Diana O’Dwyer presents a refreshingly honest and interesting analysis of the November 29 2024 Irish General Election result. No attempt is made to hide an obvious fact : this was a setback for the left.
People Before Profit’s (PBP) slogan during the election campaign was “End 100 years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael”. But now we are facing into yet another Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael (FF-FG) government. Why has this happened? Are we stuck in a never-ending Groundhog Day or does hope for radical change remain?
After the last election in 2020, escape from a century of FF-FG rule seemed not just possible but probable. The cycle of alternation between the two frenemies had finally been broken with the identical twins of Irish capitalism forced into a grand coalition, propped up by the Green Party with external support from right-wing Independent TDs. [2] The 2008 economic crash and the decade of social upheaval and struggle that followed had enabled Sinn Féin (SF) to steal the mantle of the largest party in the Dáil for the first time and it looked certain to lead the next government.
But now, almost 5 years later, FF and FG have returned with an extra 13 seats and are only one seat short of a majority – compared to 7 short last time. They are not any more popular than they were in 2020 – their share of the vote actually fell slightly (by 0.4%). But in a situation with little in the way of class struggle and where no clear alternative was posed, they were able to maintain and even improve their position. FF topped the poll at 22%, followed by FG on 21% and SF on 19%.
Frieda Afary has written an excellent analysis (see below). She shows that the Democratic party candidate Kamala Harris lost 10 million votes compared with Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Trump’s vote totals in 2020 and 2024 were almost identical.
This article analyzes the vote breakdown, the pundits’ views, argues that Trump is a fascist and offers perspectives for the needed anti-fascist resistance.
Donald Trump’s election as president, and the Republican victories nationwide are a catastrophe for progressive forces in the U.S. and around the world. What the November 5, 2024 election showed was that while this country is still divided, there has been a rightward shift nationwide and across all demographic and geographic groups. (Levitt, 2024)
Vote Breakdown:
Let’s take a closer look at the demographic breakdown of the votes. Approximately 72 million voted for Harris and 75 million voted for Trump. Approximately 700,000 voted for Jill Stein and 700,000 voted for Robert Kennedy. This means that Democrats received 10 million fewer votes than in 2020 when Biden received 81 million. Trump received approximately the same number of votes he received in 2020. (U.S. Election Results, 2024)
Howie Hawkins, Green Party Presidential Candidate in the 2020 USA General Election, reports from Kyiv, Capital City of Ukraine, on a meeting of the European Left Alliance for People and the Planet.
Dispatches from Europe, No. 8, November 6, 2024 – European Left Alliance for People and the Planet
Air Raid Alerts in Kyiv
I arrived in Kyiv on the afternoon of November 2 to the sound of air raid sirens. The air raid warnings had been going on all day. They come by phone once you get the Air Alert app, which is one of the first things my hosts had me do. Now my phone screen is covered with air alerts.
By the end of the night of November 2-3, Ukraine had been targeted with 96 drones and 1 air-to-surface missile. Ukrainian air defense units intercepted the missile and 66 of the drones, but between the drones that got through air defenses and debris falling from intercepted drones and missiles, six districts of Kyiv were hit, mostly residential buildings. One explosion woke me up. A large explosion hit a building at one of the campuses of Taras Shevchenko National University.
The lame duck President of the USA Joe Biden – a “proud Irish-American Zionist” – is a bigger danger to the people living in Gaza and Palestine because he does not have to bend to electoral pressures.
The US president’s behaviour towards Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has clearly retreated from the semi-critical approach he had begun to adopt after realizing how costly his total complicity in the Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people is electorally, especially among traditional Democratic Party voters, as it is even resented within the party itself.
This is a very persuasive analysis. Accordingly, we must hope that pressure mounts in the USA and elsewhere to drive Biden out of office as soon as possible. Some reports suggest that Biden only agreed to leave the election race in favour of Kamala Harris after Barack Obama threatened Biden with ejection from the White House, using the 25th Amendment mechanism.
