As Trump Escalates Moves to Hijack the Vote, Democrats
Hold Empty “No Kings” Marches

Midterm War-Elections and
the Drive for a Police State

Build a Workers Party to Put Capitalism Out of its Misery

NOVEMBER 1 – The midterm elections in the United States are now upon us, marking two years since Donald Trump was elected president and two years before the next presidential election. The Democrats have campaigned on the issue of “affordability,” as voters find it increasingly impossible to make ends meet as their wages are gutted by inflation, due in good part to Trump’s failed war on Iran. Republicans have sought to whip up hysteria over immigrants, as they have done in every election since 2016, while making the midterms a referendum on Trump’s presidency. The U.S. president, meanwhile, has threatened to “annihilate” Iran with a huge bombing spree as soon as the voting is over, pretending that such a monstrous war crime would induce the Tehran regime to capitulate. The Democrats, meanwhile, want to step up the war on Russia over Ukraine, and both imperialist parties are gearing up for launching World War III against China.

Working people and the oppressed have no side in this dispute between parties and politicians who despite their vitriolic squabbling all support the rule of capital, disguised as “democracy.” No matter who wins on November 3, fuel prices and food prices will stay high, and probably increase, as the standoff in the Persian Gulf continues. Both parties support the genocidal Zionist militarists in Israel and would deny Iran a deterrent to the nuclear-armed U.S./Israeli terror bombers, and thus neither party is capable of achieving peace in the Middle East. On the home front, the Democrats want the rampaging ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Border Patrol to stop terrorizing the cities and states they govern, but are not trying to stop deportations. In fact, the cops of whom Democratic mayors and governors are the bosses protect the masked federal agents as they violently snatch immigrants off the streets.

The Democratic Party paved the way for Trump, twice, under “deporter in chief” Barack Obama and “Genocide Joe” Biden. Disgusted by the blatant racism of the master of the White House, many young people in particular have been attracted by appeals of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Yet the DSA is and always has been part of the Democratic Party, which the trade-union bureaucracy and leaders of black civil rights and immigrant rights groups are wedded to as well. Against this class collaboration, what’s needed is intransigent class struggle. To put an end to the ravages of capitalism, the Internationalist Group calls to break the Democratic stranglehold on social movements and to undertake the struggle to build a workers party on a program for international socialist revolution.

The Spectre of Communism

As President Donald Trump opened his campaign for the midterm elections on the night of July 3, against the floodlit backdrop of Mount Rushmore, he announced the theme of his campaign: to defeat “The Threat of Communism to America.” Name-checking Karl Marx, he declared that a generation after the end of the Cold War, “there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” of “illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work.” The communists, he thundered, rather than upholding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are for “death, tyranny, and the pursuit of evil.” Vowing to “vanquish communism quickly,” he proclaimed: “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms,” and that if Congress passes the Save America Act (to purge voters), “then we will not lose an election for 100 years.” And again, “We will not lose an election for 100 years.”

Fast forward to October 27, when in South Florida, Republican senator Ashley Moody, appointed to fill the seat of the gusano (Cuban counterrevolutionary) senator Marco Rubio when he became Trump’s secretary of state, tried to whip up attendees at a campaign event, vowing: “socialism – communism – will never get a foothold in this nation.” The message was in “television ads, in mailed fliers, everywhere voters look” (New York Times, 29 October). Two days later, Moody wrote on X: ‘THE COMMUNISTS ARE COMING.’” Don’t we wish. In reality, her Democratic opponent, Angie Nixon, is just a liberal who joined the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America (DSA) this year, and says “to be clear: I am not a socialist.” Coming to help her out were DSA Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former contender for the Democratic presidential nomination Bernie Sanders. None of them are socialists, much less communists.

The anti-communist hysteria that Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) cohorts are desperately trying to whip up is totally artificial. It is, however, fully in line with the drive for mass deportations and police-state rule of the Trump II administration. Barely a week before the Mount Rushmore event, a pair of MAGA judges imposed sentences totaling 500 years in federal prison on nine activists for a protest outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Prairieland Detention Center south of Fort Worth, Texas.¹ Days before that, federal authorities arrested 15 Minnesota activists, including a number of trade unionists, on conspiracy charges in retaliation for the massive resistance in the Twin Cities against the murderous marauding by the masked ICE and Border Patrol immigrant hunters.² The Internationalist Group calls to defend the Minneapolis 15 and the Prairieland defendants.

