THE JANUARY 6 HEARINGS WON'T SAVE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AT THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS

The January 6 hearings into the attempted coup that threatened to tip over America's democracy won't resolve any of America's political problems. 

IT IS IRONIC that a country whose governments have been more than keen to export their own definition of democracy to other countries, whether they wanted it or not, is now in the throes of investigating an attempted coup that threatened to tip over democracy, such as it is, in the United States itself. The current House of Representatives investigation seeks to make sense of those tumultuous events on January 6 2021

Prior to the hearings beginning, the bipartisan committee investigating the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol promised to deliver a coherent narrative that tied deliberate actions of President Donald Trump and his associates to the unlawful violence and interference which aimed to prevent Joe Biden being officially announced as President.

It is also ironic that the US mainstream media, that has never admitted to its share of the responsibility for putting Trump into the White House in the first place, is providing live coverage of the hearings. The first committee hearing was scheduled for prime time television and was duly screened by networks such as CNN. This is the same network that provided extensive and uncritical coverage of Donald Trump's successful presidential campaign simply because he was a ratings winner and pulled in a bumper load of advertising. It was Amy Goodman of Democracy Now who sarcastically observed that the cable network provided more live coverage of an empty stage, waiting for Trump to arrive, than it provided of Bernie Sanders immensely popular campaign to become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.

While the January 6 insurrection remains of intense interest to the political establishment and the corporate media, its doubtful that ordinary Americans are of the same state of mind. After over five hundred days of constant opinion on the subject from the usual talking heads, people may well be numb to the committee hearings and have simply tuned out. As Branko Marcetic writes in Jacobin the January 6 hearings: 'As political theatre and a play for the midterms, they’re an opening night bomb.'

Working class America has more immediate economic issues on its mind - like the escalating cost of living adding further to the heavy economic burden of ever present issues like already unaffordable housing and a lack of access to basic healthcare. The Biden administration's failure to grapple effectively with such pressing economic matters is perhaps the  principal reason for Joe Biden's unpopularity and he has been roundly criticised by the left for not doing enough to assist ordinary Americans. Celinda Lake, a Washington-based Democratic pollster who does survey research for Democratic Party committees, probably summed it all up best when she remarked that the president’s slump in the polls 'is a sign that people are just really unhappy with life.' 

Corporate Democrats have always insisted that its Trumpism that lies at the heart of all that ills America. But, in reality, he has always been a symptom of the wider malaise of American capitalism. As socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez observed shortly before the last presidential election:

'If people's lives don't feel different under President Biden, we're done. You know how many Trumps there are in waiting? I'm tired of incremental change - bullshit little ten percent tax cuts. I think, honestly, a lot of my dissent within the Democratic party comes from my lived experience. It’s not just that we can be better, it’s that we have to be better. We’re not good enough right now.'

But having succumbed to the ineffectual centrism that AOC has always railed against, the Biden administration has ensured it will lose the working class vote both in rural America and in America's industrial heartland. But the Democratic Party establishment will blame its defeat in the midterm elections in November on everything from Trumpism to Fox News and everyone who has refused to bow at the altar of neoliberal identity politics.

Having pushed working class concerns to the fringes of the party, the corporate Democratic Party elite shouldn't be surprised that, in reply, the American working class has chosen to abandon the Democratic Party.