This would mean that not only did they force Biden out of the race, but that the Democrats know full well that Biden isn’t fit to serve out the rest of his term, but are comfortable letting him continue as a figure head if it serves their efforts to retain power for the party.
At the same time we must dismiss wild conspiracy claims about these developments. There was no “coup” against Biden – since when did party bosses deciding to bully an unpopular leader to resign become a coup? A better argument is that Obama, Harris and company did not go far enough dumping candidate Biden, who clearly has major medical cognitive issues – War Criminal Biden should be booted out of the White House as soon as possible, by any means necessary – the 25th Amendment is a satisfactory instrument.
John Meehan August 7 2024
Joe Biden’s Crime Against Humanity
Joe Biden will alas not stand in the dock before the International Criminal Court – that much is sure. There is no doubt, however, that the court of history, which is the fairest of criminal courts, will include his name prominently on the list of perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
Since he announced his decision to stop running for a second presidential term, Joe Biden has become a “lame duck” – an expression that commonly refers in the United States to an elected official who has reached the final months of their term without any extension prospect. The expression means that the official’s influence has become limited, as everybody knows that they will not remain in office for long. However, a person in such a situation in a presidential political system in which the president is elected by popular vote (indirectly in the US case), is also, in contrast, more free-handed than a president campaigning for an additional term, who must therefore ensure that he (no she, yet) does not lose votes as a result of positions or measures he may take.
Sharon Smith, writing for International Socialism, explores the control wielded by the Democratic Party establishment over the nomination process in her article, “The (undemocratic) Democratic Party machine lurches toward the election.
Foreword : USA Presidential elections are shit-shows – mud-slinging works.
Readers may know a famous Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) quip about why he called his opponent a pig fucker. Johnson admitted it wasn’t true, but “I want him to have to deny it,” he explained.
Mr Johnson became President of the USA in November 1963, taking over from the assassinated John F Kennedy.
Johnson won an election landslide in 1964 claiming his opponent Barry Goldwater was a fanatical warmonger. By 1968 demonstrators all over the globe were marching against the USA invasion of Vietnam – a favourite chant was :
“Hey, Hey, LBJ
How many kids did you kill today”
Donald Trump (age 78) looked more mentally capable than President Joe Biden (age 82) in a recent TV debate. The New York felon, convicted in a jury trial and fined 86 million dollars for sexually assaulting the writer E Jean Carroll, is now up against a more formidable Democratic party opponent Kamala Harris (age 59). The gloves are off :
“Ms Harris, speaking at a private fundraiser headlined by singer-songwriter James Taylor in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, said much of the rhetoric coming from Mr Trump and his running mate, US Senator JD Vance, was “just plain weird.”
Her use of the word “weird” to describe her opponents was part of a new strategy from Democrats.
The Harris campaign called Mr Trump “old and quite weird” following his appearance on Fox News on Thursday, and at least one supporter showed up outside the event yesterday holding a sign proclaiming “Trump is weird.” – RTÉ News Report
The (undemocratic) Democratic Party machine lurches toward the election – by Sharon Smith
What the Democratic Party establishment wants, it gets—and that includes its chosen presidential candidate. It had anointed Joe Biden well before the election primary season got underway in early 2024. This is why Biden ran virtually unopposed and predictably won every Democratic primary.
But the path to Biden’s reelection was not as smooth as Democratic Party leaders envisioned, mainly because Biden’s cognitive decline—underway for several years—has accelerated in recent months. Perhaps the leaders of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) believed they could shield the public from Biden’s decline through the entire election cycle by limiting his time in the public eye. That strategy backfired badly. The Party leadership is entirely to blame for the ensuing chaos. But don’t expect them to change course.
An article from the Financial Times journalist Edward Luce, which should be a wake-up call.
Donald Trump’s running mate opposes abortion and aid to Ukraine and says he would not have certified results of 2020 vote.
