The coming 2020 election will mark a crossroads for the American two party system and impending end of the bipartisan political duopoly that has governed the US since the failure of Radical Reconstruction in the 19th Century. The basic division between liberals and conservatives is about to be sublated into their higher logical synthesis. The Democratic and Republican parties are case studies in Hegelian-Marxist dialectical logic illustrating two fundamental laws: the unity of opposites and the negation of the negation.
Before the civil war the DP stood for slavery and the maintenance of the status quo while the Republican party opposed slavery and would have taken measures to modify the status quo and set in motion a dialectic that would,have eventuated, perhaps in a generation to two, in a slow process of emancipation. After the collapse of Radical Reconstruction the Democrats slowly turned into what is now termed “liberalism” especially after the FDR years and LBJ’s capitulation to the Civil Rights agenda of the 1960s.
The pro-slavery and then segregationist DP negated its previous incarnation and changed into its opposite, while at the same time the Republicans negated their previous incarnation as an anti-slavery group and became supporters of the anti-Black and poor people policies of resurgent crypto-segregationists in the South and their allies: under the false flag of “conservatism” they also turned into their opposite.
For the last 75 years or so politics in the US has been a bipartisan condominium run by the DP (left wing liberals) and the RP (right wing conservatives) resulting in a basic centrist governing class.
As the history of the socialist movement shows in periods of crisis liberalism and conservatism begin to break down and liberals breakup and move up a notch in their logical progression and move in the direction of socialism or they defect to the conservatives. The same sort of progression occurs in the RP and the conservatives break up and move in the direction of fascism (their ultimate destination) under the banner of the ultra-right.
What is clear is that the center no longer holds and attempts to resuscitate it are ultimately going to be futile. The choices between the road that ends in socialism and the road that leads in fascism are clearly set before us as well as the dead end of centrism offered by political reactionaries governed by the delusion they can recreate the old bipartisan duopoly. These three positions are personalized by Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden respectively. The predictable outcome of this conflict, based on the current existential situation which is that the DP is conflicted between the Sanders road and deadender Biden, while the Trump roaders are unified and undivided despite some minor internal conflicts, is that a Biden nomination will split the DP and strengthen the forces of fascism and could lead to a Trump victory.
Whether we like it or not, no matter our subjective intentions, any support for Biden objectively strengthens the forces of fascism in the US and we must at all costs support Bernie Sanders or almost any another Democrat if it comes to that, than Biden and if Biden wins the nomination he will split the DP and we will have to urge Sanders to run as an independent and lay the foundations for a real working class Third Party to emerge in the US on the model of the emergence of the Republican Party out of the dissolution of the Whigs and Free Soil Democrats. This would be a radical Revolutionary move for the CPUSA and no matter who would win in 2020, Biden or Trump, it would be in the long term interests of the working class to have a mass Third Party created to further their interests and it is unthinkable that we would compromise opportunistically our commitment to Marxism-Leninism by telling the working people to support their class enemy Biden as the lesser of two evils and thus, however unintentionally, give aid and comfort to the forces of fascism.
