“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters”
– Antonio Gramsci
It may be easy to attribute the chaos of our current world to simply being a by-product of the 2020 Covid pandemic. However, the rise of populism (both right & left) has been happening since the 2008 financial crisis broke our world and sent our families into crisis. When many saw their livelihoods disappear while their governments bailed out the banks & corporations which had plundered them, it was this moment when the old world had sabotaged itself. As the old world tried to save itself from collapse, it had awakened the true social agents of change: the people. It awakened many to the harsh reality of neoliberalism & what it had been doing to our society & economy since the 1980s. The old world may have saved itself for that moment, but it had also sown the seeds for its own demise by finally revealing itself to the masses to be a callous world order that never had the intention to care for us.
We have awakened to the realization that we are merely disposable statistics to our government, who would rather tell us that our suffering is our own doing & launch mass propaganda campaigns on the ideas of “personal responsibility”. All the while this government has ignored its own “personal responsibility” of caring for its citizens, especially in crisis.
Two populist movements were born out of this awakening in 2008:
- Libertarian (Tea Party) movement
- Democratic Socialist movement
The difference between these populist movements illustrate the increasing divide within the USA (and the world) that is forming. Both are born of a disillusionment with the old order, however, one is invested within tradition, whereas the other is invested in imagining a new system. Both would require the death of the current neoliberal order to be created.
The Libertarian (Tea Party) movement reflected a belief that the USA has somehow deviated from its initial ideas on liberty, freedom, and democracy. It sees the issues not within the structure of the United States, but rather, those who have soiled the sanctity of the constitution and have strayed from what our founding fathers had intended. Such ideas cultivated reactions towards traditionalism in not just the political sense, but social sense as well. Libertarians may have a reputation of being fiscally conservative & socially liberal, however, make no mistake that the Tea Party movement laid the groundwork of reactionary social ideas regarding race, gender, & sexuality, as well as being invested within conspiracy theories in public discourse on an unprecedented level.
In contrast, the Democratic Socialist movement reflected a belief that there was something that was structurally wrong about the current state of affairs in the USA that would require a political revolution to restructure a world for oppressed peoples. The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 & “We are the 99%” mantras reflected an increasing awareness among people which saw how the economy had intentionally been structured in a way which only benefited the rich. Such upticks in awareness led to calls for “get money out of politics!” & “tax the rich!”. The rise of social-democratic sympathies (cloaked as democratic socialism) was a natural consequence of neoliberal capitalism causing income inequality to rise to record-high levels by 2008; this was of course was worsened by the financial crash, which saw most of the wealth that average Americans had be erased in a matter of days to months. Some communities have yet to recover (those being predominantly black communities who are now either being gentrified or abandoned). The Rust Belt & Appalachian regions were no better, as manufacturing & mining had essentially disappeared by 2008; the lack of financial capital available after the recession was a final blow for many industries & neighborhoods.
These two movements would shape American politics indefinitely for the 2010s, as the Tea Party would shape the Republican Party and set it on its course towards fascism. The Tea Party would give the Obama Administration major blows in the midterm elections of 2010 after they had preyed upon the frustrations of the Rust Belt (Ohio especially) & the Appalachian regions. Much was also focused on ensuring that Obama was delegitimized as “Unamerican”, giving rise to birther conspiracy theories which claimed he was not born in the USA, along with claiming he was a Muslim informant.
Here one sees the strategies of the Tea Party which would soon define the GOP’s politics: claim a monopoly on the American identity & fighting for the “forgotten white working class”. Make no mistake that it was the Tea Party movement that was the first to engage in the racial politics that many believe is ripping apart America today, no matter how many times conservatives may say it’s the “radical left” and “critical race theory” or “intersectionality”.
Their political strategies of claiming to represent the forgotten American was racially coded as the white working class who had been hit hard by the recession. The Tea Party was able to capitalize on the insufferable rhetoric by liberals who claimed that Obama represented a new progressive era for America given his racial identity. All the while, most of the country had been suffering in the early years of his presidency with no sight of any of it getting better.
