The political system in the US is in a crisis. The bourgeois pundits are beside themselves at the political ascendency of Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders just walked away with a win in the state of Michigan where he was predicted to lose in the polls by double digits. So certain was the Sanders defeat that he himself was already off campaigning and didn't stick around to hear the results. In Trump the Republican Party has a front-runner that is being denounced by his own party for openly advocating all those things the US government is already doing. Sanders has been largely kept to the periphery of the media spotlight as the official “can’t possibly win” candidate, but has been doing unexpectedly well. The broader the array of candidates the more necessary it is to shepherd the electorate into voting for one of the two favored children of the bourgeoisie. The election reveals at once the political bankruptcy of the capitalist state, while it also shows deep levels of dissatisfaction with the state itself. Ultimately it is designed to pick the candidate that best reflects the aims and point of view of the ruling class.

Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist” has a considerable amount of popularity among workers and youth. His background is one of rising up through local politics from serving as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont to serving in the US Senate. In Vermont, the appearance of political independence has always had a beneficial effect on Sanders’ political career. It is this that buoys him across the country, in that he is nominally considered an “independent” political candidate. Of course he always politically caucused with the Democrats and he certainly isn’t independent of the bourgeoisie. What was an asset in the local politics of Vermont, the appearance of independence from the Democratic or Republic Parties, has become an asset to him nationwide.

Trump parlayed his family fortune into real estate with the bankruptcy and reorganization of New York in the 1970s. His main wealth is in the marketing of his own name. He was always a political chameleon, perfectly willing to espouse official political liberalism to the Democratic Party leadership in New York when it meant being in a better position to snatch up more real estate. To rise further and step into the political leadership of the grand old bourgeois republic he must make sure to open his mouth frequently and defecate as much backwards lunacy as possible. His views, while reactionary, are shared to a greater or lesser extent by much of the bourgeoisie. Trump’s popularity largely comes from the fact that the media has promoted him. While the New York Times calls him a fascist, it was organs like the New York Times that promoted the political environment of permanent war and reaction that put Trump on a trajectory towards the White House.

The Democratic Party is an improbable beast. It carries out a program of political reaction and imperialist violence while posturing as friends of the people. The Republican does its own populist posturing but with less of the cognitive dissonance inherent in the Democratic Party’s talk left but act right method. In 2011 in Wisconsin, over the Black Lives Matter movement, over the recent protests in Flint, Michigan over the toxic water and the government suppression of EPA findings, the Democratic Party asserts itself as savior by inserting itself as the default leadership, before any other organization might arise. The political struggles are occurring in rapid succession and it is getting harder for the Democrat machine to control things as they used to. This is where a formerly “independent”, now Democratic Party candidate, Bernie Sanders has his place.

The Democratic Party has lost a part of what was its former voting base. What has arisen in its place is not enough to rebuild their voting base. It gets harder still after the Obama years, remembering that Obama continued and built on everything that the Bush regime left behind. Since the onset of the economic crisis in the early 70s the Democratic Party, like the rest of the global bourgeoisie, has been out for blood. As the Democratic Party’s actions became increasingly and openly hostile to workers and the poor, the more the Democrats increased their adoption of identity politics. Indeed Obama represented an attempt to rebrand the American bourgeoisie, to make it more “diverse” in order it appear more legitimate as they launched a state drive to lower workers living standards that the class might be more exploitable, poorer and thus more competitive. The proletariat does not stop being a proletariat just because the big factories shut down or move away. It is the hardship of the unemployment in the reserve army of labor that makes proletariat exploitable once more.

Branding the cattle

While elements of the media speak in tones of horror about the popularity of Trump. His name itself is a media brand. Indeed the political environment of permanent war, permanent austerity and the every growing police state created him. His support is the product of the capitalist’s own incessant nationalistic propaganda, as much as it is the reflection of frustration and the current political order. Trump proudly proclaims the furtherance of the dominant state policies. Whatever the bourgeoisie is already doing, Trump stands up and proclaims that he will do it more. Sanders speaks of his aims at drawing as many people into the Democratic Party as possible and the Democratic Party machine prepares the way for Hillary Clinton to assimilate Sanders’ supporters into boosting her campaign into a Trump versus Clinton election. The bosses’ pundits inform us that to refuse to vote for Clinton would be the ultimate victory of Trumpean evil. We are to fear that Trump, as president would start torturing, waging permanent wars, putting people in camps, building walls across the Mexican border, conducting mass deportations and ruthless punitive drone warfare campaigns. For the bourgeoisie events aren't going according to script.

What passes for public debate is so base and crude, it is like a mirror revealing the true nature of the capitalist class. For Clinton, Sanders and the Democrats, they have a completely stilted political language where they aren’t allowed to use the word “worker” and must at all times drown out its use by repeating the words “middle class” like a mantra. For the Republicans it is the eternal debate over important things like penis size and how many people they intend to kill if they become president. In the final result, what comes of this spectacle are a series of bourgeois nonentities whose actions are more remarkable in their similarities than in any differences. The political class as represented by its Democrats and Republicans has done nothing attack workers and the poor at every opportunity. They act only for the sake of facilitating the accumulation of capital and repressing the workforce that makes capitalism possible.

With the largest segment of the workforce now earning less than $30,000 per year there is a numerically growing class of those who have no property and must sell their labor power for a wage, a proletariat in the most basic sense of the word. [1] Far from fracturing into non-existence this class looks like it might eventually start learning to walk on its own feet again one day. The candidacies of Trump and Sanders have tapped into the visceral vein of dissatisfaction in broad layers of the population but they reflect as well the quandary of the bourgeoisie that wants either a great dictator or a great reformer to save themselves from the effects of their own system.

For revolutionaries this endless election can be demoralizing. It is demoralizing to see ones friends and co-workers all fall for the rhetoric and marketing of bourgeois politics. Voting gives legitimacy to a political order that has nothing to offer except poverty, war and ecological disaster. There are many more creative and constructing things that could be done. It’s the revolutionary political organization of the class that is needed. Capitalist elections can be left to the capitalists.

AS

[1] www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/net#11E7C2C