On November 8, Senate Democrats made a deal with Republicans to end the government shutdown. The deal was attacked by many podcasters allied with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
Led by President Trump, Republicans threatened to cut or end funding for the SNAP (food stamps) program. In 2024, some 41 million people depended on the program.
In the face of court orders, they backed down, but the Supreme Court allowed them to go ahead with the cutoff. Hours before eight Democrats caved to Republican demands and announced they’d vote to end the government shutdown on Republican-Trump terms.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 
“Ironically, perhaps not coincidentally, the deal to end the government shutdown came right after stellar results for the Democrats in the off-year elections held on November 3, 2025.” I’m increasingly convinced that the Democrats actually do not want to win and the sell-out strategy employed by Schumer is intended to actually depress the turnout of their own voters. We saw Democrats flipping seats in Trump +30 districts in an off-year election, the polling showed that the general public blamed Republicans for the shutdown and their was strong pressure/enthusiasm from their voters signaling that they should keep fighting. If the approval rating of Trump/the GOP get bad enough then really no amount of gerrymandering can save them, this stuff can create guard rails but eventually if say 75% of the voting public disapproves, regardless of safeguards such as geography, district shape, demographics, voter apathy, difficulty in voting etc. the end result will be an inevitable loss. I think I’m being rather conservative here because I remember seeing an estimate that in spite of downsides of the electoral college a 12% edge in popular vote advantage is enough to win all swing states plus the vast majority of states. I would think the same principle must apply to congressional and senatorial elections. FDR gained a 17.59% lead over Hoover in the 1932 elections and picked up all but six states.
I think this is a phenomenon of a quite different nature than what left-wing critiques of the democrats often focus on, e.g. mobilizing people to win elections and then immediately demobilizing them once the election is won so they can govern comfortability. The typical left-wing critique assumes that democrats want to win but that they fear the enthusiasm of their base manifesting itself as a continual movement that may gradually become combative and independent of party leadership. In general, it’s assumed if the democrats can get a big electoral blowout victory and govern how they want. But I actually think it’s fair to question whether this is still their goal because winning big means they’ll have to do something for voters; it also means the usual excuses for why they can’t do anything to materially improve the lives of their votes/the average person aren’t going to wash. Although many leftists, even those who consider themselves revolutionary, assume that there’s enough gas left in the tank that capitalist politicians can reform the system in major ways to expand its lifetime and buy it political legitimacy, the question is do the democrats themselves believe this to be the case? My gut feeling for now is that the capitalists have settled on Trump/MAGA as the only way to keep, more or less governing, in the same way as before. The Brandon regime failed spectacularly and ended with the first popular vote loss for democrats at the presidential level since 1988, the 2004 election withstanding as I think most can agree it’s a special case. What’s more is the Republican candidate in 2024 was reviled, had a failed first term, was convicted of multiple felonies and still eeked out a narrow popular victory against the sitting Vice President. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the full truth of what I call the palace coup of 2024, its quite obvious that the sitting president was forced to cancel his election bid through extreme coercion but what methods were employed to achieve this was kept secret in the media. You don’t need to be a fan of genocide Joe to realize there’s something off about the president who won 14 million votes in the primary being passed over for the candidate who wasn’t at the top of the ticket — and its clear from the details that emerged that the party power brokers actually wanted to strip the entire ticket and replace the democratic candidate with someone who wasn’t on the ballot. All quite an odd thing when you consider the lengths that were employed to suppress a primary challenger, there were several states like North Carolina and Florida where Biden was the only candidate on the Democratic Party ballot.
It’s pretty clear that the 90s centrist democrat thing is now a total dead end. Even trying to tinker with it by giving it a mostly aesthetic and symbolic New Deal flavor like Biden and his sycophants attempted is dead on arrival. You can look to Britain as a mirror of the future of a possible democratic regime, the conservative government collapsed and now Tony Blair’s heir Keir Starmer is historically unpopular with something like 13% approval. And they actually came in with pretty good margins by European standards — not withstanding all the damage that was done to Labour by the neoliberal insurgency within the party against Corbyn and the uniform establishment media assaults on him on fake anti-semitism allegations. Many are saying that the Conservative Party in UK is liable to go extinct even though many scholars consider it to be the oldest political party in the world and one of the most successful in history. Politics in Britain is a very well-controlled insiders game, major shake-ups like the extinction of one of the two core bourgeois parties reflect a much deeper crisis than even that big event suggests on the surface.
