Democrats in Power

‘Woke’ Liberalism in the Service of Imperialism

23 February 2021


Audio of a talk based on this article at an online meeting on 20 February 2021:


In June 2019, Joe Biden addressed a gathering of wealthy donors at the swank Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan. Seeking the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, Biden assured his rich patrons that, were he to defeat Donald Trump in November 2020, “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change” (salon.com, 19 June 2019).

In a country marked by extremes of poverty and wealth, in which tens of millions of people live paycheck to paycheck and 45,000 people die each year because they have no health insurance, it might seem odd that a politician hoping to be elected president would promise in advance not to improve the lives of the population. Were the United States a real democracy, it would indeed be incomprehensible, but America is ruled by a capitalist oligarchy that completely controls the levers of state power, as well as the mainstream news media that theoretically holds politicians accountable. Biden sought the support of American oligarchs by assuring them that their coffers would continue to overflow, while millions of working people endure often fatal poverty in the richest country in history. The only thing unusual about it was that he felt the need to make the assurance at all, because there was never any doubt about where his loyalties lay.

Democrats, like Republicans, have faithfully administered American capitalism for generations, including over the last 40 years of stagnating working-class living standards and the funneling of wealth to the top 0.1 percent of the population. Although there are minor differences between the two parties (in recent years largely centering on social issues), the Republicans and the Democrats articulate and pursue the needs of big capital with equal zeal. In the post-WWII interlude of rising real wages, which was materially conditioned by the destruction wrought in the war and by the growing strength of organized labor, even Republicans embraced higher income taxes and social welfare programs. Declining labor militancy and profit rates in the 1970s initiated a shift in both parties toward austerity and shoring up capitalist bottom lines by extracting more wealth from the working class and emboldening the financial parasites on Wall Street. The figures of Ronald Reagan for the Republicans and Bill Clinton for the Democrats represented a closer and more self-conscious alignment of political ideology with the oligarchy’s demands for neoliberalism.

It is an indication of the almost complete disregard of the political establishment for the working-class majority that Congress voted trillions of dollars to prop up the corporations while only grudgingly cutting a pathetic one-time check for $600 to regular people suffering from the Covid recession—or that Biden’s promise to provide an additional $2,000 was immediately up for negotiation and whittling down. The bipartisan consensus of servility to the oligarchs leaves little of substance for the two wings of the Wall Street party to say to the electorate, and so those two wings have developed their own competing discourses that are united in their emptiness. Republicans have resorted to spreading unhinged conspiracy theories of the sort that used to draw concern for their promoters’ mental well-being, while insufferably smug Democrats employ the jargon of “woke” liberalism to signal to each other how distasteful they find the racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia that are ultimately products of the system they serve. Both discourses, which commit their purveyors to no material program for any oppressed community, are wholly compatible with brutal capitalist exploitation and imperialist plunder.

‘Uncle Joe’: Racist Corporate Warmonger

As a senior member of the US Senate in the 1990s and 2000s, Biden played a key role for the Democrats in waging class warfare against working people (despite his image as a sort of goofy “everyman” straight-talker). Author of the notorious Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (aka the “Crime Bill”), Biden was a leading advocate of “tough-on-crime” policies that disproportionately affected black and Latino Americans. He regularly employed racist tropes (e.g., “predators” who were “born out of wedlock”) to support those policies, and echoed rightwing fantasies of black “welfare queens” to push massive reductions in government assistance to the poor. Indeed, Biden and 24 other Senate Democrats voted for the Republicans’ “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,” which Democratic President Bill Clinton signed into law in August 1996. Clinton had previously campaigned to “end welfare as we know it,” and the bipartisan project of “welfare reform” drastically reduced the percentage of poverty-stricken Americans who were able to access relief (see “Whither America?,” 1917 No.43).

