President Trump?
It just might happen. What seemed, a year ago, like a laughingstock candidacy is now a plausible winner in the wildest political year (and there is still the forthcoming “October surprise”) since 1968. No matter what happens, the old US party system is broken. Donald Trump is like no major candidate in living memory. Just as one had to reach back to Eugene Debs to find a candidate as seemingly radical as Bernie Sanders, finding a serious precursor to Trump is even more difficult. The quiet eclipse of Sanders in August guaranteed that many of his ex-supporters will stay home or vote for the Green Party. Respectable official society, including a good swath of the Republican establishment and even the normally “apolitical” military, is either in withdrawal or openly supporting Clinton. Generals, diplomats, foreign policy wonks and the New York Times all agree that a Trump presidency will be a disaster. The Financial Times sheds tears over the possible demise of the “internationalist” (read: US-dominated) world order in place since 1945. Such declarations make no difference; if anything, they only add to Trump’s “anti-establishment” credentials and panache.
The situation shows important parallels to the Brexit vote in Britain in June; there, the entire political and academic establishment, “left” or “right,” came out to “remain” in the European Union, and something like a class vote (albeit mixed with other less savory elements) came back with a big middle finger. That is what is brewing in the United States. What is occurring is nothing less than a (very) skewed referendum on the past 45 years of American politics and society, and those who feel they got the short end of “free trade” and “globalization” think they have finally found a voice, even as Trump’s economic program, such as it is, is a chimera. Just as in France or in Britain, the new right-wing populism does not make its inroads in the wired yuppie metropolitan centers of Paris or London, but rather in the passed-over middle and small towns, including towns where gentrification has forced the former urban working class to relocate. So it is in the United States, where Trump does not play well in the San Francisco Bay Area or in New York City, but in the medium, small-town and rural preserves of the “unnecessariat.” We might also see the rise of Trump-style authoritarian populism in a disturbing global context, one that includes the ongoing advances of the far right in western Europe (France, Scandinavia, Austria and now Germany), in eastern Europe led by Hungary and Poland, along with Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey and, most recently, Duterte in the Philippines.
It is perhaps remarkable that, in America’s supposedly “middle class” society, the white working class is being discussed and catered to as the ultimate arbiter of this election. So unprecedented are the politics of 2016 that mainstream ideology suddenly feels the need to talk openly about the working class it previously disappeared or took for granted. UAW bureaucrats and AFL-CIO blowhard president Richard Trumka scurry hither and thither to convince the union rank and file not to vote for Trump.
Trump, for his part, when able to stay “on message,” has made disarmingly lucid speeches about what has happened to workers in the decimated former heartland of mass industry, the key “swing states” of the Midwest. The hard-scrabble white working class of the former mass furniture industry in Virginia and North Carolina is also easy pickings for Trump, not to mention the West Virginia miners and ex-miners turned off by Clinton’s “green” agenda. And why should we be surprised, when the main surprising thing is that for the first time a candidate of a major party has bothered to talk directly to such workers about what has happened to them in the past decades, in contrast to the feel-good rhetoric of the Walter Mondales and Bill Clintons and now of Hillary Clinton? Saying “America never stopped being great,” as Hillary Clinton and the Democrats do, is already ideology run amok, and is even colder comfort to ex-industrial workers in the heartland, to a large swath of black people north and south, or to poor whites in Appalachia and elsewhere, currently subject to the highest death rates in the country by suicide, drugs and alcohol. We should not overlook, when identifying the class fractures at work, the role of identity politics, so rife in the metropolitan centers, in fueling the rise of Trump. Identity politics always had and has an explicit or implicit “suspicion” of workers qua workers, just as they have been supremely indifferent to the dismantling of the old industrial heartlands, which ravaged communities of white, black and brown workers alike. The rise of Trump is in part payback for the decades of condescension and barely concealed contempt for, or at best indifference to, the fate of ordinary working people rife in elite academia, the corporate media and the higher-end publishing world of the New York Times and posh journals of the chattering classes. Trump is a racist, you say? A misogynist? An immigrant and China basher? Yes, he is all those things, but these accusations from the garden-variety left and liberals do not get to the heart of his appeal as an “anti-establishment” figure. His apparent base does also have the highest per capita income of the major candidates and ex-candidates (Clinton and Sanders), indicating that he has forged a coalition of middle-and upper-class whites with some white workers and poor whites, itself rather unprecedented. All these groups have in common a conviction that the older America they knew is being replaced by an America with a blacker and browner working class, and multiple immigrant groups from East and South Asia, and from Latin America. Last but not least, Trump has indeed brought many elements of the far right, the David Dukes and gun-show crowd, into broad daylight, allowing them to emerge from the dark corners of the alt-right, and “freed their tongues,” as one of them put it, from the dominant “politically correct” atmosphere. Whether Trump wins or loses, such forces will not be going quietly back into their previous relative obscurity. To conclude, these advances of the far right and authoritarian populism around the world are the mirror of the failure of the moderate “left” which has collapsed into the happy family of center-right/center-left consensus of the past 45 years, led by the Tony Blairs, Francois Mitterands and Gerhard Schroeders in Europe and by the Jimmy Carters, Bill Clintons and Barack Obamas in the United States, and now joined by Hillary Clinton. Such forces are no stop-gap barrier, as many “lesser evil” theorists would have us believe, to the ascending right, but rather feed it, making it and not a serious left, of the type Insurgent Notes aims to help bring into existence, the apparent “anti-establishment” alternative to the status quo.
Comments
Really? Hard-scrabble working working class ignored or dismissed forming the fuel in the Trump fire? No more and no less than the same class backs Clinton. You argue that Trump’s appeal is “anti-establishment”? You ignore the power of racism at work; that Trump is not quite so new in the Republican Party which has been playing to racism, albeit with somewhat coded music, for 50 years– that Trump uses this racism, caters to it with “anti free trade” rhetoric is just another expression of the “yellow horde” jingoism. Trump is the culmination of the Republican’s “Southern strategy” gone national and on crystal meth, and dispensing with the “economic” camouflage of the “free market.”
Those acres of “Trump” signs in suburban Virginia; or suburban New Jersey are not on the lawns of hard-scrabble ignored workers.
Those attending the convention in Cleveland were not displaced workers. They were and are the American petit-bourgeois– eager to preserve their little capital.
