As the main-wing, finance capitalist bosses fend off attacks from both internal and inter-imperialist rivals, the U.S. presidential election has led them to drop much of the facade of liberal democracy—most obviously in the capitalist mass media.
While the candidates fill the airwaves arguing over who is the bigger racist, the election is accelerating the rise of fascism, the state of monopoly capitalism in decay, when the bosses can no longer rule in the old way. When pressed by growing competition from competing capitalists, they take more direct control of the state, both to discipline the smaller bosses and to attack the working class in preparation for war. To those ends, they need a tighter alignment between the media and the bosses’ state.
In particular, the Hillary Clinton liberal imperialists are using Donald Trump’s racism as a pretext to exert more direct state control over the election process. Trump is a figurehead who has floated to the front of the smaller, more domestically oriented bosses’ racist movement, which was built on the hypocrisy of the big finance capitalists’ racist history.
Bosses’ Media Dumps on Trump
While both Clinton and Trump represent ruthless, racist bosses who will do anything to stay in power, Clinton’s funders have more resources—not only more money, but more access to the levers of state power, including the mass media. Having concluded that they cannot work comfortably with Trump, they are using their apparatus to make his victory in November a long shot. The bosses’ biggest newspapers, TV stations and websites are openly cheerleading for Clinton. “Journalistic objectivity,” always a myth under capitalism, has gone completely out the window.
In May, New York Magazine published an anti-Trump article headlined, “Democracies Fail When They Are Too Democratic” (5/1). In June, Salon.com—among others—called on the press to openly fight Trump: “Expose his tricks…Keep Trump off balance…Use his weakness against him” (6/2). In August, we saw the results: “[I]t has become almost impossible to separate coverage of the Trump campaign from attempts to tear it down. The media has long been accused of having a liberal slant, but in this cycle journalists seem to have cast themselves as defenders of the republic against what they see as a major threat” (Los Angeles Times, 8/2).
This phenomenon has been especially transparent in the New York Times, the main-wing bosses’ foremost propaganda outlet. On Sunday, August 28, the Times’ lead story—splashed across four columns at the top of the front page—highlighted the racist segregation in housing developments built by Trump and his father, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. This was old news that had surfaced more than five years ago (Huffington Post, 4/29/11).
One week earlier, the Times detailed how overseas powers like Saudi Arabia donated tens of millions of dollars in exchange for access and possible influence at the U.S. State Department while Clinton was secretary of state. That article played on only one column on page one—below a story suggesting that Trump’s business debts could make him beholden to the Bank of China, among other lenders.
Capitalist Crisis and the Move Toward Fascism
As capitalist economies are failing right and left, fascist conditions are intensifying around the world. The bosses are moving relentlessly toward wider war. The U.S. is no exception, with the Clinton-led liberal bosses leading the charge. The democratically elected Turkish ruling class used the pretext of a failed coup to round up tens of thousands of workers and summarily fire tens of thousands more. Some may have been part of the aborted coup, but most were removed so that more “loyal” people could replace them.
 We can’t afford the illusion that the ruling class is targeting only the Trumpers. The rulers need fascism to preserve their floundering profit system; once they are done with the little bosses, they will come after the working class even harder. We can’t predict the trajectory of rising fascism, or when it will become full-blown, but the trend is clear. We must understand that the trappings of democracy will prevail only as long as the bosses find them useful. As the capitalists’ economy crumbles and inter-imperialist war spreads, they will jail and kill millions.
When will they stop? When the international working class, led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, ends their system for good.