In 2008, Barack Obama tapped Biden as his running mate in part because he was seen as a bridge to the white working class. Perhaps the main factor, however, was that having Biden as vice president offered reassurances to the military-industrial complex that Obama’s denunciation of the “dumb war” in Iraq was only hot air and would in no way deter him from pursuing America’s imperialist interests in the Middle East and beyond. In announcing its choice, the Obama campaign declared: “Joe Biden brings extensive foreign policy experience, an impressive record of collaborating across party lines, and a direct approach to getting the job done.” Biden’s “record of collaborating across party lines” included voting (along with all but one Senate Democrat) for the USA Patriot Act, which massively curtailed civil liberties in support of the “war on terror.” And his “record of collaborating across party lines” also included endorsement of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—criminal imperialist ventures that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in the pursuit of natural resources and spheres of influence for American corporations.

The Obama/Biden administration faithfully continued with cold-blooded murder and regime-change military campaigns. Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill summarizes:

“Obama and Biden dramatically expanded U.S. drone strikes, including systematic strikes in new countries. They initiated a secret bombing campaign in Yemen in late 2009 that eventually metastasized into the genocidal Saudi-led scorched-earth war that continues to this day. They facilitated regime change in Libya, surged troops in Afghanistan, and imposed or tightened deadly economic sanctions in a variety of nations. The Obama-Biden administration developed an almost clinical process for compiling kill lists and then sentencing people to death through a Frankenstein extralegal system of unofficial judges, juries, and executioners. Among their kills were several U.S. citizens, including a teenager who was never accused of any crime. Obama openly rejected calls to hold CIA torturers accountable and failed to close Guantánamo.”
The Intercept, 4 December 2020

In 2014, US-backed forces, including neo-Nazis, overthrew the Moscow-friendly government in Ukraine. Vice President Biden not only provided advice to Ukraine’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, he pressured him to fire the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, in exchange for a $1 billion loan guarantee (New York Post, 20 May 2020). Aside from the obvious hypocrisy of the Democrats, who have torn their shirts over “foreign interference” by Russia, it may be that Biden’s desire to remove Shokin was due to the latter’s threat to prosecute Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma, which paid Biden’s son Hunter “as much as $50,000 per month” (New York Post, 23 September 2020). As Hunter Biden’s corruption has become widely known and is now under investigation, Democratic Party operatives, their media stenographers and Silicon Valley social media censors have opted to baselessly assert that the Burisma revelations were part of a “Russian disinformation campaign” (RealClearPolitics, 14 December 2020).

Perhaps the most telling story of Joe Biden’s connection with Ukraine was his attempt to persuade Obama—as he had done with Bill Clinton in the Balkans a generation earlier—to adopt an aggressive military stance that could have led to World War III. According to the New York Times (10 November 2019):

“When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2014, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. pressed President Barack Obama to take decisive action, and fast, to make Moscow ‘pay in blood and money’ for its aggression. The president, a Biden aide recalled, was having none of it.
“Mr. Biden worked Mr. Obama during their weekly private lunches, imploring him to increase lethal aid, backing a push to ship FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Kiev.”

It is hardly surprising that Biden’s bid to become president last year was endorsed by leading Republican neocon war hawks like Bill Kristol and former Bush speechwriter David “Axis of Evil” Frum, both of whom have been comfortably integrated into the “polite conversation” of mainstream liberal news media.

From Trump to Biden: Imperialist Continuity

Why did most of the political establishment come together behind Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November 2020? After all, Trump is not only a member of the ruling class, his tenure as president included massive tax cuts to the wealthy and a bailout of trillions of dollars to Wall Street hedge funds and other corporate parasites. The answer has to do with Trump’s strategy that won him the presidency in 2016 through a combination of (a) a pseudo-populist appeal to a Middle American working class ground down by deindustrialization and (b) a resurrection of a pre-neocon “nationalist” conservatism that eschews “regime change” wars and unnecessarily provoking Russia. If the first component involved Trump whipping up racist fear of migrants and promoting protectionism (in particular against China), the second had him exposing the disastrous policies of the preceding decade and a half under Bush and Obama (and of course his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton). In even rhetorically challenging the sacred cows of the Washington consensus and the military side of administering the US empire, Trump all but ensured that the security state ghouls would undermine his presidency at every step. Trump’s obsession with celebrity, his treatment of women, bigotry and crude nouveau riche materialism were not what offended the oligarchy.

