Paralleling international developments, Trump exploited the reactionary and militarist character of the Obama administration, the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. Clinton ran as the candidate of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, in alliance with privileged sections of the upper-middle class based on identity politics. She evinced open contempt for the grievances of workers devastated by mass layoffs and the destruction of wages and pensions, promoting the slanderous claim that Trump owed his electoral success to racism within the "white working class."
In the aftermath of Trump's election, the Democrats have shifted further to the right, including a move last week to remove supporters of Bernie Sanders from the Democratic National Committee. They have systematically covered up the far-reaching significance of the election of Trump and the appointment of figures like Bannon.
The central focus of the Democrats since Trump's election has been an increasingly frenzied campaign over Russian intervention in the US elections. This has been aimed both at fighting out conflicts within the ruling class over foreign policy and, ever more openly, justifying Internet censorship and the destruction of free speech.
The central orientation of the Democrats is on winning the support of the military and the intelligence agencies, which are emerging as the arbiters of American politics. The Democratic Party's orientation was spelled out in a column by the New York Times' Thomas Friedman published yesterday, in which Friedman once again called for the intervention of the military against Trump.
Appealing to Defense Secretary James Mattis, best known for commanding US forces in the destruction of Fallujah in 2004, to take "action," Friedman wrote: "I am not talking about a coup" Trump needs to know that it is now your way or the highway -- not his." In other words, the military must take control, coup or otherwise.
The fracturing of the political system is an expression of an intractable crisis of American capitalism. In the conflicts within the ruling class, there is no progressive or democratic side. Trump's open Republican critics include a war criminal and advocate of torture (George W. Bush), a fanatic war hawk (McCain), a close ally of Wall Street and the military (Corker) and a far-right advocate of cuts in social spending (Flake).
Nothing progressive can come from a resolution of the crisis from above through some form of palace coup. Any such settlement will only shift the entire political system further to the right and escalate the assault on the working class and the drive to world war.
A political crisis on the scale engulfing Washington is a hallmark of a pre-revolutionary situation. Social explosions are on the horizon. The critical task for the working class is to advance its own, independent solution to the crisis and not allow itself to be dragged behind any faction of the ruling elite. The fight of the working class against Trump and the entire ruling class raises the urgent necessity for a mass political movement opposed to the Democrats and Republicans and directed to the overthrow of the capitalist system.
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