‘An inch from civil war’: a near miss for US capitalism

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has accelerated the polarisation of American society, as the Republican presidential candidate dodged death by the narrowest of margins. But it wasn’t just Trump who dodged a bullet. The entire country went right up to the edge of a precipice, before taking half a step back. As the title of a Financial Times article put it: “America is staring into the abyss”.

The thinking representatives of capital understand this and are gripped by feelings of dread. The near-miss on Saturday has shown how easily the political situation could spiral out of all control.

An inch away from ‘civil war’

What do we know about the shooter? Remarkably little. We know his name was Thomas Crooks, a 20-year-old man from a middle-class suburb who lived with his parents. None of his neighbours seemed to know him. He was, apparently, a polite man; he would sit alone on the bus. Registered to vote as a Republican, he had apparently donated $15 to a Democratic Party campaign in 2021. This is the kind of information we are getting. His former classmates described him as a boy who avoided attention. His employer described him as a competent worker. And that is it.

It may be that the investigation into his online presence will reveal a political motive, but none has come to light so far. It has been suggested, and it is not implausible, that he was one of more than 40 million US citizens with an untreated mental illness.

All the indications are that he was a solitary man, a loner acting on his own initiative. He was seemingly quite unremarkable. And yet, for a few moments, the fate of the most powerful country on Earth, home to 330 million people, rested on the steadiness of Thomas Crooks’ trigger finger.

The thought that immediately passed through everyone’s mind upon hearing the news was: what if that finger had been a fraction steadier? What if Trump had not turned his head at that precise moment?

The rage at the Pennsylvania rally, captured by a BBC journalist, spoke for itself. “They shot first. This is war!” shouted one. “Civil war,” another simply yelled. Many others had the same thought. “Civil war” was soon trending on Twitter, and the search term “American Civil War” spiked to a one-year high in Google’s analytics. Numerous headlines ran a variant of the exact same title: “An inch from civil war”.

It’s pure speculation to imagine what might have happened had that bullet hit its target. An immense combustible rage would have ignited, that much is certain. There would have been mass protests of Trump’s supporters. In a country with 44 million AR-15 rifles like the one wielded by Crooks, no doubt many would have been armed and looking for revenge. If shooting had started, the National Guard and perhaps even the US Army might have been sent in.

Politicians, including many Republicans, would have desperately tried to cool things down, while others would have tried to whip things up. Many senior Republicans have already hinted that this was a Democratic Party-orchestrated shooting. Would the arrest of prominent Republicans whipping up chaos have followed? Amidst such an atmosphere, the Republican National Convention would have been charged with choosing Trump’s successor.

All this is speculation, of course. One day it might make an interesting premise for a film in the ‘alternate history’ genre. But it all suddenly seems very plausible.

Biden’s presidency, which started with the 6 January storming of the Capitol building in 2021, very nearly ended, if not with all-out civil war, then with another 6 January raised by a factor of 10.

This is the geometrical factor with which polarisation in US society has risen in the course of four years. On the eve of a new Trump administration, which now seems all but inevitable, the tensions tearing the fabric of bourgeois democracy in America are at a level unseen in generations.

A history of violence

Biden took to the airwaves to make a statement so jarringly at odds with reality that in any other context it would be thought of as a piece of dark irony / Image: U.S. Secretary of Defense, Flickr

Since Saturday, a chill has run down the spines of America’s rulers. This wasn’t just a lucky near miss for Trump, this was a lucky near miss for all of them.

Biden urged calm, for Americans to “lower the temperature”. Even Trump – who proved remarkably unfazed by the shooting itself – seemed to have felt a chill in the pit of his stomach at the thought of what very nearly unfolded. He quickly put out calls for ‘national unity’, and his team was told to stay off social media in order to cool things down.

And then Biden took to the airwaves to make a statement so jarringly at odds with reality that in any other context it would be thought of as a piece of dark irony:

“The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.”

This is a real gem – especially in the context of the US-backed mass genocide presently ongoing in Gaza… about which we hear no such condemnations from western leaders. In his speech to the nation, Biden unashamedly brushed aside the long history of political violence in the US – of genocide, slavery and imperialist war upon which US capitalism rests. Even leaving that aside, assassination and political violence, up to the point of civil war, have a long history – one might even say, a long tradition – in the United States.

But the present situation is different, even by US standards. As the Financial Times put it in a lead opinion piece:

“It is always tempting to point out that guns and political murder are a staple of the US republic. That is true compared with other democracies. But the conditions in 2024 are unique. A bullet almost killed the man who is vowing retribution if he is returned to the White House. A spirit of vengeance is haunting America.”

Among millions of middle and working-class Americans there is indeed a ‘spirit of vengeance,’ and, in fact, of pure hatred: hatred of corrupt politicians, of the ‘establishment’, of dark forces that millions do not necessarily understand, but which they distinctly feel ranged against them.

It isn’t hard to understand Trump’s appeal for a section of them. Hundreds of millions are watching the purchasing power of their wages decline. They see good jobs becoming scarce. They have given up the dream of owning a home. They dread the prospect of illness, responsible for two thirds of bankruptcies in the US. The future represents a bleak, terrifying unknown for them. And all the while, they watch the Biden Administration spend untold billions on wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

They haven’t understood why this is happening, but they hate the establishment that they see as responsible. And many among them see Trump as an arsonist they can send into the White House to burn the system down from the inside.