I agree with S. Artesian’s analysis. A recent study found that Trump voters’ median household income is $72K, well above the national average of $56K. These folk–petit-bourgeois and racist as Artesian says–support Trump because they fear for their future in a US that is becoming more diverse. It should be noted that if he were elected (entirely unlikely now) Trump would wage a war against the working class–turning the US into a police state in which black and brown people have no rights, in which an underpaid working class would be “the dangerous classes,” etc.
Good piece. You exaggerate the role of politically correct academia in leading to today’s backlash politics- today’s right wing backlashes are also happening in places where that factor is absent. Also it’s not right to put Duterte in the far right category. Even with his anti drug death squads and Hitler jokes, he’s actually identified with and supported by the left. Not saying that’s a good thing but it is a fact. Anyway otherwise correct line editorial.
I completely agree with everything you have written. It seems to me that the issue is establishment versus anti-establishment, content versus discontent. I know it seems odd that in wealthy America anti-establishment discontent can have risen to such levels, but the Trump and Sanders campaigns show that it has. So its Trump representing anti-establishment and Clinton representing the Establishment that is at stake. Let’s assume Trump will not win. But the contention will not go away, what with the numerically minuscule billionaire class increasingly flexing its almighty dollars converting the state and politics into capitalism market economy. So, I assume also that we agree that Sanders’ analyses as to the root causes the problem, i.e., global financial capitalism, is correct, and Trump’s diagnosis, i.e., big government, foreigners, high taxes on rich, is incorrect. The real issue then is how to get the major of discontented people – for they are now a majority (if you add up Trump supporters and Sanders supporters) – to see that Sanders and not Trump is right? In other words, how to create class consciousness in a plutocracy? I don’t see that we’ve entered into a revolutionary situation yet, so I don’t see revolution as an answer. The answer – and don’t call me a liberal for this – must lie in education. But how educate when the school of public opinion is owned by the capitalist plutocracy? Or to put this differently, how to take the Sanders momentum and create a genuinely competitive Socialist party? These are my questions, I’m looking for answers.
Trump is against certain sections of the political and cultural establishment, including the established leadership of his own party, but he is firmly on the side of the business establishment, which he idolizes. Nor do the bosses of the corporate media regard him as an enemy, even though they show a bias toward Hillary. They do not suppress his message in the way that they suppress the message of the left. He is a sham anti-establishment figure who diverts anti-establishment feeling into channels that are safe for capital.
Let me add a few words to my comment above, especially in view of the comment by Stephen Shenfield. I think Stephen is perfectly right too: Trump does represent corporate and billionaire America. But that is why he got the nomination, and why he is running for president and not Sanders. Sanders, of course, was the genuine anti-capitalist candidate in the field of candidates, and for that reason big business, big media, shut his campaign down. It was way under-reported if we think of reporting as fair-minded, balanced, etc., all the things big media is not. So, given a choice between a populist candidate and a socialist candidate, the billionaire class will always support the populist. This is because nationalism diverts the general public from what really ails them, namely, the capitalist billionaires and their political minions. This is exactly what happened in Italy when the discontent gave rise to a strong Communist Party on the left and the populist-nationalist Mussolini on the right – money supported and put into power Mussolini. The same happened in Germany in the 20s and early 30s, when the choice was again between socialism-communism on the left and a populist-nationalist on the right. Big money supported Hitler. And thus the same in America with Trump and his enormous support from Big Money (despite fastidious defections at the political level which have more to do with elect-ability than real disaffection). So this brings me back to my original question with a vengeance: How break out of the American plutocracy when that plutocracy contrives to throw up an ersatz dissonant, whose clownish “politically incorrect” finger at the establishment is sufficient to convince a very poorly informed discontent electorate brought up in the propaganda of Corporate America to really support him? Let us not forget that the Koch brothers and their ilk finance the Tea Party, the myth of a liberal media, angry anti-government sentiment, etc. – and the mass of their followers are ignorant and gullible enough not to see the contradictions. .
A couple of brief, albeit, random comments:
First, the IN editors are right with this editorial: There may just well be a President Donald Trump. Not a pretty sight, but one should be honest about the growing popularity of right-wing populist currents.
What’s needed, though, is a closer look at the Trump “phenomenon”. Alexander Zaitchik provides such an attempt with “The Gilded Rage”: http://skyhorsepublishing.com/titles/11885-9781510714281-dont-tread-on-me
Other writers like Chip Berlet and Sara Diamond have done important work so far as “far right watch”/”Antifa” reporting goes.
Also, quite a few North American leftists can try seeing German Antifa activists at work and taking some notes….I include myself in this category.
Second, Jacobin magazine has published some good work on Duterte. Here’s one: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/duterte-philippines-election-maoists-cpp-marcos-death-squads/
It is not because Trump plays to racism, jingoism etc., that his campaign is not fueled to an important extent by the anger of “hard-scrabble working class” people, worrying about their future. That is the question today, why is this anger captured by Trump and other right wing populists? Why is it so quiet at the class struggle front?
Sander
S.Artesian is obviously more familiar with the middle class suburbs of Virginia and New Jersey, but I can attest that there are a lot of Trump signs in the yards of barely standing houses in the Rust Belt. Trump will win West Virginia, which is filled with thousands of ex-workers left with nothing; not even the pensions they were promised. Mines closed with nothing else happening, their schools are being shuttered with the few left standing lacking money to even buy a text book. S.Artesian may say that the nearly guaranteed West Virginia Trump victory will be driven by racism, but this is a state that came out heavy for Sander’s supposedly socialist program just a few months earlier. Working people are driven by necessity to look for an alternative, and Hilary’s claim that everything is just fine ain’t winning them over.
I liked the editorial. For reasons I’m sure you understand, I wish you had spoken of “working-class whites” or “white working-class people” instead of “the white working class.”
AM,
Can’t say that I am, never having lived in the suburbs of either, just having seen pictures. Haven’t lived in W Va, but I’ll take you word for it. Don’t doubt that there is an element of disemployed, laid off, sloughed off workers considering or determined to vote for Trump as an “alternative.” Do doubt that the fuel in this fire, the hard core, of the Trump movement is former or current working class whites. That’s not who’s showing up at Trump rallies, pushing and punching black people at Trump rallies.
Nor do I think Trump has a chance of winning. Not 1 in 1000. I do think the Republican Party, born in the overture to a civil war, the Kansas-Nebraska Act , dies in this overture to another one, with the Trump supporters abandoning it, and forming what will become the core to a real fascist organization.
