Buying into the charade of elections as any kind of path of change harms the efforts to de-legitimate the system. Its phony promises that are like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, always visible yet always out of reach. Even if you do elect some good people or, for the sake of argument, let's say you elected a socialist president into the White House and a majority socialist Congress but still left intact the existing vast inequities of corporate capitalist power and the military and police bureaucracy. In the absence of a mass movement that was prepared to and set about toppling that economic and apparatus of coercive power and replacing it with the people's organs of power, then nothing would change.
What would happen if this political system, now dominated by socialists, moved to curb the extant huge disparities of economic power?
" During Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration (his White House was not even remotely socialist but it did carry out reforms), prominent economic elites actually plotted a military coup modeled after Germany and Italy's fascist regimes. As Alan Nasser relates, based on the recent release of data from the National Archives,
The owners of Bird's Eye, Maxwell House and Heinz, among others, totaling about twenty four major businessmen and Wall Street financiers ["including Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush's father. Bush, along with many other big businessmen, had maintained friendly relations in 1933 and 1934 with the new German government of Chancellor Adolph Hitler, and was designated to form for his class conspirators a working relationship with that government"] planned to assemble a private army of half a million men, composed largely of unemployed veterans. These troops would both constitute the armed force behind the coup and defeat any resistance this in-house revolution might generate. The economic elite would provide the material resources required to sustain the new government.
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Only a fascist-style government, they thought, could enforce the kind of economic "discipline" that would reverse the Great Depression and restore profits.
Interestingly, it was a military man, a prominent retired general assigned the task of raising the 500,000-man army, who blew the whistle after pondering the grotesque implications of the undemocratic installation of a fascist dictatorship in Washington. FDR was thus able to nip the plot in the bud. [i]
"Nasser notes that FDR declined to reveal the plot publicly and punish the fascist coup conspirators, despite their treasonous plans, out of class solidarity and concerns that if the plotters were broadly exposed it would produce a victory -- at a particularly sensitive time -- for anti-capitalist sentiment. The coup's failure, it should be noted, turned on the decision of just one man -- the general who was picked to lead the coup. [ii] The conspirators themselves, key figures of this country's economic elite, cheerleaders at every opportunity for "freedom,' "democracy,' and "the American way of life,' were not at all reluctant, when their fortunes appeared to be even mildly attenuated, to override the putatively sacred principles of what America claims to be all about." (Globalization and the Demolition of Society , Pp. 245-246)
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