A Fool and His Vote Are Soon Parted: “What’s Left?” October 2016, MRR #401

Because of you Bernie is going to have to campaign for Hillary every day until election day and he shouldn’t have to do that. One, because he hates her. It’s just unlike you he’s adult enough to pretend he doesn’t

― Seth Meyers, “Hey,” Late Night Show

I was “Clean for Gene” in 1968 even before I could vote. I canvassed for George McGovern in 1972. In 1996, I voted for Ralph Nader on the Green Party and attended a couple of rallies, but not much else. Same with Bernie Sanders in 2016. I put up his poster and voted for him, but that was about it. Over the decades, I’ve gradually distanced myself from the electoral mania that seems de rigueur for such progressive/third party efforts. This time around I’m definitely feeling my age and getting quite vexed over those Sandernistas for reinventing the wheel of naïveté under the guise of youthful idealism.

By Sandernistas, I’m not referring to those third party stalwarts or vanguardists who jumped onto the Bernie bandwagon, only to return to their respective political folds once Bernie lost. I criticized them and their sectarianism in MRR #397 after tackling the viability of independent third party politics in general in MRR #396. Sandernistas are those young, politically unaffiliated, OWS types who were swept up in the frenzy of Bernie’s “political revolution,” but who now feel bitterly betrayed by his defeat and capitulation to Clinton and the Democratic Party. Those other progressives, social democrats, and Leninists might all be delusional about the importance and promise of their respective third parties, pre-party formations, or social movements, but they cannot be considered naïve by any means in that they fully understand that the electoral system is rigged and that American politics-as-usual are a dead end.

Not so the Sandernistas, who are credulous in three important ways, the first being their belief that genuine revolution can be won electorally through the Democratic Party. Personally, I don’t think significant social change can be had outside of taking to the streets, but I’d be happy if a dual role were possible for electoral politics and street action simultaneously, with a vibrant social movement mediating between the two. The youngsters inspired by Bernie’s call for an electoral revolution are idealistic to a fault, in that they think they can storm the bastion of capitalist power that is the Democratic Party without firing a shot.

Which brings me to the gullibility of Bernie’s followers when they proclaimed they were shocked, shocked they tell us, over the Wikileaks dump of DNC emails revealing that prominent party Democrats had it in for the Sanders campaign. “But they’re not playing fair,” they wailed, as if playing fair has anything to do with politics, or for that matter life. I fully expected the Sandernistas to demand that Debbie Wasserman Schultz be given a “time out” for her anti-Sanders partisanship. I mean, this is the party of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who won election in 1948 by stuffing ballot box 13 with votes from deceased Texans.

Finally, there’s the overwhelming personal sense of betrayal that many Sanders followers expressed when Bernie lost the primary and endorsed Clinton. Seth Meyers commented that “Look, I know you’re ‘Bernie or Bust’ but the results are in. ‘Bust’ won,” but his sarcasm fell on deaf ears. The weeping and gnashing of teeth continues, and it’s as if Hillary or Bernie or the Democratic Party personally slapped them in the face or ran over their dog. I mean, get over yourselves and take Joe Hill’s advice “don’t mourn, organize” to heart. But that would be too much work and way too adult, so I stand by my conclusion that they are naïve beyond belief.

For those of you who felt that a political revolution in the Democratic Party was possible, that you were being treated unfairly by the Democrats, and that Bernie’s primary defeat and subsequent endorsement of Clinton were bitter betrayals, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. It’s a beautiful suspension bridge painted orange, and it even produces its own income. But I really don’t have the time to further disabuse the Sandernistas of all their other misconceptions, which are legion. The idea that all you have to do is occupy a park or a square OWS-style and voilà, instant movement, is ludicrous. Or the Manichaean good-vs-evil notion that the struggle is between political purity and choosing between the lesser of two evils, which is also bullshit. Even contrasting idealism with pragmatism is a false dichotomy in that it ignores the need to think strategically and dialectically. My pet peeve has been the canard that if I vote for Hillary, or for that matter Trump, I’ve completely sold out and legitimized the entire capitalist-statist-racist-patriarchal-fascist-imperialist system under which we live. Part of the simplistic belief that voting is the be-all-and-end-all to all politics, it’s also part of the idiocy that one vote, my vote, changes everything. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a vote is just a vote.