I think Big Capital knows on some level that Trump/MAGA is the last force in US politics with enough vitality and popular support to create enough buy in to achieve their aims with some degree of legitimacy. You can see this with how many establishment liberals are acting like Trump won a +20% pv victory and not the +2% he actually got. You also see it in how many big capital democratic donors are becoming born-again Trumpists. The impact of political Zionism here cannot be discounted as you have democratic-aligned billionaires like Bill Ackman going from being a solid democratic donor to shifting his loyalty to the Republicans over Zionism and changing his political stripes from liberal to right-wing. The same Silicon Valley oligarchs that was often considered to have Obama in their pocket and to have been his secret weapon are now MAGA to the man. Kamala recently expressed her surprise and shock at the fact that the titans of industry (her words) did not stand up to Trump as she had expected.
So I actually don’t have faith that the democrats want to win, even if discontent with Trump grows to the point their practically handed victory on a silver platter, they’re controlled by the same class of people as Trump and I think those people have decided reform is over. When I saw the way that the student protestors were cracked down on across the country during the Gaza genocide, in spite of their extremely peaceful and orderly protests, I came to the conclusion that the ruling class is done with reform. I think the fact that New York Democratic Party establishment ran an independent candidate against their own candidate for New York mayor is supporting evidence. Decades of “vote blue no matter who” propaganda can turn on a dime it seems. This was exactly what insiders have said the secret strategy for the democratic establishment if Sanders had won btw an independent centrist bid to split the vote and deny Sanders the presidency (and hand Trump the election).
“If Mamdani’s avowed socialism was no longer an obstacle to his election as mayor of New York City, a city with no prior history of socialist leadership, he still had a problem.” I think LaGuardia actually considered himself a socialist. Not that Mamdani’s election isn’t an important victory but I think people actually underestimate how right-wing US politics has become since the end of WWII. I tend to think the 60s was rather overrated in comparison to the “red 30s” much of the 60s/70s activism was built by activists and organizing infrastructure that were actually developed during the 1930s super-crisis. People can disagree with that assessment but I don’t see how US politics is less right wing when votes to reduce the work week to 35 hours and to create a trust-fund for each American paid for by taxes on capital nearly passed. That’s not really conceivable now. Even in the early 20th century Debbs won 6% of the vote as an independent during the 1912 election when 3 of the 4 major candidates were yapping to the public about how they were more progressive than the other candidate. Debbs campaign manager even complained that Wilson stole their campaign platform out from under them. I think it’s arguable that the US is more right wing than it was in the 1950s. If you go on instagram or X.com you will find open racism so extreme that it seems like a satire or parody of what a 1920s Klansman believes. It is most often coming from younger people too, which, you can argue about how sincere it is and whether its just young people getting off on the thrill of perceived transgression but it is real and at least some people are extreme true believers in that stuff. I’ve been on the internet a long time, back when a lot of sites were less moderated than they are today, and the amount of racism you see and the vitriol of it is worse than I remembered it to be 20 years ago — and I hung out in pretty edgy “free for all” places. I emphasize this because there is a genre of person who implicitly believes in whig history and think things only get better and more progressive (“arc of justice is long…”etc.) and who can’t look past the attainment of major civil rights victories in the 60s. For this reason, they have a hard time comprehending that things are getting worse. If intersectionalism is even true it doesn’t even make sense how class injustice and inequality is escalating (and few deny this) but we’re getting better on racism, feminism, and LGBT. Because what undergirds this stance is the idea that all oppression is linked so working on one even to the exclusion of one is working on the others. That style of activism doesn’t work like a communist party formation which tries to balance the interests of all portions of the working class while setting priorities on what’s most important to work on.
“The new generation sees Zionism for what it has always been: a scheme to establish an imperialist-backed European-Jewish colony in Palestine” a settler-colonial project sure but I’m not sure about the European part since only 33-40% of Israelis are Ashkenazi (European) much of the population are Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jews) and this group actually tends to be the most rabidly right wing in Israeli society. You can see the argument for Israel serving Western imperialism certainly. I wonder sometimes if it hasn’t become a kind of imperialist power in its own right but that’s beside the point. Israel is an absurdly racist and right wing society, so you’ll find white supremacy there if you look but the key thing is that the supremacy of Jews over non-Jews is affirmed. The main exception to this is Palestinian Jews, who while a small minority, weren’t spared the ravages of colonization in the Naqba. I genuinely wonder if Israel has fallen below Nazi Germany in depravity, only like 5% of the population thinks too much force is being used in Gaza. The Holocaust was actually kept secret from the German people and Nazi Germany was a dictatorship so you couldn’t speak out anyways. Unless someone illustrates how Israel is secretly a dictatorship while seeming democratic on the surface it seems to me to be a descent into depravity that I’m not sure there is a historical analogue to.
