IT is a fair question to ask: how does a ruling class that controls more money ($45 trillion), nearly twice the annual gross domestic product of its country, produce two men who should not be leading a country, let alone a country with the most powerful military in the world? When Joe Biden, the incumbent president of the United States, and Donald Trump, the former president, met to debate each other in late June, they confounded anyone who watched them. The expectations for the two men were extremely low: for Biden, age 81, the expectation was that he would not demonstrate any cognitive impairment during the ninety minutes that they spent on stage; for Trump, age 78, the only expectation was that he should not appear to be too much of a bully. Neither met their expectation. Biden was dazed and confused, while Trump was his normal belligerent self. As soon as the debate ended, there was chatter that Biden should step aside and let someone else face Trump at the US presidential election on November 5, 2024. By then, Biden’s health might have deteriorated further, and Trump must have been sentenced to jail. It is fair to ask why this is the best that the US ruling class is able to produce.

　　All the polls that are out there show that Trump is ahead of Biden, even if only by a few percentage points. The main issue is not the national average, but the state averages. In the United States, most of the fifty states are not in contest because the general tendency in those states is to vote for one or the other party (for instance, California is reliably Democratic, while Idaho is reliably Republican). As the US public gets more and more electorally divided across the map, fewer and fewer states are treated as ‘swing states’, or states where any one of the two parties could possibly win. In 2024, the expectation is that there will only be six ‘swing states’, which will be Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The total population of these states is 42.9 million or about 12 per cent of the US population (this is just more than the population of California, the largest state in the US which has 39 million people). That means that the registered voters in very small states will decide the election for the 333 million people who live in the United States. In every one of these ‘swing states’, Donald Trump is polling higher than Biden, in some cases far above the the stain of the old plantation oligarchy defines the party system. The capitalist class has decided that this is the contest, so this is the contest. That is the reason why it is appropriate to say that the US capitalist class is a class in despair, a class that has neither a project for the public nor people capable of carrying forward a project. It had political cadavers, people who are like zombies, saying things that they do not believe in order to maintain a collapsing system for as long as they can.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Wei Xiaoxue

　　From:https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2024/0707_pd/the-us-ruling-class-is-in-deep- despair（2024-7-7）