Yves here. Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai start with the question of undemocratic behavior in the EU, namely the impression of Ukraine men into military serviced and the constitutional court confrontation in Poland and in what they and the US midterms vote say about the condition of what passes for democracy.
By Radhika Desai. Published at Geopolitical Economist
Radhika Desai: Hello and welcome to another Geopolitical Economy Hour, the socialist and anti-imperialist conversation that illuminates the fast changing political economy and geopolitical economy of our times. You’re watching Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economist, and I’m Radhika Desai. Today’s show is our regular fortnightly with Michael Hudson. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Hudson: It’s good to be here.
Radhika Desai: Michael, you and I were going to talk about the upcoming midterms. We are recording on the morning of Tuesday, the 3rd of November, when they are taking place across the United States. And we were going to discuss what was involved in them and so on, and we will discuss that. But meanwhile, as we were talking about what we were going to say, we were confronted with another crisis. I mean, the midterms are shaping up to be a bit of a crisis already, given that we have no idea how Donald Trump will respond if and when the results turn out to be what they are widely predicted to be, which is a Democratic sweep. Now, Trump may react in a whole range of different ways, creating a constitutional crisis in the United States. But here is another constitutional crisis which has some sort of parallels with what may happen in the United States.
So in Poland, there was a constitutional crisis sparked just last Friday because President Karol Nawrocki refused to appoint five of the eight judges recommended by Prime Minister Donald Tusk to the Constitutional Tribunal. Tusk then tried to force the issue by getting his unappointed judges to claim that the Chief Justice, who had been appointed by the previous conservative right-wing PiS government, had been suspended, and also tried to use the police to prevent the Chief Justice from entering the court. Now, President Nawrocki, who was on his way to Senegal for some kind of summit, turned the plane around, returned to Poland, got into the court building, and there held a press conference accusing the government of forcibly seizing a constitutional institution. And as we speak, both sides remain intransigent.
I can see at least three different axes of confrontation here. One is between the liberal EU oriented elite represented by Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister, and on the other hand, the conservative populists of the PiS variety represented by President Karol Nawrocki. That’s the first one. The second one is a confrontation between those who would be happy to participate in Europe’s war on Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy, and those who are not at all sure this is a good idea. And then there are those who favour the EU and those who think that the United States is a better partner. And here it seems that a lot of what’s involved is who Poland is going to buy arms from, whether it’s for its own defence or to take part in the Ukraine war, et cetera.
So Michael, what’s your take, and what are the parallels you see with the situation in the United States? And this whole issue of the West essentially going on and on about democracy while it is being visibly hollowed out in the heartlands of the West itself.
Michael Hudson: Well, in our discussion before the show, we agreed that the common denominator between Poland and the United States is the question of what is a democracy. And if you look at the whole history of Western civilization, Aristotle already said long ago that what constitutions call democracy are really oligarchies. And the problem for oligarchies for the last maybe twenty-five hundred years is how do you prevent democracy, literally rule by the majority, so that it is controlled by the minority?
And there are many ways of doing this. One of the ways was to divide what you could call a parliament into two houses. The Senate meant the elderly in antiquity, and by medieval times in Europe and America, it meant the large landowners, who sat for a much longer term to prevent parliaments from doing anything that’s democratic. But then one of the additional ways of checking democracy is to say, well, in the popular idea, democracy is that everybody gets to vote. Okay, you’ve got to let everybody vote. The key, as the ancient Romans decided, is how do we make their votes not count?
And that really is the common denominator between Poland and the United States right now. The way that they’ve decided to make votes not count is to make the actual implementation of any policy that Parliament might pass, that the majority might pass, subject not only to the Senate veto, but to a constitutional court. That’s the problem today.
In the United States, this is the most expensive campaign process in history. And the Supreme Court has ruled that, well, we’ve got to do it the way the Romans did. The Romans assigned weighted votes to the wealthiest Roman constituency, much higher than the votes of the agrarian people as a whole. And so when the wealthiest classes voted, their votes, maybe the one to ten percent, outweighed the ninety percent. So that made sure that there wouldn’t really be a democracy there.
