Republicans
and Democrats prepare bipartisan agenda of social cuts and war
By Patrick Martin
23 October 2018
With only
two weeks until Election Day, November 6, early voting has already begun in
many states to select 435 members of the House of Representatives, 35 state
governors and 36 US senators, as well as thousands of members of state
legislatures.
The Democrats
and Republicans are raising and spending a record amount, more than $5 billion,
to carry out mudslinging attacks on each other and promote the illusion that
voters have a real choice between these two equally right-wing parties
controlled by the corporations and the wealthy.
The election
campaign has unfolded under conditions of deepening alienation of the
population from both big-business parties. Party leaders and media pundits
express the hope that the turnout at the polls in the midterm election could
rise to the level of 50 percent of those eligible to vote.
Put the
other way round, at least half the population will vote for neither party,
under conditions where Trump, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party
are all “under water”—far more disapprove than approve, according to the
polls—and Congress as an institution has an approval rating of barely ten
percent.
No amount of
attack ads and media propaganda can alter the reality that both parties uphold
the profit system, defend the interests of the super-rich, and regard the
working people, the vast majority of the population, with a combination of fear
and contempt.
The
Republican Party, led by President Trump, is campaigning on a program of
undisguised racism directed at immigrants, rejection of even the mildest
domestic reform proposal as “socialism,” and militaristic bluster. Trump chose
campaign rallies last week as occasions to make a series of belligerent
threats: to send troops to the US-Mexico border, to tear up the Intermediate
Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, to step up trade war with China.
The
Democratic Party has retreated steadily over the past two years before Trump’s
ultra-right barrage, offering only token opposition to such measures as the
persecution of immigrants, the $1.5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy, and the
installation of two far-right justices on the Supreme Court. They have embraced
Trump’s policies of militarism and economic warfare, joining in the
near-unanimous passage of a record $716 billion military budget, and applauding
his trade war measures against China and other countries.
The
Democrats have even sought to outflank the Trump administration from the right,
demanding an even more aggressive foreign policy in regards to Russia, using
the Mueller investigation and bogus allegations of Russian interference in the
2016 election to justify censorship of the Internet and sweeping attacks on
democratic rights. Spearheading this campaign is an influx of at least 30
candidates for congressional seats drawn from the ranks of the CIA, the
Pentagon, the State Department and National Security Council.
Behind the
strident denunciations and recriminations between the two capitalist parties,
however, preparations are well under way for a new stage of bipartisan
collaboration against the working class once the election is safely past.
Current
polls suggest that the Democratic Party will emerge in control of the House of
Representatives, which requires a net gain of 23 seats, while the Republican
Party will retain control of the US Senate. When Congress reconvenes in
January, Washington will likely return to “divided government,” with the two
parties negotiating a bipartisan policy whose outlines are beginning to emerge.
Statements
last week by Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggest the most
important features of such a bipartisan regime.
McConnell
responded October 16 to reports of a sharp increase in the federal budget
deficit by demanding significant cuts in social spending. He rejected
suggestions that either the enormous tax cut for business and the wealthy,
passed in December 2017, or the record military spending approved during the
summer, were in any way responsible for the deficit. “It’s very disturbing, and
it’s driven by the three big entitlement programs that are very popular:
Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid,” McConnell said in an interview with
Bloomberg.
President
Trump, speaking at a campaign rally October 20, announced that he was tearing
up the Intermediate Nuclear Force treaty with Russia, setting the stage for a
new arms race, as part of an increasingly confrontational policy. Referring to
intermediate-range missiles, which would allow the US to target Russia from
bases in Europe, and to target China from Japan, South Korea and Australia,
Trump said, “We’ll have to develop those weapons. We’re going to terminate the
agreement and we’re going to pull out.”
These two
comments suggest the outlines of the bipartisan policy that would be put into
effect after the elections: Trump and the Republicans will carry out the more
aggressive anti-Russian policy demanded by the Democrats; the Democrats will
join forces in the enactment of a bipartisan onslaught against social benefits,
to make working people and the retired pay the price of military escalation.
Until
Election Day, of course, most Democrats have seized on McConnell’s comment on
the need to cut entitlement programs as the occasion to issue demagogic
statements presenting themselves as diehard defenders of Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid.
But one
prominent Democrat, Phil Bredesen, the former governor of Tennessee who is now
seeking a Senate seat, declared, “I think there should be no pressure to do
anything to reduce benefits from Social Security in any way whatsoever,” but
called health care benefits (Medicare and Medicaid) “more complicated,” adding
that it was necessary to “manage the cost of these programs.”
McConnell
acknowledged in his statement last week that the popular opposition to cuts in
the entitlement programs made them politically difficult. “There’s been a
bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes because of the popularity
of those programs,” he said.
The Senate
Republican leader added that these programs could only be cut with the
cooperation of the congressional Democrats, which might even be facilitated by
the Democrats winning control of the House of Representatives. “I think it’s
pretty safe to say that entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the
debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to
achieve when you have unified government,” he told Bloomberg.
The two newspapers that serve as the main
voices for the Democratic Party wing of the ruling class, the Washington
Post and the New York Times, signaled their support for
this deal-in-the-making, each newspaper addressing one side in the impending
trade-off.
The Post published an
editorial October 18 expressing concern over the budget deficit and criticizing
Trump for having opposed “entitlement reform” during the 2016 presidential
campaign and embracing “fiscal populism” instead. “Structural causes of the
federal government’s long-term debt problems, Social Security and Medicare,
remained unaddressed, in keeping with Mr. Trump’s repudiation of the GOP’s
previous support for reform of entitlements,” the newspaper complained. The
editorial was aligned completely with the comments of McConnell, although it
made no mention of the Senate leader.
The Times conveyed its views
in an editorial headlined, “Candidates Who Can Help Take Back the House,”
endorsing six Democratic candidates for Congress in the New York and New Jersey
area, including two candidates from a military-intelligence background, part of
the cohort of 30 “CIA Democrats” identified and profiled by the World
Socialist Web Site. The editorial begins with an invocation of today’s
“frightening moment” when, supposedly, “A foreign government methodically
exploits divisions that President Trump deepens, stirring fear of immigrants
and Muslims, resentment of women and hatred against African-Americans.”
In other words, the Times portrays
the social divisions in America as the result of Russian interference, not as
the product of the deepening social inequality produced by the workings of the
capitalist system.
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