One month after the November 2000 election, the US Supreme Court issued its infamous ruling, in a five-four split decision, halting the recount of the presidential vote in the state of Florida, questioning the right of the American people to elect the president, and handing the White House to Republican candidate George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote.
The high court’s decision marked a turning point in US history, constituting a fundamental and irrevocable break with democracy and the traditional forms of bourgeois legality.
North explains how the “irrepressible conflict” that led to the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery are today paralleled by a new “irrepressible conflict” between capital and labor. It is this conflict that underlay the repudiation of bourgeois democratic forms of rule in the US election 20 years ago, and today, at a much sharper stage of its development, the present attempts by President Donald Trump to turn the 2020 election into a coup d’état.