Well, the same thing happened in the United States. If you read the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton and especially James Madison said, well, democracy is a threat to the wealthy people. They oppose banking. They oppose the large landowners. How do we keep them in check? Well, we’ve got to have a Supreme Court, and we’ve got to have various ways of making sure that their votes don’t count. Well, the Supreme Court has said just that, that voting should reflect the wealth of the classes that pay for the political campaigns of the candidates who are running in the primaries. And as long as you can have private funding, then essentially the politicians are up for sale. It’s what Americans call pay-to-play.
And if you’re a politician and you want to run in a primary, or if you win the primary and run as either a Democrat or a Republican against the opponent, you’ve got to find financial backers who are going to pay for the campaign expenses, and especially the media expenses, the television ads, the radio ads, the newspaper ads and all of the campaigning. That’s what’s been happening in the United States, and we’ll get to this election in a minute. This is the most expensive campaign in history, and one of the issues of the campaign is that either the Republicans or the Democrats will say, well, my opponent is funded by AIPAC, and a vote for my opponent being funded by AIPAC is a vote for the war that is pushing up your oil prices, your gas prices, your diesel prices, your fertilizer prices and all that. So you could say that the whole issue is who is funding which candidates.
And in Poland, the process you described is particularly tricky because when parliament passes a law proposed by the Prime Minister, the President has to approve it. And as it happens in Poland, the Prime Minister, Tusk, his party is essentially the European Union party. And the Americans say Tusk is representing democracy in trying to appoint his judges, who will rule in his favour and subordinate Polish laws to the EU laws. And the EU laws are controlled by the European Commission in Brussels, by von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas.
And America says that the opposing party, the Law and Justice party, is called democratic, but it’s populist and nationalist. The Law and Justice party was formed out of the Solidarity trade union movement, and its backers are on the land and in the small towns that have been left behind by the whole neoliberalization of Polish development. And the United States says, well, populism and nationalism may have the votes, but that’s not democracy. Democracy is whoever we say is pro-American. And look at the leading democracies according to the United States. They are Ukraine, the most corrupt, kleptocratic country in the northern hemisphere, and Israel. Any country that is pro-American is a democracy.
And in fact, the United States has created an institution, the National Endowment for Democracy, to fund and stage demonstrations. And obviously Tusk’s party staged a demonstration against the court, trying to support Tusk’s takeover, saying that you cannot have a democracy in Poland that outweighs what the unelected EU bureaucracy in Brussels states. And Brussels states, well, we want Poland to have a stipulated level of immigrants that it has to take, especially from Ukraine. Poland and Ukraine are not very friendly, so you can imagine how the Polish voters feel. And the EU laws want to force all of their members to back the war on Russia being fought largely in Ukraine, and to pay for the militarization, and essentially to bring Poland under the domination of the German, anti-Russian, Christian Democrat neoliberals under Merz.
Well, what you’re seeing right now, in addition to Poland’s constitutional crisis, is riots all over Europe. You’ve seen the French riots in the papers. You’ve seen in Albania the riots against Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who’s made a corrupt deal with the Arab Emirates to try to develop seafronts. You’re having riots all over Europe. So what the papers call a constitutional crisis, from Poland to Albania to the United States, is really the culminating fight of the neoliberal globalist oligarchy against democracy. That’s what we’re seeing at the broadest level.
Radhika Desai: I agree substantially with what you say, although I wonder if it is a straightforward fight between what you’re calling the EU globalist elite and democracy. Because remember, what’s ranged against the EU elites is not necessarily any kind of progressive or democratic force. It’s a conservative populist party which has its own set of problems. So we’re looking at an extremely complex situation here, in which any kind of serious democracy that genuinely has the interests of the vast majority of the people at heart is kind of lost somewhere in all this mayhem. And this is as true of the United States as it is of Poland.
