Guest Writer: Brunch, Genocide, and the Death of Democracy

Editor’s Note from Clayton:
Every now and then, we feature a guest blogger here on the hallowed pages of Cincinnati Delusion. This post comes from Chris Sutton, a lefty friend whose thoughts you can follow on Twitter/X. In this piece, he shares how everyday people can drive meaningful, incremental change — one day at a time. It’s a lengthy piece, but one that you will certainly enjoy.

Brunch, Genocide, and the Death of Democracy

By: Chris Sutton

One of the cool things about being plugged into politics is that a simpleton like myself can mask pseudo-intellectualism with big fancy concepts, spinning the otherwise banal into something that sounds generally interesting. As a self-described “boring person” who never has much to add to the general social interaction amongst friends unless it involves the depressingly hopeless take like “the Bengals might do it this year” or some Deeply Online thing no normal, well-adjusted person could be paid to care about, I usually have to dress up even the most modest conversational offerings in something that at least makes me sound less stupid.

For example, my friends who know I follow politics might ask me “wow did you see that thing Trump did?” And instead of going “Yeah, that’s crazy” my response would sound more like: “Well, Marx argues that societal change and historical progress result from the ongoing struggle and resolution of these consequences. It’s akin to someone like Charlie Day believing he’s a genius because he learned Mandarin, created complicated scientific formulas, and even began to casually glance at War and Peace. You know - smart guy stuff. This particular moment of solipsism by Charlie convinces me by proxy that if I can reshape the hackneyed opinion of “Trump is gross and bad” into something that feels more layered, then in turn, perhaps I do add value to the general discourse. It’s a pretty hack bit, one that doesn’t ever really fool people, let alone interest them. My friends are just nice and nod along. However, there are folks probably wondering “how the hell  did we get to this point of looming fascism in America?” I believe a deeper political analysis can actually prove to be worthwhile to pursue.

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Typically, we accredit someone’s ethics to what political party they affiliate with. And while electoral politics does indeed play a role in the extension of one’s values, American politicos tend to place an outsized worth on the box you tick every couple of years in the voting booth. In true US of A fashion we have diluted voting from a prestigious democratic privilege into a consumer good. Those of us who have worked within the Maw of Hell known as electoral politics come out on the other side recognizing there’s little more to your vote than arguing blue text vs green text. Meanwhile, most Americans still generally view voting as the most important practice of civic participation. But does any of this even matter with what we’re seeing in today’s political terrain? Regardless of your political affiliation, it feels like the wolves are running the hen house, and the helplessness we are all collectively feeling is being translated into anger. In just under a decade we went from Hope and Change to “well, 99% of Hitler is still better than 100% Hitler.” Dark times indeed and this is where I’d argue that a little bit of political analysis via Marxism, could actually be beneficial - specifically the idea of political economy and dialectical materialism.

The concepts themselves are pretty expansive, but for the sake of this essay and everyone’s self-diagnosed, neurodivergent crappy attention span, the TL;DR version is that nothing happens in a vacuum. Political movements, social struggles, laws, etc. are all built on the sum of the parts of the political actors in a society that essentially produce outcomes. Think of it like how an atom has both a negative and a positive charge - there is no ethical or moral demarcation of either, but both are necessary to create a whole. It is up to the political actor to ascribe the “good” and “bad” to said set of outcomes.

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Dialectical materialism helps us understand the general contradictions that are inherent in capitalism. Contradictions are essentially the force that moves an economy and society along, but within it, creates inherent struggles. Take for example, you as a laborer, only have your skills, physical body, and services, to sell to an employer in exchange for money. The capitalist - i.e. the owner of the business that you are employed at, puts a market value at your labor (a wage) and regardless of the amount of profit you produce for them, there will always be a cut for them. Suspending whether or not that’s right or fair, we can see the immediate contradiction between the worker who produces value, and the owner who keeps the surplus value (money after wages are paid) - this is a rudimentary example, but in a system that is dependent on continual growth, either wages or profits must go down. And you can guess who usually wins that argument. Thus, you have a contradiction (as well as a good argument for unions). And after a long enough time, these contradictions help shape the narrative to produce outcomes. It’s why viewing Trump as a natural conclusion vs. an anomaly is so crucial to mounting any sort of legitimate opposition, one that cannot in its current state, be the Democratic Party or Never-Trump conservatives. Let’s explore why, shall we?