That “core” is itself petit-bourgeois and racist.. And there will be money behind it. Big money. Hedge fund money, ready to pony up.
That, the transfomation of Trumpists into that corp of nightriders is down the road a piece, I think. But then, I also predicted Carter would beat Reagan.
AM,
Can’t say that I am, never having lived in the suburbs of either, just having seen pictures. Haven’t lived in W Va, but I’ll take you word for it. Don’t doubt that there is an element of disemployed, laid off, sloughed off workers considering or determined to vote for Trump as an “alternative.” Do doubt that the fury in this fire, the hard core, of the Trump movement is former or current working class whites. That’s not who’s showing up at Trump rallies, pushing and punching black people at Trump rallies.
Nor do I think Trump has a chance of winning. Not 1 in 1000. I do think the Republican Party, born in the overture to a civil war, the Kansas-Nebraska Act , dies in this overture to another one, with the Trump supporters abandoning it, and forming what will become the core to a real fascist organization.
That “core” is itself petit-bourgeois and racist.. And there will be money behind it. Big money. Hedge fund money, ready to pony up.
That, the transfomation of Trumpists into that corp of nightriders is down the road a piece, I think. But then, I also predicted Carter would beat Reagan.
This just goes to show how much SWP can rot your brain.
No class appeal (even in deformed, distorted terms–what, now only pure on a white pegasus bearing the invariant program has any ‘class’ patina to it?) by Trump whatsoever?
Pure white supremacy? News to me, and I’m a Chicano. Trump expanded his margins with POC of all categories versus Romney or McCain, which puts paid to the laughable summary that this is “a referendum on whether David Duke-ism has to be in code or can go in the open.” Yeah, that crypto-platform definitely explains shifts among Hispanics to Trump.
Complaining about a lack of non-Democratic Party campaign against voter suppression…from someone who is opposed to electoralism (sort of bizarre to organize around voter registration if you’re not contesting the ballot line; the “Freedom Democrats” emerging out of SNCC etc knew that).
Bush came close to canceling the 2004 election? ‘Made plans’–earth to Artesian, the military-security-secret state core makes contingencies for every eventuality. Some feckless military bureaucrat’s job is to periodically open the pdfs for ‘invade Canada’ and update it.
You are obviously in some respects dwelling politically on another planet.
“You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry.” This is a direct quote from Trump, referencing his own campaign. When is the last time a leading bourgeois candidate said something like this?
Racism, xenophobia, etc., on the other hand is nothing new from a bourgeois politician. What he said here is new, from the mouth of a person like him. Of course it is total bullshit, but it is still new. It still at least superficially addresses a working class thrown overboard in a way no major party nominee has done in years (or ever).
What sort of materialist analysis, viewing the working class as “the revolutionary agent,” leads you to believe that the racism and reaction of his campaign is more of a motivating agent than this sort of quote?
Or are you just saying that the petty bourgeois component is the main force driving the campaign and will be the main source of turn out for votes and a future movement? If that’s the case, why appeal to workers at all?
“Or are you just saying that the petty bourgeois component is the main force driving the campaign and will be the main source of turn out for votes and a future movement? If that’s the case, why appeal to workers at all?”
That’s exactly what I’m saying, and that’s exactly what the “sociological” and demographic analysis of Trump’s support indicates. As for why appeal to workers at all– because that is the classic(!) corporatist appeal– that there is a unity between/among a “popular” national bourgeoisie and a “national working class”– that there is and can be a common interest. There’s nothing new in the that appeal of a common interest– FDR played it, Hitler played it, Vargas played it, the popular fronts played it.
What better way to obscure and disorient class struggle than to appropriate it, as capital appropriates labor power, under the flag of “us” vs. them– them being black, brown, from Mexico, Syria, etc etc.
On another point, I absolutely reject the notion that Trump’s appeal is in any way the result of “multi-culturalism,” or “identity politics” or “years of neglecting the ‘white working class’.” That’s bunk– opposing discrimination against people on the basis of gender, color, sexual orientation does not trigger popular reaction.
FWIW, if we want to point to where the “left” and “marxists” went wrong– the place to point is in NOT opposing the gerry-mandering, and concerted efforts at disenfranchisement that has been waged in the US for 30 years– to not oppose that overt/covert policy of the bourgeoisie, independent of the established parties; to not oppose it programmatically, meaning as a point of agitation, practice, and organization was, I think, the greatest failure of the “left.”
Here’s another good one on Trump: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/trump-gop-republicans-tea-party-populism-fascism/
According to US NPR, exit polls of early voters show that Trump’s “base” of support is not in “alienated” white workers, or poor whites. According to the exit interviews, 44% of Trump supporters have college degrees, higher than the national average; and the median income of Trump voters interviewed was $72,000– higher than that of Clinton voters.
This is well put. I don’t understand how the commenters have misunderstood Loren’s point here regarding Trump’s base. Loren writes, “His apparent base does also have the highest per capita income of the major candidates and ex-candidates (Clinton and Sanders), indicating that he has forged a coalition of middle-and upper-class whites with some white workers and poor whites, itself rather unprecedented.” Regarding comments that he has ignored the role of race, I am completely puzzled. Did these commenters read the article? The quote I have pasted quite clearly situates race at the CENTER of the Trump phenomenon.
Loren I think you should explain more of what you mean about the nefarious impact of identity politics on this election. I find it troubling that it is not clear to some people that the pseudo-left’s policing of language, hierarchy of correctness based on a scale of comparative oppression (expressed through liberal intersectional thinking), the enforced silence on references to differences in phenotype no matter how they are expressed (enforced through a kind of racial and ethnic political correctness), and the identitarian left’s general haughty and arrogant posture have not alienated many of the working class. Of course these things have. These things rank up there with liberal feminism as central sort of knee-jerk reaction phenomena that cause working class whites to express disdain for the left. White working class people don’t see any space for themselves within this identitarian jargon, and it would be foolish to say that they haven’t jumped on the Trump bandwagon for these reasons. This is absolutely the case with the so-called “alt-right” base that Trump has mobilized, which is not an insignificant number of voters.
Different sources say different things. According to the Washington Post: “From polls, it is clear that Trump’s supporters tend to be blue-collar men with lower levels of education.”
Yeah, but there’s supposed to be that stuff called data out there that can validate,or invalidate claims– claims like Trump opposed the invasion of Iraq; or that the US has lost millions of jobs because of foreign competition; or that global warming is a Chinese plot to eradicate US industry… .