American ‘democracy’ is in decay

Of course, Trump, the demagogue, has no solutions to the real problems that Americans face. He makes all kinds of promises. He promises revenge against the establishment, to purge the state, and to represent the ‘little man’.

He points the finger at the ‘deep state’, the ‘woke mob’, China, immigrants – at every bogey, in fact, except the rotten bourgeois system of which he is a part and which is really responsible for the ills of US society. These are no answers at all, but who else is giving any answers?

In defiance of what millions know to be the hard realities of life under capitalism today, Biden and the Democrats trumpet declining inflation and booming GDP figures, as if to tell American workers: “Are you stupid? Can’t you see that things are getting better?”

The liberals sneer at those who swallow Trump’s demagoguery as credulous fools, unable to recognise ‘fake news’ when they see it. They need a reliable, ‘sensible’ pair of hands to rule in their collective interests, especially in such volatile conditions. So they’ve thrown everything they can at Trump, who is much too much of a maverick, who stands for his own egotistical interests, which are at odds with those of the rest of his class.

Yet, with the exception of a few more perspicacious strategists of capital, they cannot understand why everything they throw at him seems to rebound to his political advantage, whilst sowing cynicism and distrust of the whole setup of capitalist democracy.

Already, before Saturday, one in three Americans believe the 2020 election was rigged. Events since 2020 have seemed to confirm for millions that there’s an establishment plot against Trump and, by extension, against them. Trump supporters have watched one of his allies after another sent to prison on various charges, Steve Bannon being the most recent. Then there’s Trump himself, who has faced four different criminal charges.

A state-sponsored assassination attempt would have been insanity precisely because it is not in the interest of the US ruling class. But Trump supporters are more than ready to believe it. When we add to this the almost incomprehensible fact that the shooter was able, in plain sight, to climb on a roof a mere 150 metres from the main stage in Butler, PA – the conspiracy theories write themselves.

A revolutionary communist alternative

This is the level of legitimacy that the state, ‘democracy’, and the ruling class has among tens of millions of Americans, a situation that would have been unthinkable just a couple of decades ago. The root cause of this crisis of legitimacy of all bourgeois institutions is to be found in the crisis of capitalism, which in the US is compounded by the relative decline of its might as an imperialist power.

Far from agreeing with Biden that political violence has no place in the United State, one in five citizens today believe that violence is necessary to get the country back on track. 41 percent think that civil war is inevitable in the next five years.

Trump has managed to capture a certain portion of that anger, which is really distorted class anger, fundamentally stemming from the rottenness of the capitalist system. He sells a racist demagogy with a rosy-tinted view of the past when workers supposedly had it so much better – a past that, at any rate, will never return under this dying capitalist system. More importantly, he doesn’t come across as a clean-cut ‘politician’ of the establishment type.

He has captured this anger because he alone among figures of any prominence has given expression to it, and because the ‘left’ has atrociously failed to do so.

Bernie Sanders and the so-called ‘Squad’ have tied themselves so tightly to the Democratic establishment that they are defending Biden’s candidacy even when the liberal mainstream media are coming out against him / Image: Senate Democrats, Wikimedia Commons

Let us look at what passes for the ‘left’ in America today. Back in 2016, Bernie Sanders and the so-called ‘Squad’ could have perhaps played such a role, had they broken from the Democrats. Instead, they have tied themselves so tightly to the Democratic establishment that they are defending Biden’s candidacy even when the liberal mainstream media are coming out against him!

Ilhan Omar, who just a few months ago was being smeared by the liberals as an ‘antisemite’ for making a few peeps against Israel’s war, a few days ago described Biden as “the best president” in her lifetime! It’s hard to imagine a more revolting spectacle of servility before the establishment than this ‘lesser evilism’.

A really revolutionary left that directs its whole fire at the whole capitalist system, and the rigged two-party sham of ‘democracy’ that upholds it, could undoubtedly tap into and tear away some of the same angry layers that presently trail behind Trump’s reactionary demagogy. The AOC types only serve to help convince these same layers that Trump alone stands against the establishment, pushing them more firmly into his embrace.

But there are millions more, especially among the youth, who have correctly identified the capitalist system as the root cause of the crisis the US masses are facing. One in five young people in the US today see communism as the best economic system. Many were too young to vote in 2020, but if some of them were convinced to vote for Biden as the ‘lesser evil’ back then, they’ve been cured of that notion now.

It is to this audience that we appeal: the assassination attempt has only enormously entrenched Trump’s support, to the extent that a second Trump administration appears all but inevitable. This is the reactionary and inevitable result that is to be expected from acts of individual terror.

But it will be precisely that experience, of a second Trump presidency, that will break the illusions that millions of his supporters harbour. However, the example of Trumpism itself shows that once these illusions are broken, they will not automatically give way to an understanding of the only real way out of the crisis of capitalism, which is the expropriation of the multi-billion dollar corporations under the control of the American workers, i.e., communism.

Only if a powerful revolutionary communist organisation exists across the whole of the United States, as a fighting alternative to the two bosses’ parties, will we be able to break the support for the far right.

The possibilities that will open up will be enormous, but only if we organise and prepare for them now. Join the Revolutionary Communists of America. Join the Revolutionary Communist International.