In addition, the Democratic Socialist movement would bring income inequality to the forefront of our minds, along with the rampant corporate influence within our politics. Discussions about our broken healthcare & immigration system would soon dominate Left-circles in the USA, which had then compelled Obama to construct “Obamacare” & DACA. We do not need to lie to ourselves: Obamacare was simply a neoliberal health care reform bill whereas DACA was a temporary solution to the crisis of undocumented children in the USA. Both of these would become core components of the Republican Party’s main focus to counter, as the GOP’s politics would soon to simply reflect an “Anti-Obama line” by 2012. That is to say, their politics would soon become “counter anything Obama wants”.
Progressives were still enamored by the grassroots energy of Obama’s 2008 run that many, despite Obama’s neoliberal tendency, were still aligned with the Democratic Party. Obama’s primary role for the neoliberal old order was to maintain it after it was flung into crisis during 2008. Through charisma, celebrity connections, & neoliberal identity politics, Obama was able to maintain the world order through imperialist violence & Reagan-esque rhetoric on economics. The Occupy Wall Street Movement would soon lose steam and many would reintegrate with the Democratic party for Obama in 2012 so he could win a second term. Therefore, Obama had successfully maintained the neoliberal world order, despite it facing collapse in 2008, as he reinvested much of the left-populist movement (the democratic socialist movement) back into democratic party’s political machine. With no left opposition & collaboration with the right wing, he was able to topple Libya in 2011, intervene in the Syrian civil war, make neoliberal reforms, strengthen NATO & EU ties, and essentially reset Americans to no longer be so invested in radical change (in the meantime).
What seemed to pose the most danger to Obama’s political “neutrality” (of neoliberalism) was the increasing awareness of police brutality towards black communities, as Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, & Eric Garner would soon become faces of the young #BlackLivesMatter movement that started in 2013. The many racial uprisings that occurred in Ferguson & Baltimore were denounced by Obama, as he was able to position himself as an authoritative voice on how Black Americans should be able to respond to police brutality & the impunity for officers which followed. He would go to the extent to label those who rioted in Baltimore as “thugs” and attribute much of the struggles of Black Americans to be internally created. With no support from the most powerful man in the world, these calls for racial justice were easily silenced. Especially as he was able to weaponize his identity to justify his entitlement towards how poor Black Americans should be reacting to injustice.
Despite the Left now pacified, the right wing was beginning to ramp up culture war rhetoric for the 2014 midterms and onwards. This is where one sees the developments of the alt-right pipeline that could be traced back to video game Youtubers like iDubbbz, Pewdiepie, and commentary channels that poked fun at outrageous compilations of “social justice warriors” & feminism as a whole. Same-sex marriage would soon be legalized by a Supreme Court decision in 2015 & Trans rights were soon beginning to enter public discourse, whether it regarded hormones for teens or the notorious gender-neutral bathroom discourse. This was coupled with the increasing calls for racial justice, despite many believing that Obama’s presidency signaled a post-racial America. All of this created a divide between one America which believed that equality was not here for all, and one America which believed that these calls for equality were baseless and mostly rooted within narcissism.
As I mentioned before, the right-populist movement was centered around the ideas of restoring the American ideals enshrined in the constitution, which caused many to tie themselves to traditionalism. The increasing progress for marginalized groups had begun to agitate many who had felt left behind during the economic recovery of the 2010-onwards period. This, coupled with the ridiculing of “social justice concerns”, allowed many to begin embracing a traditionalist lens towards issues that did not merely concern political ideals, but now social ideals as well.
