There were jubilant scenes of celebration, not only in the USA, but across the world, when it became clear that Donald Trump was going to lose the White House. How Trump is winkled out of that residence remains to be seen, given that at the time of writing he is still in denial about the result of the vote, but it is clear that whatever he may want personally, the US state machine is moving to install Biden in January.
So fluid was the situation that at one time supporters of Trump were simultaneously demonstrating in different states, either to “stop the count” (Pennsylvania) or to “count the votes” (Arizona), depending on whether the count showed a Trump or Biden ahead. Republicans turned out en masse to try to get into a count in Detroit, Michigan, after a Facebook campaign over allegations of falsified counting. In some states there were scuffles between supporters and opponents of Trump. But once Fox News declared against Trump, the game was up.
Psychologically un-equipped to lost this big
Trump’s niece Mary, a qualified psychologist, made the interesting point in an interview with the BBC that her uncle had never before experienced a setback, on such as scale, which he couldn’t bribe or cheat his way out of. Spoilt his whole life and rarely contradicted by the sycophants around him, Trump is psychologically un-equipped to deal with public defeat and humiliation.
It is possible that the Trump campaign may launch multiple lawsuits over counting in key states, but legal experts in the US do not think these lawsuits have much chance of success. On CNN, Franita Tolson, a law professor at USC Gould School of Law, pointed out that “Much of the litigation is a longshot and unlikely to succeed…I suspect that a big goal of this litigation is, in the short term, to change the narrative from a potential Biden win to a conversation about election mismanagement or even fraud”.
Now that even Republicans are giving up on Trump – and they are probably as relieved as anyone else in the ruling elite to see the back of him – it looks like a case of ‘game over’. The Illinois Republican congressman, Adam Kinzinger, tweeted that Trump’s lying “is getting insane” and he pleaded with his party to “STOP Spreading debunked misinformation”. Another Republican, Texas congressman Will Hurd tweeted: “Every American should have his or her vote counted.” Even the revered Republican strategist, Karl Rove, suggested as early as Wednesday morning said the ‘mass fraud’ allegation of Trump “isn’t going to happen” in America. “Some hanky-panky always goes on,” he said, “and there are already reports of poll watchers in Philadelphia not being allowed to do their jobs…But stealing hundreds of thousands of votes would require a conspiracy on the scale of a James Bond movie. That isn’t going to happen. Let’s repeat that: that isn’t going to happen.” (Guardian, November 6)
The circle of wagons gets smaller
Meanwhile, the circle of wagons around Trump grows ever smaller. At some point, when every single TV news outlet and every arm of the state acknowledges Biden as president-elect, when Republican politicians across the country have come to terms with their defeat and called on Trump to concede, someone close to him, perhaps a family member, will have to tell him that it’s curtains.
Joe Biden has won with the largest number of votes cast for any candidate in US history, and more than four million more than Trump. However, what was a bigger surprise was that Trump got more votes than he did in 2016, beating the total of Hillary Clinton that time. Clearly, many pollsters had clearly got something badly wrong: they were anticipating an overall national lead for Biden by anything up to ten percentage points, although in the end it came down to three per cent. As recently as October 20, the Wall Street Journal carried an article under headline ‘American Values’ Portend Trump’s Defeat.
Trump is gone, ‘Trumpism’ lives on
What is important for socialists is that we discuss and learn lessons from this election. What does it mean and what are the perspectives for the future? It is evident that Trump’s victory in 2016 was not a one-off aberration; he may be an ignorant, lying, racist, misogynistic narcissist but as a representative of a certain strand of the American ruling class, he and his like are now an integral part of modern politics.
As exit polls have shown, the majority of young voters, working class voters and ethnic minorities voted for Biden. (See Michael Roberts article on this here). If white men, by a small margin, stood by Trump, the reason lies in the fact that they were the least damaged by Trumpism. Earlier this year, the Financial Times (Feb 7, 2020) reported a poll that found, “Americans who say they are financially better off under Donald Trump’s presidency are overwhelmingly white men…” It reported the opposite in most other demographic groups: a generalised discontent over loss of livelihoods and security:
“…forty-eight per cent of black men believed they were worse off since Mr Trump took office, with 33 per cent saying they were ‘much worse off’. Forty-five per cent of African American women said they their finances had deteriorated. Similarly, 49 per cent of Hispanic women said they were worse off…while 42 per cent of Hispanic men said they were worse off”. This poll data precedes the effects of the pandemic, which in the USA, like in the UK, have dramatically affected the finances of the poorest layers in society much more than the better off, who at least could fall back on some savings.
Coronavirus and the economy interlinked
Not surprisingly, then, Black voters went overwhelmingly for Biden, as much as 90%, Latino voters (with the exception of Florida and Texas) and a big majority of women of all races as well as young voters.
For many workers, the two issues of coronavirus and the economy were clearly interlinked, because, as it is in the UK, people’s response to lockdowns and restrictions to stem the tide of the pandemic are heavily overladen by their fear of greater financial security that follows. Trump has presided over a shambolic response to Covid; in comparison with which the UK response looks like a well-oiled machine.
Trump’s personal pronouncements on Covid have veered from the surreal to infantile. A timeline of his ignorant pronouncements and stupidities would make a good comedy script, were it not for the fact that the net result has been nearly a quarter of a million dead in what is potentially the most technologically-advanced country in the world.