I was also interested to see, by the way, that even the Financial Times, which you’d normally think would have sided one-sidedly with the European Union on this matter because it’s very Atlanticist, very pro-EU and all that, could not find it in itself to do so, because it is painfully aware that the pro-European side, the Donald Tusk side in Poland, is using the same sort of unconstitutional manoeuvres to gain its position as the PiS, according to the Financial Times, has done. So the Financial Times’ case is that the PiS packed the court with its own people. Now the terms of some of those who had originally been appointed by the PiS have expired, so Donald Tusk is now taking the opportunity to appoint these people. But interestingly, the Financial Times can’t really choose between the PiS and Tusk, but it certainly takes the side of the European Union and defends the European Union’s power to intervene in the domestic affairs of its member states by essentially withholding European Union funds when they are seen to step out of line. And by the way, this is also very interesting. The European Union keeps saying that it is withholding funds in order to protect democracy and constitutionalism and what have you. But in reality, what it’s doing is enforcing neoliberalism.
Now, I just wanted to clarify that, but let me pick up on some of the really good, substantial points you’ve made. So first of all, you started off with Aristotle. And I think it’s very important for us to remember that until the 20th century, practically no major intellectual, and that includes Aristotle, thought democracy was a good thing. They all thought it was an awful thing, something that must be prevented, because it gave power to those who did not have property and gave them power to act against the interests of property. So I think that at least back then they were very brazenly forthright about what side they stood on.
Since the 20th century and the advent of mass politics, it has been very difficult for the elites of most Western societies and beyond to openly voice anti-democratic sentiments. So everybody claims to be democratic, but as you rightly pointed out, while they claim to be democratic, they are constantly looking for ways in which they could ensure that the democratic rights of ordinary people do not count. And this is done in two principal ways, and these are both getting absurd.
One of them is, of course, to invoke constitutionalism and liberalism above democracy. So you say that there are constitutional limits to what a majority can do. So the majority, for example, cannot expropriate the wealth of any part of society. This is usually constitutionally forbidden. So there is that sort of limit. The second way in which you do it, which is happening more and more in Europe now, is to invoke some kind of higher principle over democracy. So you say that you stand for the rights of Ukraine, and no matter how unpopular your position is, you are going to stick by it because this is somehow superior to the democratic principle. And this is what you see people like Annalena Baerbock doing when she says, I stand for Ukraine, even though the vast majority of Germans do not wish me to do so, and what a wonderful political leader I am.
And last but hardly least, you spend money on elections. You spend money on disinformation, beguiling people, misleading them into voting for that which is not in their own interest and so on. And as you rightly pointed out, I was shocked to discover that this midterm election, Michael, is the most expensive in US history. It is more expensive than the last presidential election of 2024. Just think about how much is invested here. And what’s more, given how brazenly the elite acts these days, we know that people like Elon Musk have given close to half a billion dollars to the Republicans. They have said so openly. They have given half a billion dollars to the Republicans in order to fight the elections. Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, and other almost equally rich people have also been making extremely substantial contributions. Websites like OpenSecrets have clearly shown that the amount of money is not only great, but an enormous amount of it is dark money. It is secret money. So in all of these ways, efforts are made to ensure that the voice of ordinary people is not heard.
And maybe I’ll add one final thing. One of the big problems that we face today is that there is no doubt in the minds of ordinary people that what our governments are doing is not in our interest. As you rightly pointed out, there are riots all over Europe. And to talk about North America, there has not been any president in the United States who has been as unpopular as Donald Trump since the days of Truman, that is, nearly 80 years ago. So there are clearly record-breaking levels of disaffection and apathy among Western publics.