2016 was thus the perfect moment for the reactionary movement of the Trump presidency to win and transform American politics by centering those who had felt abandoned by the neoliberal order which the 2008 recession had plunged into crisis, but Obama had helped maintain & repair. With his infamous “Make America Great Again” slogan, Trump was able to energize the sentiments which the Tea Party movement had been cultivating since the 2008 recession. He perfectly captured the desire of “restoration”, which many who were part of the populist-right had yearned for since they believe the crisis of 2008 signaled to them that America had deviated from its initial ideals. That somehow the USA was not living up to the ideals of our founding fathers and that we needed to restore tradition to ensure that life can become better. Such rhetoric translated to fears of (Latino) immigrants invading America, LGBTQ+ ideas ruining children’s minds, and so on. In short, Trump was a culmination of what the Tea-party movement had been building for the last couple of years. This was bolstered by the rise of the QAnon conspiracy, which built off of prominent conspiracy theories that the populist-right had been discussing for years now, which centered on how “global elites” were corrupting the USA for their pedophilic & sadistic desires; the QAnon conspiracy would provide cover for Trump, as it implanted within many people’s minds that he was being undermined by the “Deep State”, which had also actively destroyed the America they loved.
However, Trump was not the only populist candidate who had captured the public eye. How could we forget Bernie Sanders, who had come onto the scene in 2016 to appeal to another group of people who had felt abandoned by “the neoliberal order which the 2008 recession had broken, but Obama had helped maintain & repair”: millennials and college students. With mounting student debt, no career prospects due to the recession, rising costs of living, and inaccessible healthcare, the youth (and particularly millennials) were awe-inspired by the rhetoric of Bernie Sanders who had promised a new future of what America could look like. He built off the energies of the Occupy Wall Street movement that centered upon taxing the rich & focusing upon the “99% versus 1% of billionaires”. He echoed much of the early critiques of income inequality that had been actively pacified during the Obama administration since he reinvested many progressives into the Democratic Party. His courageous label of a “Democratic socialist” was able to reinvigorate not simply the left-populist movement in the USA which the Obama administration actively defanged, but the socialist movement as a whole in the United States.
Social-democratic tendencies began to gain prominence among college-educated youth, along with multiracial, multigenerational, working class Americans who had also been struggling in the post-recession era. Despite Bernie’s loss in 2016 to Hillary (which is suspected to have been rigged by the DNC), the socialist movement had been reinvigorated in the United States.
Trump’s victory signaled a wake-up call for many liberals, who were in utter disbelief that Americans would proudly vote in an explicitly sexist & xenophobic president. So much so that they would indulge in #Russiagate conspiracy theories to ensure that this was not America’s doing, but rather, an external power’s fault. We now have 3 groups who compose the American electorate following the 2016 election:
- Right-Populists: Believe in the foundation of America & believe they must restore the nation to the constitutional ideals which the country has deviated from
- Liberals: Believe in the foundation of America & believe that it was undermined by an external (and now internal) power.
- Left-Populists: Believe that America there is something structurally wrong with America, which has sabotaged the American people from living good lives.
Notice how conservatives have essentially embraced Right-Populist tendencies, whereas liberals and left-populists continue to bicker amongst each other. Left-Populists would lead the charge against Trump in the 2018 midterms, as many progressive, self proclaimed “Democratic Socialists” would follow off the momentum of Bernie Sanders and inspire more people to demand a better life for them and their families. 2020, on the other hand, was captured by Liberals who sought to suppress the left-populist movement by uniting with moderate Republicans to ensure a Trump defeat. This was reflected in the Super Tuesday primary result, which saw all moderate Democratic candidates drop out & then rally behind Joe Biden to defeat Bernie Sanders, whose votes had been split by Elizabeth Warren. Morale was low within the progressive camp, and many had begun to become disillusioned by the Democratic Party. And then the pandemic hit 2 weeks later, which began the new crisis which our people must face up against after just recovering from the 2008 recession only 12 years earlier.
The mass death of over 500k people [May 2021 figure, now it is 800k], high unemployment, low job prospects, lack of economic help from the government, and so on had reminded the American people of the same feelings of disposability, anxiety, & hopelessness which the 2008 recession had instilled within us. As we struggled, we once again saw massive bailouts for corporations, such as the airline industry. The social agents of change (the people) had now begun to realize why nothing had changed in 12 years regarding the government’s care for us. This was bolstered by the May Uprising that was in response to the brutal killing of George Floyd, which had reignited the black liberation movement in the United States off the work of not merely the #BlackLivesMatter movement founded in 2013, but the radical politics of the 1960s.