If you’re a Republican, you may believe that a global network of rich pedophiles and Globalists (codeword for anti-semitism) control the networks, the media, the banks, and immigration system. In addition to that, Joe Biden was letting trans communist immigrants into the country unabated to steal your job as the shift manager at the local Kroger. For Liberals, Trump is president again, and your inherent empathic sensibilities view a lot of what he’s doing as bad. It feels like no matter how many @StillWeRise_ slide decks you post online to “own” your Q-pilled Uncle, he keeps ruining the family function, refusing to play the annual game of cards because Rummikub is actually “woke." At this point, anyone on what is considered the “political left” (a term I use begrudgingly) is struggling to cobble together any semblance of strategy to combat the accelerating reality that we do indeed live under the fascist rule of the stupidest, most perverted freaks alive. 

The Left-left (Your Soviet flag waving, DSA card carrying Bernie bro dead-ender types like myself) are still analyzing the Bernie 2020 phenomenon in a Quixotic quest to find the One Bad Actor that contributed to his loss. And the Resist Liberal folks (The I Named My Dog After Michelle Obama-types) lay the entirety of sins at the feet of “Mango Mussolini” because apparently, bad politics only started in 2015. The best praxis Leftists can produce is hosting weekly protests, meetings for dumbed down struggle sessions, and posting deep fried jpegs of quotes from Communist thinkers no one has ever heard of. Meanwhile, Democrats and their loyalists are laser focused on assuring that the idea of Healthcare as a right is DOA, and anyone who voted for Zohran is actually a Hamas sympathizer loyal to the caliphate. The biggest act of resistance we’ve seen from The Democrats thus-far was Chuck Schumer bragging about using the Byrd rule to rename Trump’s Magnum Opus from The One Big Beautiful Bill to just “The Act” - a move so bold it made The Harper’s Ferry raid look like child’s play.

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To be clear, I don’t want to downplay anyone’s efforts. I certainly haven’t been successful in bringing about the Cincinnati Maoist Land Reform I have dreamt about since 2016, despite my best efforts. We’ve seen some wins from ballot measures that protected abortion in Kentucky and Kansas. We saw some states vote to increase minimum wages and electorally we’ve seen wins from folks like Omar Fateh in Minneapolis and Zohran Mamdani in NYC. Union militancy is on the upswing as workers are fighting for their rights to a decent job. Every action matters in the current resistance. But it feels like the wheels are spinning and the car keeps sinking into quicksand. And unfortunately, it seems like it’s gotten worse with the Horrendous Ugly Bill being signed. To the surprise of literally no one, Trump and Congressional Republicans were able to pass this seminal work with relative ease after a few Republican holdouts sat down like the good lap dogs they are and kissed the ring. Even Lisa Murkowski, who lamented the bill, fell in line despite admitting it would hurt most Americans, including her constituents. Democrats, outside of Comrade Chuck Schumer, are nowhere to be found in fighting this. Apparently, the looming specter of Sharia Law (I.e. free public transit) in New York City is a greater threat to the country than thousands of Americans losing the ability to afford their lifesaving medication. Swag connoisseur and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been taking some selfies around Brooklyn after taking a victory lap giving the longest Congressional speech on losing ever recorded. I don’t think it’s helping, but it definitely makes the haters (me) mad, and that counts for something I reckon.

But for the regular Joe, the freakout over the Voluptuous Delicious Bill is warranted. Without getting too mired into the specifics, that’s for nerds to argue about - this bill is very bad for most people. It kicks a ton of people off of the Medicaid rolls, essentially defunds entire sectors of our healthcare industry who rely on Medicaid for funding (35 Hospitals in my soon-to-be home of Kentucky could close from this bill alone), boosts the budget to ICE which gives it more money than most country’s entire military budgets, and gives another gigantic permanent tax break to the rich. It’s not hyperbole to say that unless you’re a billionaire or some sick freak who gets off by cosplaying as a Tom Clancy character to arrest an immigrant grandmother whose asylum paperwork was filed incorrectly, this bill doesn’t benefit you at all. However, as disgusting as it is, the bill really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Like Trump’s election (and re-election), it’s more so a natural conclusion of the conditions that 40+ years of staunch neoliberalism has created. Obama had no problem boosting the DHS budget, a department Bush created post 9/11, as well as re-signing his tax cuts. All of this was tee'd up by Clinton and Carter’s market deregulation and NAFTA which ruined both local and foreign economies, which immiserated American workers and caused an influx of cheap migrant labor from Central and South America. That’s an essay in and of itself, but for another time. 

