On Tuesday evening, September 10th, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump squared off in their first and only Presidential debate. The one main takeaway from the debate is that after several decades of lesser-evilism, it has become increasingly difficult to identify who the lesser evil is. This is because the Overton window has shifted so far to the right in the neoliberal era that the space which was once occupied by traditional liberals like FDR and JFK is now a void. The Democrat Party has moved into the realm of Reaganism, adding in a flavor of bourgeois (false) wokeness to soften its loyalty to corporate governance, capitalist degradation, and war. This has left the Republican Party as the forerunners of late capitalism’s slide from covert to overt fascism, albeit not without an internal struggle led by the entrenched neocons who are now jumping ship to join the Reaganist Democrats.
In this decades-long slide toward overt fascism, Republicans have pushed for an expansion of the Southern Strategy into parts of the Midwest and rural coastline, still relying heavily on racist, bigoted, and xenophobic sensationalism to appeal to voters. This remains a successful strategy in 2024 due to the material degradation caused by late capitalism, which has sparked a reactionary response from “middle-class” whites who feel their privileges slipping away and need a bogeyman to blame. In response, Republicans and conservative media feed them with a never-ending list of scapegoats — illegals, criminals, wokeness, Haitians, etc. — designed to provide cover for the real culprits: the capitalist class and corporate governance.
Meanwhile, Democrats have assumed the role of warhawks from the 1980s/90s neocons, using everything from outdated cold-war propaganda to their own brand of xenophobia to push for more wars. The fact that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both praised Reagan during their campaigns, and Harris pulled a similar move with John McCain on Tuesday, suggests this is a conscious and strategic move to express loyalty to the military industrial complex. It's no coincidence that Dick Cheney recently endorsed Harris.
– Hampton Institute
Excerpted from “Irrational Politics in a Dying Empire:
Our Response to the Trump-Harris Debate”
September 11, 2024
Excerpted from “Irrational Politics in a Dying Empire:
Our Response to the Trump-Harris Debate”
September 11, 2024
What a spectacle we witnessed [Tuesday] night.
Trump predictably leaned on racist tropes and violent rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes our immigrant neighbors, spreads vicious lies about women exercising control over our bodies, and fans the flames of hatred against our LGBTQIA+ family. . . . Have no doubt: Trump has and will continue to advance the interests of Christian Nationalist fundamentalists and white supremacists in his pursuit of unrestrained power.
[Yet in terms of policy] there is very little difference between Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump.
BOTH Harris and Trump boasted about embracing war criminals and guaranteeing the dominance of American capital at the expense of everything else.
BOTH of them promised to support fracking and bragged about their results in expanding fossil fuel extraction.
BOTH of them promised to continue building our military and stoked military tensions with Iran, China, and Russia.
BOTH agree on giving Israel unilateral authority over our foreign policy decisions in the Middle East.
BOTH agree on unlimited militarization of our border.
BOTH agree that private interests like the profit of fossil fuel companies outweigh the collective interest of the survival of our species and our planet.
The end result is the same. Working people are squeezed back into the meat grinder of our exploitation economy, the American empire remains unchecked, and our planet is burned to ash as our core democratic freedoms – like the rights to protest, boycott, and petition the government for redress of grievances – are crushed.
The banner headline across the top of The New York Times home page – “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” – was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for former President Donald Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy.
In Gaza “now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead,” an ABC News moderator said. “Nearly 100 hostages remain. . . . President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?”
Vice President Harris replied with her standard wording: “Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal and we need the hostages out.”
“End immediately”? Anyone who isn’t in fantasyland knows that the only way to soon end the slaughter of Palestinian civilians would be for the U.S. government – the overwhelmingly biggest supplier of Israel’s armaments – to stop sending weapons to Israel.
Meanwhile, a pivot to advocating for a cut-off of weapons to Israel would help Harris win the presidency. After the debate, the Institute for Middle East Understanding pointed out that the need to halt the weapons is not only moral and legal – it’s also smart politics. Polls are clear that most Americans want to stop arming Israel. In swing states, polling has found that a large number of voters say they’d be more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would support a halt.