I’ve pointed out before that I live and vote in California, a state that Clinton is sure to win come November. So whether I vote for Hillary or Trump or write in Bernie Sanders is irrelevant. I could write in Mickey Mouse or self-righteously abstain from voting entirely and it will make no difference. Of course, there’s so much more to electoral politics, third parties, movement building, or fomenting revolution. I’m just sick and tired of political naïveté masquerading as youthful idealism or worse, serious revolutionary activity.

Now, get the fuck off my lawn!

***

There is another approach to Bernie’s “political revolution,” aside from the cynical opportunism of third party/vanguardist hacks and the naïve enthusiasm of the youthful Sandernistas. My peeps, the ultraleft, push the political form of the revolutionary organization that does not strive to be either a mass-based, quasi-democratic, parliamentary bourgeois party or a professional, democratic-centralist Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. Ostensibly a cadre party as “hard as steel, clear as glass,” the ultraleft revolutionary organization leads by example, intervening at pivotal historical moments or in crucial social movements to clarify social and political contradictions in order to push the working class into actualizing itself as a class, and eventually into social revolution. Luxemburg, Bordiga and the original Council Communists saw Lenin and the Bolsheviks as fulfilling that role during the Russian 1917 revolution up through at least the October Revolution, although some subsequent ultraleftists have not been as kind to either Communist icon. In my humble analysis, that’s not what Lenin or the Bolshevik party actually did, and no ultraleft cadre party organization has managed to win a successful social revolution using this strategy. Certainly no one intervened in the Sanders campaign to show the Sandernistas the error of their ways. Hence my cantankerousness.

***

For those of you keeping score, it’s 2 to 1. I was correct that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination and that the “Dump Trump/Never Trump” movement would not succeed. Similarly, I was right that Hillary Clinton would get the Democratic nomination and that the “Bernie or Bust” movement would be all bark but not much bite. And that they were, loudly, inside and outside the DNC in Philadelphia. Their activities did help Bernie to negotiate a slightly more leftist party platform while not actually playing much havoc with the convention proper. There was far more raucous protest and disruption at the Democratic convention however than at the Republican one, which brings me to my prediction that Cleveland 2016 would make Chicago 1968 look like a pink tea. I was wrong. Aside from acrimonious behind-the-scenes politicking in the RNC’s rules committee and Ted Cruz’s reviled non-endorsement speech on stage, the convention itself was remarkably disciplined and on-point. The streets of Cleveland were low-key and often empty, with nary a riot in sight. Some of that had to do with so many of us predicting, with a certain amount of glee and bloodlust, just the opposite and thus scaring the bejeesus out of the public. But I think there’s a deeper reason here. The young and the restless realized where the center of action was and gravitated toward where history was being made. Nothing could be done inside or outside the RNC to change things. Not so the DNC where there was at least the perception that protest might change the course of history. That’s why there was more shit happening in Philadelphia where even the Green Party’s Jill Stein hoped to woo disaffected Sandernistas.

***

I finished my second novel. It’s all edited, rewritten, and copy edited. Now, it’s in the hands my book designer, and ultimately, IngramSpark.

It’s called 1% Free, and it’s near-future speculative fiction/science fiction political thriller with a dash of noir. Aside from the genre tropes, it’s also dystopian and utopian fiction, but I’ll let you figure out which is which. It’s 2042, and America’s second civil war rages. Besides the collapse of the United States into racialized warfare, there are revolutionary social movements that combine red, black, and green politics; wild-assed youth countercultures; and meditations on science, cartography, technology, and extinction. There’s also a lot of prognostication via fictionalization, much like my first novel End Time in which I predicted the rise of Zapatistas in southern Mexico. The accuracy and desirability of the future I predict is also up to you to decide.

I have a book launch for 1% Free at 6 pm on Thursday, November 3 at the Book Passage bookstore at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I’m putting together some swag now.

What shape is your firing squad?: “What’s Left?” June 2016, MRR #397

(Visuals are crucial in social media. As this is a blog, and because these columns will be reposted on Facebook and beyond, I will be adding graphic content on the top of each column from now on to enhance their dissemination.)

