Racism, Fearmongering and the Midterms

Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

On all sides, the driving force in the 2018 midterm elections was fear. At Republican election rallies, Donald Trump whipped up howling mobs into a racist frenzy against a caravan of desperate Hondurans and other Central Americans trying to flee the made-in-America violence and destitution of their countries. While thousands of National Guard and military troops were dispatched to the Mexican border, the president proclaimed his intent to trash birthright citizenship as codified in the Fourteenth Amendment. Passed after the defeat of the slavocracy in the Civil War, the amendment granted citizenship to the former slaves, a right also accorded to immigrants’ children born in the U.S. In these elections, voting rights for black people, achieved through the courageous battles of the civil rights movement, were once again under assault, particularly in Georgia, where black Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was a target of racist robo calls, as was Andrew Gillum in Florida.

When compared to their Republican opponents, it didn’t take much for the Democrats to come across as the “lesser evil.” They didn’t have to offer much of anything to the working class, black people, immigrants or any of the multitude of dispossessed. It is a testament to the misery inflicted by the capitalist rulers on the population that, according to media reports, the Democrats regained a majority in the House of Representatives largely because they defended the right of people with pre-existing conditions, i.e., sick people, to have access to health insurance.

Voter turnout was the largest for any midterm elections in over 50 years. On their side, the Republicans picked up at least one more Senate seat, reflecting both Trump’s success in riling up white rural backwaters and the fact that each state gets two senators regardless of its population. The “founding fathers” instituted that setup to curb “the will of the people.” Key to the Democratic Party’s House victory was the suburban vote. The Democrats ran a slew of women candidates, a number of whom played up their previous careers in the military and the CIA, helping to flip a number of districts where Republican women voted Democrat out of revulsion for the misogynist Trump.

The Democrats won the overwhelming majority of the black vote, as well as a hefty percentage of Latino and Asian voters. This result was due more to fear of Trump and his “Make America Great Again” yahoos than to any confidence that the Democrats would actually fight for their interests. The racism, immigrant-bashing and open bigotry of the White House have emboldened all manner of racist killers, including outright fascist groups. Leading into the elections, a white supremacist murdered a black man and woman at a Kentucky grocery store, and three days later a Nazi-lover gunned down eleven Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue. (read on)