.S. citizens from living with their immigrant spouses or spouses.
But it is not Biden’s right-wing politics that has surprised the establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the ruling class factions that tend to lean towards it, especially Wall Street, the intelligence agencies, the military high command, and Silicon Valley. What these groups fear most is that Biden’s collapse and Trump’s victory will lead to a change in the war policy against Russia, even though Trump has made no secret of his readiness to unleash the power of the US military, including nuclear weapons.
Biden’s blunder comes at a time of growing crisis for the American ruling class. Washington’s puppet government in Ukraine is losing a war that is costing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. Britain and France are about to hold elections in which the leaders of those two countries, Washington’s main allies, are, if anything, less trustworthy than Biden. And from July 9 to 11, Biden will oversee a NATO military council in Washington that will push for direct intervention in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the US national debt is approaching $35 trillion and is rising rapidly due to the endless funding of the wars in Ukraine and Israel and the high interest rates levied to oppress the American working class in the name of fighting inflation (which has the effect of making the debt even more expensive). The political bankruptcy of US capitalism is a direct reflection of its financial bankruptcy.
Under these circumstances, Times Trump is spearheading a campaign to remove Biden from the running. Such a move is fraught with danger. The Democratic Party has no politician who is popular and despised (though the Republican Party faces similar problems if Trump is removed). And the Democratic Party’s upper-middle-class base is a patchwork of many identity-based constituencies who will demand that Biden be replaced by their “buddies,” risking factionalism within the Democratic Party. This has nothing to do with political differences. Replacement simply means repackaging Biden’s war policies with a new face and name.
Ultimately, Biden’s decline symbolizes the decline of the political order and the capitalist ruling class it represents: an ossified regime that tolerates no challenges to its authority.
In these circumstances, vast political possibilities open up, especially for the working class, which is why Biden has cracked down on campus protests against the Gaza massacre and why Democrats are desperately trying to keep third parties off the ballot, one of which is the Socialist Equality Party (SEP).
SEP presidential candidate Joe Kishore said in a statement:
This debate expressed the political corruption of the United States, the heart of finance capital and the cockpit of imperialist war planning. The crisis must be understood as the expression of profound objective factors.
While it is impossible to predict how events will exactly unfold, one thing is absolutely certain: there will be no progressive solution to this crisis unless the worldwide working class unites as an international force based on a socialist program.
