Exclusive for El Magonista by Prof. Gonzalo Santos, October 11, 2021
The Parliamentarian shot down the so-called "Plan B" the Democrats submitted to her after she shot down their initial immigration component in the big reconciliation bill now under consideration in the U.S. Senate.
We called it ahead of time. Let's go out on a limb and make our next prediction regarding what will soon happen to all current immigration reform proposals in the Senate: in the tumultuous, cliff-hanger process to get the big three progressive passed this year - the infrastructure and the safety net/climate change economic bills, and the democracy strengthening bill - the immigrant reform effort will be dropped, lost in the shuffle, abandoned - though no doubt followed by Democrats' lamentations and another batch of thin promises to really try to revive them "later."
But next year, we will soon find out, will be declared "out of bounds", too; the usual ruse will be again deployed, lamenting that "nothing can get done in an election year." But maybe after the elections, in 2023? (if Dems win, yes?? Don't forget to vote!!)
It's not advisable to hold our breath any longer, people - go ahead and exhale, and if you want to cry, go ahead, too. For those of us who were expecting this outcome based on a sober, clear-headed assessment of the displayed behavior of both Dems and Republicans, unencumbered by wishful thinking or party loyalties, we take no pleasure of been proved right again, just saddened, frustrated - even infuriated - that magical thinking is still so pervasive and entrenched in the immigrant rights movement. After thirteen years of having our hopes raised, only to be dashed over and over again, it has now reached the level of collective sadomasochistic syndrome.
So here we are again, or will soon be, in the familiar place of a "novia de rancho" - toda vestida y alborotada while the groom skips town. The immigrants are indeed about to be thrown under the bus once again and stay ran over for the foreseeable future; especially given how determined the Dems are in squandering this rare opportunity - which they haven't had since 2009 - 2010 - to ram through Congress an immigration reform over the vociferous, but legally irrelevant, objections of the Rabid Xenophobe Party.
The Republicans are obstructing everything again, as a granite wall - we've all known that for years. But the Dems just can't find their spines nor muster the courage to abolish the filibuster in reciprocity, now that they can - which would not only be amply justified but just about the only way they can hope to pass their major pieces of legislation this year. But they will not dare. Remember, they are Democrats - the Wet Noodle Party.
Their loyalty - let me repeat it one more time - is for preserving the duopoly, which in turn manages and protects the interests of the plutocracy who owns and runs this country, including the Dems. American democracy is but the optimal system of rule for a deeply entrenched oligarchy with a veneer of democratic legitimacy meant to secure the consent of the ruled - well, at least among those who actually vote.
But our mainstream social movements - periodically culled and purged of their radical leaderships and mor radical programs, and then coopted or coerced into a purely reformist track that is securely controlled and regulated by the two-party system - operate mostly under the fantasy that the Democratic Party is an albeit imperfect "ally." This delusion is no accident.
Most of the seemingly autonomous NGOs involved in our social movements are in fact funded by the same donor class that funds the duopoly - creating a spectacular, but false, illusion of democratic activity! And when an authentic anti-systemic radical social movement arises, it is immediately targeted for brutal state repression, if it cannot be controlled, or coopted by the Dems and the donor class. In contrast, radical right, pro-systemic movements like the Tea Party movement, the pro-life movement, the open-carry gun movement, and now white nationalist Trumpism are allowed to propagate mostly unmolested.
Back to immigration reform. Today, while the Republicans skate eights around every piece of legislation the Dems attempt, the immigrant rights movement's big advocacy organizations (by funding) remain paralyzed, un-mobilized, reduced to follow the appalling show in Washington as mere spectators, forced to sit and watch this phony roman circus with phony gladiators battling phony battles and spilling phony blood all over the august Washington phony combat arena.
And at the community level, angst and unanswered prayers, dread and confusion, and soon, disillusionment and anger sets in - and who knows, maybe another layer of newly recruited Trumpists pealed off the wimpy Dems. Or they will sit out the next elections.
