Trump and Biden have no clear plan for addressing the pathetic failure of the United States to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden champions “testing and tracing” but has wavered on whether he will grant states the right to decide the fate of basic measures such as mask mandates. His commitment to the corporate health industry means that the U.S. will continue to lack a public health system capable of addressing the pandemic or reducing enormous healthcare costs bankrupting the working class. A Trump victory ensures that the danger of the pandemic itself will continue to be questioned no matter how many poor and vulnerable people perish.
The United States is a sick society and the COVID-19 pandemic is but one of its ailments. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are agents of the dictatorship of capital—the disease that has made the U.S. a sick society since its formation. The dictatorship of capital relies upon a feverish spread of the exploitation and destruction of its hosts: the people and the planet. Biden and Trump are ill-equipped to provide an antidote for austerity, endless war, mass incarceration, and the other symptoms of the disease. Each of these symptoms are a prerequisite to the existence and reproduction of the disease itself.
The only political antidote to the dictatorship of capital is socialism, which is broadly defined as the transfer of state power from the agents of disease, the capitalist class, to the oppressed and exploited classes. At this time, no coherent movement for socialism exists in the United States. The Sanders wing of the Democratic Party is no monolith and has yet to shed the hope of reforming an institution that has long been under the complete rule of monopoly capital. Activists marching under the banner “Black Lives Matter” emerged as the U.S. entered the early stages of a protracted economic crisis precipitated by the spread of COVID-19. No clear, organized alternative to the Democratic Party was able to form out of these disease-ridden conditions. The masses are thus left with two racist and vile candidates for the Oval Office occupying most of the political space in the United States.
-- Danny Haiphong, "The United States is a Sick Society That Produced Two Sick Options for President" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).
