What
Constitutes a "Legitimate President" in the United
States?
By Danny Haiphong
“The
struggle to legitimize the US Presidency is
ultimately a desperate attempt by the finance
capitalist-aligned ruling class to stabilize the
system with endless war.”
January 19,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "BAR"-
A recent
piece authored by Robert Kuttner, the founder of the
liberal magazine The American Prospect, laid
out the criteria for a "legitimate" Presidency. The
purpose for such criteria is given away by the piece's
title, aptly named "Impeaching
Trump." There currently exists a layer of the
liberal section of the ruling class that is committed to
ousting the President-elect from office. The danger in
such a move does not necessarily reside from the
elimination of Trump and his particular form of rule.
What is dangerous about the effort to impeach Trump is
the conflation of the genuine interests of oppressed and
working class people with Kuttner's
particular definition of Presidential legitimacy.
What defines a
"legitimate President" of the United States according to
Kuttner? The criteria of Presidential legitimacy are
simple. The President must be anyone else but Donald J.
Trump. Trump's unsettled business ventures mix "official
duties with personal enrichment," which is deemed
“illegal” under the US Constitution. And a legitimate
President certainly cannot have peaceful relations with
Russia. Trump's so-called ties to Russia are grounds for
treason and enough to warrant impeachment.
Yet Kuttner’s
argument for what constitutes a legitimate President
rests on the assumption that the system of governance is
legitimate in its own right. Yet the system of
capitalism and imperialism in control of the US state
apparatus has never been mired in a deeper crisis of
legitimacy than the one currently in motion. Since
Trump's election, establishment Democrats and
Republicans have waged a multifaceted campaign of war
against Russia in attempt to resolve the crisis. This
campaign includes Kuttner's narrative that Russia
meddled in US elections in favor of Trump as well as the
vast NATO-sponsored
military buildup in the Baltic States bordering
Russia. The struggle to legitimize the US Presidency is
ultimately a desperate attempt by the finance
capitalist-aligned ruling class to stabilize the system
with endless war.
“The President must be anyone else but Donald J. Trump.”
So the question
must be posed again: What really constitutes a
legitimate President of the United States? A "legitimate
President" in the eyes of the ruling establishment is
defined by a number of factors. "Legitimate"
Presidents help consolidate and manage the crisis of
imperialism in a manner that is palatable to the policy
objectives of the ruling class. Such rule must also be
effective in curbing the ideological and political
development of the inevitable insurgency that arises
from capitalist and racist oppression. Donald Trump's
deviation from the ruling class on Syria and Russia as
well as his public white supremacist worldview makes him
an unsavory choice to govern a superpower that is
circling the drain.
Perhaps the
best example of a "legitimate" US President under
imperialism is leaving office on January 20th. Barack
Obama has consistently met all the criteria for what
makes a President legitimate in the hearts and minds of
the ruling class. Obama managed the crisis under terms
that handsomely rewarded his capitalist masters. The
"first Black President" worked diligently for Wall
Street, transferring the most
wealth to the top 1 percent from the rest of the
population in US history. Obama achieved a new record
for the most transfers of military
weaponry to racist police forces that occupy Black
American cities. He deployed US Special Forces to 70
percent of the world's nations, with a staggering 1600
percent increase in Special Operations Forces in
Africa from 2006 until the present. These forces helped
Obama drop over 26,000 bombs in 2016.
“Under Obama, imperialism's most egregious crimes found
room to flourish.”
Obama was
a gift to the imperialist system, which before his first
term began was stuck in both political and economic
turmoil. Under Obama, imperialism's most egregious
crimes found room to flourish. Not one banker was
punished for the economic collapse of 2007-08. In fact,
trillions of dollars were sent to Wall Street's coffers
while working class and oppressed people were left with
an economy dominated by low-wage
and contract jobs. The real unemployment
rate sits at 23 percent as millions of people have
gone uncounted by official unemployment statisticians.
But imperialism had plenty of opportunity over this
time to spend trillions militarizing
the Russian border, funding
and arming jihadists, and renovating
the US nuclear arsenal.
Under Obama,
the ruling class won and the people lost big. Yet
despite this development, popular protest was relatively
small in size and duration. The Occupy Wall Street and
Black Lives Matter movements brought police terror,
white supremacy, and inequality back into the political
discourse, but were unable to develop a solid
organizational and ideological basis from which to win
material victories. The anti-war movement was completely
suppressed, and the LGBTQ and women's movements were
consumed under the Democratic Party umbrella. All of
this can be traced back to the "legitimate" Presidency
of Barack Obama. His rule ensured that radical and
revolutionary political alternatives would have no
breathing room under the weight of political symbolism
and neo-liberal dogma.
“It
appears that no amount of information will stop the
Democrats’ push for Trump to abandon his rhetorical
gestures of peace with Russia and continue the dangerous
war against Russia that began under Obama.”
Obama
popularized oppression and exploitation among a large
section of the electorate for the majority of his
Administration. Workers and oppressed people struggled
in disorganized silence. And even when popular protest
ensued, few activists held Obama accountable for things
like mass incarceration or the continued protection of
the banks. The Obama period has been the highest
expression of the Democratic Party's transformation into
the War Party and the most legitimate party of
imperialism. Trump's ascendancy has brought this reality
out of the darkness and into the light.
Recent weeks
have intensified the Democratic Party's rabid drive to
become the most preferred imperialist political party in
the United States. Hollywood millionaires such as Meryl
Streep and Tom Hanks have lauded
Obama's rule while taking ineffectual
swipes at Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the
Obama Administration has moved forward in peddling the
lie that Russia, Trump, and WikiLeaks worked together to
meddle in the 2016 elections in favor of Trump. Numerous
reports of Russian hacking have been discredited and the
only intelligence report that exists on the subject contains
zero detail on the specifics of Russia's so called hack
job. But it appears that no amount of information will
stop their push for Trump to abandon his rhetorical
gestures of peace with Russia and continue the dangerous
war against Russia that began under Obama.
“Donald Trump's deviation from the ruling class on Syria
and Russia as well as his public white supremacist
worldview makes him an unsavory choice to govern a
superpower that is circling the drain.”
A recent piece
on Obama by fellow admirer and corporate liberal Ta-Nahesi
Coates exemplifies the danger of the current moment.
While "progressives" obsess about Trump, pundits such as
Coates have gone into overdrive to legitimize the
Presidency of Barack Obama. The piece aggrandizes Obama
and wishes him a warm farewell. Coates is unable to
provide one example of how the Obama Presidency
benefited the oppressed in a material way. The
Democratic Party has been embarrassed by the rise of
Trump yet the policies of Obama's two terms helped Trump
take the White House. To hide their complicity,
Democrats have sought to soil the insurgency of the
coming period by defining themselves as the legitimate
political leader of the oppressed. However, empty
promises no longer get the job done so the Democrats
have turned to all out war instead.
The definition
of a "legitimate" President is dependent on the lens of
the inquirer. If one looks through the lens of the
ruling class, a legitimate President manages the crisis
of the imperialist system of exploitation under relative
terms of social peace. The expectation is that working
class and oppressed people will continue to validate
this definition in the name of American Exceptionalism.
However, there has never been a US President that has
genuinely governed in the interests of humanity. The
imperialist state is an organ of class rule. It is
organized to protect the interests of the capitalist
class and suppress the interests of the working class
and oppressed. The coming period holds much potential
for the further development of radical insurgency. The
effort by the Obama camp of the ruling class to
legitimize the Presidential seat is nothing but an
attempt to stifle the insurgency.
Danny Haiphong is an
Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area.
He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com
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