WHY ISN’T TRUMP ABOUT TO BE JAILED FOR MULTIPLE CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR? The Center-Right tacit alliance in effect since 1876 remains intact

The TV broadcasting of the select congressional committee hearings on January 6 just confirms what we already knew, though with a lot of gory details added. Trump is a criminal to a degree that deserves greater punishment than a house thief or even a bank robber. After all, he committed sedition which will get you the death penalty or life in jail in much of the world.

But we know that the centrists who dominate the Democratic Party as well as the select congressional committee do not want to deal a fatal blow to the right or to the Republican Party, because their strength bolsters the claim of the centrists of being the true defenders of the non-privileged as well as of racial justice. That way they appear to hold the moral high ground while furthering the interests of their corporate backers. They uphold progressive ideals rhetorically but end up watering down electoral promises in order to reach agreements with their colleagues across the aisle. For that reason, the centrists have always treated the right and the Republicans in general with kid gloves.

If leftists were to do half of what Trump and his backers have done they would have been locked up from the very start. Just take the use of arms by rightists in the name of the second amendment. When the Black Panthers defended the same right, they were hounded by the FBI and many of their members received life-long prison sentences or were murdered as in the case of Fred Hampton.

When Obama was elected president in 2008, any illusion that he may have been a truly progressive president was shattered at the outset when he harped on “reaching across the aisle” and “consensus politics” and began the “kid gloves” treatment. He could have taken advantage of the honeymoon of his early months in office by going after Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration for their admitted use of torture and defense of it. Public opinion at the time would have approved of a full investigation into black sites and waterboarding. The results may have been devastating to the Republican Party. Instead, Obama said he didn’t want to “look backward” and so, in effect, let Cheney and company off the hook. Some would say that such lenience was a mistake because the right quickly recovered and sabotaged all of Obama’s initiatives. But it wasn’t a mistake. It’s been the Democratic Party strategy all along.

That strategy dates back to 1876 when the northern liberal Rutherford Hayes (the “liberals” were then the Republicans) cut a deal with the ex-slave holding southerners whereby Jim Crow became the law of the land in the south. In the twentieth century the Democratic Party centrists of the north accepted the racism of their southern party companions who, due to voter suppression, maintained seniority in congress and thus held important chairmanships of congressional committees. Thus Jim Crow was tolerated in the south and in return the Democrats counted on all those electoral college votes in presidential elections. All that changed in the 60s with the civil rights movement and Nixon’s southern strategy.  

On appearance, the Democrats are going after Trump and are outraged by what happened on January 6. But there is a limit to what they are willing to do to right the wrong. The Democrats would much prefer to tolerate the right, no matter how outrageous its actions are, than to run the risk of permitting the emergence of a leftist pole in U.S. politics that would fill the gap. Not only do the Democrats prefer it. So do their corporate backers.

 All the talk of “reaching across the ally” means in effect that we the Democrats will rhetorically embrace far-reachng programs of social justice but then we need to water them down in order to get a majority in congress. And not even a majority if you consider the fillubuster which requires 60%. The Democratic centrists the so-called blue-dog Democrats with their corporate ties are not interested in those programs in the first place. They defend them to get elected and they drop them in order to ensure corporate funding for their campaigns.