Unfortunately, the only forces that are giving any voice to this disaffection are right-wing, conservative, so-called populists. I really think that populism is not the correct name. These are essentially right-wing authoritarian, practically fascistic forces. I’m talking about the organized forces involved, not the ordinary people who support them, because ending up supporting one of these does not necessarily make you a fascist. So this is the important distinction. But nevertheless, these are very, very right-wing forces, and their dominance, the lack of any progressive, left-wing, socialist, anti-imperialist presence in the political fray, simply means that people’s democratic rights are violated even further.
Michael Hudson: Well, the common denominator between what you’ve been describing, the Polish situation, the American election and all the riots in Europe, is Donald Trump’s war with Russia and Iran. That is what is destabilizing the economies. That is what is, on the one hand, pushing up the oil prices and the fertilizer prices and the electricity prices that are squeezing the households of wage earners from Europe to the United States. And it is also leading in Europe to concerted cutbacks in social democratic spending. They’re talking about cutting back pensions. That’s one of the fights. And cutting back any kind of social support for wage earners in order to finance the military spending to fight America’s war against Russia and Iran.
And that really is the issue. The population at large wants the government to support the social democratic programs that it thought were part of the whole post-World War II economic order. But the postwar order that the US established was, from the beginning, an order dominated by the financial sector, with veto power over other countries. And as matters have turned out for most of the Global South countries that you and I have been discussing for the last few years, the instrument for overriding whatever domestic populations might vote for is the International Monetary Fund, with its stabilization programs, meaning destabilization, austerity programs.
They say that if a country has problems paying off its foreign debt, or whatever is causing its currency to weaken, then in order to get the loans to enable it to carry its debt and its trade dependency on the West, it has to lower wages, it has to devalue the exchange rate. Well, there are common world prices for raw materials and energy and for just about everything except labour and local real estate. So when you’re devaluing a currency, you’re lowering wages relative to what wage earners have to pay for their cost of living, which is set largely by the imports from the leading Western countries. So obviously this is even more effective at overriding democracy than the Senate.
And so the question is, the whole tradition of Western civilization was so different from everything that went before. In the Bronze Age, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, you had rulers who were preventing an oligarchy from developing by cancelling the debts, and who saw the oligarchy as an opponent of the rulers who were trying to maintain economic order, all the way east to China, with the emperors under Confucianism. The idea was to keep the population satisfied, not running away. And the West had no institution like that. There was no central power, no kingship or emperorship, until they had kings who basically represented the oligarchy of which they were members.
And so we’re really seeing something that is becoming a civilizational crisis for the rest of the world, which is confronted by neoliberal globalism supported by Europe, the United States and its allies in Japan and South Korea, at their own expense, as they have their own democratic crisis. So what seems to be a democratic crisis is really a question of whether you are going to have the financial class dominating the rules by which economies work, concentrating wealth in its own hands, polarizing the economy and ending up doing what the Roman Empire did, impoverishing the population, or whether you are going to have some central authority that can prevent all of this. The West has nothing. China does, because it has the creation of money and banking as a public utility in public hands. And it creates credit for a completely different reason than the financialized West does, as we’ve talked about.
So I think the dynamics that you and I have talked about for the last two years are framing this whole discussion over democracy, which goes way beyond who gets to vote, in a world where, in the United States, it’s pretty well understood that the voting today isn’t going to affect America’s war against Russia and Iran. The Democrats are actually even more pro-war and pro-Zionist and anti-Near Eastern and anti-Russian than Trump, who’s being pushed by all of these. So nobody expects the actual policies to change. It’s only about which individuals you get to vote for, who are going to support policies that are supported by what’s called the deep state, and what you and I call the financial class.