With Vance, Trump is doubling down on Maga
Ohio senator is an intelligent and forceful exponent of the Maga movement — and maybe also its future
If there were any doubts that Donald Trump would go full “America First” he banished them on Monday with his vice-presidential pick. JD Vance is the most high-profile Trumpian cheerleader among senior Republicans.
Trump could have held his nose and chosen Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, who gave him the biggest run for his money in the Republican primaries. Haley is a relative moderate on abortion. Selecting her, or a like-minded figure, would have signalled that he wanted to broaden his appeal to wavering suburban female Republicans.
Vance, by contrast, is an unapologetic Christian conservative. If Joe Biden can find a silver lining in the gathering storm clouds, Vance would be it. Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, is an effective campaigner on a woman’s right to choose.
Ashley Smith analyzes the impact of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on the deepening political crisis in the U.S. and the ever growing weakness of the Joe Biden campaign.
The United States was already headed for one of the most acute political crises in recent memory. Then former president and convicted felon Donald Trump was nearly assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania. Having survived, Trump has consolidated his base and cornered the Democrats by blaming them for the attack.
Trump will now position himself as a strong man and survivor over a debilitated Biden campaign. He has an inside track to victory in the election with a clear advantage despite being widely despised.
Even before the attempted assassination of Trump, President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance had thrown his candidacy into doubt with the bourgeois press, the Democrat’s capitalist donors, and centrist politicians, all calling for him to pass the baton to another nominee.
GOP Capitalizes on Assassination Attempt
The attempt against Trump has drowned out all other issues. The image of him bloodied, defiant with fist raised, and chanting “fight, fight, fight” has been plastered across the media and will no doubt end up on t-shirts at this week’s GOP Convention in Milwaukee.
Jeffrey St. Clair writes a fact-stuffed polemic in the online magazine Counterpunch, which is relentless – like witnessing the last hours of an exhausted punch-drunk emperor surrounded by grovelling flunkies.
Till now, I did not know the concept Bardo :
Bardo “is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between
While we can not be sure which mechanism will be used to remove Joe Biden from his White House job, we can be sure his days as a power-wielding President are over. Expect a shit show next week; Democrats praising new President Kamala Harris; Trump’s coronation at his republican party gets little media attention : and plenty of gruesome gaffes from old man Donald are likely to surface.
Seymour Hersh said Biden isn’t all there. Thomas Friedman and Jane Fonda were reduced to tears. Rob Reiner, who watched the debate with Fonda in LA in the company of Doug Emhoff, the husband of Biden’s VP Kamala Harris, screamed at the TV: “We’ve lost.” One of the party’s top money-bundlers told Politico: “Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention or he dies. Otherwise, we are fucking dead.” These were just some of the shock reactions to Joe Biden’s somnambulant performance in his debate against Trump last week in Atlanta.
Biden’s decrepit appearance, death-rattle voice and baffling answers shouldn’t have been a surprise. He’s 81-years-old and he’s been descending into senescence for years. But most people, including many of his most ardent supporters, hadn’t seen this diminished version of Biden before on extended display.
Biden doesn’t make many prolonged public appearances anymore. He hasn’t given a full-press conference in nearly a year. He’s been kept on a tight public leash by his staff, restricted to short interactions with the White House press gaggle or prepared remarks fed to him by a teleprompter. Even then he’s seemed halting, confused, and mentally frail.
Carl Bernstein – the Watergate Journalist – describes Biden’s “horror shows”
During an interview with CNN, Carl Bernstein said multiple sources told him there have been at least 15 occasions in the last year and a half “where the president has appeared like he did at that horror show (his debate performance).”
Bernstein said that in the last six months, sources have told him there has been a marked rate in Biden’s cognitive decline. He says that some of his sources have taken their concerns to Ron Klain in the last year, worried that the President is losing his train of thought and didn’t have the capacity to pick up where he left off. Bernstein described a fundraiser at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York in June of 2023, where the President became “Very stiff…almost like a kind of rigor mortis.”