Try this source: http://www.sarahsmarsh.com/
There is also analysis of the data. And also seeing things with your own eyes. Both are quite useful.
“Many of the differences reflect that Republican voters are wealthier overall than Democratic ones, and also that wealthier Americans are more likely to turn out to vote, especially in the primaries.” As per 538 election site.
We’ll see what happens in the election. As it stands I’ve run into a lot of poor, isolated, ruined workers who are backing trump. And some employed workers too, such as members of the “truckers for Trump” (though this has some petty bourgeois elements too).
The driving forces can be investigated, but there’s no doubt that Trump has gained a lot of support among poor ruined workers. Just look at West Virginia.
In 2008 the majority white coal country county of McDowell County West Virginia went for Obama, so we can say they are at least not driven by race hatred. So when they go for Trump this time around will it be that they are xenophobic and racist and misogynistic, or will it be because Trump was the first candidate to even verbally aknowledge this totally ruined group of industrial workers?
But again, the issue isn’t if [b]some[/b] workers support Trump; just as it was not the issue that/if some workers supported Nixon, or Reagan, or Bush. The issues are the claims:
1. “Donald Trump is like no major candidate in living memory”–demonstrably wrong as a) Buchanan preceded Trump playing similar themes b) Trump as surrounded himself with the same “advisors” “consultants” who have been in the stable of every Republican presidential candidate since Nixon, c)what’s important isn’t Trump or not Trump but how and why Trump presents the absolutely logical extension to its “illogicity” of the bourgeoisie’s “strategy” since Nixon– “coding” for racism, suppressing voter enfranchisement, jerry-mandering– that point being where the coding strips itself away. And why that appears at this moment.
2. “What is occurring is nothing less than a (very) skewed referendum on the past 45 years of American politics and society, and those who feel they got the short end of “free trade” and “globalization” think they have finally found a voice, even as Trump’s economic program,”– again absolutely not the story, at least not the whole story. This isn’t a referendum on free trade or globalization– part of that 45 years was also the reduction in poverty rates until 1979, and then again prior to 2001; part of that 45 years where the were attempts to secure measures of equality for women in reproductive health care, in schools, in after school supports. Part of that 45 years is also the 30 years of attempted voter suppression, the corporate focus on state legislatures to dismantle protective legislation, and unions.
The “referendum” being held is whether or not white supremacy can dispense with the “code” a la David Duke dispensing with the white sheets .
Is there real economic distress in West Virginia? Sure thing. In the rural, and small town areas of Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, etc? Sure thing.
Was that distress caused by globalization and free trade? Absolutely not.
Trade may have reduced some jobs by some fraction, but the overwhelmingly loss of employment in the rural areas begins with Reagan/Volcker and the double-dip recession of the 1980s and the great asset stripping adventure of the bourgeoisie determined to offset the fall in profits. The loss of jobs has been the result of the advances in productivity coupled with reductions in profit margins and has almost zero to do with globalization.
Globalization and “free trade” is no less an attempt to obscure the class nature of this distress, the distress imposed by capitalism, than is Trump’s characterizing of Mexican migrants as rapists and murderers.
3. This: “It is perhaps remarkable that, in America’s supposedly “middle class” society, the white working class is being discussed and catered to as the ultimate arbiter of this election. So unprecedented are the politics of 2016 that mainstream ideology suddenly feels the need to talk openly about the working class it previously disappeared or took for granted. UAW bureaucrats and AFL-CIO blowhard president Richard Trumka scurry hither and thither to convince the union rank and file not to vote for Trump.”
…pretty much takes the cake. The media, the politicos, which have spent decades avoiding “working class” as a category, using “middle class” wherever and whenever possible, suddenly is now granted authority in deciding what, who is working class and what working class issues are. Priceless. Nothing fits the fantasy of an “enlightened section of the bourgeoisie”– of which there is none– than the concurrent fantasy of an ignorant, reactionary, brutish working class.
4. I’m sorry I made a mistake (3) above doesn’t take the cake, this does:
“And why should we be surprised, when the main surprising thing is that for the first time a candidate of a major party has bothered to talk directly to such workers about what has happened to them in the past decades.”
Because Trump isn’t talking directly to workers about what has happened to them, since workers are and as a class include women workers, black workers, latino workers, migrant workers, the working poor, workers at the minimum wage. He is talking directly to the petty-bourgeoisie that make up the bulk, and the shock troops, of his campaign, as manipulated by the same people who manipulated the petty-bourgeoisie for Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush etc. He is directly not talking to the class, but appealing to reactionary, racists segments of various classes under the classic corporatist mantra of “unity” a shared “us” vs. “them.”
5. I’m sorry, (4) doesn’t take the cake, this: ”
We should not overlook, when identifying the class fractures at work, the role of identity politics, so rife in the metropolitan centers, in fueling the rise of Trump. Identity politics always had and has an explicit or implicit “suspicion” of workers qua workers, just as they have been supremely indifferent to the dismantling of the old industrial heartlands, which ravaged communities of white, black and brown workers alike. The rise of Trump is in part payback for the decades of condescension and barely concealed contempt for, or at best indifference to, the fate of ordinary working people rife in elite academia, the corporate media and the higher-end publishing world of the New York Times and posh journals of the chattering classes”
does, really. Parroting Trump’s nonsense is not a revolutionary strategy, nor does it amount to a materialist analysis. Identity politics have had zero to do with the so-called “alienation” of the so-called white working class. Everybody, except Loren it seems, knows exactly where this type of “critique”– a critique of the “corporate media” “academic elites” the “NYT” and “posh journals” of the chattering classes goes– it goes right into the pocket of reaction. No struggle for equality for those subjected to extraordinary levels of exploitation or oppression or discrimination or mistreatment is responsible for the actions of reactionaries, racists, scheming self-aggrandizing politicos. Tagging “liberals” or “liberal journals” as a problem WITHOUT IDENTIFYING THEIR SPECIFIC ROLE IN THE REPRODUCTION OF CAPITAL, ignore that the attacks upon them are triggered that they no longer suffice to meet the needs of capital. Claiming, as the editorial does, that this is “payback” is schadenfreude…. and a mouthful of ashes.
I posted a long reply but it may have been lost in the ether. I won’t bother rewriting it
“Clinton wins the college-educated segment by 25 percentage points, 59 percent to 34 percent. Trump’s edge among those without a college education is 10 points, 52 percent to 42 percent.
