Re: <nettime> why is it so quiet (in the US)

Interestingly, the best articles on this situation came from one researcher of stalinism, Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic and one historian of the holocaust, Timothy Snyder in the Boston Globe. While the first reminded us that Trump's political career began with spreading the "birther myth" to render Obama's presidency illegitimate, the latter compared the current strategy to the "stabbed-in-the-back"-myth after WWI in Germany and how that poisoned German democracy for the years to come. Both researchers are well-read in Hannah Arendt's theories of "totalitarianism". In fact, after the US elections Arendt's book was sold out for months on Amazon. It is actually the parallel to Stalin that is most illuminating: If you wanted to know what Stalin was up to next, just check what he accused the opposition of: It was less an accusation but an announcement. Similarly many commentators understood his accusation of voter fraud in 2016 when he declared that Hillary Clinton did not win the popular vote with 3 million votes, but only collected "illegal votes". Now in 2020 he takes this to the next level.

While the Republican Party has a long tradition in voter suppression, they could now also use an old trick to rig the election. There has been an example: the elections of 1824 using the 12th amendment. For people who read German, this is the historical background: https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/corrupt-bargain-die-us-praesidentschaftswahlen-1824-und-2020/?no_cache=1

The twitter-posts used in this article show that this scenario is already present in the discourse of the Trump base. The reference to the 12th amendment is like a code-word for a right-wing version of cancel-culture: a Trump fan answers "Lation4Biden" with this reference: "Your Vote no longer matters."

For that reason it is premature to think that only because his legal strategy is failing, we are safe. It seems that the legal battle is only of a fund-raiser. More importantly it is a way to keep up the false claims about voter fraud. Trump needs to continue this confusion until the date when the electoral college is voted in mid-dec. Then he could either rig the vote of the electoral college. Or he could manage that the vote is passed on to the House of Representatives. In both cases he has real chances to stay in office.

In Germany there was a similar situation in February in the state of Thuringia. Although all parties agreed to not use the votes of the extreme right-wing AfD, the liberals did use them to make their candidate prime-minister. He did not last long, but it was a shock. It could happen that we will have a déjà-vu on the night of 8th to 9th 2016 after Dec. 13th, when the Electoral College got together. There would be no way to legally stop that. In this case only a "colour revolution" would help.

But what are the Democrats doing? Instead of getting ready, they marginalize those people in their party who have the ability for grass-roots-mobilization, in fact the same people who Joe Biden owes his victory. History is repeating: German democracy was attacked over and over again between 1919-1933. The workers beat back all attempts for a putch. And over and over again they were betrayed by their leaders. At the end, a "democratic putsch" is what got Hitler into power. He was "hired" by the conservatives who believed they could use him for their goals (just like Mitch McConnell and the Reps thought they could use - and control - Trump.) And then Hitler could use legal means to destroy democracy: the state-of-emergency act. We are very close to the abyss. Hopefully we will collectively get a hold of a floating barrel - just like the sailor in E. A. Poe's maelstrom. But I would not count on it.

Am Sa., 14. Nov. 2020 um 18:32 Uhr schrieb Eric Beck <[email protected]>:

It seems to me that the chance of a Trumpist coup is slim, as his support among the forces that might assist him doesn't seem to be there. But I try not to put myself in the position of thinking like those forces, so what do I know.

But that possibility isn't the only reason to be frightened of the US election results. Trump being ousted aside, it's clear from what transpired that the US electorate is a more conservative and more nationalist place than it was four years ago. More than two-thirds of Trump's voters were enthusiastic about him. The extremely high turnout that is supposed to lead to more left-leaning outcomes instead saw Trump accruing as much of the vote as Democrats did, and the Democrats lost seats in the House and failed to take control of the Senate, which they should have coasted to. In California, 65% of the population voted *for* Biden but almost the same number voted *against* protections for casualized workers and against reinstituting affirmative action. Those results deserve underscoring: in the midst of a deep recession, voters decided for regulations that would further immiserate precarious workers, and after a summer of uprisings against police violence and of liberal insistence that racism must be cured, people in US's (allegedly) most liberal state voted overwhelmingly against simple protections for racial minorities.

And so on. Reading the results nationwide yield similar conclusions. Even the minimum-wage ballot measures that passed could be read as a renewed economic nationalism rather than any sort of benefit for low-wage workers, especially the results in California.

I'm not convinced using election results to read the political present and future necessarily leads to accurate conclusions. Elections are blunt, and the mass revolt against police violence, among other movements, is still going on. But if you want to use the results, they point to some grim possibilities. And that's on top of Biden already openly stating that he will do nothing to change the US system of segmented and private health care in the middle of a pandemic, his insistence to not only do nothing to check police violence but to actually put more cops on the street, etc.

Shit's fucked up and bullshit, as the old saying goes.
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