Trump, of course, was never ideologically committed to anything. His inclination toward political self-preservation and his tendency to dispense with window dressing continued to put him at odds not only with the Democrats but with many Republican leaders. Yet in the end, Trump basically got with the program. He did not “drain the swamp” but appointed it to his cabinet. He even hired notorious uber-hawk John Bolton as his national security advisor. Trump, who had campaigned against Clinton’s catastrophic plan to impose a “no-fly” zone in Syria (and thus risk a war with Russia), eventually bowed to pressure and ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles to be fired at Syria in 2017—a move that prompted CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to enthuse that “Donald Trump became president of the United States” with the assault and MSNBC News anchor and professional liar Brian Williams to swoon over the “beauty of our weapons.” Last year, Trump ordered drone strikes that killed top Iranian military commander Qassim Suleimani and the deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad. At the time, we wrote:

“These assassinations follow a series of escalating U.S. provocations against Iran: Washington’s withdrawal from the JCPOA agreement (aka Iran deal) in 2018, reimposition of punishing economic sanctions aimed at isolating the natural gas and oil-rich country, deployment of nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to an American airbase in Qatar in May 2019, U.S. airstrikes targeting Shia militias in Iraq right before the drone strikes. The U.S. now promises to deploy 3,500 more troops to the Middle East, adding to the already 14,000 sent there since May.
“Motivations for President Donald Trump’s authorization of the attack lie partly in the domestic arena, as he maneuvers for re-election later this year and seeks to consolidate a position of strength in the face of impotent attempts by the Democrats to impeach him. But U.S. involvement in the Middle East has long been a matter of strategic and economic interests largely centered on access to oilfields and pipelines.”
—“Defend Iran! Imperialists Out!1917 No.42

Trump’s imperialist attacks were never going to be enough, because he was already seen as unreliable by the deep state, which along with its Democratic party butlers and corporate media servants spent much of his presidency breathlessly promoting the “Russiagate” fantasy that Trump was actually a “Manchurian candidate” whose subservience to Vladimir Putin and/or Russian intelligence may have stretched back to the 1980s. The inevitable collapse of the labyrinthine and shifting conspiracy theory somehow did not tank the Democrats’ chances of victory in 2020.

Apparently unable to process his defeat in the presidential election, Trump ended his days in office crying about non-existent voter fraud (while encouraging state officials to “find” him the votes he needed to win) and egging on the right-wing mob that stormed the Capitol in January (an act that Democrats claimed was the equivalent of organizing a coup attempt). One of his final acts as president was to signal a reduction in the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Wall Street Journal (26 January 2021) noted: “Mr. Trump, who had railed against what he called ‘endless foreign wars,’ drew American forces down in Iraq and Afghanistan to 2,500 personnel in each country this month, in an effort to bring the longstanding military engagements to a close.”

Biden has hinted that he will not withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, as stipulated in the agreement Trump signed last year with the Taliban. The new president’s threat to keep and perhaps increase the number of American forces in the country “for counter terrorism” purposes is simply the latest Orwellian twist in a two-decade long act of terrorism that is the occupation. Earlier this month Biden announced he was “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen including relevant arms sales,” though he reiterated his support for Saudi Arabia (possibly by continuing to supply the country with weapons for “defensive” operations) (CNBC, 4 February 2021). Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan was quick to add that the president’s withdrawal of support for “offensive operations” in the region “does not extend to actions against AQAP [al-Qaeda], which are actions we undertake in service of protecting the homeland and protecting American interests in the region and allies and partners.” Washington has no intention of neglecting “American interests” in the Middle East and will pursue its objectives regardless of the cost in civilian lives.