“Trump’s lead is 4-to-1 among white men with less than a college degree, 76 percent to 19 percent. ”
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-12/education-level-sharply-divides-clinton-trump-race
“Nor do I think Trump has a chance of winning. Not 1 in 1000.”
Care to revise that before it’s too late?
Nope, like I told you at the getgo, I also predicted Carter would beat Reagan, so my record is unblemished by anything that resembles accuracy.
I’m sticking with my original prediction. And why not? Haven’t we just witnessed the perfect demonstration that facts don’t matter?
This is an earlier comment from AM that was not posted when submitted:
So when Trump goes to a town like Monessen in Pennsylvania (totally ruined steel town, population around 8000, nearly one fifth black which is much higher than most surrounding areas, median household income 50% of the national average, houses collapsing or selling for $2000, school ranked bottom of the barrel) and talks about the deindustrialization and collapse of the place, he is appealing to the petty bourgeoisie? Good luck finding much of one there. Last time through I think I spotted 10 functioning businesses.
No, he is running a populist campaign, which entails appeals to many classes, including the petty bourgeoisie but also directly to the working class (see earlier comment when he said “You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry” in reference to his own campaign).
While Trump talks about the collapsed steel and coal towns, Clinton and the New York Times proclaim a full recovery, that things have never been better, that unemployment is at a new low, etc., echoing the financial elite riding the stock market rises and the relatively recently ascendant sectors such as the top 1% of the black population with a 1.2 million dollar median net worth. It’s not difficult to see then why Trump’s rhetoric could reverberate not only with the hateful and reactionary petty bourgeoisie of the Tea Party Crowd but also large swaths of the working class, even when both candidates are despised across the general population.
Of course our job would be to figure out not only the basis of the petty bourgeoisie support for Trump but also how he was able to win over a substantial number of workers. I would guess that him being the first candidate to directly address the absolute destruction of a huge section (6,000,000 industrial jobs alone in the last 16 years) of the working class in years would be the key to him winning not only “some element of the working class” but in places like West Virginia, nearly all of it.
Sure he is a populist, a reactionary, and generally a piece of shit. Sure his conclusions and pronouncements are totally wrong headed and won’t lead to any gains for the working class. Sure his campaign would be in the interests of the exploiting and oppressing classes. But the point is that he has won many of their ears. The struggle is to do something similar, though on the basis of honesty and truth and with the kind of actually useful class based and revolutionary program that Insurgent Notes has tried to elaborate over the years.
PS. Global trade, the transfer of production, opening of borders to cheaper imports, etc., is all tied into the workings of capitalism. The falling rate of profit and the need to recover a “satisfactory level of profit” is what led to asset stripping in the US and took capital to places like Cambodia and Bangladesh in the first place.
“So when Trump goes to a town like Monessen in Pennsylvania (totally ruined steel town, population around 8000, nearly one fifth black which is much higher than most surrounding areas, median household income 50% of the national average, houses collapsing or selling for $2000, school ranked bottom of the barrel) and talks about the deindustrialization and collapse of the place, he is appealing to the petty bourgeoisie? Good luck finding much of one there. Last time through I think I spotted 10 functioning businesses.”
–When he couples that with attacks on immigrants, when he claims that China has “stolen” the jobs, when he uses all the means and methods so common to xenophobic, racist movements, he’s not “speaking plainly” or making “lucid speeches” appealing “directly” to the working class., he is appealing not to their class condition, but to their prejudices, their racism to obscure the class relations. That’s the point.
It’s a bit like telling me that Hitler’s support drew on his “speaking directly” or “speaking lucidly” to the German working class about the source of their economic distress; that he was addressing a “neglected” “scorned” working class.
Actually it’s exactly like that when you say: “No, he is running a populist campaign, which entails appeals to many classes, including the petty bourgeoisie but also directly to the working class (see earlier comment when he said “You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry” in reference to his own campaign).” Workers party? Not for nothing was it called the National Socialist German Workers Party, after taking over the German Workers Party.
That anyone can doubt the appeal of racism, outside the working class and inside the working class boggles the mind. Was George Wallace speaking “directly” and “lucidly” to the concerns of a “neglected” white working class? Or was he using that to tap into the racism of white workers confronted by the growing number of, and growing militancy of black workers?
That anyone can doubt the impact of racism is beyond my comprehension after the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act by the USSC; after the 16 years of state and national efforts at voter suppression. That no groups outside the civil liberties type organizations, and those connected with the Democratic Party, ever attempted a class-based movement independent of the Dems and the ngos to take on the issue of voter suppression is astounding.
When the Trump-right attempts its repeal of the 14th amendment, the left will have yet another opportunity to repeat that failure.
The tropes that Trump employed are the result of 40 years of reaction against “equality.” That the accumulated economic distress overwhelms workers, or part of the workers, is not a dispute– that Trump offered racism, anti-immigrant attacks, xenophobia as a solution, or substitute for a solution is also not in dispute. Maybe you call that speaking directly, or lucidly, I don’t. What he appealed to is the petty bourgeois fear, insecurity, that has so paralyzed “white workers.”
“PS. Global trade, the transfer of production, opening of borders to cheaper imports, etc., is all tied into the workings of capitalism. The falling rate of profit and the need to recover a “satisfactory level of profit” is what led to asset stripping in the US and took capital to places like Cambodia and Bangladesh in the first place.”
–No kidding, but the asset stripping, union-busting, capital flight preceded “globalization” (and borders have never been ‘open’). The loss of jobs attributable to “free trade” is markedly less than those lost to “productivity improvements.” US autoworkers did not lose their jobs because of “free trade.”
But all this is just so much blood under the bridge. Or will be soon.
I don’t think there’s any underestimating of racism going on. It’s all the chattering classes have talked about in regards to Trump’s support, because, you know, workers with white skin are a bunch of dumb racists.
Look, why is Trump’s appeal to WHITE workers? Have white workers suffered more than black workers? Are white workers’ incomes less than black workers’ incomes? Is unemployment higher for white workers than for black workers, for white youth as opposed to black youth?
I think the answer is no to all of the above. So then, what is the basis of Trump’s appeal to white workers? Their economic distress, or their loss of relative economic superiority? What is the target that Trump points to as the basis of that threat? Is it a “lucid” explanation, and appeal? Is it speaking directly to the “economics” behind the distress in rural US, or is it using job loss, economic distress as the code for sanctioning racist attacks.?
