African revolutionary and scholar Frantz Fanon warned us of the likes of Kamala Harris in his seminal work, “The Wretched of the Earth.” Fanon placed a great deal of emphasis on the development of the national bourgeoisie in the African independence struggle.
“The national bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission as intermediary. As we have seen, its vocation is not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism. The national bourgeoisie, with no misgivings and with great pride, revels in the role of agent in its dealings with the Western bourgeoisie,” wrote Fanon.
The Democratic Party has spent the last five decades integrating its ranks in order to strangle the strivings for liberation that emerged from the occupied ghettos and streets of Black America in the 1960s and 1970s.
As Roberto Sirvent and I concluded in our book, more and more people are realizing that diversity does nothing to fundamentally change the White supremacist character of the Democratic Party.
The 2020 election cycle is an anti-Black political affair. Wall Street’s new favorite candidate Pete Buttigieg is polling at 0% approval with Black voters and for good reason. Buttigieg has time and time again shown his disdain for Black America, whether by telling a Black woman in South Bend he didn’t need her vote when she questioned him on his support for racist policing or by faking Black political support in South Carolina.
Joe Biden is the co-author of nearly every piece of legislation behind the mass Black incarceration state, including the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and the 1994 Crime Bill. While not sporting the same lengthy record as Biden, Elizabeth Warren posed as an indigenous person to win a prominent tenure position at Harvard Law School and has shown that she is malleable enough to serve the interests of the White corporate oligarchy in charge of the Democratic Party.
Bernie Sanders has maintained a class-first approach to round two of his “democratic socialist” campaign but has managed to inspire young Black Americans to dump the likes of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker in favor of universal healthcare, education, and housing. This is a positive development and a direct challenge to the pro-austerity posture of the Black misleadership class.
White corporate elites at the head of the DNC have made their fear of Black Americans abandoning the sinking Democratic Party ship well known. The 2020 DNC convention is being held in Milwaukee, the same city where Hillary Clinton was notoriously rejected by Black American voters as a pawn of corporate power.
Barack Obama has made his presence felt very early in 2020 by taking every opportunity to warn younger voters of the dangers of veering too far left from the Democratic Party establishment. Obama has every right to worry about the future political behavior of Black America. The Democratic Party’s race problem is a real threat to the preservation of the U.S. imperial order.
Black Americans have for the last few decades understood that the Republican Party is the White Man’s Party (taking the place of the Dixiecrats). Absent of an independent Black left, Black Americans in the main have held their noses and voted for the Democratic Party to prevent Republican Party presidential victories. But the Democratic Party has dutifully taken orders from Wall Street and the war machine.
White supremacy is its guiding logic. It was only a matter of time before the 40-plus year Race to the Bottom and the centuries-long racist war on Black America would converge to spur a crisis of legitimacy in Washington.
The Democratic Party is principally responsible for the crisis, which culminated in the rise of Donald Trump and Sanders in the 2016 presidential election. Sanders’ meteoric rise in popularity was predicated upon his willingness to challenge the American “exceptionalist” ethos that presumed neoliberal capitalism to be the most effective means of economic governance worldwide.
Democratic Party elites have fiercely defended the racist logic of neoliberal capitalism and have made life more insufferable for key sections of its captive base in the process.
Democratic administrations are just as much to blame for the end of welfare, the near end of public education, and the rise of mass Black incarceration as their Republican counterparts.
Since as far back as the 1960s, the Democratic Party has operated as the most effective branch of the War Party by finding more covert, yet no less bloody, methods from which to devastate and annihilate humanity. Black Americans and other oppressed people don’t owe anything to the Democratic Party.
Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area and a contributing editor for blackagendareport.com.
Black voters.21
Opinion
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