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Zooey, are you voting for Steve Garvey?
LOL.
No.
I voted Yes on every proposition except 34 and 36.
I thought all the propositions were pretty straight-forward, with the exceptions of 33 and 34, so I researched those until I was satisfied.
There is literally only one entity that Prop 34 applies to: AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The proposition was created by conglomerate landlords to force the foundation out of Housing Advocacy actions. They’ve been buying “fixer-upper” housing because they believe that adequate housing is essential in the fight against AIDS, and they work to improve the properties, but it’s a work in progress. They also spend money on advocating for affordable housing, so the big boys put this together to push them out of the housing game. As far as I can tell.
Prop 36 is just another one of those “if we incarcerate more people for longer sentences, we will cure society’s ills” kinds of initiatives that cost a lot of money, destroy families, and don’t fix anything except private prison profits.
Welp. I clearly do not have the pulse of this country. I don’t know what just happened. I thought 2020 showed that a majority of Americans simply did not want Trump in the White House a second longer, and it didn’t matter that the Democrats put up a flaccid candidate. I thought it was a rejection of Trump. I dunno.
Maybe this explains it. Maybe not.
How Trump won the election
Jason Hickel
All the takes about Trump winning the US election are correct and yet they also miss the point.
Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it. It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this.
But these are all just symptoms. The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly.
Progressive
It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned.
Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even basic steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee – things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes.
And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future.
Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct.
They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment. At home, they suppress and demonise progressive and socialist tendencies.
Risk
Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development.
The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of ‘mistake’ but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital.
And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism.
They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time – this election being only the most recent example.
Formidable
They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they – and I mean the liberal ruling class here – don’t really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation.
They 100 per cent prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative. So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of “converting” the Democratic party is dead.
This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation.
This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.
This Author
Jason Hickel is a professor at ICTA-UAB and visiting senior fellow at the LSE, London. He is author of The Divide and Less Is More. He writes about global inequality, political economy and ecological economics. This commentary first appeared at X.com where Jason uses the handle @jasonhickel.org
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