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Trump is really only an aberration in that he’s gauche enough to brag about the pain he and his sycophants are going to cause, rather than couching it in the usual soft peddling with phrases like the dignity of “earning entitlements” or benevolence of trickle-down Reaganomics which has been repackaged under the auspices of the “Abundance Agenda.” Even for as much of a home run as going against NAFTA should have been in 2016, Hillary, despite always being called “the smartest person in the room” couldn’t figure out that her support of the Trans Pacific Partnership was actually a bad thing. She rightly changed her tune, but only after getting pummeled by Trump and Republicans for it.

Trump is a rich, stupid nepo-baby that by all measures should be unrelatable to your average American. But even for someone like myself who would happily entomb him alive under 2 tons of cement, I have to admit - the man has charisma. He’s a bold-faced liar but at least he doesn’t talk like a robot. Admittedly, the dude is pretty funny in the most bizarre way, and people like funny. If the world was created by a just God, he would be hosting a Bar Rescue style interior decorating show, making some suburban mom cry for putting some “Live, Laugh, Love” script over her rustic furniture - calling it “boring, ugly, disgusting really.” And even a good journalist's nastiest breaking ball “gotcha” question can’t strike him out looking. He’s called Teflon Don for a reason. The tweet “Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wiggle his way out of THIS jam! *Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily* Ah, Well. Nevertheless” is a prescient north star to remember any time you think “well, this will surely bring Trump down.”

Trump’s MAGA appeal was racism first and foremost. But what’s less talked about in the #Resistance circles is that Trump was admittedly good at capturing people’s anger, naming specific enemies (even if they were ironically people exactly like him, not immigrants and trans people) and saying they were going to arrest them in a military-style junta. In contrast to a lot of his Republican counterparts or bi-partisan predecessors, Trump does have a unique ability to read a room, gauge its temperature and reflect a sentiment accordingly. Threatening to jail large swaths of the populace is a political consultant's worst nightmare, but honestly, it does play well to a country atrophying under the weight of its own political economy. Unlike the mealy-mouthed centrist knuckleheads who claim that “everyone could be a winner under our current conditions if we just vote for the correct thing.” Trump understands that there are going to be winners and losers. And frankly, the anger in most folks is palpable. MAGA wants their enemies' heads on pikes, and Trump is willing to do the dirty work as a “man on the inside” to give them the names.

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And it’s not for nothing that the “Never Trump” Republicans like the bozos at the Lincoln Project, or buffoonish leeches like Mitt Romney, are completely useless. The only reason they don’t like Trump is because he’s a loud-mouthed idiot that makes their Nazi-coded agenda sound as evil and depraved as it is. While Trump is anything but an outsider, he receives that status from voters and supporters because he’s willing to openly clown people in his own party. He’s always been a political operative and close to “The Swamp” but because he ran a campaign branded as essentially “your life sucks because the party you support is run by pansies with ugly wives,” people gravitated towards that. Is Trump actually a fighter? No, but he is petty and vindictive and most Americans, specifically Republicans, can’t seem to tell the difference. Either way you want to cut it, people are fed up. It’s why the liberal response to the Trump/MAGA movement writ-large has been so ineffective, infuriating, and just downright depressing. The crux of what I’ve wanted to discuss really has a lot more to do with liberals, leftists, and the worst of the bunch - the never-Trump conservatives. The point of bringing up the Marxist way of analyzing political action and molding it into voting, is that to reckon with the fact that Trump is a natural progression and not an abnormality, requires both a dialectical examination as well as just some plain old soul searching.

In 2017, an image made the rounds on the internet of a sign at the Women’s March rally that read “If Hillary Were President, We’d Be At Brunch.” A lot of folks cheered and shared it on social media, myself and some others groaned and rolled their eyes, but I don’t know how many of us actually saw that as a harbinger of what to expect in the next decade. The Onion itself couldn’t have parodied the resistance to Trump/MAGA/whatever, better. It perfectly encapsulated the enervation of how Democrats, their voters, and the losers like the grifters at the Lincoln Project would react. To liberals, so long as the president handles the concentration camps, mass deportations, killing people overseas, etc. with grace and dignity, we can largely ignore it, and in most cases, co-sign it (by voting). Maybe in another essay we can dive a bit deeper into how the Democrats and their base essentially tee up the Republicans to enact or exacerbate the abhorrent things we see, but we can look at just a few key examples. Take Tom Homan: the current acting Border Czar of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement also known as ICE - or more accurately, the American Gestapo. Homan has been the architect of everything from the child separation policy to what’s now known as “Alligator Alcatraz” - an immigrant detention center in South Florida that has a literal moat. Very Cool.