Radhika Desai: Yeah, I agree with you that the outcome of this midterm is not going to change that much, particularly as far as the wars are concerned, because both sides in contention in the United States are equally committed to the war. So there’s hardly anything to choose there. But there is one scenario that I’d like to invoke, which I think is very interesting. And that is that if it happens that today’s election leads to the so-called blue wave, and the Democrats essentially take control of Congress, or even just the House of Representatives, they could start such a wide range of procedures against the Trump administration, judicial procedures, congressional procedures, investigations and so on, that Trump will essentially become mired in defending himself against all of these. He will have hardly any bandwidth left to pursue any war, so that the civil war within the United States will dominate over any other war. So that’s one scenario that I see as a possibility, because Trump never had much bandwidth anyway, so his capacity to conduct his own defence and carry out wars on one or more fronts is to be doubted.
But let me come back to a series of points you’ve raised, because they are really very interesting. First of all, you referred to China and how China does get many things right. But of course, if you ask the Western elites, and here I include all sides of the Western elites, the populist as well as the establishment ones, they’re all profoundly against China, and they all claim to be against China on the theme of democracy. China is authoritarian, we are democratic, et cetera.
But if you think about it, in the West, like I said, democracy was not given to the Western public by its elites. Democracy had to be hard fought and won by working people in the West, organizing to clear some political space for themselves and trying to exert more and more political power over the electoral arena. That’s how social democratic parties essentially fought for and won what democracy we have in Western countries. But unfortunately, their ability to take power through these means, through the means of mass struggle, was limited. They did not achieve anything like full democracy. What they achieved was liberal democracy. And if you think about it, liberal democracy is an oxymoron, because liberal democracy is a type of democracy that is aimed at keeping capitalism in place while permitting some limited forms of political participation, through voting, et cetera, to ordinary people.
Now, I’m not saying that this is completely without any potential to threaten the elites. It has some potential, but every sort of measure is taken to ensure, like we were saying earlier, that the votes of ordinary people do not matter. And the first and foremost of these are constitutional limits on the democratic rights of ordinary people. So there’s a limit to what majorities can do, no matter how strong they are. They cannot expropriate property, the right to property is ensured and so on. So this is the key issue.
Whereas I think that what we are seeing in China, what is reviled as authoritarianism, is actually an attempt to realize the power of ordinary people in a large and complex society. A billion people is a huge society. How do you realize some sort of people power in it? And what you see in China is the Communist Party of China pushing back against decades of China being reviled as authoritarian. Finally, they are now defending themselves and saying, look, we have our own form of democracy. We call it whole process democracy, et cetera. We won’t go into it right now, but I just want to say that this is one important thing that one should remember.
And an associated point I want to make is that people talk about neoliberal globalism, but very often I think that this idea of neoliberal globalism is really a label used by the populists, or what I would prefer to call the right-wing forces that are increasingly powerful today, to beat up the liberal establishment with. Because what they all agree about is that they want society to remain capitalist. And given that these two forces dominate the discourse, this prevents ordinary people from seeing that the very problem lies with capitalism itself, because neoliberal, financialized, globalized capitalism is the only kind of capitalism you will have. When you talk about neoliberal, global, financialized interests, they are the capitalist interests of our time, and one needs to oppose them in order to arrive at anything more progressive.
And wherever such opposition emerges, every attempt is made to discredit it. So whether it is Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders or Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for the Senate now, all of these forces are typically reviled as somehow being antisemitic, not acceptable. What was it Trump said about him, that if he were to get elected, he’d have to pass through a metal detector in order to enter the Senate? These are the sort of prejudicial things that are said about people who carry with them any whiff of progressive politics. And I think it is the extinguishing of this type of progressive politics that matters, no matter what happens today in the elections. I think a lot can happen, and we may be in for an extremely turbulent time, but at the end of the day, all this turbulence is still not the turbulence of the emergence of a genuinely democratic force.
Michael Hudson: I think you’ve summarized the context very well. You pointed at the beginning to the long fight for a social democratic party that will use public spending to increase productivity and the prosperity of the economy as a whole. There’s no social democratic party in the United States. And the fight that everyone’s talking about in America, on the front page of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, everything, is the fight in Michigan, where you have a social democrat, El-Sayed, running for senator against a Republican candidate who, I’m told, is a registered agent of Israel and is funded largely by AIPAC.