It’s June. I’ve been on Facebook six months now. You’d think someone who was an IT guy would be all over that, and I must admit the whole Zuckerberg = Satan equation had a lot to do with me not getting on Facebook sooner. After all I email, I blog, I surf the worldwide intrawebz. It was inevitable I would make a pact with the devil sooner or later.

The Facebook shit is a part of my social media strategy to publicize my second novel when I publish it, but it has been pretty interesting in its own right. I’m still figuring out the “Friends” thing, so I clicked on someone’s profile who had a mutual friend, as Facebook so kindly pointed out. His profile came up with “Friends 3,316 (1 mutual)” and I clicked through, wondering how anyone could accumulate so many digital acquaintances. Turns out, 3,000 of them were Bernie Sanders supporters, most of whom had incorporated the Bernie meme into their profile picture, often with their selfie plus words like “Feel The Bern,” “Not Me, Us,” “I Am A Democratic Socialist,” “Bernie or Bust,” or just “Bernie.” Sometimes, the profile picture was a soulful photo or graphic portrait of Bernie in unabashed adulation. I’d stumbled upon a secret cell of Sandernistas, only they were just a bunch of Facebook “friends.”

The Democratic National Convention is next month, and Hillary’s coronation is assured. Bernie doesn’t have the delegates and he’s pledged not to resist Clinton’s nomination. I can’t help wondering what anger or soul-searching is in progress among those “friends” on Facebook, and how many will remain friends come August, or November.

Before Bernie’s candidacy maxxed out short of the nomination, his presidential run deeply divided the Left. So, what else is new? The Left gets deeply divided over what to order from the deli, so Bill Scher’s 2-4-16 story in Politico Magazine (“Why Socialists Can’t Wait for Bernie to Lose”) is somewhat predictable and cliched. In that old joke about what kind of firing squad the Left would form, the punchline being a circle guns pointed inward, there’s already disagreement over whether to make the firing squad a triangle or square instead. Bernie calling himself a democratic socialist has not only raised the word and a discussion of socialism to the fore in the American public, it motivated actual democratic socialists to support and campaign for him. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has endorsed Bernie and is actively campaigning/canvassing for him. Same with Socialist Alternative (SA). In the parlance of the Left, both are pre-party formations or activist organizations, not political parties or mass organizations.

My coverage of Jacobin Magazine’s range of opinions on Bernie’s campaign covers the thoughtful, non-dogmatic Left—from Bernie’s “moving the discussion to the left, and mobilizing an absurdly high number of people” to contending that he is “this election’s Democratic sheepdog […] charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party.” (MRR#389) Then we have the leftover Left, the serious third party electoralists and dogmatists, the sectarians and vanguardists, the wreckers and splitters. That last phrase was what Communist Party members used to call Socialist Workers Party Trotskyists, before the CP turned social democratic and Trotskyism splintered into oblivion. The CP has even given Bernie its reticent support by not running its own slate of candidates in 2016. So, what about the leftover Left?

Let’s recap Scher’s dissection of Jill Stein and the Green Party of the United States, but not without pointing out that this fully electoral, national Green Party (henceforth GP) is not associated with the non-electoral Greens/Green Party USA or the meta-electoral Association of State Green Parties (which encourages the formation of independent Green parties on the state level). Right away, you can see why I put the green party phenomenon into the leftover Left category as none of these different entities get along or have a chance of winning crap. Because anyone can become a member of the GP, and because those members then determine who runs under the party imprimatur, the GP has occasionally become the pawn of lefty vanguard parties like the Workers World Party or the Party for Socialism and Liberation who run their leadership as GP candidates. My old Peace and Freedom Party is chronically exploited for its reputation and ballot access by such Leninist relics.

“Do you root for Bernie as an almost unique chance to get millions of people to think seriously about socialist ideals, or against him for planting a false flag of revolution? And if you expect him to lose in the end—which, to be fair, most socialists do—should you ride the train as far as it goes, or get off it now and throw your energy into the real revolution?” Such are the dilemmas dividing the Left as Scher sees it, who then argues “[i]n many ways the split is most acute around the Green Party.”