I never said white workers are a bunch of “dumb racists.” But the history of the “white” working class is the history of its demands and insistence and agreement to a “special status.”
Chattering classes? What they’re talking about, what they’re all talking about is exactly what you are talking about, what the IN editorial is talking about– the “neglected” white working class, ignored and incensed by the audacity of those thinking blacks, women, gays, have some sort of “special” status; they’re all talking about the alienated working class, whose “values” have been so violated by………immigrants working for less than they would ever accept.
So please, if you want to talk about what the “chattering class” considers important, look in the mirror.
Jeezus, Sartesian. Can’t you ever once admit that you’re wrong? 69% of whites with a high school diploma or less voted for Trump, against 25% for Hillary.
Trump’s appeal, unlike that of David Duke and long-standing white supremacists, was inseparable from his discussion of economic decline of the “rustbowl” variety. If he were only a racist, misogynist, immigrant and China basher, he would never have gotten any farther than David Duke et al. It’s
racism mixed with economic decline that makes him stand out, and got him to the White House.
Oh I can admit I’m wrong, I told you at the getgo I predicted Carter over Reagan, and Clinton over Trump. I also thought Bush was going to cancel the 2004 election (came close on that one as Tom Ridge and DHS developed plans for just such a scenario).
However when people claim Trump spoke “lucidly” or directly to the fears of the white working class, and then locate the lucidity in his supposed “economic program” and repeat the anti-intellectual nonsense about academic journals and university elites, and “intersectionality,” and the rest of that hogwash, I tend to regard it as just that, hogwash.
As for Trump would only have gotten as far as Duke did without his appeal to “economics,” no, not really since Trump had access to a lot more money than Duke did; Trump had his TV stardom working for him; Trump has a “brand.” Trump’s appeal, the publicity, the “excitement” around his came initially from his attacks on migrants, on the vulnerable, on his racist appeal. He built that into the typical national-socialist appeals/confusion to and of the “volk” as “laborers”– by which is meant, petty bourgeois proprietors. It’s the threat to small, and shrinking, property that Trump parlayed.
He appealed to xenophobia, racism, chauvinism. We can say either those workers that voted for him are intelligent enough to see through Clinton’s bullshit, but not intelligent enough to see through Trump’s; or that those workers that did think there was some “economic benefit” to Trump’s “program” understood that it was inseparable from the racism, and xenophobia, and that was all right with them, because somebody else will pay that price. I would say, off hand, that’s the prime marker of the petty-bourgeois
High school degrees or less? Shit, if only I had know that 50 years ago, when, with a high school degree and one year more, scared shitless, facing down racist thugs with less than high school degrees. If only I had known that they were working class and responding to a rigged economy, and not people of color because of their color. Fact is that “economics” has always been the explanation for racism. It’s absolutely impossible to separate one from the other in the appeals to the “white” working class. They’ve been essential to the organization of the “white” US working class, ever since the AFL’s support of the Asia Exclusion Act.
In the end, we’re left to ask, if the appeal to white workers was based on lucid, direct appeals regarding the economy, why they didn’t resonate with with black and latino workers? Either the white working class is predisposed to these appeals, based on deep-seated traditions, prejudices, reinforced materially, and now feel threatened;, or the appeals are to the petty-bourgeois that permeates the white working class with their greater access to property; to employment as police officers, etc.
I’m willing to say I’m wrong about one of those– but not both.
In either case, since we know how important promises are to politics, I promise not to bother IN with any more of this.
most of this comment is incoherent nonsense.
I could not unpack most of what SA had to say about the editorial but he did make one important point (if not here then on his blog) about the role of “globalization”. Of course capital has always been global and so its a myth to think it hasn’t always played a role. But the dramatic destruction of dead labor was well under way from the late 70s long before the wave of free trade agreements began under Bush in the early 90s. Among the leaders of that destruction were key Trump advisors like Wilbur Ross – one of the many aspects of this con job Trump has now pulled off on at least a large segment of the (mostly white) workers who voted for him.
It was striking that Clinton never really had an answer to Trump on this issue even when he lied about her husband’s role in NAFTA. Of course, she was loath to cut the ties that bind her to big capital.
Black candidate Obama got 6 million more votes in 2012 than white candidate Clinton got in 2016. So either America is even more mysogonistic than racist or race might not have been the prime motivator in this election, as much as Stormfront and urban academic identity politickers may argue otherwise.
Or maybe Americans are becoming more racist as time goes on in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
Clinton’s identity based appeals weren’t enough to motivate her would be base. Broke working class single mothers in Fayette County PA and Eau Claire WI were drawn more by promises of being able to make a decent living again than any feelings of common identity with Hilary on the basis of shared gender.
Of all sources, the Washington Post actually spelled it out: “Beginning in the 1960s, the Democrats put greater emphasis on mitigating the very real injuries of race and gender than they did on the very real injuries of class, which would have upset corporate America far more. This helped fuel a racial and nativist backlash…”.
Trump’s victory in three rust belt states gave him the overall victory. The other states he won have long been in the realm of the Republicans as all of Clinton’s have long been Democratic. It was all to script except for PA, MI and WI. These 3 rust belt states were the shocking and surprising wins for Trump and they were driven in large part by ruined workers who have watched living standards decline for decades.
Not for nothing Sanders won the popular vote in 2 of those 3 in the primaries, and wasn’t far off winning PA either.
By the way, Trump appealed to native born workers more than “white workers”. He talked about American workers, visited ruined industrial towns with large black populations, talked about bringing back Detroit and specifically said black people were worse off under Obama than Bush and guaranteed they’d do better under his presidency.
And yeah, since you asked, a lot of workers with white skin are pretty damn bad off. The dreaded “white people without college degree” were one of the hardest hit groups of the 2008 crisis. They’ve lost jobs, lost unions and union protection, lost income and lost hope. That’s probably why some age brackets have seen a 22 percent death rate increase over the last few years, something unprecedented in an “advanced” country.
One last thing. I’m no statistician and I haven’t fully dug into even the limited available information so far available, but it seems that a fall in support among black people in general played a major role in Hilary’s loss. She lost tens of thousands of votes in heavily black cities like Detroit and Milwaukee, only a small portion of which can realistically be attributed to voter suppression (in Michigan for example if you didn’t have a photo ID you could just sign a paper instead). So that “black people” not seeing anything worthwhile in her may have had as much to do with the results as “white people” seeing anything worthwhile in Trump.
again, another comment that doesnt actually make any sense at all.