Homan was an Obama appointee to the Associate Director of ICE and began pushing the idea of child separation as a policy in 2014. He explicitly stated that the goal of separation was to deter immigrants from coming to the US. Something Stephen Miller, the actual ugliest ghoul ever conceived, has also echoed. While Obama was reluctant to enact that particular policy, it was only met with consternation for its optics, not its goal. The Obama administration, in an attempt to appease centrist Democrats and appeal to Conservatives, pivoted to ramping up building detention facilities, expanding the national surveillance apparatus (used with the a-ok from Bush’s Patriot Act and NSA) and shoveling millions into the hiring and training of more ICE officers. The Obama administration believed that by fast tracking deportations of what they called “unlawful residents” and targeting folks who “are believed to have committed felonies or be involved in organized crime” this could both quell the cries from Republicans about his “open border policies” and placate Democrats that still ranked border security as a top election issue.

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The problem is, when you build a lot of detention facilities that are owned by private corporations like GEO group, private prison operators have investors that expect an ROI. This in turn balloons the budgets of rogue agencies like ICE that are dependent on quotas for said funding. The delineation between who is just overstaying their visa vs who is an MS-13 kingpin gets foggy really quickly. The result was the Obama administration deporting vastly more people than his successor in the Trump administration. And the kicker is, whether you put families together in internment camps or separate them upon arrest, the deportations in and of themselves become family separation vicariously. To their credit, immigration and civil rights organizations were raising the alarm about where these policies would lead. Again - these things do not dissipate with new regimes, but rather build on each other. Trump could not have done Alligator Alcatraz without his bi-partisan predecessors setting in motion the conditions and infrastructure to eventually enact it. Your average Vote Blue No Matter Who, RBG shirt wearing wine mom will still wax poetically about the Obama administration, but even selective memory doesn’t erase the fact he was nicknamed the “Deporter in Chief” for a reason. Worse, still, is the new liberal mantra “FAFO” or F*** Around and Find Out. It’s a term I’ve seen being used to rip on everything bad that happens to liberals' political enemies. The children of Texas families who died in the recent Kerrville flood are being blamed because their state voted for Trump and Abbott. A town in Kansas became a Democrat FAFO punching bag because its only regional hospital will close - which apparently they deserve, because 75% of its residents voted for Trump. I didn’t realize that children, the largest recipient of medicaid, are meant to bear the sins of their parent’s vote. It’s also been used to dance on the graves of Palestinian children because people did not want to vote for Kamala Harris due to her endorsement of Biden’s genocidal policies. For what it’s worth, 3rd party voters would not have made up the difference by which she lost.

When I use the term political parties, I mean the orgy of politicians, consultants, lobbyists, and the paid cheerleaders working within the Superstructural circus tent that makes a political party. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that both parties want to see their enemies tarred and feathered. Republicans want it by firing squad, whereas Democrats, the managerial types they are, want to make sure the paperwork is submitted before they liquidate Republicans to some offshore labor camp to build more Sweet Greens and 5 over 1’s. At this point, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person working for either party actually doing anything that isn’t directly their own personal best interest. I don’t mean that in the goofy, anarchist punk rock “all politicians are phony and none of this matters” trope - I mean that in the “the current system does not incentivize people to do so” type. There are obviously exceptions, but how effective can those exceptions be at shifting the foundation the party is reliant on? Voters, on the other hand, are a different ballgame. And if you’ve made it this far, this would be the one takeaway I would press. Since I do consider myself on the “left” of the political spectrum, I don’t really know how to appeal, nor do I care to pander to Republicans. I’m not interested in a Red Brown alliance, and frankly, if Elon Musk could ship them off to Mars to live in their Ayn Rand utopia, I’d be okay with that. Personally, I’d like to live in a society where everyone’s needs like housing, food, healthcare, and safety were met without condition to their value what they produce as a worker, their sexuality, or their immigration status. And I’d like a political project to reflect that.

