Today I went searching for something John Dos Passos wrote in The Big Money about the execution of alleged murderers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I had read the USA trilogy, which contains The Big Money, back in the 1950s, when its radicalism seemed a little dated, given that of Allen Ginsberg. I didn’t know it at the time, but Dos Passos had already completed a transition from 30s radical to 50s neocon, as so many American writers of his generation did. Still, the passage in question has stuck with me over the years as a cry of hopeless rage on the order of Ginsberg’s Howl.

they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons

all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight

there is nothing left to do we are beaten

….they have built the electricchair and hired the executioners to throw the switch

all right we are two nations

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch . . .

I found it in plenty of places; a poignant blog by Kevin Drum came up among them. “Everything old is new again,” Drum writes at the end, echoing the Peter Allen song. And it all seems to coalesce into a huge pile of significance today as I read reports of a federal secret police unit raging round the city of Portland, Oregon detaining and maiming peaceful protestors and fast backward to the re-institution of the federal death penalty by a venal Attorney General and a Supreme court that can hardly be trusted to avoid equal venality.

I add these abominations to the list of crimes the president and his minions (among whom I include his enablers in the United States Senate) have got away with: cheating to win the 2016 election and then covering it up, the latest chapter in that sorry story being the Roger Stone commutation; wholesale scapegoating of immigrants including the now infamous separation policies, concentration camps, and other efforts to subvert immigration statutes, undermining our nation’s public health service as part of an overall attack upon the provisions of the Affordable Care Act with the result that we now have the worst of the worldwide coronavirus epidemics whose death toll is now over 140,000 and rising; attempting to seize control of messaging to the nation about the current pandemic first by holding daily press briefings that were little more than campaign rallies and when that didn’t work launching a series of attacks on Anthony Fauci and when that began to backfire demanding that hospitals and states bypass the CDC and submit coronavirus data to the White House; subverting half a century of foreign policy in eastern Europe to further the geopolitical ambitions of Vladimir Putin while ignoring Putin’s cash bounties for the lives of American soldiers. The list goes on and on. George Will has charged that our country “is now being administered by a gangster regime.” I agree.

The Sacco and Vanzetti execution was clearly a miscarriage of justice by legal standards that constituted norms only yesterday. We can now add those norms to the list our present regime seeks to overturn. Support for that regime continues to wane as the coronavirus pandemic grows worse, but leaders, supporters, and enablers of the regime continue to laud and to pursue its criminal agenda, all the while attempting to ratchet up its authority. As of today I am no longer interested in the niceties of analysis. Like George Will I hope for an electoral tsunami in November so profound that it destroys this present regime and the Republican Party with it.

While I intend to vote for Joe Biden, I believe Biden will have to relent about Medicare for All and abandon his historic commitments to the banking and insurance industries. He will also have to confront his record of uncritical support of policing This present Republican regime has exhibited the death throes of late capitalism, particularly its violence against struggling minorities. Perhaps late capitalism will maintain itself by force among us; it can only do so by displaying its illegitimacy for all the world to see. Democratic socialism is the way of any viable path out of our present decadence. What stands against democratic socialism is massing now to support the continuation of our present kleptocracy. Its playbook will include the time-honored tactics of smear and voter suppression, which loom particularly large this election cycle because of the pandemic. Added to the usual tools of voter suppression now are lack of federal support for election reform and the current effort by Republicans to destroy the US Postal Service, which will be charged with transporting the millions of mail-in ballots expected to be cast. But the most disturbing elements of that emerging Republican playbook are a federal secret police of unknown size and the thousands of militarized police forces throughout the country who through their national union have now declared support for the Republican gangsters and their president.

The Fraternal Order of Police supported Obama and Biden in past elections but endorsed Trump over Clinton in 2016 claiming that she ‘snubbed’ them. It is time for Biden to repudiate police militancy if he is to represent the hopes and dreams of the thousands of Americans who have now taken to the streets. This will be a massive task, but it might begin with a truth and reconciliation commission, modeled on the South African experience but with some added legal authority. A more massive task will be to restore the rule of law. It isn’t true that we’ve never before been where we are now as a people, or that the character of our times “isn’t who we are.” But it is true that we have never before confronted so massive a task as it will be to establish justice in a land that can no longer forget its sins nor sweep them under the rug.

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch . . .

But we are the strangers who beat our nation bloody. We are the crooks and liars who bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp. We turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people, and we didn’t care as long as it wasn’t us who got herded into those slums and factories and sweatshops. And we have now got this miserable excuse for a government because we voted for it. And it may be too late to vote it out. We can now certainly not vote it out before countless more Americans die. We have hired the executioner to administer the lethal dose.