The dilemma of whether to “build the party” or to “build the movement,” identified by Scher with respect to Stein’s Green Party candidacy, has been around at least as long as Lenin’s “What is to be Done?” Lenin himself came down heavily for building the socialist party, and that building the socialist party was building the socialist movement for Lenin. After the party, the priority is for a party newspaper to announce, propagandize and recruit for the party, but I’m not doing Lenin 101 here. As a footnote, Lenin’s electoral strategy was entirely utilitarian, subservient to the needs of the party to seize state power by any means necessary.

But what was footnote has become scripture for many socialists, who then split hairs and fracture organizations. As a consequence “there are plenty of parties: the Socialist Party USA, Peace and Freedom, Socialism and Liberation, Socialist Equality, Socialist Workers and Workers World” to name but a few. All agree the party is paramount, but what is the party’s strategy? Is it solely parliamentary, devoted to educating the masses and hopefully winning elections, like the Socialist Party? Or is it proudly revolutionary, eschewing any electoral involvement for politics in the streets and hell bent on seizing power, like the Revolutionary Communist Party? Is it conveniently electoral, seeking to move the Democratic Party to the left in the process and quietly deferring to the Democrats over the Republicans as the lesser evil, like many third party supporters of Bernie Sanders? Or is it opportunistic, switching between strategies as the times dictate, and occasionally running their leadership as candidates in surrogate parties, like the Party of Socialism and Liberation?

Stein’s GP is independently electoral and one of a half dozen third parties in the electoral popular front called LeftElect, which includes “Socialist Party USA presidential nominee Mimi Soltysik. (Other socialist candidates already announced are Gloria La Riva of the Party of Socialism and Liberation and Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party. The Peace and Freedom Party, another LeftElect participant, is deciding whether to endorse Stein, La Riva, Moorehead or a fourth candidate now running as an independent.)” Scher gets it that the fight for ballot access in our electoral system is all consuming, and that whether to run one’s own candidates or support a progressive Democratic candidate like Sanders is a life-and-death decision for most electoral third parties. Ralph Nader’s high profile run for president in 1996 and 2000 on the GP ticket no doubt helped that party with recognition and recruitment, until it didn’t and the Bush/Gore Florida hanging chads controversy overshadowed everything else. Stein herself expects Bernie to lose, giving her GP an opportunity to enlist “soon-to-be disgruntled Sanders voters.” As Sher quotes Stein in conclusion: “‘let this be a learning experience, the teachable moment’ for Sanders backers, so they will discover that ‘political revolutions that start in the Democratic Party, unfortunately, they die in the Democratic Party’.”

Which brings me full circle to the hordes of disappointed Bernie supporters come July. I registered Peace and Freedom Party in 1971 when the voting age was lowered to 18. Somehow, I never got the memo from Anarchist Central not to vote because it only encourages and I’ve been voting ever since. On the heels of the electoral tumult in 1968, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated and Eugene McCarthy’s loss, I colluded with fellow anarchists and a cadre of New American Movement lefties to run for city council and board of education in Ventura on an anarcho/democratic socialist ticket. We lost resoundingly, but we did get a county-wide bus system out of the deal by moving all the other candidates to the left. Then Nixon defeated McGovern in the landslide 1972 elections. I’d campaigned for McGovern, handed out literature, even did some precinct walking. I was distressed over McGovern’s loss and angry that Nixon’s win portended impending fascism, but I also became acutely aware of the limitations to the electoral process through these experiences.

I never took American elections seriously again, or more precisely, I finally put them into perspective. Voting and elections do change things, but only incrementally, and are worth only an incidental amount of my attention. The notion that any voting or electoral participation at all legitimizes the entire bourgeois corporate-state edifice is as much sophistry and mythology as is the official American ideology that voting and elections make a real difference. I continued to register Peace and Freedom Party until changes to the California electoral process forced me to choose between being a member of that party and participating in the Democratic Party primaries. Now, I get a ballot by mail every two years, fill it out in under ten minutes and put in the post, then be done with electoral politics for another two years.

It’s not difficult to predict that chaos will reign both inside and outside the RNC in Cleveland come July. Much harder is to predict what will happen in and around the DNC in Philadelphia. Bernie’s supporters certainly will push their quasi-socialist agenda and protest when they’re shot down, but will they start floor fights and fist fights, walk out of the convention, defect to one or another third party, or riot in the streets? Or will they bite their lips, hold their noses, and in the end vote for Hillary?

