SocialistWorker.org has written very little on the 2012 election
results, in part because it doesn’t have much to add to the contention
of the Nation and the liberal media that a progressive surge of women, gays and blacks blocked the reactionary designs of “white men.”
In
reality, millions of white workers voted for Obama in 2008 in the naïve
belief that a black president would be more sympathetic to their
interests. The last four years has disabused many of them. The final
results are not yet in, but it appears that between 5 and 8 million less
votes were cast in 2012, and most of the voters who stayed at home were
white.
Of course, the “party of the nonvoting” dwarfed the
winning candidate’s total too, as 90 to 95 million eligible voters
abstained, including, it should be pointed out, some 8.5 million African
Americans (more than a third of the eligible black voting population).
On
the eve of the election, leading ISO member Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
posted a foul commentary (“Why they don’t challenge racism,” November 5,
2012), which treated as good coin an Associated Press report that
“explicit racist attitudes toward African Americans have increased” in
the past four years. Taylor took the opportunity to contend that this
shabby and unsubstantiated piece of evidence demonstrated “the
centrality of racism in American politics.” What Taylor means, in
reality, is that the white population is imbued with racism, for which
claim she provides, and can provide, absolutely no proof.
The
piece is replete with references to “Black life,” “Black communities”
and the need for a “Black agenda” and a “Black movement.” Essentially,
Taylor complains that Obama did not pay sufficient attention during his
first term to petty bourgeois African Americans like herself “whose vote
was critical to the candidate becoming president in the first place”
and who thus expected “that their particular issues” would receive some
attention. The article reeks of selfishness and the striving for
privileges.
The racialist orientation of the middle class ex-left
is reprehensible and sick, and sinister in its implications. Such
outfits and individuals will more and more openly lend their support to
“democratic” imperialism as it encounters the opposition of vast numbers
of people to austerity, repression and war.
-- David Walsh, "Organization stands on the 2012 election results" (WSWS).