One area of supposed sharp disagreement between Trump and Biden was the latter’s promise to return the US to the “Iran nuclear deal” that the former abandoned. Earlier this month, however, Biden’s secretary of state trotted out the well-worn claim that Teheran was “weeks” away from building a nuclear weapon. During his Senate confirmation, he noted that “We are a long way” from re-entering the JCPOA agreement due to uncertainty over whether or not Iran was “actually making good if they say they are coming back into compliance” (Business Insider, 8 February 2021). The range of debate within American imperialist politics is limited to how the US—which possesses by far the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and is the only country ever to use atomic weapons—can stop Iran from developing enough fissile material to make a single nuclear bomb.

In his first major foreign policy speech as president (4 February 2021), Biden condemned “Russia’s aggressive actions” and threatened that he “will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia and defend our vital interests and our people.” He also absurdly claimed that America’s “prosperity, security, and democratic values” are threatened by China: “We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.” Listening to a US president, Biden in particular, denouncing the “aggression” and threat to “democratic values” of Russia and China is to witness the height of hypocrisy.

Despite a British judge’s ruling last month that extraditing Julian Assange of WikiLeaks to the US “would be oppressive” given the emotional and mental state to which his imprisonment has reduced him, the Biden administration continues to seek his extradition to be prosecuted under the draconian Espionage Act. Assange’s “crime” was to publish true information about American war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq (see “Free Assange Now!,” 1917 No.43). Presumably Biden wants to be able to commit more such war crimes without the prospect of the media exposing them. When it comes to the mainstream corporate news media, he need not fear.

A ‘Diverse’ Den of Thieves

In the first days of the Biden presidency (21 January 2021), New York Times “gender reporter” Alisha Haridasani Gupta wrote:

“President Biden’s proposed cabinet would be the most diverse in U.S. history, comprising more women and people of color than any cabinet before it—which, in many ways, fulfills Mr. Biden’s campaign promise to select a team that ‘looks like America’ and modernizes the predominantly male, white institution.…
“If the Senate confirms Mr. Biden’s picks, more than half of his 25-member cabinet will be nonwhite and 48 percent will be female, according to an analysis by the nonprofit group Inclusive America, which tracks diversity in government.”

Gupta noted that Biden had also given high-profile positions to foreign-born, gay and trans politicians, but warned that it is not enough simply to include “diverse candidates” in the cabinet—it is necessary to give them “a true voice and an opportunity to shape policies.” As the Biden administration was revealed, it should have been obvious to anyone not paid to cover it up that it would be a rogues’ gallery of cynical careerists, corporate tools and imperialist maniacs. The danger posed to oppressed and working people in the US and around the world has nothing to do with the gender, sexual orientation or racial/ethnic background of any of the people in the Biden administration—it is in the certainty that they will “shape policy” to serve the interests of America’s imperial ruling class.

Vice President Kamala Harris attempted to sell herself to Democratic primary voters last year as a “progressive prosecutor”—she was district attorney for San Francisco from 2004 to 2011 and attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017. She bragged about threatening poor parents of truant children with jail time and favored lengthy prison sentences for minor offenses. Harris’s bid for the presidential nomination tanked after competitor Tulsi Gabbard eviscerated her in a televised debate. Gabbard noted that Harris “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana”:

“She blocked evidence—she blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California.”
—CNN, 1 August 2019

Harris’s reply to Gabbard consisted of arrogantly dismissing her as not a “top-tier candidate” and accusing her of being an “apologist” for Syria's Bashar al-Assad. Indeed, Harris sits comfortably within the Democratic imperial establishment, with hawkish denunciations of Russia and China. As a US Senator, her first foreign policy vote was to criticize the United Nations for condemning illegal Israeli settlements. At the 2017 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference, Harris intoned: “I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. And we can never let anyone drive a wedge between us.” Washington pumps over $3 billion a year in aid for its ally Israel, which in turn uses the money to buy weapons from US contractors to maintain its qualitatively superior military position relative to the horribly oppressed Palestinian population.

Biden is of course committed to preserving the long-standing alliance with apartheid Israel. When Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it was widely understood as a provocation to the Palestinians, whose leadership regard (illegally-occupied) East Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state. Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed that the US will keep its embassy in Jerusalem and declared: “Our commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct” (Israel National News, 28 January 2021).

