On the Current Situation in the United States

Let’s begin with the purely electoral aspect of Trump’s victory in November. He lost the popular vote by 65 million to 62 million, but that didn’t matter because he won the archaic Electoral College by 304 to 227. The Electoral College was established in the late eighteenth century to appease the slaveholding states: it was a device to turn the non-votes of the slaves who counted to determine the number of representatives in the House into votes that would count in the presidential election. The trick was to use the number of representatives plus the two senators as the basis for determining the number of electors—thereby enshrining the deep fraud of the three-fifths compromise into the presidential election system.

Trump lost the entire Northeast (New York State, Massachusetts, etc.) and the West Coast (California, etc.), and won most of the states in between.

Further, there are 220 million adults of voting age in the United States, of whom 90 million did not vote at all, and studies have generally shown that the non-voters are overwhelmingly in the poorer half of the population and on specific issues (healthcare, welfare, etc.) are to the left of both the major Democratic and Republican Parties. Non-voting in the United States is not merely a radical gesture of “who cares?” but is a conscious policy, starting in the Southern states, of active voter suppression. The long-term “war on drugs” has created millions of convicted felons (mainly black and brown) who can never vote again, and conservative state governments create all kinds of other obstacles to the votes of the poor, and especially the black and brown poor.

That’s the basic outline of the purely electoral aspect of what took place in November 2016. Strictly in terms of votes, Trump takes power as the most vulnerable and unpopular United States president in memory.

Far more important was the success of Trump in winning significant support among working-class and poor whites, especially in the so-called “Rust Bowl” of formerly industrial states: above all, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana. Trump, the billionaire, survivor of serial bankruptcies, succeeded in casting himself as the “outsider,” the “anti-establishment” candidate against Hillary Clinton, whose ties to Wall Street could never be hidden away. Further, Clinton’s campaign consciously chose to ignore the working-class vote, expecting to win with the more affluent middle and upper-middle class vote. This strategy backfired badly. (See the brilliant article “The Unnecessariat” about poor whites in rural and small town America, who have the highest rate of death by suicide, drugs and alcohol, and who live precisely in the counties with the highest rate of votes for Trump.)

It should be noted that the virtual entirety of the Republican and Democratic establishments, including military, intelligence services and diplomats, denounced Trump before the election, much as the entire British establishment had denounced Brexit. It made no difference; it only underscored the distance between the entire political (and intellectual and media) elite and ordinary working people. And as one British politician famously commented, “Ordinary people are sick of experts.”

The liberal left behind Clinton hammered away about Trump’s racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim posture—all true enough. But this ignored the warped, distorted “class” appeal of Trump that attracted many people who may or may not have shared such views but who heard and gravitated to Trump’s promises to “rebuild American industry” and put millions of workers back to work, an appeal never made before by any major party candidate.

Further, there were important examples such as Macomb County, Michigan, in the suburbs of Detroit. It was and is a white, blue-collar population which already in the 1980s became “Reagan Democrats,” i.e., workers voting for Ronald Reagan’s promises to “rebuild America” after the crisis and stagnation of the 1970s.

In 2008 and 2012, Macomb County voted for Barack Obama; in the 2016 Democratic primaries it voted for the left-populist Bernie Sanders, and in the fall election voted…for Trump. This is a well-observed phenomenon of unstable left and right populism going back to the 1960s. It undermines any simple analysis of Trump’s base being primarily racist, misogynist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim though it may also be those things. Fifty-three percent of voting women voted for Trump, as did 30 percent of voting Latinos.

No question that Trump’s rise and victory unleashed hardcore fascist and proto-fascist forces, from the Ku Klux Klan to the so-called “alt right,” a vicious Internet phenomenon of significant weight but with relatively few people “on the ground.” Anti-Semitic episodes have skyrocketed, as have attacks on Muslims; a mosque in Texas was burned to the ground, as was a black church in the South. Further, Trump’s announced plans to deport millions of illegal immigrants have struck fear deep into the Latino and Muslim communities in the United States, including among people with established middle-class lives and United States citizenship.

Once in power, Trump appointed the most right-wing Cabinet in history, including seven billionaires: a Secretary of the Treasury, Mnuchin, from Goldman Sachs, who had specialized in thousands of home foreclosures in the 2008–09 meltdown and thereafter; a Secretary of Education, the billionaire Betsy DeVos, who wishes to privatize all public schools; an Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, from Alabama, with a long proven record of anti-black legal measures; a Director of the Environmental Protection Administration who thinks global warming is a fraud; a Secretary of the Interior who wants to sell off public lands, including national parks, to mining and oil companies; a Secretary of State, Tillerson, who resigned as CEO of Exxon after years of oil deals in Russia and ties to Vladimir Putin. And so on.

One might wonder what Trump’s blue-collar base makes of such a witch’s Sabbath, but the truth seems to be that they are largely unaware of such nasty “facts,” dependent as they are on trashy media such as Fox News, if they pay attention to news at all. Trump’s immigrant ban has apparently played very well with such people.