Unless you own a ski doo dealership or inherited daddy’s fortune, we can find some common ground that we’re both getting screwed by capitalism, and the people who pay us to make them money aren’t paying us nearly enough. If Republicans are upset that things cost more and it seems harder and harder to get by, they aren’t wrong. But blame our economic system, not immigrants or trans people. Crony capitalism is just capitalism and it’s throwing us all under the bus and your boss is the driver. Republicans are obviously hostile to the idea that capitalism is the problem, but I do not think the Democrats are the party that’s going to wholesale abolish it and rebuild an equitable society either. Why would they? Ever since Clintonism and the party reformation of the 90’s, it has no incentive to. See, what generally frustrates me as both a political observer and an unwilling participant in late stage capitalism, is that no matter how much the Democratic Party is willing to “show us who they are,” folks don’t want to “believe it.” As writer Matthew Barrad puts it: “The America that Obama left behind is the same America that made Trump president.” This is perfectly apt for Biden as well. Poll after poll showed that the two most important issues for voters across the board were the economy and immigration with the Genocide in Gaza being the number 1 issue for undecided voters. What did the Democrats decide to do about any of those things besides exacerbating those problems? The Biden administration, to a small extent, tried the Build Back Better plan, but it was stripped damn near bare to the bone, and only small provisions made it into the Inflation Reduction Act. Insofar as immigration, Biden’s administration continued increases in funding to DHS and ICE. Additionally, the Biden administration also recorded more deportations than Trump’s first term and continued both Title 42 and child separation policies. When Kamala finally got the reins, her first ad was even cut with ICE agents citing the need for tougher borders, and Democrats ran on Trump as being soft on immigration! I mean seriously man, what the hell? And instead of the voters holding their party accountable, they pivoted to scolding holdouts for failing to want to “fight fascism via the voting booth” (I say that in jest for what should be obvious reasons.)

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Gaza and the genocide itself deserves it’s own write up, but suffice to say, what liberals were okay with happening to Palestinians is coming home to roost. I have seen no shortage of that Sharon McMahon lady self quote that’s something to the degree of “Every atrocity in history began with someone deciding who counts as human” which is objectively true. But scroll a few tiles down and she chalks up dead Palestinian women and children blown up by US bombs as a “single, separate, issue voters need to consider in November.” Hmmm.. The Imperial Boomerang, an idea coined by theorist Aimé Césaire and explored in great relevance to Western political economy by the late Mike Davis is something liberals need to understand quickly. Fascism is just imperialism turned inward, and while I would argue America has always been fascist to some degree, the slow-burn of our emaciating structures of Democracy are now accelerating to a degree that can’t hold much longer. The Big Beautiful Bill’s budget for ICE is signaling that the wars we fought and funded in the Middle East, Latin America, and Indochina are now coming home.

Part of being a Commie is wanting both your bread and your roses. We all desire to have our needs met, a good quality of life, as well as the dignity and beauty life can provide us. And we can have it. But we have to get serious about what that looks like in the coming future. I would argue first, it requires a long, hard look at yourself as a political actor. If you’re someone who believes in the same things as I do, the deck is stacked against you. I don’t mean that in the bastardized Identity Politics that is commonly used as Oppression Olympics (please for the love of God read the Combahee River Collective statement people!) - I mean that neither party has your best interests in mind. The point of discussing materialism and political economy is to recognize that both parties, with a few exceptions, are largely the same. It is the political actors, ourselves, who determine what we are and aren’t willing to accept. Why is deportation under a Democrat better than under a Republican? Is genocide really more palatable if it’s a woman co-signing it? It’s fine to be angry that your family or friends that voted for Trump are cheering on ICE rounding up migrants in droves to “protect American security.” But why then, is a party saying that mass starvation of Palestinians is the price to pay to protect civil liberties here? It’s a race to the bottom that we’re all losing. Secondly, stop settling. Do not let anyone browbeat you into choosing 99% Hitler. There is no “vote them in and push them left.” That isn’t a thing, it won’t be a thing, it never was a thing.

The Democratic Party is a rotted corpse of corporate stooges who will pink/greenwash any cause to get a cheap vote then hang you out to dry when some snot-nosed pollster finds you inconvenient to winning a house race in a red +2 district. Any party that can justify genocide simply to win an election where they’ll be the ones tough on the border is not a party you can change from the inside for the better, and that’s a reality the masses need to understand. Lastly, and most importantly; get organized. Voting is and can be a good force for change. But your labor, whether at work or through volunteering is your most important political tool. Find groups that support causes you believe in and sacrifice a brunch or two to go canvas a neighborhood. Work with mutual aid groups and food distribution groups. If a local union strikes, join the picket line with them. Go to protests (ones that aren’t organized with your local police department's permission.) If you rent, distribute renter’s rights pamphlets and talk to your neighbors about how terrible your landlord is. Post online - I’ll argue until I’m dead that posting is praxis! There’s a million different things you can do - just do something other than woke scold your uncle. Social media is a great tool to find groups amenable to whatever cause you’re passionate about.

The atrocities that we’re seeing won’t stop unless millions of people decide, en masse, to take direct action. The foundation of this country is as weak as it’s been since the end of the Civil War, and the contradictions of capital have never been more stark. We can learn from the lessons of Reconstruction that trying to have our cake and eat it too - i.e. capitalism and democracy - is a fool's errand. We deserve so much better than what we have now. But it won’t be given to us through the benevolence of smooth talking politicians wedded to capital- we’ll have to take it.

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