Blinken previously served in the Obama administration, where he pushed for the use of military might and even occasionally outflanked Biden in his advocacy of violence:

“In his roles in the NSC under Obama and as deputy secretary of state, Blinken advocated for more robust U.S. involvement in the Syria conflict, and notably broke with his boss, Biden, to support the armed intervention in Libya. He was also a close aide to Biden when the then-senator supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He continues to believe that diplomacy needs to be ‘supplemented by deterrence’ and ‘force can be a necessary adjunct to effective diplomacy. In Syria, we rightly sought to avoid another Iraq by not doing too much, but we made the opposite error of doing too little.’”
—Politico, 23 November 2020

Blinken is particularly hawkish in relation to China, and he has indicated that Biden will continue the policies pursued by the previous administration. When Trump provoked China by sending aircraft carriers to the South China Sea last July, we noted:

“Washington deployed the aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Ronald Reagan, along with dozens of aircraft, cruisers, destroyers and a B-52 bomber, to conduct naval exercises under the pretext of ensuring ‘freedom of navigation,’ i.e., blocking China’s access to raw materials and energy sources from Africa and the Middle East. This was quickly followed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s hypocritical insistence that Chinese activity and territorial claims, such as military installations on islets throughout the South China Sea, were ‘illegal’ under ‘international laws’ to which the US itself does not adhere.
“Donald Trump’s hardline approach, with support from the Democrats, is a direct continuation of the Obama administration’s ‘Pivot to Asia,’ which involved then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reframing previously low-level territorial disputes in the region into matters of US ‘national interest.’ Washington’s aim then, much like today, was to exacerbate existing tensions and prevent China from taking a leadership role in the area, while supporting US allies by protecting their access to resources.”
—“Provoking China,” 1917 No.43

It is hardly surprising that Blinken “rejected Beijing’s maritime claims in the South China Sea” (Newsweek, 29 January 2021) just as Biden ordered the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt to the area. It’s simply business-as-usual as Washington continues to threaten the Chinese deformed workers’ state.

Under Biden, there is also a fundamental continuity in Washington’s campaign to strangle Venezuela and replace President Nicolas Maduro with US puppet Juan Guaido, whom even the European Union acknowledges no longer has any legitimate claim to the presidency. Blinken confirmed support for Guaido (Reuters, 19 January 2021) and said that Biden would seek to “more effectively target” sanctions on Venezuela, which has suffered enormous hardship as a result of the sanctions already in place.

Blinken heads a State Department that will include Victoria Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Nuland was one of the key Obama/Biden administration officials who facilitated the Ukraine loan guarantee in 2014. She is infamous for her “Fuck the EU” leaked phone conversation with the US ambassador to Ukraine, which revealed her picking the country’s new government. Her push for an even more bellicose US position in Ukraine won her the praises of late Republican Senator John McCain. Also working in Blinken’s State Department will be Wendy Sherman, the first woman to serve as Deputy Secretary of State. According to Politico (5 January 2021): “Nuland and Sherman, who entered academia and the think tank world after leaving the Obama administration, have been outspoken critics of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy—particularly his appeasement of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” By “appeasement” of Russia, mainstream news media means insufficient eagerness to start a war with a nuclear-armed rival.

Lloyd Austin, the new Secretary of “Defense” (i.e., the Minister of War), recently sat on the board of directors of military contractor Raytheon. Over the last four years, Austin accumulated half a million dollars in Raytheon stock and received a total of $1.4 million in compensation from the company and United Technologies (which merged with Raytheon). Austin, a retired US Army general, previously “distinguished” himself during the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and later went on to head US Central Command and oversee “the US’s role in pushing Islamic State militants out of Syria and Iraq” (dw.com, 8 December 2020). The Pentagon is supposed to be headed by a civilian who has not served in the military during the previous seven years, so Austin required a waiver from Congress, just as James Mattis did before him. As the first black defense secretary, Austin’s appointment was greeted with gushing enthusiasm by empty-headed liberals, including PBS NewsHour “reporter” Nick Schifrin, who noted both that Austin broke the “brass ceiling” in the Pentagon and that the US military—which has murdered millions of brown and black people since the end of WWII—“is proud of its past efforts to fight racism” (22 January 2021).

