The Great Meltdown

Daniel Lazare reflects on last week's disastrous presidential debate and explains why the Constitution is largely to blame

There’s a terrific line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in which a character explains how he went bankrupt: “Two ways.  Gradually, then suddenly.”  

The same goes for the U.S. following Thursday’s presidential debate.  For decades, a handful of critics have been warning that an eighteenth-century constitution that is both unworkable and unchangeable is a recipe for disaster.  And for decades, they’ve been right.  U.S. society has gone through various stages of denial as the constitutional vise has tightened: anger, frustration, paralysis, and spiraling corruption as it became clear that political controls were ineffectual and it was therefore every man for himself.

But then Joe Biden and Donald Trump took the stage in Atlanta, and, in a way that would have made Papa Hemingway proud, gradual decline gave way to sudden collapse.  

Biden’s performance was, of course, disastrous.  Slack-jawed and blank-faced, he stuttered and stumbled, mangling words and facts and losing his train of thought mid-sentence.  “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump joked after Biden’s speech grew particularly garbled.  “I don’t think he knows what he said either.” 

After months of Democratic denial, the essential bankruptcy of the Biden administration was plain for all to see.  Trump meanwhile sprayed lies with a firehose as he tried to blame the January 6, 2021, attempted coup on Nancy Pelosi and accused pro-abortion Democrats of wanting to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.”  Blaming illegal migrants for everything from crime to troubles with Social Security, his obsession is beginning to resemble Hitler’s obsession with “Judeo-Bolshevism” as the be-all and end-all of German decline.

But as bad as Biden and Trump were individually, the combination was even worse.  By failing to effectively counter his opponent’s lies, Biden wound up validating them.  His weakness made Trumpian Bonapartism seem stronger, more inevitable, more in synch with the country’s general trajectory.  Famed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh quoted a longtime Democratic contributor to the effect that party members should:

“Accept reality ... 2024 is likely beyond recovery at this point.  Too steep a hill to climb.  Plan and execute a long-term plan to counter Mr. Orange and build a moderate platform for the recovery ... and let Biden wander off to the Jersey Pine Barrens.”

With a top Biden adviser rejecting talk of finding another candidate at this late date as a “DC parlor fantasy,” Democrats are thus surrendering before the battle is joined.  Trump won’t launch another coup because he won’t have to — victory is already in hand.  Where Bidenism presented itself as an alternative to democratic decline, it’s now clear that it is nothing more than a brief interruption in America’s ongoing slide to the ultra-right.

A few things should be clear about last week’s debacle.  One is that the Constitution is not the whole story — something known as the long-term capitalist profitability crisis is no less central — but its role is undeniable.  The political scientist  Juan Linz barely scratched the surface when he wrote in a much-cited 1990 essay that separation of powers in a presidential system leads to bitter institutional struggles that “no democratic principle” can resolve because both sides claim equal “democratic legitimacy.”  But the problem in the U.S. is even worse because democratic legitimacy is nowhere to be found at all.  It doesn’t exist in the executive branch thanks to an Electoral College that has usurped the popular vote twice since November 2000.  It doesn’t exist in a legislative branch in which one house is hopelessly gerrymandered and the other is an undemocratic monstrosity that grants a demographic Liliput like Wyoming nearly 70 times as much clout per capita as a minority-majority giant like California.

It is also nonexistent in a judicial branch whose lifetime appointees have zero accountability as far as the general public is concerned.  As this blog has pointed out ad nauseam, five of the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices were appointed by unelected presidents, either Dubya or Trump, while four were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the U.S. population.  The result is a right-wing minority dictatorship that is likely to continue well into the 2030s, one from which there is no reprieve whatever under anything resembling present circumstances.

So instead of competing democratic claims, all we have are competing undemocratic claims whose sole legitimacy rests on a 237-year-old document that is beyond the people’s control.  With both sides claiming to be more constitutional than the other, “we the people” have been shut out so completely that the only democratic solution is to wipe the slate clean and begin the process of formulating a new system of government from scratch.

Previously, any such suggestion would have been rejected as mad, utopian, the sort of fantasy that frustrated Marxist intellectuals engage in when they can’t sleep at night.  Now it is a matter of growing urgency.  Thursday’s collapse has left a gaping hole where a kind-of, sort-of, semi-democracy used to be.  In its place is a growing dictatorship.  Democratic warnings about what a second Trump presidency will mean are not exaggerated in the least.  Indeed, they are understated now that party leaders are giving up on 2024 and setting their sights on 2028.  Yet by that point, the electoral principle will have gone straight out the window since a second Trump presidency will amount to an ex-post-facto validation of the 2021 attempted coup.  Elections will continue in some form or other, but the only way Republicans will regard them as valid will be if they win.  Otherwise, they will accuse Democrats of cheating, rigging the vote, stuffing the ballot boxes, etc., and since they will control Congress and the courts, their opinion will prevail.  “Rule of law” is a liberal cliché that means next to nothing.  But it is about to give way to something even worse, which is to say the rule of Donald Trump’s prejudices and whims.

The prospects for the working class are grim.  With economic inequality already at grotesque levels, the capitalist economy is on a knife’s edge.  But Trump’s call for a 10-percent across-the-board tariff will compound the problem since it is a replay of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that Congress passed in the wake of the 1929 stock-market crash.  By boosting tariff rates by nearly 50 percent, Smoot-Hawley triggered a round of economic recriminations that caused world trade to sag by anywhere from a third to a half.  Although the specifics are controversial, the result was to help turn a financial crisis into a global depression in which GDP fell by an average of 17 percent.  If this happens again, the consequences will be savage in terms of wage cuts, layoffs, poverty, and union-busting.  Trump, of course, is an ignoramus who can be counted on to make every economic mistake in the book.  If so, the political dynamics of the MAGA movement will compel him to respond to each and every blunder with stepped-up right-wing radicalism.  The effect will be to send the country careening ever further in the direction of outright fascism.

The only way the working class can fight this is by severing all ties with the Democrats, a collection of Hamptons, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley billionaires whose elitist presumptions have sent millions of ordinary people fleeing into the arms of the Republican right.  Labor must replace class compromise with class war and a hopelessly antique constitution with a call for workers’ democracy.  Otherwise, Democrats will drag them down into the abyss.

Two other things should be kept in mind with regard to last week’s debacle.  One is that the U.S. is now in a full-blown succession crisis.  What will Democrats do if Biden, stubborn old fool that he is, refuses to step aside?  Will they invoke the 25^th Amendment, an unworkable Rube-Goldberg device that will only make matters worse?  Will they free up Biden’s delegates and hold an open convention in August?  No one knows.  

The other is that the meltdown also leaves a hole where an empire used to be.  Trump is not an anti-imperialist, to say the least.  Rather, he’s a “transactionalist” who views NATO with suspicion and prefers to bargain with Russia and China one-on-one.  While socialists want nothing to do with the Atlantic alliance, they should recognize that weakening it creates a power vacuum that like-minded right-wing nationalists will hasten to fill, people like France’s Le Pen, Hungary’s Orban, Holland’s Wilders, and Germany’s AfD.  Just as in the 1930s, the effect will be to divide the world up into regional power blocs — the EU, Russia, China, and so on — that will foster the growth of beggar-thy-neighbor policies.  The upshot will be more turmoil and war as the great unraveling accelerates.