My crystal ball is clouding up.

Third Party and Skinhead Spoilers: “What’s Left?” May 2016, MRR #396

[My original intro for this column is below. Clearly, shit has happened. No more contested GOP convention. It’s between Clinton and Trump. Marx help us!]

[Covering the primary elections is like trying to nail jell-o to the wall, an almost impossible task. Last column I predicted that evangelical voters will go for Rubio, Cruz or Bush and largely pass over Trump. I was wrong. Evangelicals are flocking to Trump, against their church leadership and their professed Biblical morality. More surprises to come, I’m sure.]

I’m the first to admit that living in the Bay Area, between freewheeling San Francisco and the Peoples Republic of Berkeley and post-Occupy Oakland, my politics don’t really stand out. And living in California, with its Democratic Party hegemony and progressive social bent, means that my politics are also often an indulgence, me being able to honor a picket line when the union movement is essentially dead, or vote for Bernie Sanders while not affecting Hillary’s inexorable win one iota.

So, on viewing the 2016 elections from my Left Coast perspective I tend to oversimplify matters, and maybe dumb down certain aspects of American politics. Like in emphasizing the chaos in the Republican camp versus the dull inevitability on the Democratic side, I gloss over the relentless shift of those politics to the right in the last 45 odd years, something I’ve emphasized in previous columns. Even with the ongoing melee in the GOP, Republicans are on track to elect a significant majority of conservative state governments. That’s because, although there are more registered Democrats than Republicans nationwide, Republicans vote more consistently. So while both parties turn out in force for national elections, Republicans also vote heavily in mid-term elections while Democrats don’t. Thus Republicans choose more of the state governors and legislatures which then control the process of redistricting in each state, which then further skews state-level elections toward the Republicans. If the GOP retains its hold of either the House or the Senate, and perhaps both, about the only thing the Democrats will control outright is the presidency. Hillary’s seemingly unstoppable bid to be the next president is not merely a triumph of the lesser of two evils, but a potential right-of-center Democratic Party victory that fulfills Bill Clinton’s New Democrat turn towards neoliberalism. Obama was never the “great black hope” of American progressives so much as a middle-of-the-road Democrat treading water while the rightwing tide steadily rises. Hell, Bernie Sanders ain’t even all that progressive when it comes to gun control or Black Lives Matter or Israel or military interventionism.

Gloating over the collapse of the Republicans then does not mean celebrating a Democratic victory. And there’s no joy to be found in third party politics, whether in alternative ones like the Greens or Libertarians, mildly leftist ones like the Peace and Freedom or the Socialist Party, or even vanguardist ones like the Workers World Party or Party for Socialism and Liberation. America’s 50%+1 winner-take-all electoral system virtually ensures that only two political parties dominate the political process by favoring the middle-of-the-road, thus marginalizing all other electoral contenders. Third parties do persist, but they have little to no chance of directly influencing politics let alone gaining power. Or, they do so well that they actually replace one of the two main parties, as when the Republican Party replaced the Whig Party to face off against the Democratic Party. But breaking the two-party monopoly with a more European, parliamentary system isn’t in the cards.

What third parties are good for is fucking with the two parties currently alternating in power. Third parties hope to move the main party with which they identify further to the political extreme—left or right—as when George Wallace ran as an American Independent Party candidate in 1968 hoping to capture the white working-class Democratic vote that Trump now garners so effortlessly. But Wallace didn’t make much of a difference in Nixon’s landslide victory of that year. Instead, third parties are often the spoilers in a heated two-party contest, as when Ross Perot’s Reform Party cost Bush Senior a second term in 1992 against Bill Clinton, or Ralph Nader’s campaign as the Green Party presidential candidate in 2000 cost Al Gore the White House against Bush Junior.

Sometimes, just the threat of an independent third party run can cause political turmoil as when Donald Trump—whose ongoing campaigns virtually guarantees that the Republican National Convention will be a contested one—threatened to mount a third a party breakaway effort upon rumors the GOP establishment intended to broker the convention to favor a predetermined outcome. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is currently exploring a third party presidential run if Trump wins the Republican primary and Sanders wins the Democratic endorsement. Being a moderate Democrat-become-Republican-become-Independent, Bloomberg is a socially liberal (pro-abortion, gay marriage and gun control), fiscally conservative (small government, lower taxes) politician, meaning he doesn’t have a chance to be nominated by either party in the best of circumstances.