For head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Biden picked Alejandro Mayorkas, who previously served as Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) before running the DHS under Obama. Mayorkas is portrayed in the media as a moderate or even progressive on immigration issues, perhaps because he himself is an immigrant (his family fled the Cuban Revolution) or perhaps because of his association with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative. In fact, Mayorkas and the Obama administration “deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century” combined (ABC News, 29 August 2016).

During his confirmation hearings:

“Mayorkas faced questions from some Republican senators who expressed concerns over a 2015 DHS inspector general’s report that found Mayorkas pushed for the approval of applications for a program for wealthy immigrant investors on the behalf of well-connected Democrats when he served as director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).”
—CBS News, 19 January 2021

Biden’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, is the first woman to fill that role. She is also a war criminal. According to Scahill:

“[Haines] was a key player in developing the Obama administration’s global assassination program. She was a prominent defender of Gina Haspel, a central player in the CIA’s kidnap and torture program, and supported her nomination by Trump to serve as CIA director. Haines was reportedly so central to the drone assassination program that she would at times be awoken in the middle of the night to help decide whether to kill someone on the other side of the world with a Reaper or Predator drone.”
The Intercept, 4 December 2020

Another “glass ceiling” shattered by the Biden administration came with the appointment of Janet Yellen as the first female Secretary of the Treasury (with much fuss on social media over the fact that it was Harris, the first female vice president, who did the swearing-in). Yellen, who previously served as Federal Reserve Chair, took over $7 million in “speaking fees” in 2019 and 2020 from the Wall Street financial institutions she is supposed to oversee. When Politico reported on these legal bribes, Democratic party officials condemned the authors of the report as “misogynists.” One of Yellen’s patrons was the hedge fund Citadel, which paid her $810,000 “for two speeches and a series of ‘webinars’.” During the GameStop affair in January, Citadel propped up Melvin Capital and used its leverage over the Robinhood app to stop Redditers from buying (but not selling) GameStop stock. When a reporter asked Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki whether Yellen should recuse herself in advising the president on the matter due to the obvious conflict of interest, Psaki simply responded that “the Treasury Secretary is a world-renowned expert on the economy” and “It should not be a surprise to anyone that she was paid to give her expert advice before she came into office” (RealClearPolitics, 28 January 2021).

Biden nominated long-time Hillary Clinton loyalist and Democratic party hack Neera Tanden to head the powerful Office of Management and Budget (OMB). While Tanden was leading the neoliberal Center for American Progress (CAP) think tank, it took millions of dollars in corporate money from Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires looking to buy support in a future Democratic administration. Tanden is well-known for her prolific and sometimes venomous social media attacks on Bernie Sanders and other progressive opponents (as well as Republicans)—and she even once punched a journalist, Faiz Shakir, who worked for the CAP-linked ThinkProgress website, after he asked Hillary Clinton about her support for the Iraq War. During her confirmation hearings, Tanden—who would be the first woman of color to be OMB director—apologized for her past comments, but then suggested to NBC News that she has been unfairly targeted because she is Asian American:

“Tanden says she has frequently been described as ‘aggressive,’ a term that she said she feels assigned to her because of the current racial environment. The collision of racial and gender stereotypes have, in part, likely skewed the image some have of her conduct in professional environments, she said.…
“‘People’s perceptions of leadership and who leaders are has not been, to this moment, an Asian American woman. And that means that I have to do more work than maybe others have had to communicate my leadership and what I bring to the table,’ Tanden explained.”
—NBC News, 10 February 2021

What Tanden “brings to the table” offers nothing to the people of color whose oppression she hides behind—she is a corporate toady who has openly advocated the imperialist plunder of Africa. In 2011, Tanden sent an email to Shakir and others in which she supported stealing Libya’s oil:

