For the second year in a row, the Democratic Party spokesperson replying to Trump was a former member of the CIA—the Central Intelligence Assassins. This one—Abigail Spanberger, the governor of Virginia—carried out orders for eight years under both the Bush and Obama administrations. Spanberger worked the “Counter-intelligence Division”—the group that forwarded the lists of people approved to be “designated kills” for Obama to sign off on every Tuesday, as he did every week of his reign. This "designated" them to be killed with a drone missile, even if they were at home or driving in a car with their families. 

Last year, the Democrats appointed Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan to be the designated respondent. Slotkin worked for the CIA in Iraq for four years, designing counter-insurgency against armed groups opposed to the illegal and murderous U.S. occupation of that country. U.S. counter-insurgency techniques in Iraq, including by the CIA, included notorious forms of torture, deprivation and overall degradation, such as waterboarding.¹

But back to this year. Spanberger climaxed her speech with the following: 

At the same time, she said, the president “continues to cede economic power and technological strength to China, bow down to a Russian dictator, and make plans for war with Iran.” 

“[T]hrough [the Department of Government Efficiency], mass firings, and the appointment of deeply unserious people to our nation’s most serious positions, our President has endangered the long and storied history of the United States of America being a force for good.”

Here is Spanberger almost word for word putting forward what the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) called “The Great Tautological Fallacy.” Here he describes it in the talk The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go:

One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way, and weighing people down, is American chauvinism—the disgusting notion that America and Americans are better and more important than everybody else. This is a poison infecting people broadly in this country, even among the bitterly oppressed, and there is a great need for people to break with this American chauvinism. Free yourself from the GTF!—the Great Tautological Fallacy. A fallacy: an idea, or a way of thinking, that is false, wrong. A tautology: a round-in-a-circle way of reasoning that asserts something and then claims to prove it by merely asserting the same thing again. So, the Great Tautological Fallacy to which I am referring is the notion that America is a force for good in the world, and therefore whatever it does is good (or at least done with “good intentions”), even if the same thing when done by other forces, especially by forces opposed to “us,” is bad, is evil—because... because America is a force for good in the world. [Go here to watch the whole passage of this speech, where BA elaborates on this point to great effect!]

So by Spanberger’s (and the Democratic Party’s) logic, torturing detainees and killing people (sometimes with their families in tow) without benefit of trial because they might be an enemy is good… because America is a force for good in the world. And, evidently, because Trump is not draping this country’s sordid history and murderous present-day mayhem and machinations in this same kind of rhetoric, he risks ceding that ideological weapon and exposing the truth of the brute force and unjust violence that has been covered over by that lie. And, following the logic of Spanberger’s reply, he does this while giving too much ground to the rival imperialist powers China and Russia.

Spanberger, Slotkin and the rest have their differences with Trump—serious differences, and this is important. How serious? Just last October, Slotkin called on U.S. soldiers and CIA members to disobey illegal orders. Trump threatened Slotkin and five other Democratic legislators who joined her with hanging (!), then tried to have them prosecuted and got as far as a grand jury—which refused to indict them. Such differences can be part of the first condition of a situation where revolution is possible—what the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has analyzed as “A crisis in society and government so deep and so disruptive of the ‘usual way of things,’ that those who have ruled over us, for so long, can no longer do so in the ‘normal’ way that people have been conditioned to accept.” [For more on this—including the other two conditions—go to the major new talk by BA that we are posting today—HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, or Forging a Way Out of the Madness?]

At the same time, these are differences over how to use lethal force to maintain U.S. domination of the planet, not whether. Democratic and Republican—and Republi-fascist—administrations have all used that force and domination over the planet, with the result of over 14 million people being killed since World War 2. By designating as spokespeople these “national security moms” (as the New York Times and other mainstream outlets call them), the Democrats send a message in the clearest possible terms that this party stands for world domination and will carry out brutal and illegal methods to maintain and expand that domination.

Their differences with the fascists pivot on how to rule. And again, in the context of a massive uprising of the people from below around the slogan “The Fascist Trump Regime Must Go Now!” and infused with the stand of “In The Name of Humanity, We Refuse To Accept A Fascist America!” those differences can take on heightened strategic significance.