The 2016 elections: American democracy in shambles

Joseph Kishore, World Social­ist Web Site

Behind the whole rot­ten process, the fun­da­men­tal issues are cov­ered up or ignored. The real­i­ty of Amer­i­can “democ­ra­cy” can per­haps be summed up in the fact that, three weeks before Novem­ber 8, the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary has launched a mas­sive mil­i­tary esca­la­tion in the Mid­dle East, and there is no sig­nif­i­cant dis­cus­sion about the con­se­quences in an elec­tion that is sup­pos­ed­ly the prin­ci­pal means through which the pop­u­la­tion can affect policy.
The cri­sis of democ­ra­cy is a prod­uct of the decay of Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism, over­seen by a rul­ing class that is deter­mined to advance a pol­i­cy of war abroad and aus­ter­i­ty at home—a pol­i­cy that requires ever greater attacks on demo­c­ra­t­ic forms of rule. What­ev­er hap­pens on Novem­ber 8, it will resolve noth­ing, and only set the stage for a pro­tract­ed polit­i­cal cri­sis that can be resolved only through the inde­pen­dent inter­ven­tion of the work­ing class on the basis of a rev­o­lu­tion­ary social­ist program.