Actually profuse bleeding is spilling everywhere else outside Washington: among the detained/deported/persecuted immigrants and the brutalized communities of color; among the pauperized working-classes of all colors; on the parched, burnt lands of the West and the flooded, hurricane devastated lands of the East; in the suicide rates, the opioid rates, the Covid-19 hospitalization and death rates (we just crossed the 700,000 deaths by Covid-19 marker).
I do not even need to mention the blood-spattered sands of war-torn Central Asia (courtesy of the U.S. military industrial complex), the thousands of yearly drownings in the Mediterranean (courtesy of the European Union's anti-refugee policies), or the Haitian and Central American tragic exoduses (courtesy of U.S. past and present imperialist practices).
In our Society of the Spectacle (read Guy Debord), none is more grotesque, ineffective, mind numbing, dispiriting, mendacious and callous than the duopoly's full-court pantomime in Washington. The mesmerizing shadow boxing there is literally disarming our people's capacity to rise and rebel!
And that one party - the Republicans - uses the disgust generated by this vacuous and corrupt spectacle of plutocratic governance among the fed-up citizenry, to abolish the duopoly and adopt an even worse, one-party, authoritarian rule project for America - is beyond appalling; it is downright surrealist!
For one thing, the Republicans are channeling the frustration of the American people in the wrong direction, sure to lead to even worse catastrophes than those already caused by the dysfunctional duopoly. For another, this frontal challenge to whatever remnants of democracy still exist, eludes the tone-deaf, clueless, appeasing Democrats, who continue to wax nostalgic of the gone era of a triumphal, liberal-led, functional, duopoly rule of domestic and international Pax Americana.
The Establishment Dems, still much in control of the party, are showing us all the limits of their inveterate conciliatory, compromising, liberal-centrist worldview, in full display this year under pressure both from the Trumpist GOP, on the one hand, and the Progressive Caucus, on the other. And it isn't a pretty sight to behold.
Despite the red alarms going off on the ongoing Republican assault on democracy, the centrist Dems blithely continue - á la Obama, á la Clinton, and now á la Biden - to search for the elusive ghost of bipartisanship, continue caving to their own Blue Dog reactionaries, continue trying to make the daily-sabotaged duopoly work again!
What will be the outcome? Soon we shall see the progressive agenda blocked by both Republicans and Blue Dogs, ditched or cut down to a minimum, all those progressive bold new proposals derailed; and after that occurs the road will be cleared, once again, for Trumpian rule to be restored and perhaps hereafter consolidated - a road paved by the eternal naiveté of the liberal Dems, who live in the past and can't perceive a neo-fascist threat if it hits them in the head.
So what now, people? (Notice I'm not addressing myself to the Dems, or offering them any advise, which I believe would be an entire waste of my time and an exercise in futility - but to you!)
Firstly, we have to shed all illusions and accept that the Dems will be Dems, and they will clearly not do what is required to advance any of our progressive people's agenda - an ample and just immigrant reform certainly being one of its main pillars since the early 1990s.
The Progressive Caucus in the Democratic Party - which I respect, and am glad to see it has grown considerably in size and determination since the 2020 elections, is not yet capable of commandeering the party the way the Trumpists have taken over the reins of the GOP. That asymmetry reflects the power imbalance between anti-systemic forces and pro-systemic forces.
So the Progressive Caucus is going to continue to be blocked by their own corrupt, duopoly-loyal Dem establishment, and of course by the Trumpist GOP. And in truth, the PC cannot and will not do its job absent a mighty grass-roots, un-cooptable and autonomous, militant but peaceful people's revolt, capable of putting the entire duopoly against the wall.
What needs to happen, then? Well, social rebellion, that's what! We in civil society need to mobilize massive resistance in the streets of America! We need to shut down business as usual and put maximum pressure on both wings of the duopoly - pressure against the cowardice and complicity of the Democrats, pressure against the obstructionist, callous, anti-democratic Republicans.