And you had El-Sayed’s rival Democrat in the primaries backing the Republicans, saying that El-Sayed is not Jewish, and not only that, he is against the fight to cleanse Israel of the Arabs, and that to oppose genocide is antisemitic. He’s an antisemite, because if Israel doesn’t kill them, they will kill the Israelis. That’s basically what she’s saying. And he’s not funded by AIPAC like I am. And that’s the badge of honour for supporting democracy, Democratic Party style, as most of our politicians are very closely aligned with that.
So that’s the issue. Well, remember, you and I talked about Michigan quite a bit two years ago in the presidential campaign, when you and I were advisors to the Green Party candidate Jill Stein. And Stein went especially to Michigan, Minnesota and other states that had very strong Arab and Islamic populations. And her point was that the Democratic Party has to basically be ended because it’s the war party. And the war, as it happens, is mounting against the Islamic populations, the Palestinian population, the Iranian population, all the way through West Asia. And very largely, I think it was the votes for Stein and the voting public who thought, yes, we’re not going to vote for the Democrats because they’re for the war, that helped tip the election to Trump in the first place.
Well, now just look at what they’re doing now. You have Trump and the Republicans pushing for a war in Iran. Trump is promising that the day after the election he’s going to wage war, and there’s talk of atomic war. He says he’s going to absolutely destroy Iran. Well, you can imagine what that war is doing to the oil prices, the fertilizer prices and the budgets of the populations in these countries. This is exactly what it is. And somehow all of this has been interwoven with the rhetoric of antisemitism, of campaign funding, of who your funders are.
And if you’re talking about who your funders are, you realize, wait, who are politicians in America in the first place? They’re factotums for their funders, who fund them because they represent the interests of their funders, and the funders are very largely the billionaires. And if there’s any kind of class warfare built into the American system, I think there’s a realization that social democracy has not been ensured by giving everyone the right to vote, if the right to vote really doesn’t count because of all the ways in which the government is set up. So there’s really very little choice here, if the right to vote is for either the Republicans or the Democrats, both of which are anti-labour, pro-war, pro-Wall Street. Well, then there isn’t any parliamentary social democratic party here, as there is in the rest of the world. And it’s the United States that is largely pulling the strings on European countries, meddling in their politics through groups like the National Endowment for Democracy and all of the other non-governmental organizations that sponsor the existing illiberal, anti-democratic parties against which the German, French and Polish populations are all fighting.
Radhika Desai: Yeah, as you were speaking, I was just thinking that in addition to the neoliberal policies that the right-wing populists as well as the so-called neoliberal globalists are all equally committed to, there is also the war. The populists claim that they are against the war. But at the same time, Trump has certainly done very little to end the war in Ukraine. He has started a new war against Iran. And all of this is, of course, further undermining the prospects for peace, development, et cetera, which is what the whole world actually wants. So while in Europe there is certainly some kind of opposition to war on the populist side, in the United States it’s very clear that once these populists are elected to power, they continue to support the war. That’s what Trump has done. That’s what Meloni has done. Meloni got elected, and look at what has happened. So clearly the right-wing forces cannot necessarily be relied on to end war.
And it seems as if all sides have become addicted to war, and this is, to me, for a number of reasons. The first is, of course, that war is a better way of giving a stimulus to the economy than any genuine improvement in the lives of ordinary people, than giving ordinary people a higher income, et cetera. Instead of that sort of demand stimulus, you might as well stimulate the economy by creating demand for weapons, because that at least has the advantage, from the point of view of those who hold wealth and influence, that their relative power over society is not diminished. Inequality in society continues and so on. So this is the preferred way of doing it. Secondly, of course, all these interests are into selling weapons abroad. Thirdly, as long as you are at war, you can continue persecuting the opposition. You can discredit them by saying that they are anti-national, that they are engaging in some kind of treason, that they are antisemitic, all of these things. For all of these reasons, I think that the Western establishments, and in many cases the so-called populist opposition to them, have all become addicted to war.