. . . Israel’s war on 2.2 million people in Gaza has been a supercharged escalation of what Israel had been doing for 75 years, treating human beings as suitable for removal and even destruction. As Israel’s war on Gaza has persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events.
That and so much more – left unsaid from the debate stage, dodged in U.S. mass media, and evaded from the podiums of power in Washington – indict not only the Israeli government but also the U.S. government as an accomplice to mass murder that has escalated into genocide.
Silence is a blanket that smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral voices. Making those voices inaudible is a key goal for the functioning of the warfare state.
– Norman Solomon
Excerpted from “Undebatable: What Harris and Trump
Could Not Say About Israel and Gaza”
Common Dreams
September 11, 2024
Excerpted from “Undebatable: What Harris and Trump
Could Not Say About Israel and Gaza”
Common Dreams
September 11, 2024
Trump’s construct of “migrant crime” is a racist myth. This association – more immigrants = more crime – has been repeatedly disproven. If anything, studies and data suggest the opposite: more immigrants = less crime. Let me explain.
Trump Republicans often assess “crime” levels using incarceration, arrest, and murder rates. Every year from 1870 to 2020, immigrants have been incarcerated at a lower rate compared to U.S. citizens. This gap has become even more pronounced since the 1960s. Today, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S. citizens. Immigrants are 30% less likely to be incarcerated than White Americans.
In Texas, U.S.-born citizens were between 2 and 4 times more likely to be arrested for violent, drug, and property crimes than undocumented immigrants, according to a study published in 2020.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. murder rate has decreased while the share of the foreign-born U.S. population has increased. While immigration rates declined significantly in 2020, homicide rates rose sharply. While immigration rates started rising in 2021 and 2022, homicide rates leveled out and then declined.
Trump and his political operatives can publicize and make up cases of individuals who happen to be immigrants engaging in violence. But don’t let them distract you for the fact that there’s no link between “migrant” and “crime.” It's a second Trump presidency – not immigrants – that poses a grave threat to the safety and well-being of Americans, of humanity.
[Kamala Harris says] that Americans are “exhausted about the division” – seeming to imply that the country was once solid and unified, fully in agreement on the nature of American values and such matters as who are enemies are. This seems to be one of the media talking points of the moment, which is ironic almost beyond belief. A nation born in a state of legalized slavery has never been a unified nation. What unity that does currently exist isn’t the result of Americans simply deciding to get along – or all agreeing on a specific, external enemy – but rather the result of decades and decades and decades of intense struggle, a la the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the workers’ movements, etc., etc., and the ongoing creation of the country as it exists today.
During the debate, most of what Trump blathered was screw-loose nonsense, mixed, of course, with his special brand of racism, that is to say: the invasion of illegal aliens. This was the issue Trump rambled on about regardless of what he was asked to address, be it the economy, abortion, the January 6 riot, or whatever.
. . . The media consensus seems to be that Harris won the ping-pong game – I mean, the debate – because she spoke with clarity, factual accuracy, and sufficient contempt to continually put Trump in his place. And yes, I get this, she won the ping-pong game. But in her “victory,” what deeper truth did Harris advance? What not-yet-existing country did she envision and present to the American people . . . and the world? I heard the clichés, especially the military clichés, but I didn’t see the vision.
– Robert C. Koehler
Excerpted from “The Trump-Harris Debate:
Racist Lies Vs. Military Clichés”
Common Dreams
September 12, 2024
Excerpted from “The Trump-Harris Debate:
Racist Lies Vs. Military Clichés”
Common Dreams
September 12, 2024
Pundits, a day later, ruminate about who won the September 10th “presidential debate,” but that is the wrong question. The most important revelation from Tuesday night's clusterfuck of bad theater ought to be this: the patient won't survive. The bedridden train-wreck sprawled across the gurney in the hospice unit is the United States of America – and the debate wasn't destined to be revelatory. We already knew that the corpse, writhing and contorting in agony, will need life-support first and a skilled embalmer soon enough. The debate proved for the billionth time that the greatest country on earth has less hope than a popsicle on the surface of the sun.