Of course, all the “communist”-baiting and “antifa”-smears are actually aimed at painting the Democratic Party as some kind of subversives. This is knee-jerk Republican electoral messaging harking back to the Reagan era, but with a difference: today it is directly connected to Trump’s drive to install police-state rule. The “communist threat” theme picked up with the election of DSA Democrat Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor last year (despite Trump’s cordial meetings with him), and peaked again in June when several DSAers won Democratic primaries. Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, is not a member of or endorsed by the DSA and told the Detroit Economic Club on October 21, “I am a capitalist.” But evn he gets labeled a socialist because AOC and Bernie Sanders campaigned for him. Fear not, Wall Street, El-Sayed, Angie (“I am not a socialist”) Nixon, AOC, Sanders, Mamdani and the rest are bourgeois politicians who pose no threat at all to capitalist rule..

Defeat the Racist War on Immigrants and the Imperialist War on Iran

On top of the red-baiting there are the racist slurs from the white supremacist in the White House, labeling any Jewish or black person who votes for El-Sayed “crazy,” and his targeting of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a refugee from Somalia, whom Trump repeatedly calls “garbage.” In rallies he says that she should “get the hell out” of the U.S., to which the crowds yell, “Send her back!” In January, a MAGA supporter physically attacked the Congresswoman. Trump’s vile calls on Minnesotans to “fight back” against Somalis, targeting them in the feds’ Minneapolis rampage, and his vendetta against Haitians are a sequel in the Trump II administration to his smears of Mexicans as prime scapegoats in Trump I. On the eve of the midterm elections, Homeland Security staged a pre-dawn search of Ilhan Omar’s home, seizing her phone and threatening to deport her. We strongly defend Rep. Omar against this vicious assault on her rights.

On Trump’s drive for mass deportations, after the eruption of mass resistance to the marauding ICE/Border Patrol Gestapo in Chicago and especially Minneapolis, the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Markwayne Mullin has toned down its tactics and upped the number of detentions. The Democrats want ICE out of their cities or states, but their line is that they are the party that can deport better. (Trump is only beginning to catch up to the numbers deported by Obama and Biden.) The role of the Democrats in aiding Trump’s deportations was shown yet again when on October 8, federal agents shot a Dominican immigrant, Oscar Belgal, in the Bronx, while his five-year-old child was in his car. As demonstrators tried to block the feds from taking Belgal from a hospital, Mayor Mamdani rushed to the scene. Protesters shouted “Mamdani complicit” as he called for “ICE out” while two blocks away his NYPD was brutalizing anti-ICE protesters.

At a demonstration outside the NYC Federal Building the next day, some protesters yelled for Mamdani to “fire Tisch,” the police chief. But Jessica Tisch was put in as chief as a guarantee that the DSA Democrat mayor would follow the orders of Wall Street, and any new chief would do the same. So also for the other main demand of the Democratic Party “progressives,” to “Abolish ICE” – another immigration agency would do the same job. El-Sayed made this explicit, saying “we don’t need ICE, we can go back to INS,” the Immigration and Naturalization Service that existed up to 2003. The INS carried out “Operation Wetback” that deported over a million Mexicans in the 1950s. And don’t forget how Obama expanded the ICE concentration camps The Internationalist Group calls for workers action to stop deportations, for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to smash the ICE Gestapo with workers revolution..

This election is not just about domestic repression: the losing U.S./Israel war on Iran is costing Trump votes, big time. Iran’s success in choking off oil supplies at the Strait of Hormuz has sent gasoline and diesel fuel prices soaring, raising the cost of everything from getting to work to putting food on the table. To get out of the unwinnable “forever war” that he got himself into, Trump is now threatening massive military action after the midterms, to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly,” as he threatened at the United Nations on September 22. The Wall Street Journal (28 October) and other media report that the U.S. and Israel have concrete plans for a “short, intense” bombing campaign right after the November 3 U.S. elections, but Iranian leaders have countered that they are ready and would hit U.S. warships, regional infrastructure, energy production facilities and underwater cables.