Meanwhile, Trump’s alt-right top counselor, Steve Bannon, former editor of the far-right Breitbart News, had emerged as the most powerful figure in Trump’s inner circle. He called in the heads of various craft unions in the building trades, representing the workers who will most directly benefit from Trump’s plan to rebuild United States infrastructure, thus potentially, à la Mussolini, establishing some kind of trade union base.

Yet Trump’s first three weeks in power point to a regime aware of its weakness and unpopularity (his polls, in the 30 percent range, are the lowest in history for a new president). Hence Trump (and Bannon) have issued a steady stream of presidential decrees, many of dubious legality, and most notoriously the recent ban on travel and immigration from seven Muslim countries (Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Somalia, Libya and Sudan), which led to mass mobilizations at airports around the country demanding that detainees be allowed to enter the United States. As of this writing, the ban has been declared illegal in the courts, but the outcome remains to be seen.

We might conclude, provisionally, with the Orwellian overtones of Trump’s non-stop propaganda machine, starting with his daily flood of “Tweets.” This is the claim to create “alternative facts” to those reported by the media, which latter Trump has declared to be the main “opposition party” in the United States. Another Trump adviser, Kellyanne Conway, openly defends these “alternative facts,” such as Trump’s claim that three to five million illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 elections, to the assertion of a link between the measles vaccine and autism, to the fraud of global warming created by China to undermine United States industry. Well before the election, it was established that the “blue states” and “red states” lived in separate digital realities with little or nothing in common. Now, a regime in power is openly committed to creating “alternative facts” whenever necessary and convenient, making Hitler’s antiquated “Big Lie” of an earlier low-tech era seem amateurish by comparison.

Trump’s most vulnerable point is exactly his strong point in the election: his claim of providing the millions of industrial or infrastructure jobs that his blue-collar supporters are expecting. (As indicated previously, he comes to power as extremely vulnerable.) There is in fact little room in American capitalism for such a program, given the government deficits implied, not to mention the ongoing automation of industrial sectors by robotics. Faced with that cul-de-sac, Trump will have to create a smokescreen of more “alternative facts,” which will be fairly transparent. At that moment, to head off a working-class rebellion, Trump and Bannon will be tempted to create a state of emergency based on an ostensible war scare (most probably with China) and/or a terrorist action in the United States on the scale of 9/11. (Lacking the latter, they can always create their own.)

Such a crisis will be a turning point in Trump’s administration, depending on what the working class, black, brown and white, will do.

Comments

11 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.
  1. Loren, I assume the above is what you would have said at the Feb. 6 meeting had you been there. Here is what I would have said had there been room for discussion: I agree with your analysis of the election and in particular with not ascribing the result purely (or even mainly) to “racism,” misogyny and other deplorable currents. I agree there is little room in American capitalism for a program of rebuilding the infrastructure and bringing back industrial jobs. I agree also that the failure to follow through on their promises would undermine Trump’s and Bannon’s working-class support. I am not convinced that their program cannot be carried out by over-riding the law of value by command (fascism in one country). According to Alfred Sohn-Rethel, The Economy and Structure of German Fascism (available on line), that is what Hitler did, doing away with unemployment, restoring the old smokestack industries to their previous dominance, and thereby securing his base—at the cost of destroying the Deutschmark and with it Germany’s place in the world market and, inevitably, war. Trump and Bannon may not get their program through against opposition in both parties, but if they do, the turning point would not be when it fails but when it “succeeds”—implemented, of course, in a white-supremacist, nativist manner. (A historical aside: the electoral college was a generally antidemocratic measure, not particularly linked to the slaveholders; the three-fifth’s clause was for them. The Constitution was framed in the aftermath of Shays’ Rebellion.)

    • In addition to Noel Ingnatiev’s fear that Trump could succeed in his plan for infrastructure and work, referring to Hitlers success in doing so, some more arguments:
      – The neoliberal – or better: monetarist – policy of pumping money into the economy by the financial sector is a failure already admitted at the G20 summit of Shanghai 29-2-2016. So why not pump these sums in ‘infrastructure’?
      – Pumping money didn’t give rise to inflation as long as these huge sums stayed in the financial sector and didn’t reach the ‘real’ economy. If ‘infrastructure’ (see Hiltlers famous ‘Autobahn’s – not by coïncidence between the future Eastern Front and Western Front – making it possible to switch his attack partly from Russia to France and Great-Britain) in fact means investments in preparing the USA for war, then these gigantic sums will circulate only partly in the ‘real economy’. And besides: economists have become convinces that inflation is better than the present deflation.

      The vital question of crisis and war is nearly absent from the protests against Trumpism, as are other working class issues (unemployment, wages and social security). Questions of race, gender, sexuality that are shared with the middle classes prevail. And even more dangerous, defense of ‘democracy’, ‘civil right’, the ‘Constitution’ and ‘America’ try to mobilise workers under a bourgeois program, as happened in the 1920s and 1930s preparing a defeat of the working class. I don’t see how Insurgent Notes opposes these trends, on the contrary.

      By the way, I’m not an economist, so tell me if I’m wrong.