I’ve been thinking more about your comment on economic growth in the last post. Obviously, favorable conditions for surplus value extraction and realization are part of that and your comment on the theory that capitalist continental Europe and Japan had faster economic growth because the period of fascist defeat put the working class on the back foot has merit. This reminds me of a somewhat marginal Marxist critique of the East Asian developmental states (Asian tigers) which pointed out that while Keynesians and other bourgeois economists who favor State-intervention have pointed to the success of East Asian models as a counter-argument to neoliberal ideology that what they ignored about East Asian models is labor organizing/activism is comparatively suppressed compared to Western Europe. If you look at Japan, for instance, yes, they have unions but they are a step below the type of trade unions that labor radicals referred to as “yellow unions.” It isn’t merely the case that these entities have reformist, quiescent, pro-capitalist, or anti-communist leadership, which is what the term yellow union was coined to describe, but that they are company unions, they are entities set up by the corporations themselves to prevent an independent union leadership of any type emerging. They also tend to be organized by company rather than by the industrial/business sector they operate in the context of, they rarely strike or aggressively seek a favorable renegotiation of contracts, they seek to don’t bargain across industrial sector on the whole but merely with the company they operate under and that’s to the extent they even do bargain, as most the time they just approve whatever the company is offering without question, per their intended function. They don’t really have internal democracy either. Their existence is something of an eccentricity because Japan under the Occupation was designed by New Dealers who saw in it an attempt to do things in Japan they could not do in America. So these fake trade unions were set up to project an image of a New Progressive Japan that could serve as an alternative model to communism in Asia. So, all-in-all, labor is highly suppressed in non-PRC East Asia compared to Europe and even the United States, where trade unions, where they still exist are at least not fraudulent entities set up by the corporations themselves, this is particularly true the period when Japan and the other Asian tigers were experiencing rocket ship economic growth.
However, I do not think this on its own is enough to explain it, as post-WWII Europe experienced high economic growth but there was more latitude for the working class to engage in labor organization/struggle and be involved in politics than Japan or the capitalist dictatorships that composed the Asian tigers (Hong Kong, South Korean, Taiwan, Singapore). There’s a couple things on my mind here, obviously the post-WWII was a better period for surplus-value realization in the world economy as a whole due to the impact of the Great Depression on gold production and the build up of money pools. I think we can argue that from a big picture perspective, especially in a world context, the two key determinatives are the conditions available for surplus-value extraction and surplus value realization. The post-war period had both of these.
There are some other factors, in my other post, I raised the question of excessive rentier burdens. Marx made the case that the industrial bourgeoisie desires to curtail faux frais in the form of excessive rent and interest burdens to the extent it is able, and Michael Hudson does a good job of documenting this history, though he might be accused of having an excessive sympathy for industrial capital and engaging overlyemphasizing these things for populist reformist purposes. Free trade was to some extent part of this counter-rentier strategy on the part of 19th century industrial capitalists. Other than their interest in reducing what the landlord and banker takes from their own pocket, they did realize that high rent, food, and consumer goods costs means they have to pay more in wages to reproduce labor power. As anyone whose read Marx’s writings concerning the mid-19th century corn law struggle, the industrial capitalists and their apologetic economists did not engage in this struggle out of concern for the proletariat but because they hoped that a lower cost of living would mean they could pay less to labor in the best case scenario and hold flat or slow a growth in money wages at worst.
