THE US presidential election is no ordinary, run-of-the-mill contest between a warmongering Republican candidate funded by big business and a warmongering but less socially reactionary Democratic candidate funded by big business.
Supporters of Republican President Donald Trump are plumbing new depths in order to misrepresent the contest as one of a patriotic, plain-speaking, law-and-order champion of American motherhood and apple pie against a pro-violence, anti-white, foreigner-loving front-man for communism and the so-called “deep state.”
The Republican convention has already revealed the extent to which the peddlers of this grotesque fantasy are no longer on the fringes of that party.
There have always been substantial factions and prominent individuals in the Republican Party who are socially liberal or whose isolationist outlook makes them wary of overseas military involvements. Some have even combined both positions.
Even Trump — not a longstanding party member — has in the past displayed “isolationist” tendencies in foreign policy, winning praise in some British and other European quarters for his reluctance to wage war against North Korea, Iran and Syria.
In the 2016 presidential contest, his standpoint on international relations contrasted favourably to that of blood-thirsty Democrat contender Hillary Clinton.
But that was then and this is now. Today, Trump is a president who pours oil on the flames of the massive unrest in US cities.
Behind a deliberately gossamer-thin facade, he sides with racist police officers and gun-totin’ white vigilantes, and they know it.
In tandem with his belligerent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his policies and rhetoric are kindling conflicts in Latin America, the Middle East and the South China Sea that could prove catastrophic.
Far from resisting the hawks in the Pentagon, Trump is now aligned with them to a degree that alarms those civilian sections of big business which — logically enough — prefer trade and commerce to chaos and war.
Even the likes of former president George W Bush and former secretary of state Colin Powell have announced that they cannot support a second term for Trump.
Hundreds of other Republicans, including former Congress representatives and retired heads of the CIA and FBI, are calling for a vote for Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden instead.
Plenty could be said about Biden’s own record as a former US senator and vice-president.
His early reactionary record on race relations and support for US attacks on sovereign states has to be weighed against a relatively — we are talking about the US — progressive record recently on taxation, immigration, LGBT rights and climate change.
Of course, like Trump, he defends the wealth and power of US monopoly capitalism and its imperialist interests around the world.
Electing Biden guarantees only one thing — that Trump and the most aggressive, reactionary circles of US monopoly capital are not in the White House.
Which is the better post-election position for workers, the unemployed, black people, women, gays, lesbians and the poor to find themselves in on November 4? As the Communist Party of the USA puts it: “Defeating the far right at the ballot box across the nation at all levels of government will allow for more advanced struggles.
“The struggle for universal health care, education and the right to housing and jobs will not develop beyond its current stage if the far right maintains a foothold in the state.”