Michael Hudson: Yeah, I think that you’ve summarized it basically. So where do we go from here?
Radhika Desai: What do you think is going to happen this evening, Michael, or in the coming weeks and months, because we may not know the results for a while?
Michael Hudson: Very, very little. It’s very interesting. The pollsters for the Democrats see the Democrats winning six Senate seats and taking over the Senate. But the Republican pollsters are saying, well, wait a minute, it’s very hard to poll MAGA Republican members because they just don’t respond to people knocking on their door polling. I’ve never seen such a disagreement among pollsters before. And the question is how many people are simply not going to show up. Well, on the other hand, there’s been an enormous amount of mail-in voting, more than ever before.
And then you have Donald Trump saying, well, he’s going to disallow the votes in states that vote Democratic. And he said, well, we’re going to have ICE, the immigration authorities, at the polls throughout the country, so that if immigrants vote, and they’re not going to vote for Republicans anymore, then we’re going to frighten them away, because they may be arrested as they approach the polls. Who are you? Can we see your identification? And all of that. So you’re seeing all of this white racism against the Hispanics. And what makes it so important is that the Hispanics were very largely supporters of the Republicans. There had been a movement of support by Hispanic voters away from the Democrats to the Republicans. Well, now they see that there’s this racist profiling of them. Are they going to vote Democratic, or will they simply not vote because they’re afraid to go to the polls? Nobody knows about the turnout.
And the important thing is, whoever they vote for, apart from the personal attacks on Trump and the charade of trying to impeach him or pass laws that Trump will simply veto as president, there’s not really going to be much change. And Trump will have at least two months, and probably the rest of his term, to fight his wars and reward his campaign contributors on Wall Street and in the FIRE sector, finance, insurance and real estate, and the artificial intelligence sector, and the oil industry, and continue to fight non-oil-based wind power and solar power, and do all the bad things that he’s doing. There’s no indication that this is going to be interrupted at all. So all that it’s really doing is inflaming the country and making it as frustrated here as it is in Europe.
And the one thing that is unknown is how much the Democratic Party will fight against the Bernie Sanders democratic socialists. That’s really the key. And the Democratic National Committee says we have to purge the Democrats of socialism. Socialism is bad. It’s not democratic, because it’s not what the oligarchy, our backers, vote for. And so you’re back to the property and wealth qualification for voting that you talked about.
Radhika Desai: Yeah, this is so true. I’d just like to make two or three points and then ask you to make a final set of remarks, Michael, because we should draw this to a close. So here are my points. In addition to all the points that you made, which I completely agree with, there may be low turnout, and the Democratic Party is doing any possibility of progressive politics no favours by attacking the democratic socialists and so on. I would add that another big element in the situation is how Trump will react to the blue wave. Supposing there is indeed a blue wave, supposing he loses control of Congress, is he going to react by trying to cast doubt on the election? Is he going to try to say that this election is not acceptable?
Now, there is one interesting and potential ray of hope on this front. On the one hand, Trump no longer has a Justice Department with any leadership capable of standing up to him. But what we have seen is that the Supreme Court has stood up to him on a number of counts where he has tried to rig the elections in his favour through one means or another. So I think that that is a good thing. Trump could create a lot of mayhem. Trump could create the United States’ own constitutional crisis, as if he hasn’t already created a constitutional crisis, by the way, with all his heavy reliance on executive orders, his marginalization of Congress and all these things. But nevertheless, I think Trump could create a constitutional crisis of a new sort by challenging the results of the election. I think that is a possibility.