So this brings me to something that the East Asian tigers and Japan broadly did do: which is that they expropriated the hereditary landlord classes in their countries without compensation. The Occupation government saw the landlord class in Japan as a potential threat to peace and offered them payment for their lands which were practically forced at gunpoint, then wiped out what they got for it with hyper-inflation. South Korea and Taiwan both expropriated the hereditary feudal landlord class without even the pretense of compensation in order to win the peasant majority of their countries away from the influence of their communist neighbors. Labor was suppressed but another form of class struggle that of the peasantry against their landlords or the industrial capitalist against propertied rentiers, particularly of the landed feudal variety was permitted on the grounds that it would help capitalism. When we compare these then developing countries to other newly independent and colonial countries we tend to find they grew much faster than countries that did not go down this path even against countries that very much had major state-focused development schemes and labor suppression like India and Egypt. It can be somewhat hard to say how determinative this is, as countries that don’t experience major popular reforms in this way can also experience bursts of major economic growth, see Lenin’s commentary on the Prussian vs. American path on the land question. Even the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore have major policies aiming to keep rents down and land-use efficient, both were influenced by Georgist philosophy, in Singapore in particular the vast majority of land is state-owned. Other than Singapore, these programs merely established land rent extraction on a more broadly held and capitalist basis, much like how the expropriation of feudal estates in the French Revolution led to the creation of a large petit-bourgeois rural middle class, more land was put into more hands true, and without compensation to the original owners, but the long-term tendency of landowners to charge money rent for land-use was not overcome. However, to my mind, the impact of this social leveling and lessening of rent burden can produce at least a short to medium acceleration of economic growth as industrial and commercial capital finds it easier to assert itself.
Next part, the State focus in these countries, they attempted to copy Soviet and Chinese economic plans but on a capitalist basis, and this mainly entailed forming mergers of industrial interests into new monopolies or promoting/subsidizing existing monopolies. It seems reasonable to think that the State intervention on behalf of capitalists can produce more growth in a particular state vis-a-vis countries that take a more hands off approach. However, much like the theory that capitalists get rich by swindling their customers, this stance seems to fall apart when you look at the system as a whole rather than on a case-by-case basis, the East Asian developmental states used the State to promote growth where the West and its other Neo-colonial satellites broadly did not to the same extent. It was impossible for them to grow faster than the world market long-term and to some extent their relative development against the rest of the world that did not engage in such policies was determined by the fact that much of the world did not pursue such policies or retaliation to their policies. If the world as a whole had, then they would have had no special advantage, particularly in competing with the portion of the world that was already more developed. At best, had the West broadly engaged in similar policies on the same scale, the only advantage their model would’ve provided was something that already existed without a state-driven growth model: a combination of late-comers advantage and lower wages, a less militant and activist working class. Part of the reason that the Japanese model finally collapsed in the early 90s was that by the 80s the BOJ was struggling to find things to invest in once it had achieved level of more-or-less parity with leading capitalist countries like the United States. There’s also a very interesting theory about how the heavy-industry boom in Japan, which was consuming a massive portion of Japan’s total GDP/investment was brought to an inevitable close by the spike in the price of oil, it has interesting implications to anyone whose read Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR as one thing he emphasizes is that because light consumer-focused industry is more profitable than heavy industry, one thing that allowing the operation of profit to determine production will do is retard the long-range development of a society as heavy industry produces the materials and tools that production must be carried on with.
We could also make an argument that the destruction of physical capital and inability/negligence in replacing it during WWII was a factor in higher economic growth in continental Europe and Japan than in the Anglosphere because these regions suffered more intensive capital destruction. As a glut in physical capital was part of the reason for the Great Depression in the 30s and the refusal of capitalists to upgrade to more advanced machinery and machine-tools (State-of-The-Art machine tool manufacturers in the US and Germany had to sell to the USSR in the 1930s because they were literally the only buyers) this wipeout potentially explains some of the growth rate as capitalists felt they could invest in new capital without fear of excessive competition from those using old capital or the dead-weight that capital they are still paying for burdens their balance books.
From what I can tell there are a few factors that can lead to high economic growth:
And I’ve said what I’ve said regarding rentier charges and the change to a higher mode of production like going from feudalism to capitalism already. I think it’s arguable that measures taken to help make credit available, terms easier for creditors, reducing the influence of commercial monopolies through free trade, and reducing rent burdens can have a real impact on growth. Right now, I don’t know enough to say how determinative it is but I think Hudson, whatever his other flaws, is right to emphasize a connection between the 18th/19th century revolution/reform struggle against rentiers and the vibrant capitalist economy that emerged in Europe and its offshoots in what were once feudal/slavery-dominated economies. One thing that’s notable is that the allies cancelled all the debts Nazi Germany owed to its client/occupied countries, these were forced loans that were extracted at gunpoint. Other states did not get this type of broad based debt jubilee and its remarkable that the topic doesn’t come up more, perhaps because it complicates a neat story of Germany’s post-war prosperity being due to a return to liberal market fundamentals. And again it ignores that Germany cannibalized the economy of all of Europe to try to keep itself from collapsing. It seems credible that it entered the post-war period with a better starting point, in spite of everything, than its continental European competitors.