The Democratic Party is one of the pillars of U.S. imperialism and, if anything, an even bigger warmonger than Trump. Democrat Biden provoked the war with Russia over Ukraine by refusing to give Moscow any commitment to halt NATO encroachment, sent tens of billions of dollars of weapons to the fascist-infested army of the Kiev regime and made it a NATO war on Russia. Democrat Biden supplied Israel with all the monster bombs for the slaughter in Gaza. Today, the Dems accuse Trump of being soft on Russian president Putin and Chinese president Xi. They are happy to see Trump squirm over high gas and diesel prices, and have forced over a dozen war powers votes, but have no plan to end the war. The Internationalist Group calls to defend Iran against the imperialist/Zionist war, and we have long said that Iran has the right to a nuclear deterrent against the U.S./Israeli nuclear terrorists.

On the one new issue in the midterm elections, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Democrats have latched on to opposition to data centers, which soak up energy and water, threatening local communities. They also want to have “guardrails,” slow down the build-out and have some government control. Trump, on the other hand, is partying with the technoauthoritarian moguls pushing for full speed ahead and no limits to the “free market.” Meanwhile, the masters of Big Tech warn of “the risk of extinction from AI.” Or as one put it in a stock offering:

“Sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight, and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”

–From prospectus for Anthropic IPO, 26 October

But beyond the dangers of AI agents run amok, any “guardrails” or oversight by the imperialist government where both parties are gearing up for war with China, with AI slated to play a key role, won’t diminish the existential threat. Revolutionary Trotskyists defend China against imperialist attack and counterrevolution. And with tens of millions of jobs at risk of being wiped out, the Internationalist Group has called for unions to fight for workers control of technology.

“You Can’t Fight Trump with Democrats” – Build a Workers Party

The midterm elections are in large part a referendum on Trump. “The Donald” has told his followers to pretend that he is on the ballot, and even staged a pretend Republican convention in Dallas to energize the MAGA ranks. Democrats are delighted to oblige, as nothing will bring out their voters so much as a “Stop Trump” groundswell. Trump’s approval ratings in opinion polls are in the mid- to low-30s, still higher than Democrat Jimmy Carter at his low point, but a majority strongly oppose Trump. The incumbent party typically loses support in the midterms, and Democrats are dreaming of a “blue wave,” in which they take the House of Representatives and the Senate. In terms of the popular vote at this point (November 1) such a sweep does not seem impossible, although somewhat unlikely. But after the steady stream of Trump threats over the midterms, and his vow to not lose another election “for 100 years,” why would that stop him?

The only real issue in the midterm elections is Trump’s control of Congress. On Iran, Republicans will pay at the polls for the price at the pump, but the Democrats won’t end the war. Deportations will likely escalate as the DHS plans to hire 5,000 more ICE agents, bringing the total to 27,000 (up from 10,000 in 2024). Democrats will join Trump in trying to starve Cuba into submission. Vicious repression of transgender youth will not stop, as the Democrats try to duck the issue. Left protests over immigration raids, genocide in Gaza or the war on Iran have largely died out. Instead, everything is folded into impotent “No Kings” parades organized by Democratic Party front groups with unions and left groups tagging along, focused on getting out the vote for the Democrats. While there has been talk of a “general strike” if Trump tries to steal the election, they just mean a big protest, not mobilizing workers’ power to shut it down.

On November 7, this same bunch are organizing a “March for Our Democracy” event in NYC. For working people, it isn’t democracy, and it certainly isn’t ours. The bourgeois elections that Trump is going all-out to block, rig or hijack (see  accompanying article, “Donald Trump Wants to Rig the Midterms: Count the Ways”) are won by money, lots of it. Even if some Democratic candidates – or of minor bourgeois parties like the Greens or Working Families Parties that act as pressure groups on the Democrats – take “progressive” stances, they are all part of political superstructure of U.S. imperialism. The MAGA crowd are not going to stop. They have only begun to implement their agenda, elaborated over four decades, for an armor-plated police state regime. To stop them, and fight the attacks by a capitalist system in accelerating decay, class-conscious workers must unchain labor’s power by forging an internationalist communist party to defend democratic rights and all the oppressed through international socialist revolution.

Trump says “America will never be a communist country.” Want to bet? And, by the way, in almost every language except English, “America” includes all of the Western Hemisphere, where millions are fed up with being the “back yard” of the Yankee colossus. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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