The Ruling-Class Circus
The absurdity of this election has shown how badly we need a working-class politics of justice and solidarity.
As we head into the final days of the election, some thoughts, observations, rants, speculations, and provocations — by turns, cantankerous, narrow, and crabby, and, I hope, generous, capacious, and open to the future.
1.
One of the things we’ve been seeing more and more of this past decade, and now in this election, is that state institutions that many thought (wrongly) were above politics — the Supreme Court, the security establishment, the Senate filibuster — are in fact the crassest instruments of partisan politics, sites of circus antics of the sort the framers (and their hagiographers) traditionally associated with the lower house of a legislative body.
This, I’ve argued before, has been increasingly the case since the end of the Cold War.