“We have a giant deficit. They have a lot of oil. Most Americans would choose not to engage in the world because of that deficit. If we want to continue to engage in the world, gestures like having oil rich countries partially pay us back doesn’t seem crazy to me.”
—The Grayzone, 30 November 2020

The crass display that Biden has made of his appointment of women, LGBTQ people and people of color to high-profile positions is intended to bolster his new-found “progressive” liberal image. It is empty virtue-signalling—identity politics in the service of imperialism and corporate oligarchy. The same can be said of the raft of “executive orders” Biden signed upon taking office, including lifting the ban on transgendered people serving in the military, formally recognizing the discrimination suffered by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and pledging to improve relations with Indigenous peoples by engaging in “regular, robust, and meaningful consultation with Tribal governments.”

Biden has taken on former Obama national security advisor Susan Rice as his Director of the United States Domestic Policy Council. It is apparently Rice’s job to provide a “social justice” spin to the president’s domestic policy:

“‘Every agency will place equity at the core of their public engagement, their policy design and delivery,’ Rice said, ‘to ensure that government resources are reaching Americans of color in all marginalized communities-rural, urban, disabled, LGBTQ+, religious minorities and so many others.’”
Guardian, 26 January 2021

The establishment news media, liberal intelligentsia and “progressive” social media personalities are there to serve as cheerleaders for this fraudulent enterprise. Washington Post columnist Joe Davidson, for instance, effused that “Biden has quickly transformed the White House from one that coddled and comforted white supremacists under Donald Trump into an engine targeting systemic racism,” and glowed that “Susan Rice can be funny but is always focused” (Washington Post, 29 January 2021). Speeches on YouTube showcase some of Rice’s “funnier” comments such as “We are doing a noble thing in Iraq by bringing freedom” and “We remain deeply committed to Israel’s qualitative military edge.”

‘Democrat Socialists’: Biden’s Left Flank

Since the financial crash of 2008 and the ensuing “long depression” into which American and global capitalism have sunk—a crisis exacerbated but not caused by the Covid-19 disaster—there have been growing tensions within both main US political parties. Trump helped to accelerate the descent of a sizable chunk of the Republican party into tinfoil hat conspiracy theories and flirtation with the fascist right, as establishment leaders tried to figure out how best to ride the dragon. The Democratic party has proved more stable, but only because the growth of its supposedly “anti-establishment” wing shows no signs of being able—or even willing—to take over key positions and fight for its paper program.

The main political players on the Democratic left are, of course, Senator Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC) and other members of the so-called “Squad” in Congress (Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and now Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush). All are supported by the Justice Democrats, a political action committee founded by popular YouTube commentators Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks and Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk, as well as former members of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. There is a broader layer of “progressive” politicians at different levels of government who are associated in some way with the Justice Democrats, including US Representatives Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal. While there are shades of difference among them, their nominal program is fairly well expressed in the platform of the Justice Democrats (justicedemocrats.com). They support Medicare-for-All, a Green New Deal, higher taxes on the wealthy, canceling student loan debt—nothing that would be considered radical in most other advanced capitalist countries. Some, though not all, of these progressive Democrats call themselves “socialists,” including perhaps most famously Sanders and AOC.

They are assisted in this subterfuge by the support of leading members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which over the past few years has seen its membership balloon to a reported 85,000 people. The DSA has roots in the fusion of the Independent Socialist League of ex-Trotskyist renegade Max Shachtman and Michael Harrington with the Socialist Party of America in the late 1950s. Harrington, who founded the DSA and led it until his death in 1989, was a notorious anti-communist who advocated working within the Democratic party and voting for its supposedly progressive candidates. The DSA has supported many Democrats whether they were also DSA members or not but, likely due to the rapid influx of new members, the organization was divided over whether or not to vote for Biden in the presidential election.