Priceless: “Black candidate Obama got 6 million more votes in 2012 than white candidate Clinton got in 2016.”
The fact that fewer people voted for Clinton than Obama, does not mean that those voting for Trump were not motivated by Trump’s explicit racism.
” Broke working class single mothers in Fayette County PA and Eau Claire WI were drawn more by promises of being able to make a decent living again than any feelings of common identity with Hilary on the basis of shared gender.”
Except of course, Hillary did promise opportunities to make a decent living for working women, specifically; and specifically proposed raising the minimum wage, providing healthcare, and childcare etc. while Trump did not. He only said “I’ll stop the job theft that’s being inflicted on MEN by… China, Mexico, latinos, muslims….”
Even more priceless, first we denounce the “chattering class,” then we cite their journal as providing an accurate analysis: ‘Of all sources, the Washington Post actually spelled it out: “Beginning in the 1960s, the Democrats put greater emphasis on mitigating the very real injuries of race and gender than they did on the very real injuries of class, which would have upset corporate America far more. This helped fuel a racial and nativist backlash.’
First off, we can actually trace this back to the 40s and 50s with the Roosevelt and Truman Adminstrations establishment of the FEPC, desegregation of the armed forces, etc. Then we have to account for the USSC decisions outlawing segregation in schools and then other public facilities, and then Eisenhower, a Republican, enforcing those decisions even at the point of a bayonet before we get to the 60s.
Then we need to understand that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations weren’t “choosing” to address real injuries based on race (we’re not up to gender yet), but were “forced” to attempt to CONTAIN a rebellion based on a mass movement that in fact mobilized millions of African-Americans, and was driven by real conditions impacting black labor. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Post, being a bourgeois journal can’t see the real content of the history. Apparently the paper’s superficiality is deep enough for you.
And what were these anti-class acts “separating” black from whites? Oh yeah– let’s see, a civil rights act, a voting rights act, orders against desegregation, an end to restrictions on hiring and job awards based on color etc etc.
The hostility against those government actions wasn’t based on the anti-class bias, it was based on reaction against the very movement that threatened the existing treatment of black labor.
” It was all to script except for PA, MI and WI. These 3 rust belt states were the shocking and surprising wins for Trump and they were driven in large part by ruined workers who have watched living standards decline for decades.’
These 3 states are areas where the working class has been pulverized, atomized, and punished, and these states have managed to elect Republican governors who smash unions, and attack living standards of all workers, but in particular concentrate on attacks the living conditions of African-Americans– Flint, Mi ring a bell?
Most priceless of the bunch: ” By the way, Trump appealed to native born workers more than “white workers”. He talked about American workers, visited ruined industrial towns with large black populations, talked about bringing back Detroit and specifically said black people were worse off under Obama than Bush and guaranteed they’d do better under his presidency.”
Short answer: You don’t think Trump’s appeal is based on chauvinism, racism and xenophobia because he appealed to “AMERICAN workers”? Amazing.
Do you think that black people in general, or black workers in particular believed a word of that? Or do you think he said that so white people could say “See, he’s not racist.?” You make the call.
Trump also said that nobody has more respect for women than he has. Clearly then, he doesn’t stand as a symbol of sexual predation, abuse; punishing women for utilizing medical procedures, etc. etc.
“And yeah, since you asked, a lot of workers with white skin are pretty damn bad off. The dreaded “white people without college degree” were one of the hardest hit groups of the 2008 crisis. They’ve lost jobs, lost unions and union protection, lost income and lost hope. ”
But that wasn’t the question or the issue: The questions are whose conditions are worse off and if Trump’s appeal is not to racism first and foremost, why didn’t it appeal to black and latino workers?
“, only a small portion of which can realistically be attributed to voter suppression (in Michigan for example if you didn’t have a photo ID you could just sign a paper instead). ”
Sure thing, that’s an example. But voter id is only one aspect of voter suppression. One of the “favorite tactics” is to reduce the number of polling places, and change the locations of the remaining polling places– in some counties in Texas and Arizona, number of places open were reduced up to 90 percent.
“So that “black people” not seeing anything worthwhile in her may have had as much to do with the results as “white people” seeing anything worthwhile in Trump.”
Again, that’s not the issue. We’re not discussing why Hillary lost. I could care less why she lost. The reduced number of black votes for Hillary says nothing about the so-called reasons for the white votes for Trump. Get it?
Loren Goldner: ” It’s racism mixed with economic decline that makes him stand out, and got him to the White House.”
Well said.
Yes, well said. Also, to the identitarians in the room: the sky is also blue.
S.Artesian: Truth be told you come off like a blowhard asshole with rhetoric that no worker on earth could get behind. I heard you made your living in management on the opposite side of the bargaining table as organized labor, makes sense now. Did you use the supposedly inherent racism of the workers you negotiated against to chisel them out of wages and benefits, or do you only use it to scold them in forums like these that they don’t read anyway?
Last response I’ll make since this guy is apparently interested in nothing other than bloviating.
“Except of course, Hillary did promise opportunities to make a decent living for working women, specifically; and specifically proposed raising the minimum wage, providing healthcare, and childcare etc. while Trump did not. He only said “I’ll stop the job theft that’s being inflicted on MEN by… China, Mexico, latinos, muslims….””
Believe it or not, a lot of working people would prefer to make a decent living through their own effort and in a meaningful productive work rather than collect welfare or make a “better” minimum wage pushing keys at Wal Mart, especially when they have a history rooted in industrial regions where whole families worked in factories with benefits and pensions.
And can you please give me the source of that quote you just pulled out of your ass? Thanks.
“Even more priceless, first we denounce the “chattering class,” then we cite their journal as providing an accurate analysis:”
Maybe you know of some proletarian journals. I’m stuck living here in capitalism so I’ll make due with what I have. Bourgeois analysis is often quite useful, especially when it comes to conclusions that intentionally or not point out the failures of the rulers. When I find a gem in the shit pile I’m not against shining it up and showing it to others.
” The questions are whose conditions are worse off and if Trump’s appeal is not to racism first and foremost, why didn’t it appeal to black and latino workers?”
No, the question is not “who is worse off,” as if it’s some kind of contest and the winner gets to decide the election.
