Even by the standards of American “political culture,” Thursday night’s presidential debate between U.S. President Joseph Biden and former President Donald Trump was a degrading spectacle of reactionaryism and stupidity.
This is not just Biden’s dementia, which can no longer be denied. Nor is it about Trump’s thuggish personality, which has never been in doubt. On the evening of June 27, 2024, the whole world discovered the very advanced decline of the entire ruling class.
American capitalism has placed its two main spokesmen on stage: the senile warmonger Biden, whose primary policies are support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza and unlimited war against Russia, and the fascist braggart Trump, who used the debate to defend his attempted coup of January 6, 2021.
This is the “choice” that American politics is proposing in 2024.
The media focused in unison on Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the debate, with several major outlets, the New York Times in the lead, demanding that he step down. The media coverage was filled with words like “unintelligible,” “incomprehensible,” “stumbling,” and “incoherent.” Biden struggled to speak in full sentences, express complete ideas, hold a thread of a topic, or propose a single new idea, which is an apt image to describe the Democratic Party as a whole.
Biden, in fact, is the perfect incarnation of an American political system that is rotting on its feet. The president, it is true, is not capable of expressing himself clearly, and may well not be of sound mind. But what is the Times would like him to say? What policies should it develop? What achievements can he highlight? Where does he propose to lead the country as president and self-proclaimed “leader of the free world”? The answer to every question is the same: war.
Biden’s few moments of semi-clarity revealed him to be the creature of the military intelligence apparatus that he always was. Like the bedridden patient who wakes up when the nurses bring the medicine, Biden was finally able to say something intelligible when the CNN debate hosts invited him to reaffirm his unwavering support for Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.
“We provide Israel with all the weapons it needs and when it needs them,” Biden said.
Under this policy, some 40,000 civilians were massacred in nine months of merciless bombing. But Biden’s “clarity” on this subject will hardly win him support among the masses of workers and young people who hate genocide.
Biden has been equally lucid in his demand for an escalation of NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine, which threatens the planet with nuclear holocaust. Regarding the Russian president, Biden repeated the official propaganda speech:
Putin has been clear on one point: he wants to restore what was part of the Soviet empire, and not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants. And do you think it will stop there? Do you think he will stop when he – if he takes Ukraine? What do you think will happen to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think is happening to these NATO countries?
Joe Biden’s position is that Russia must be defeated militarily, “for as long as it takes” and “as much as it costs,” as he has repeatedly said. This warmongering threat is a matter of pressing urgency for everyone on the planet. It is clear to anyone with eyes to see that Washington, along with its NATO allies, is already embroiled in an undeclared war with nuclear-armed Russia.
Predictably, CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did not follow up on this crucial question. Similarly, the moderators did not ask about the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been encouraged to spread unchecked by both Trump and Biden, killing millions, much less the novel H5N1 avian flu virus, even as epidemiologists and public health experts are desperately sounding the alarm. The “fourth estate,” the media, is also very, very degenerate.
It is not just because of his age and senility that Biden has been unable to effectively respond to a single one of Trump’s fascist threats, let alone his lies. It is because, fundamentally, he offers no alternative to the likely Republican nominee.
Trump spent much of the debate railing against immigrants, repeating the blatantly false claim that migrant workers are responsible for a crime wave (data shows immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than Americans by birth) and that immigrants “are taking over our schools, our hospitals and will take over social security.” (Immigrants are net contributors to the U.S. tax base, as the Congressional Budget Office recently reminded us. They are Trump’s cronies among the super-rich who are bleeding the country dry.)
Trump dodged the only tough question of the evening, posed by Tapper:
President Trump, to stay on the subject of immigration, you have said that you are going to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Does that mean that you are going to deport every undocumented immigrant in America, including those who have jobs, those whose spouses are citizens, and those who have lived here for decades? And if so, how will you do that?
Trump has not explained how he will carry out a roundup of millions of immigrants—working-class men, women, and children. But it is clear that he could carry out such a massive deportation only through violent police methods, which would very quickly be directed against the entire working class. Such a policy involves the destruction of what remains of American democracy and the complete inversion of America’s national creed as a nation of immigrants and “a haven for humanity,” as Tom Paine put it.
Biden did not, or could not, challenge Trump on immigration, perhaps because he and his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, were responsible for creating the infrastructure of the police state that Trump now threatens to mobilize. The Biden administration openly boasts of having deported “more people than in the entire four years of the previous administration,” in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Obama, meanwhile, has deported more immigrants than all previous administrations combined. Just last week, Biden won a Supreme Court case that affirmed the executive branch’s unfettered right to prevent American citizens from living with their immigrant spouses.
But it wasn’t Biden’s right-wing policies that stunned theestablishment of the Democratic Party and the factions of the ruling class that tend to gravitate toward it: Wall Street, the intelligence apparatus, the military top brass, and Silicon Valley, among others. What these layers fear above all is that a Biden collapse and a Trump victory will change the war policy against Russia, although Trump does not hide that he is ready to unleash the American military , including its nuclear arsenal.
The Biden debacle comes at a time of growing crisis for the American ruling class. Washington’s Ukrainian puppet regime is losing the war, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. Elections will soon take place in Britain and France, whose leaders, key allies of Washington, may well be even more discredited than Biden. And from July 9-11, Biden is scheduled to oversee a NATO war council in Washington, which will push for enhanced intervention in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, US sovereign debt stands at nearly $35 trillion and rising rapidly, driven by the endless financing of wars in Ukraine and Israel and high interest rates imposed to punish the American working class in the name of fighting inflation, which has the effect of making the debt more expensive. The political bankruptcy of American capitalism indeed mirrors its financial bankruptcy.
It is under these conditions that the Times is leading a campaign to remove Biden from office. Such a move carries its own dangers. The Democratic Party has no politician of national stature who is not despised (a similar problem faces Republicans if Trump is ousted). And the Democratic Party’s upper-middle-class base is made up of various identity groups, who will demand that their “own” candidate be put forward in place of Biden, threatening to spark a factional war within the Democrats. This would have nothing to do with fundamental policy disagreements. Any replacement would simply mean a repackaging of Biden’s war policies behind a new face and a new name.
Ultimately, Biden’s decline represents the decline of the political order and the capitalist ruling class it represents. It is a sclerotic regime that cannot tolerate any challenge to its authority.
Under these conditions, vast political possibilities open up, particularly for the working class. This is why Biden is suppressing campus protests against the Gaza genocide and why the Democratic Party is desperate to exclude third parties from the ballot. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is among these parties.
In a statement, SEP presidential candidate Joe Kishore said:
The debate made it possible to express the political degeneration in the United States, the center of financial capital and the cockpit of imperialist war planning. This crisis must be understood as the expression of deep objective factors.
While it is impossible to predict the exact course of events, one thing is absolutely certain. There will be no progressive resolution of this crisis until the working class, on a world scale, intervenes as an international force on the basis of a socialist program.
(Article published in English on June 29, 2024)