There was a clear shift in response to this crisis as opposed to the last one, as many began to recognize the intricacies of capitalism, white supremacy, and America’s founding. A portion of the American Left had finally begun to formalize itself under theoretical frameworks of understanding the world, rather than the feelings of injustice which often tried to moralize the calls for socialism which we had witnessed for most of the 2010s. The American left had now begun to reconnect with the principles of scientific socialism, the contradictions within our economy & society, and how the people must enact change against those in power.
The neoliberal world order now again seeks to repair itself under the Biden administration, as it did under Obama. However, the global situation has demonstrably changed. China rises and poses a direct threat to American hegemony; Latin America rises & protests against neoliberalism and American interventionism; Africa rises against neocolonialism, AFRICOM, & French + American influence; Europe descends into fascism as the EU & NATO become more fragile; the neoliberal world order is crumbling as American Empire has begun to unravel and lose its grip on the world.
As Gramsci states: The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. The times of monsters are now as the Biden administration seems positioned to be the last neoliberal administration which the USA has. He provides resistance against the new world being born, but he cannot stop the old world from dying. These last 13 years have led us up to this position, where we must choose either Fascism or Socialism.
The Left must organize itself against the increasing fascist threat of the GOP & spineless complicity of the Democrats. The Right has ramped up its culture war, where our politics have devolved into buzzwords; all people seem to do is scream about “cancel culture, wokeness, critical race theory, transgenderism, gender ideology” and so on. Quarantine has plunged us into fragile mental states & has left 53% of the republican electorate [as of May 2021] to believe Trump actually won. We are a scared people who feel betrayed once more by our government. We are increasingly susceptible to conspiracies as many descend deeper into QAnon, Covid lab origin theories, anti-vaxx narratives, and so on. We seek to escape the horrors which our present reality presents us and therefore become distracted from class struggle via culture war discourse.
2024 will be when the new world is born. It is now up to us via class struggle to ensure it matures into socialism rather than fascism. This pamphlet allows us to understand how we got here; now we must use it to understand how we navigate these next few years.
We must create a broad-leftism by ditching neoliberal identity politics, reconnect with class struggle via the labor movement, and fight against the right wing’s monopoly on the American identity. Through militant labor, farmer, tenant, and student organizing, socialists must demonstrate the futility of the electoral system between the neofascist Republicans (who only want to make people feel better about their cultural beliefs) and the spineless Democrats (who cloak their allegiance to corporations and capital with social liberalism). We must tap back into the politics of seizure: seizure of factories, land, apartments, warehouses. For, it is the people who have the right to own these institutions. We must no longer allow respectability politics to invest in electoral parties which have done nothing but unite behind a greedy military-industrial complex and an economic system for the rich. Popular power is the only way to combat this, where people intervene to take matters into their own hands. If Americans hate politics so much, then it is time to exist outside the traditional realm of bourgeois politics through militant laboral, tenant, farmer, and student organizing to reclaim our nation from imperialist oligarchs.
We must switch the script on both the liberals and conservatives (right-populists); they believe that America’s tradition is our future. However, we must reveal to Americans that we are capable of carving our own future; one where our children are safe & we are not slaves to the ruling class that makes us fight over the crumbs of the bread they’ve eaten but we baked. We must show Americans that this empire must fall down so we can recreate a new plurinational America that reflects us all while also creating a more peaceful world order. We must convince Americans that tradition shall only repeat the pain which we have experienced not simply these 13 years, but nearly 300. We must ensure that there is no need to be afraid of the chaotic world that surrounds us; there is no need to engage in reactionary politics; scientific socialism reminds us of our revolutionary power & destiny against this chaos.
This must be our primary mission in the 2020s, which shall only get more chaotic as the world (and its geopolitics) becomes more tense, climate change ramps up, imperial multilateral organizations falter, and internal contradictions within nations heighten.
Caracol Future 