You asked “Look, why is Trump’s appeal to WHITE workers?” You’ve been told that he was the only major candidate in years (other than the Bernie abortion) to even address these people at all. While Clinton and people like you go on about the supposed “privilege” these workers enjoyed (being able to buy a car and a house on 10-30 year notes after centuries of struggle is apparently a “privilege” for people who created untold billions for the bosses). Trump came said “you guys got fucked and lost everything and your cities and towns have been destroyed.” You really can’t see how that might appeal to them? Really?
Why didn’t he appeal to Latino workers? Nativism, anti-immigrant rhetoric that was a staple of his populist program, obviously. It’s easy for a lot of native born workers to get behind this stuff when the labor tops have been crying about immigrants driving down workers wages since Marx was alive. The Latino vote typically goes to the the Democrats and that happened this time too, so not much to analyze here.
Why didn’t he appeal to black workers? The general idea that the guy is a racist, his vocal support for “law and order” and killer cops that terrorize black neighborhoods, being a Republican, etc. But he didn’t say anything about rounding up black workers, promoting white workers above them, or anything like that. Instead he said that black people were worse off under Obama (which is something both the National Review and Tavis Smiley agree on) and that he would improve their lives. Hardly the kind of blatantly anti-black racist appeal that David Duke makes, even if you and Stormfront wish otherwise.
Look, liberal professionals and academics on the coasts voted as they have for decades in America. Black people voted as they have for decades in America. White Christian fundamentalists voted as they have for decades in America. The south voted as it has for decades in America. What was the major change this time around?
Besides the drop in black and Latino votes for the Democrat (which may just go to show that they didn’t view her as a stop gap against a coming Aryan Reich as you seem to), the major shift was that of workers in the Rust Belt, mostly white, who are either ruined or in the process of ruination.
Since none of the myriad of plainly racist candidates has made serious inroads with these workers for decades… Since black candidate Obama won as much of the white vote as Carter and Bill Clinton did (and often in the same industrial areas Trump just took, for example Obama swept Scranton twice, won Erie and won Youngstown, but Trump took them all this time)… Since Obama won more white votes in the North both times around than Clinton got this time… Since the only really “new” thing about Trump was his promise to stop job losses and rebuild industry and since he won precisely because people in the areas home to major job losses and destroyed industry, it could just be that this had something to do with it. Just maybe…
Trump clearly and unequivocally won among workers with white skin in the Rust Belt. If we’re communists we would want to figure out why that happened. Your answer is that everyone with white skin except you and a handful of other Yankee heroes who marched down south decades ago are a part of a white racist conspiracy to keep blacks and women down. My answer is that Trump actually talked about economic decline where it is blatant and stinging, and where all other candidates and analysts ignore or wrote off, even if his overall campaign was a cross class nationalist populist endeavor.
So now, what do you have to say to these workers, other than calling them a bunch of bigots and dupes? What’s your program for them? What can you put forward for working people who have seen everything fall apart around them for forty years? What’s your plan to unite them with black and immigrant workers in the US and with Chinese and Bangladeshi workers overseas? Or are they so backward that only racist pronouncements from billionaire real estate developers can win them over?
Hey, can’t resist:
“Ms Clinton won the black vote by only 80 percentage points, compared to Mr Obama’s 93 per cent in 2008” – Independent (UK)
More bad news for Artie’s anal-ysis:
Trump scored 29 per cent of Latinos’ votes, two per cent higher than Romney.
So it turns out that the Trump victory driven “solely by racism” in fact was helped by gains among blacks and Latinos.
That’s all folks.
I’m sorry that my comments have made you so upset. Thank you for taking the time to respond, and develop your arguments. I will review the information you have provided and reconsider my assertions.
I really find this all very disturbing, to say the least. I argued that Trump really didn’t appeal so deeply to white workers, but he did. And I argued his appeal wasn’t based on his speaking directly to their economic distress with a so-called program of “bringing back the jobs.” If that’s the case, then how could the “mainstays” of that nonsense program that was so appealing be the same-old, same-old, tax cuts and deregulation? That’s been the mantra of the bourgeoisie for 40 years, no? That’s been the mantra for asset-stripping, decertification of unions, capital flight, declining wages, reduced benefits. So how does that amount to an appeal directly to the source of workers’ economic distress?
It doesn’t. The point isn’t that Hillary’s program was bullshit, or Obama didn’t deliver. Of course it was. Of course he didn’t
What Trump did do was identify enemies; not classes but enemies. The so-called “direct” address to economic conditions did not, could not, exist without the surrounding, primary, and overwhelming message being–“There! Look at them. There’s the reason for your suffering.”
Promising to bring good jobs to poor areas has been the stock in trade of every US politician since John F. Kennedy. Trump’s appeal was a bit different.
Who were the “shock troops” of Trump’s campaign? Certainly not workers. The campaign itself had almost no “ground game,” right? And Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of them don’t count as “workers’ media.”
Every time we get a new “right”– the argument starts about how it represents the “disaffected white workers.” I remember that argument made about the Tea Party, 4,6 years ago. Hardly an organization of disaffected white workers.
And before that we got George Wallace as the “voice of the incensed white working class.”
To think that “intersectionality” is an expression of, or accompanied by contempt for white workers; that issue of race, color, and gender are essentially “diversions” from class struggle is like a “left wing” version of the right wing Rush Limbaugh theses. I think that, in particular, has to be rejected as simply playing into the rhetoric of reactionaries.
“To think that “intersectionality” is an expression of, or accompanied by contempt for white workers;”
You could literally provide a big-name commentariat published thinkpiece doing exactly that for every word in this sentence between the campaign (and yes, fraud) to put Bernie and his supporters back in their place, to shame Trump supporters, and then to offer alibis for Clinton’s humiliating defeat.
You must live under a rock to not see how class and economic issues have been openly counterposed to all cultural or identity appeals as antagonistic–not by the largely silent or irrelevant ‘left’–but by the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’ themselves. Point your sights at the actual targets.
I think this from May 1st Anarchist Alliance is quite a strong piece, and people might find it worth a read: http://m1aa.org/?p=1307
“Just as Brexit was not the preferred option for the European establishment, so Trump as President is not the preferred option of the American establishment. In this time of revolutionary upheaval what the Establishment really requires is stability. For this it requires social democracy, but the voting public keeps putting a spanner in the works by ignoring the propaganda to vote to remain in the EU and to vote for Clinton.
In reality, none of these elections have any impact whatsoever but they have become a battle of will between the Establishment and the voting public, like between a teacher and a petulant child.”
Weatherman, Tuesday, 8th November 2016
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