HM Online 2020: The 2020 US Election: Bourgeois Democracy in Crisis
Event Information
About this Event
The 2020 US election may be the biggest crisis of bourgeois democracy since the defeat of Black Reconstruction. The past several years and weeks have been rich in lessons about the nature of the US state and its electoral system. Issues that the panelists will discuss include: the ongoing far right threat and the changing character of the Republican Party; the nature of the Democratic Party and what the left can and cannot use it for; the roots of the current political crisis in the economic crisis going back to 2008, and the impact of the pandemic; and the intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality in this current crisis.
Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is the co-author with Micah Uetricht of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go From the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism (Verso, April 2020). Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Peter Drucke's long years as a socialist and queer activist began in the US in 1978, when he was 19. He is the author of Max Shachtman and His Left and of Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (Haymarket). He lives in the Netherlands.
Suggested readings:
Peter Drucker on the election:
https://newpol.org/left-politics-after-sanders-think-internationally-historically-and-dialectically/
Kim Moody on the Democratic Party:
https://newpol.org/issue_post/two-souls-democratic-socialism/
Andrew Turl on the far right danger:
https://www.tempestmag.org/2020/10/the-urgency-of-anti-fascism/
Meagan Day interview with Against the Current
https://againstthecurrent.org/atc208/bigger-than-bernie-interview/
Kali Akuno interview with Rethinking Marxism:
http://rethinkingmarxism.org/Dossier2020/2_ShearAkuno.pdf
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