The debate wasn't about Kamala Harris – she is the default mode, the automatic pilot, a celebration of generic items, a slinky on a long stair case, a golf course watering system in a terminal draught, a row of telephone poles on an endless train ride. Forget about her. She does not exist. AI created her.
This debate was about Donald Trump. If an alien spacecraft lands on your street and parks next to a Honda Fit, the make of the car becomes irrelevant. If you are waking in the morning with a blister on your little toe and notice a tumor growing out of your side as big as the bathroom sink, you no longer attend to the foot discomfort.
Trump is our measuring stick, our gauge of disease, our face of national distress. If Trump had a debate with Jesus himself you wouldn't see it as the bantering back and forth between good and evil – you'd look at Trump and ask, “What the fuck is that?” In any context, Trump does not belong. He is a walking double take. You look at Trump as if your arm falls off and blood streams from your empty shoulder. He is bad shit that should not be there – but there he is.
. . . [Trump] argued back and forth with Kamala Harris about which one fracked the hardest. Picture two arsonists bickering over which one owns the largest gas can, and you get the idea. . . . Can you imagine that maybe a couple billion years hence, a team of alien explorers lands on the burnt remnants of our planet and discovers the video of Tuesday's debate? What will our alien visitors say to one another? Perhaps they'll say, “Those dumb fucks where watching this and chewing on popcorn while their planet roasted.”
– Phil Wilson
Excerpted from “A Few Crazy Thoughts
Regarding the Batshit Harris-Trump Debate”
Common Dreams
September 12, 2024
Excerpted from “A Few Crazy Thoughts
Regarding the Batshit Harris-Trump Debate”
Common Dreams
September 12, 2024
No matter which of them wins on November 5, it appears there will be no fundamental disruption of a system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, tens of millions of people lack health care, corporate power continues its reign of economic terror, climate change remains unmitigated, 60 per cent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and brute force continues to be our main problem-solving modality domestically and internationally.
She is less dangerous in the short term, but they both represent a system that leaves the majority of Americans to fend for themselves within an unjust economy and an increasingly dangerous world.
Related Off-site Links:
“Dystopian Vision”: Carol Anderson on Trump’s Election Denial and Racist Fearmongering – Democracy Now! (September 11, 2024).
Will Harris Take on Corporate Greed? Ralph Nader and Joe Stiglitz on Debate, Trump’s Tariffs, and More – Democracy Now! (September 11, 2024).
Ralph Nader and Joseph Stiglitz on Kamala Harris’s Economic Plans and Confronting Corporate Power – Democracy Now! (September 11, 2024).
Challenging the Duopoly: Jill Stein on Why She’s Running for U.S. President as Green Party Candidate – Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson (Geopolitical Economy Report, April 20, 2024).
Jill Stein Shatters Kamala Harris’s Platform – Sabrina Salvati (Sabby Sabs, September 11, 2024).
Blocked from Debate, Socialist Candidate Claudia De la Cruz Blasts “Spectacle” of Democracy – Break Through News (September 11, 2024).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Progressive Perspectives on the Presidential Nomination of Kamala Harris
• Progressive Perspectives on an American Coronation
• Will We Let Fascism Come to America?
• Voices on the Issues That Really Matter
• Peter Savodnik: Quote of the Day – August 22, 2024
• History Matters
• Breaking Down Kamala Harris’ DNC Speech on Gaza
• Chris Hedges on the End of the American Empire
• Marianne Williamson: “We’re Living in Very Serious Times and We Need to Be Very Serious People”
• Steve Grumbine: “It’s a Systematic Slaughter That We’re Funding”
• Memes of the Times
• On This Momentous Day in U.S. Politics, a Visit to the Prayer Tree
• Progressive Perspectives on the Crisis in U.S. Electoral Politics
• Elise Labott on How Third Parties Can Revitalize Democracy
• “Americans Deserve Choices”: Jill Stein on Breaking Points – 4/30/24
• Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis
Image: A scene from a watch party for the U.S. presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at American Eat Co. in Tucson, Arizona on September 10, 2024. (Photo: Rebecca Noble/AFP via Getty Images)
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