There is something to be said for the more, the merrier. Certainly, the chaos of a split or contested GOP convention, with the potential for third party splintering, all but hands Hillary the presidency. But she can still lose. If Trump manages to secure the nomination on the first vote, there is a chance he can defeat Clinton. Paradoxically, Hillary’s juggernaut is built around a weak candidacy, one which lots of people dislike even as they grudgingly support her. And if Trump manages the impossible and unites the shattered GOP behind a convention nomination, it’s time to start practicing the Roman salute.

I commented at the beginning of this column that my voting for Bernie in California won’t impact Hillary’s campaign in the least. California holds its primaries in June, meaning that by the time I actually vote, the Democratic Party nomination will be pretty much sown up. That’s on top of having to register as a Democrat to vote for Bernie in the first place. Used to be any registered California voter could vote in any qualified political party’s primary without restriction, whether or not said voter was a member of said party. Then, the state’s two party Democratic/Republican duopoly passed legislation to restrict party primary voting to registered party members only, with the consequence that third party supporters had to decide between belonging to their party of choice or participating in the Democratic/Republican party primaries. Third party memberships plummeted state-wide as a result of these semi-closed primaries and many third parties, like the Peace and Freedom Party to which I belonged almost from its inception, now constantly struggle just to qualify for the ballot. In turn, parasitic vanguard parties like the aforementioned Party for Socialism and Liberation or their sectarian front groups like the ANSWER Coalition, unable themselves to qualify for the general elections, take over vulnerable third parties like the Peace and Freedom in order to field their own leadership as political candidates.

So, I’m a reluctant Democrat. Even with a somewhat more progressive candidate like Bernie to vote for, I’m disinclined to give much more to the electoral process than my vote. Which is why I’m more than a bit irritated by all the bandwagon Sandernistas out there braying 24/7 about how Hillary is Satan incarnate and we all need to support Bernie unconditionally. I did my time promoting my share of Establishment politicians, everything from campaigning for George McGovern to phone-banking for Barack Obama. I’ll give Sanders my vote come June, but all that crap about Bernie being the resurrected Eugene V. Debs and his democratic socialism being a classless utopia and his presidential candidacy being the fulfillment of the American dream is so childish as to be embarrassing. What’s more, I’ll also vote for Clinton in November solely to prevent a lunatic Republican from winning, without hope or guilt.

Returning to my oft-repeated observation that American politics has moved steadily to the right in my lifetime, let me exaggerate to make my point. There’s this documentary—“Riot on the Dance Floor”—of the Trenton, New Jersey punk club, City Gardens, and Randy Now, the mailman who ran it. I think it’s still in the Kickstarter stage of funding, but there’s a 6-7 minute YouTube clip freely available. A much younger Jon Stewart is briefly interviewed by phone because he was a bartender at the Gardens in the mid-1980s, but the really interesting footage that accompanies his voice-over is of the extremely violent pit in the Gardens’ shows. There’s a particularly striking scene of what I call the skinhead wave, a human wall of mostly shirtless baldies that gathers at the back of the hall and then rushes en masse toward the stage, trampling everyone in its path until it crashes up against the people at the stage. Those who were a part of this skinhead wave, they were only a small minority of the visible crowds, yet they dominated that show with their violent antics. I experienced the skinhead wave when I lived in San Diego during the 80s at some of the larger venues, but I think it was mostly a phenomenon of larger scenes like LA, or the East Coast.

The conservative shift in American politics over the last half century is like a slow-motion skinhead wave. Initiated by right-wing individuals who are a definite minority but who sweep all before them with their aggressive attacks, ultimately hoping to crush liberals and progressives against the stage of history, this turn to the right in the country’s politics is deliberate and orchestrated. Just voting for Bernie Sanders won’t accomplish much. And quoting Joe Hill’s last words “Don’t Mourn, Organize!” doesn’t get us much further. It’s a tired platitude, and actually, Joe’s last words were “I don’t want to be caught dead in Utah.” If Trump is elected, it’s a sentiment that many may apply to the whole US of A.