We certainly need to block - by any means necessary - the return of Trump and Trumpism to power in '22 and '24, but without relying any more on the Dems to lead us, or expressing by purely electoral means our justified disgust. We need to press for our demands at all times.
If it's not from the Beltway in Washington, from where should our leadership emerge from?
The resistance has to come from below and from the left, as the Zapatistas say. The organized social forces of those most affected by the glaring inequalities and injustices of plutocratic-run America and its duopoly, must lead the way. No more donor-funded-and-controlled astroturf NGOs directing, channeling, and defusing the resistance of our people.
No more mushy politics, people! No more playing by the rules of the elite-serving duopoly - which, ironically, the rabid Trumpist Repubs already abandoned, years ahead of us!
Our social rebellion, I repeat, has to be independent from the donor class, organized outside Washington and sustained from below and from the left - not allowed to be coopted by the American plutocracy and their paid political operatives ensconced within the machinery of the duopoly.
And it has to be fearless, determined, and bold! It has to be the sort of political revolution Bernie Sanders has been calling for since he first launched his presidential campaign in 2016, and again in 2020, but much more turbocharged, deeper in its radical aims, more intersectional and internationalist than thus far (for one thing, toss out that American Exceptionalism and the imperialist sense of American global entitlement once and for all!), admittedly anti-capitalist if it's going to confront the plutocracy, and strictly independent of dark money and Dem party allegiances.
Politically, this does not necessarily mean forming a third party. But it does mean launching massive and sustained acts of resistance, civil disobedience, disrupting the political order seriously enough to get results. It means forging and maintaining a principled united front of all just causes. You know, we all need to unite and get into good trouble!
The trenches of our past indomitable social movements are already dug - but they are for now mostly unmanned, neglected or abandoned, as the "action" has transferred to the glass & steel plush offices of supposed "advocates" and "allies" in Washington. The movement banners are ready to be unfurled, the critical theory to guide us already developed - but millions of would-be militants are hamstrung by the duopoly's structures of repression and cooptation, or defeated, worn down, or disillusioned fighting this rigged two-party system without much progress.
A last word about the structural instability of the entire two-party political system in the United States. It may have worked before, but duopoly rule is finished, and not only because one of the parties is determined to hurl a wrecking ball to demolish it, as we saw all throughout the Trump regime and especially on January 6 of this year.
People are fed up and angry as they haven't been since the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War. Whatever political equilibrium restoration mechanisms existed in the United States are now plainly broken, and our structures of governance now suffer a deep crisis of legitimacy and lack sufficient viability to last much longer.
In the midst of such chaos and dysfunctionality, an era of social revolt is upon us. Given the depths of the political, economic, and social crisis we have been going through over the past two decades in this new century, we shall soon witness what may be the greatest social rebellion in American history. A great counter-rebellion will surely be whipped up by the plutocracy, the evidence of it already quite visible. The great question is in which direction this great struggle will take us -- forward, in a progressive direction, or backward, into a fascistic one?
The answer to this monumental question is about to spill out of the acrimonious halls of Congress and into the divided streets of America, along the divided border in Rio Grande and Tijuana, outside facing the repression and surveillance of the police state and inside the incarceration gulags, in the smoked-choked areas of California and in the Covid-saturated ICUs of America.
Who will prevail? Who will fight on which side of the divide? What are we, the ordinary folks currently trying to survive the onslaught of individual problems weighing down on us, willing to do collectively, for ourselves as a people torn apart by a cruel and unjust system, as a nation chained to a sinking ship, as humanity in a world on fire?
Because, it should be plain by now just watching the goings on up there in Olympus, we the people can only anticipate an avalanche of deadly thunderbolts to keep raining down on us, decimating us, and soon the unleashed harpies will roam the land picking at our exposed flesh as we attempt to flee.
Unless we fight back.
Professor Gonzalo Santos is a CSU Bakersfield sociologist, and for more than 5 decades a political activist, union leader and community advocate for immigration and human rights.