Biden’s staff and family are charged with protecting him. The media isn’t. Most other courtier reporters surely knew what Bernstein had heard. Yet, they’ve largely been complicit in covering up Biden’s accelerating cognitive decline, presumably because of their deep hatred of Trump, whose faculties, such as they are, also seem to be in an advanced state of decay.
As Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, wrote in Semafor: “It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smoke screens and find out the truth. The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age. Shame on the White House press corps for not to have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.”
There is more to this story than initially meets the eye. Much capitalist development is based on Ethnic Cleansing of original populations and the plantation of new non-indigenous populations – it happened in the United States of America (USA) and Australia – naming just two. It did not happen so brutally in Ireland – but British imperialism made a significant effort.
The Northern province of Ulster was “planted” in the 1600’s, but the native Irish were not completely exterminated. Waves of native Irish emigrated – especially in the 19th century after a misnamed Famine (in reality a “Great Hunger” caused by British Imperialist Policy) drove millions of the native Irish to the four corners of the globe. These emigrants kept alive the idea of Irish freedom, and played a significant role in every attempt to rid Ireland of British rule.
The stubborn Irish “national question” remains on today’s agenda because of the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty which divided Ireland into 2 sectarian states. A key feature of extreme Irish Unionism is identification with plantation/ethnic cleansing forms of capitalism – and that goes a long way towards explaining Irish far-right Unionist sympathy for the present day attempted ethnic cleansing of Palestine and Ukraine. We should situate recent pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine statements by the British far-right politician Nigel Farage and Sammy Wilson within this framework :
Nigel Farage Endorses DUP Antrim MP’s Wilson and Paisley, Dumping a different extreme unionist, Jim Allister
The Russian imperialist occupation of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk is ethnic cleansing capitalism in action – accompanied by child stealing and abuse similar to the behaviour of the Catholic Church in the 26 county bit of Ireland from the 1930’s to the 1990’s.
An excellent Ukrainian blog, Ukr-Taz, covers the story of Putin’s ethnic cleansing dreams in Ukraine, and Donald Trump’s enthusiastic support :
For all that can be said about Thursday’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — including about the former’s dismal performance and about the boundless creativity of Trump’s fabrications on almost every topic under the sun — Trump’s curious note about Putin’s “dream” stood out to me:
The remote Pacific Ocean island of Saipan suddenly hit Irish and global headlines in 2002 when Irish soccer star Roy Keane walked away from the Irish team’s base for the World Cup in Korea and Japan after a blazing row with his manager Mick McCarthy. Today the island is back in the headlines after the political prisoner Julian Assange walked to freedom following a court hearing in the USA-owned North Marinara territory. Like Keane, Assange did not linger in Saipan – he flew home to his native land, Australia.
That is not the only Irish connection. Many innocent Irish political prisoners were held, like Assange, in noxious British jails such as Belmarsh. A small number of dedicated human rights lawyers became household names in Ireland. The picture below shows the released Julian Assange beside one of those lawyers, Gareth Pierce.
Political Prisoner Julian Assange and Civil Rights Lawyer Gareth Pierce
The campaigns for the release of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Winchester Three and Judith Ward offer an important lesson :
When the left should get together in defence of political prisoners, it is very often a serious mistake to conduct a debate about the political views and activities of the prisoners. In Ireland that was true of the Birmingham 6, the H-Block/Armagh political prisoners, Nicky Kelly and the IRSP members framed for the Sallins Train Robbery, and the Jobstown Not Guilty political activists in Tallaght. Many comrades would be well advised to go back further and examine the Sacco and Vanzetti campaign in the 1920’s, and the Moscow Trial Purges of the 1930’s. The faults (or lack of faults) of the victims are regularly used as an excuse to avoid a united campaign in favour of the victims. The bigger story is that “An Injury to One is An Injury to All”.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 