      Fredo Corvo

      mailto: FredoCorvo@gmail.com

  2. S.Artesian,

    Success! Finally, a correct spelling of Macomb County. Congratulations.

  3. R. S.,

    The motivation behind a lot of the support for Trump from various sectors, including rust belt workers, is sussed out pretty well in the book “The Gilded Rage” by Alexander Zaitchik.

    Surely the rise of Trump and populists like him can be attributed in large part to the falling rate of profit, the economic crisis that resulted, and the failure of the Arab Spring, Occupy, etc., to formulate a solution.

    The total discrediting of the economic setup, the politicians and the media, combined with the absence of a proletarian current, has led to the current state of things.

    A way forward could be found in the merger of militants largely isolated in activist circles and campus based talking shops with soon to be disenchanted workers in the rest of the country around a class program that rejects identity politics along with capitalism.

  4. Kate Frey,

    I I don’t think anyone, including Trump himself, ever thought he would be president. There may be truth in the theories that the DNC encouraged the Republicans to put up someone like Cruz or Trump as a foil.Elements of the ruling class, especially the military and security apparatus were obviously gunning for Clinton. This spectacularly backfired on them.I think now the Trump Administration is meant to be a short term “smash and grab” operation, a four year or less corporate looting spree to enrich Trump’s family and coterie. Trump’s authoritarian politics is both designed to mask this and reflects a radicalization of traditional ruling class attitudes.There appear to be conflicts within the US Deep State, clearly the CIA and elements of the ruling class don’t like Trump. he’s seen as too much of a loose cannon.A currency war with China or a real war with Iran could be catastrophic.On the other hand I would be leery of Deep State conspiracy theories which are rife on social media right now.The role of “the Russians” in liberal politics is fascinating.The Orwellian “the Russians hacked our election” idea may have been used to both deflect blame for Trump away from the Democrats and to focus it on a pro-imperialist position.The focus may be to remove Trump not because of his assault on working people but because he is somehow committing “treason” by pandering to Putin.This may or may not reflect struggles within the ruling class but I’m a bit leery of “Trumpology”.

  5. S.Artesian,

    I think people might benefit from reading The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker by Katherine Cramer before we attribute the vote in Wisconsin, Michigan, to “Trump’s blue collar base.”

    It isn’t exactly Trump’s. And it isn’t exactly blue collar.

  6. Hi,

    This is interesting, but it doesn’t really pose the burning question of organization. We can wax politic on what Trump means, whether or not his rhetoric matches up to concrete realities, what a growing cleavage within the bourgeoisie and the state represents, and so on and so forth. Yet, without pointing to ways of how the “radical left” can move forward, all of this amounts to just…analysis without any teeth.

    The Insurgent Notes conference earlier this month could have been a major turning point among the Communist Left, what with its remarkable turnout. Unfortunately, not true to its title, there wasn’t any concrete suggestions on what to do next apart from another meeting. This concerns several members of revolutionary organizations, not just the Mid-Atlantic Revolutionary Socialists. If IN wants to truly influence the working class and intervene in it, then this meeting would have been the right time. In fact, it seems to me that there was even one individual who consistently discouraged the idea, brushing it aside as something tried, but not true (i.e., partyism).

    We can no longer seek to ignore what is directly in front of us any longer: building a party of the working class. The RSDLP was not a spontaneous creation of the workers, it was a patient and protracted effort of workers and their allies. Even if Insurgent Notes stands “neutral” on the Bolsheviks, that comes more from a position of their subsequent Stalinization than their rise, if anything. We must refuse to be weighed down by these past defeats lest we continue to their contribution. It seems that such a modest moment like the IN conference was indeed drowned.

  7. Dan the Man,

    If you think the strategy Lenin used for building an underground vanguard party in Tsarist Russia has any bearing on what working class organization in 21st century America will look like, you might want to step away from your history books and go outside to get some fresh air and hopefully a dose of reality.

  8. S.Artesian,

    It might be helpful if IN provided its own evaluation of the conference, and what the next steps should be– I mean if we really want to step away from history books, go outside, get some fresh air, and a dose of reality.

  9. ATALAN,

    Insurgent Notes has a problem with connecting to its readership. First: the website is a little clunky, not updated frequently, not modern. There are older guys behind the boards. Maybe they have more important things to do. I’m okay with that but let’s get some younger people on the internet side of things in that case. People can update their facebook and twitter pages multiple times a day. Why can’t IN get a daily update? Second: what the IN says doesn’t match what people who read IN say. A conference on building a radical left under Trump by including potentially radical Trump voters, but none of the presentations are actually about building the left and instead of reaching out to working class Trump voters a full time activist gets up and does theatrical bit on transgenderism. The contents don’t match the box. What gives?

  10. Bis,

    It really is very frustrating. There are so many of us with goodwill towards IN and looking to them, not exactly to lead us but maybe guide us or at least support us. But as others have pointed out, all we get is a paralysing lethargy embodied by a website which refuses to update for weeks and months. IN has said exactly nothing about the movement of opposition to Trump within the US and how it is going to relate to it. I think Goldner’s point about Trump’s vulnerability being the working class support which helped him to power is a good one however.

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