Revisionism, Reactionism and the ACP Part II

Let's examine how contemporary discourse seems to have soured.

Part II

Oh Shit! Barack Obama! (Continued)

The identity based choice of candidate for Vice-President in the 2008 Presidential election saw the rise to national prominence, a woman we may identify as a sort of proto-MAGA, pseudo-trad-wife, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. She was often derisively (if not misogynistically) referred to in the media with dismissive nicknames as Caribou Barbie (due to her combination caribou hunting and plain white woman persona). She would have had a massive barrier to break had she been competent. She was not. Gaffe after silly gaffe soured the legitimacy of the campaign.

The major factor that we are interested in here was the finding through the post mortem that minority and marginal groups were largely of the opinion that the Republican Party excluded them. Their identities and thus their votes were unwelcome so they either voted Democrat or didn’t vote at all. The Republican Party ultimately concluded that in order to win future elections, they would need to “widen the tent;” become more outwardly welcoming to offended demographics. A contingent within the Party went the opposite direction and the so-called Tea Party was loosely formed. A coalition of Right Libertarians, outward conspiracy theorists and self described racists, the Tea Party coalition was the infant form of today’s MAGA movement. The tent widened, it just went the other way.

Donald Trump himself was ascendent, adamant that not only was Barack Obama not born in America (using as evidence, the undenied fact that Barack’s father was Kenyan), but that his wife Michelle was transgender based on her musculature and that their children were either adopted or purchased to sell the illusion of a traditional, American marriage. Regardless of your opinion of the accuracy of this nonsense, we will operate as if it is false as we are unable to find evidence that it is true.

What of the Reds?

At this time in history, your humble author was an active member of the CPUSA (the Communist Party USA) in Minneapolis, MN. The Minneapolis Chapter of the CPUSA at the time was led by Doris and Erwin Marquidt, a spousal couple of the most ideological educated Communists. The mission of that Party at that time was smothered and almost entirely anaerobic as the central leadership had long since abdicated any sense of Communist revolution or indeed even evolution. Reactionary incrementalism soaked every aspect of the Party to an extent that against the better judgment of our ideologically correct, but materially bobtailed chapter leadership, America’s foremost Communist Party, during wildly unpopular imperial military action raging, went door knocking and sat phone banking for the Democratic Party’s nominee. Excited like college students finally able to buy a beer and cast a ballot for the potential of America’s first Black President, like it would matter in the slightest to the material conditions of the working class being sent to rendition and slaughter the peasantry and working class in the Middle East. As we saw, Barack Obama won that election and the proletarian revolution was again retroversed and thwarted by the CPUSA itself. The Party had fully thrown its lot in with the modern democratic socialist idea of incremental change (incrementalism). Push the Democrats left after electorally defeating the right. An apparently sound strategy unless the Democratic Party and its enablers represent manufactured, controlled opposition, built to obfuscate and lubricate Liberal exsanguination of the proletariat. Can we determine whether that is the case?

Go ahead and subscribe so that you can join us next time and we’ll come to understand more about how the CPUSA and Obama’s election informed our discourse and why that discourse is so damned vitriolic!