While not formally affiliated with the DSA, the magazine Jacobin basically occupies the same “democratic socialist” space (albeit with an occasional Marxoid gloss). Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara, a former vice chair of the DSA, is critical but essentially supportive of the group. David Sirota, editor of Jacobin, is a long-time liberal operative who once worked for AIPAC and later for Bernie Sanders. The magazine’s weekly YouTube show is hosted by Young Turks co-host and executive producer Ana Kasparian, who was “delighted” to give a softball interview to “the first female Secretary of State in the US” (and genocidal psychopath) Madeleine Albright at the NATO-linked Munich Security Conference in 2019. Naturally, this layer of the DSA/Jacobin milieu advocated a vote to Biden in November. In a New York Times (28 May 2020) op-ed, Sunkara wrote:

“I share the belief that having Joe Biden in the White House would be far less damaging to most workers than another four years of Donald Trump. Mr. Biden is at odds with the progressive, labor-oriented wing of his party, but every poor and working person in America, along with every socialist, would be better off butting heads with a White House filled with centrist Democrats than one filled with Trump appointees.”

At bottom, these “socialists” provide a leftwing rationale for keeping the Democratic party in power. More than that, they refuse even to pursue the agenda they claim to care deeply about. Perhaps the best known DSA members are AOC and Rashida Tlaib, who loyally voted to return “mama bear” Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House of Representatives. When left-leaning YouTube host Jimmy Dore initiated the #ForceTheVote campaign to push “progressive” Democrats to demand a floor vote on Medicare-for-All as a condition for backing Pelosi, he was roundly denounced as beyond-the-pale by the likes of Kasparian and as a “misogynist” by some DSA leaders.

AOC provides a good case study of the role of the “socialist” Democrats. When asked whether she viewed Juan Guaido or Nicolas Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela, she replied: “I defer to [the Democratic party] caucus leadership on how we navigate this,” meaning that she backed imperialist puppet Guaido. While supporting US imperialist violence abroad, AOC advocates Silicon Valley tech billionaires removing objectionable posts and even banning platforms like Parler. Following the #ForceTheVote campaign that exposed her as a Democratic party loyalist who places her own career above fighting for the reforms she claims to support, AOC took to Twitter to complain that “it was hard during this to be targeted+marred as some sellout-enemy of the people over a late tactical disagreement over 1 floor vote. Also a bummer to see figures excuse comments like ‘f- her and f- anyone who protects her.’ That’s not tone,that’s violence."

Break with the Democrats—Build a Revolutionary Workers’ Party!

Fighting for the interests of the oppressed in the US and abroad means fighting to uproot the capitalist system that benefits from that oppression and breeds hatred of people based on gender, race and other factors. There is no path to a socialist future that runs through the Democratic party—a network of corporate shills and imperialist technocrats united in their commitment to serving the needs of the ruling class. Any self-described socialist who is hesitating on this point needs to seriously reevaluate their strategic framework or stop pretending to oppose capitalism.

The alternative to the Democrats and Republicans, however, cannot be some sort of progressive “populist” organization. It must be built, through everyday struggles, on the firm foundation of working-class independence from all wings of the capitalists. At a basic level, this means the struggle for a new party must take place within the working class. This includes its main existing institutions, the trade unions, which are controlled by a labor bureaucracy that is tied by a thousand threads to the Democratic party and must be fought from within organized labor.

Beyond organizational independence from the capitalists, a workers’ party worthy of the name must be built around a political program that is at once hostile to capitalism and imperialism and committed to advancing the struggle for working-class power and a workers’ government. A revolutionary workers’ party would advocate labor strikes to stop imperialist aggression abroad and make material gains for ordinary people. It would champion the rights of the oppressed everywhere and declare its intention to link arms with workers around the world to rid the planet of a system that has brought humanity to the brink of destruction.

That is our perspective in the International Bolshevik Tendency. We are a small revolutionary socialist organization that stands in the tradition of Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders of the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. While we work with others on a number of fronts, our central strategic goal in this period is to build support for the Marxist program and help initiate a reorganization on the left around that program.


Related articles:
Whither America?” (1917 No.43)
Free Assange Now!” (1917 No.43)
‘Trial by Combat’ at the Capitol (1917 No.43)
Sanders: ‘Socialist’ Shill for Democrats (1917 No.39)