But beyond that, let me just make a couple of reflections. Number one, the war that the Democratic Party establishment is fighting against the democratic socialists within their own fold is not to be underestimated. James Carville, the architect of the Clintons’ electoral victories, the guy who said “it’s the economy, stupid”, has come out and said he’d rather see Congress remain in Republican hands than see the large number of democratic socialists who have been nominated as candidates actually win office, because for him that would be turning the Democratic Party over to a bunch of socialists. So you can see the kind of venom that is directed against any serious socialist alternative. And this reminds me, by the way, of the British election, I can’t remember whether it was 2017 or 2019, in which the Labour Party establishment itself worked to ensure that the Labour Party was defeated, because they hoped that this would create an opening for them to unseat Jeremy Corbyn as leader. They so hated him that they would rather see the party defeated than have him as a potential prime minister. That’s what it reminds me of.
But the second is a much bigger point I want to make. The United States keeps extolling its own virtues as a great democratic nation. The United States was born as a genocidal, patriarchal, slaving oligarchy. That’s essentially its birth. And Professor Gerald Horne has shown that the key motivator of the American Revolution was not any desire for no taxation without representation, et cetera, but the knowledge that Britain was thinking about ending slavery, because it was having too many problems keeping control over the slaves in the Caribbean islands. They were revolting too much, and so maybe the solution would be to end slavery. The US did not wish to end slavery. So in a certain sense, the American Declaration of Independence, which is 250 years old this year, was really more like a Rhodesian unilateral declaration of independence than some kind of great heroic milestone in the history of human freedom.
And from that point onwards, the United States remained highly restricted, even though the franchise was extended in various ways over time, thanks to the struggles of ordinary people. Restrictions on the right of African Americans to vote remained in place until the civil rights struggles of the 60s managed to remove them. So you could really say that the United States only became a proper democracy, in the minimal sense of having one person, one vote in an effective manner, in the 1970s. And then, no sooner does this happen than the Republican Party in particular, already with Reagan, is engaging in all sorts of exercises in voter suppression. So this is what you have to remember when people say that the United States is some great democratic country.
Michael Hudson: Well, it wasn’t only the rights of the African Americans that were opposed by the writers of the American Constitution. What the slave owners feared was that a majority of voters would vote against slavery. And they said they feared the industrialization of the North. They said if America becomes an industrial power, as Alexander Hamilton wanted it to be, there is going to be concentration, urbanization, the population will grow there, and not only will they vote to abolish slavery, but all this population is going to have to be fed. And they’re going to buy grain to feed themselves, and that’s going to raise grain prices, and that will increase our cost of feeding our slaves. And if we have to feed our slaves at higher prices set by the urban northern demand, then we’re not going to be able to undersell our cotton and tobacco to Europe anymore. And there was a book, Cotton Is King, all about this. All of this was said very explicitly.
And so not only was slavery supported, but any popular majority for any economic or social purpose had to be able to be blocked by a combination of the Senate and the Supreme Court ruling on the original Constitution. And of course, any court talking about the original Constitution can interpret it in any way it wants according to the prevailing political winds, which is what you have today. So that fight by the Southerners is what made the United States political system so undemocratic from the start. And in Europe, it became democratic largely because Britain’s industrial classes and others said, well, our fight is to lower the cost of production, and our fight is against the hereditary landlord class. We need labour support. And that’s why in Britain they kept pressing to extend the vote to labour, to get its support against the landlord class, saying the price of your food is going to go down if we get rid of the Corn Laws. But that alliance between industrial capital, labour and the financial sector that was backing industry at that time obviously became obsolete by the twentieth century.
Radhika Desai: Michael, first of all, let me say that the point you made about the consequences of industrialization, which the slave-owning Southerners opposed right from the beginning, is such an important addition to the point that I was making. But overall, I think what we are discussing, whether we are looking at Poland or at the United States or generally at Europe, is really the difficulty of calling capitalist societies democratic. And I think that this has been the sense of what we’ve discussed today. So Michael, thanks very much for coming on. We’ll see each other again in another fortnight. Meanwhile, I hope that our listeners have enjoyed this conversation, and until next time, folks, goodbye.
