After former President Donald Trump incited a failed insurrection on January 6 at the US Capitol building, now President Joe Biden’s election victory was certified, and he was subsequently inaugurated on January 20. Much of the US’s mainstream media then let out a collective sigh of relief that our political climate might finally return to “normal.” Many “progressives” knew exactly what this “normal” would look like, but — fearing what another four years of Trump might spell for the country — they decided their best bet was to put all their chips on the possibility of pushing Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. left. While some may have genuinely been naive enough to believe that strategy could have a modicum of success, my guess is that most of these “progressives” knew that this tactic was a pipe dream and merely used it as a red herring to lure in some of the more realistic voters. That much can be inferred from the fact that any talk of pushing Biden left promptly stopped after his presidential election was confirmed.
I have to be honest and say I’m somewhat surprised to see their collective grift be discarded so quickly. AOC went from crying about kids in cages less than six months ago to now calling them “influx facilities,” insisting that there’s some kind of marked difference between them now and what they were before Biden’s inauguration, even while officials still aren’t letting reporters see them. While Biden’s made no progress for migrant children, he’s wasted no time making progress for the military-industrial complex. Aside from launching airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria, Biden’s also proposed a $753 billion budget for the Pentagon — a 1.5% increase from Trump’s last year and the largest so far in US history.
With no prospect of Biden making any concessions for the working class, we can only hope that, come the next election, workers refuse to give another capitalist puppet the mandate to rule. Only by pledging our vote strictly to socialists can we finally hop off the capitalist merry-go-round and establish a world socialist commonwealth.
Originally published at https://wspus.org/2021/04/world-socialist-no-3-spring-2021/.