Editor’s note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today.
Well folks; with a few notable exceptions in boutique liberal, or left-wing media, I think it's safe to say that these past U.S. Midterm elections haven't produced a resplendent bounty of quality political analysis in Pig Empire media. I've tried my best to fill in the blanks by talking about what these results mean for antifascists, and trans people facing down a pogrom in progress, but in the face of precisely a billion corporate talking heads declaring this a resounding victory for "liberal democracy" it really does feel like pissing into a hurricane. Like many of you, I'm just about ready to move on from this moment because the fascists sure don't seem to have given up the ghost.
Unfortunately however, it remains impossible to say we've fully explored what the US midterm elections mean, until we talk a little bit about what they don't mean. How can we figure that out? By exploring the existential threats to our society that were not campaign issues at all. While the media warned folks that democracy, abortion, and trans rights were on the ballot with various degrees of proficiency, the same certainly can't be said for climate crisis or the still ongoing covid pandemic. In today's edition of Nina-Bytes then, we're going to look at two short articles about the surprising issues this campaign wasn't about; one for each crisis.
Let's start with climate crisis, and this pre-election November 2022 article by Ricardo Gomez over at Jacobin:
No One Is Talking About Climate in the Midterms
Well it's hardly Shakespeare, but you have to give Gomez some credit for getting right to the point; which is included in the subtitle of this article. In the lead up to the election, less than one percent of all televised campaign ads for House and Senate midterm races focused on climate crisis; with little difference between Democrat and Republican candidates. This is despite overwhelming evidence that America is already in the throes of the climate apocalypse, and numerous public polls demonstrating voters actually do care about not being boiled to death on an uninhabitable planet for corporate profits.
To put it bluntly, this is terrible politics; especially for Democrats. As our author notes however, just because politicians are choosing to ignore climate crisis, doesn't mean everyone is choosing to ignore the situation. Oil companies for example, remain quite invested in the issue:
"Although 80 percent of voters support a windfall tax on fossil fuel companies — a way of recuperating money by taxing surging profits — candidates are not running on holding fossil fuel companies accountable. Instead they are ceding the narrative on environment and climate change to oil and gas companies that have gone on the offensive — spending enormously and pouring millions into campaigns up and down the ballot to protect their profits."
Please keep in mind that none of this was a secret; when both activists and data nerds are telling Democrats to run on climate crisis mitigation policies, the decision to cede the field to oil companies is an active one. Keep a pin in that thought, we'll come back to it in the conclusion.
In the meantime, let's move on to our next article; this November 9th, 2022 piece written by Abdul El-Sayed for The New Republic:
It’s Weird that Neither Party Talked about Health Care in a Pandemic
This is another short and to the point read, albeit from a far more mainstream liberal perspective. After noting that the covid pandemic isn't over, and healthcare policy discussions dominated both the 2018, and 2020 US election seasons, El-Sayed asks how it's possible neither party wanted to talk about political solutions to America’s profound health crisis in 2022? He then breaks down a few possible answers; inflation discourse, watered-down health care reforms that Democrats can't pitch as a policy success, and general apathy from a Republican Party that would rather talk about pedophiles and white nationalist conspiracy theories.
While this is all pretty standard political class chatter, El-Sayed's article is relevant primarily because he keeps bringing it back to the larger, inexplicably unspoked issue of a raging pandemic that has killed millions already; and who benefits from that silence:
"So, two and a half years into the pandemic, that leaves us in a paradox. No single issue has so fundamentally altered American life as has the pandemic—an issue that is squarely about America’s approach to public health and health care. And despite a vigorous public debate about how to address America’s clearly failing public health and health care systems going into the pandemic, the conversation about how to fix them has all been snuffed out as we emerge from it … even though we have done next to nothing about them. The health care industry is breathing a sigh of relief after vigorously fighting any effort for reform in the last two elections."
Let's be real here for a moment, alright? You don't need me to tell you why the GOP didn't want to talk about climate crisis, or healthcare policy during the midterm elections. We're talking about a hyper-capitalist, reactionary political party wholly in the pocket of the medical insurance lobby and Big Oil. Given that the Republican response to both global warming and covid-19 pretty much consisted of pretending they aren't real and threatening anyone who disagrees, their midterm strategy wasn't much of a surprise.
Explaining the Democratic Party's failure to run on broadly popular issues of vital importance to bolster their electoral chances in an election against literal fascists however, requires more examination; especially in light of their perceived weakness on economic policy issues. Promoting policy-based solutions to problems like burgeoning medical debt, pandemic relief policies, safer energy, and green sector jobs would have been a win-win situation for Democrats; forcing the GOP to talk about something they don't want to talk about, while reeling in voters who support those policies. This isn't a question of Monday morning quarterbacking either; the Democratic Party lost control off the House this election, and even a narrow defeat will now have disastrous consequences in American life.
So what's the deal then? Well, corporate media can blow sunshine up my ass all they like, but the obvious conclusion here is that as a whole, the Democratic Party is also a hyper-capitalist, reactionary political party wholly in the pocket of the medical insurance lobby and Big Oil. If you've read any of my analysis about the Biden administration's objectively genocidal climate policies so far, you know that these folks honestly do not give a damn about anyone but rich donors, and corporate capital. Once you've decided that capitalist support outweighs the lives of billions, including millions of your own people, you've also pretty much decided that a little thing like "potentially losing power to fascists" doesn't rate either.
And in the long run, that's why you can't entrust anything as important as "stopping a fascist takeover of society" to the Democratic Party, and rich liberals in general. At the end of the day, capitalist realism demands the subordination of all other concerns to capital; including civil rights, and human lives. When push comes to shove, acolytes of the free market will always be willing to sacrifice everything, especially the poors, for a sufficiently appealing price. There is no such thing as an effective antifascism, that isn't also anticapitalist, and as such any antifascist alliance with liberal capitalists cannot help but be temporary in nature.
Let the liberal establishment bask in the warm afterglow of a less-bad-than-expected loss to clown shoes fascists, but don't join them. We've got a class war to fight; and literally everything depends on a victory for the common people, against genocidal capitalists. With any luck, they won't even see us coming.
nina illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst.
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