Calls to ‘liberate’ states
Trump’s incendiary calls for states in lockdown to be ‘liberated’ struck an echo among sections of the least well-off, small business people and the financially insecure parts of the population and that is still an issue to be reckoned with. Elements of his support are armed White supremacists, and they represent a nascent fascist movement that could, under certain circumstances, become larger and more aggressive in the future. But as yet, these armed thugs are still a minor factor in national politics, although they have been deployed in some locations to intimidate Black and Latino voters in particular.
What socialists cannot do is simply label all of Trump’s voters as racists, or look down our noses at them, as a Democratic Congresswoman on CNN admitted that too many Democratic Party leaders have done. There might be an understandable ‘gut reaction’ and an instinctive dismay on the left about Trump’s nearly seventy million votes, but what is needed is a cool and level-headed discussion on why and how his vote stood up so well.
Historical oppression of Black workers
Many of the same factors that built his vote in 2016 are there today. There is still widespread insecurity and fear for jobs and livelihoods among large sections of the population. The American ruling class has historically used the racial oppression of its Black minority as a means of political control over its White working class, by granting it meagre advantages and privileges that Black workers cannot get. The Black Lives Matter movement is the biggest uprising of Black workers and youth for generations and it was played upon by the Trump campaign, along with the ‘law and order’ issue, as if Black rights were a ‘threat’ to White rights. To some degree that succeeded, by adding to the perceptions of insecurity and alienation of some White workers. The pandemic has broadened and deepened the wellspring of uncertainty and anxiety about living standards that spans across the whole of America.
As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Millions of Americans have lost jobs during a pandemic that kept restaurants, shops and public institutions closed for months and hit the travel industry hard. While lower-wage workers have borne much of the brunt, the crisis is wreaking a particular kind of havoc on the debt-laden middle class”. (September 23)
Unemployment likely to get worse
Unemployment, although it has fallen somewhat from its pandemic peak, is still nearly three times the rate of February. “Unemployment for the arts, design, media, sports and entertainment was 12.7% in August, more than triple its year-earlier level. In education, it more than doubled to 10.2%. Sales and office unemployment was 7.8% in August, up from 3.8% in August 2019”. Moreover, it warned, “It could get worse” because most of the lay-offs had affected lower-paid workers, but “the white-collar layoffs are still to come.”
Last year, on August 1, another article in the WSJ had warned about “middle class America” falling deeper into debt because of the ten-year recession from 2009. “Cars, college, houses and medical care have become steadily more costly, but incomes have been largely stagnant for two decades, despite a recent uptick. Filling the gap between earning and spending is an explosion of finance into nearly every corner of the consumer economy.
“Consumer debt, not counting mortgages, has climbed to $4 trillion—higher than it has ever been even after adjusting for inflation. Mortgage debt slid after the financial crisis a decade ago but is rebounding. Student debt totalled about $1.5 trillion last year, exceeding all other forms of consumer debt except mortgages.” Without a doubt, the insecurities and uncertainties of everyday life outlined here will have piled up as a direct result of the Covid pandemic, not only for the lowest-paid workers, but even for those who have traditionally been better off.
Millions alienated from the political system
This is the political and economic background to the election and to the vote for Trump. It has been despite Trump and not because of him – except perhaps for a minority of enraged rednecks – that millions of American workers feel that the whole system is rigged against them. By the ‘system’, they mean the entire political establishment, including the Democratic Party machine that pretends to represent them, but never has.
The votes for Trump in 2016 and 2020 are not dissimilar to the votes in the UK for Brexit in 2016 and for Tories in 2019 and even, a few years earlier, for the BNP in many traditional Labour areas. Many working-class people, traditionally Labour voters, felt completely ‘left behind’ and alienated from the EU and from a Labour Party – specifically New Labour – that had done nothing for them. We did not label all those voters as ‘racists’ when it was clear that their votes were an expression of despair, fear, anxiety and what they perceived as a system that is rigged against the interests of the ‘little’ person. Above all, it was an expression of the lack of a clear alternative to a rotten system.
Leaders of organised labour
The seventy million votes for Trump must raise concerns on the left that ‘Trumpism’ is not dead. What led voters to support in their tens of millions the worst president in US history are social, economic and political factors that have not gone away with the end of the count and the declaration. And if that is the case, it is the leaders of the American labour movement who bear a heavy responsibility for it. Just as it is in the UK, the swing of voters towards reactionary candidates follows from the failure of the workers’ leaders to offer an alternative route forward. The leaders of US unions have clung tenaciously to the coattails of the Democratic Party, a party rooted in capitalism, and they have offered no way out for workers.
The AFL-CIO includes a minority of American workers, less than a sixth, but it still represents a potent social and political force. Unfortunately, the tops of these unions are so comfortably ensconced within the capitalist system that they are an obstacle to progress. Their ‘partnership’ approach to union-management relations offers them cosy niches within which to map out their well-paid careers. They frequent the same golf-clubs, the same social circles and have the same political outlook as the bosses with whom they ‘negotiate’, supposedly on behalf of their members. Their continued support for the most right-wing Democrats (and sometimes Republicans) is a statement of their support for the status quo.
Unions still command huge support
Yet the unions still have a great deal of potential authority and support, particularly in key industries and in major cities. Union councils in big cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle are affiliated by hundreds of thousands of trade union members and they still command huge support. At least three union locals called for a general strike if attempts had been made by Trump to steal the election.
The political failing of the trade union leaders is that they have fed the illusion that the Democratic Party somehow represents workers’ interests, when it is in fact a staunch defender of the capitalist system. We should add also that the same argument applies, although perhaps to a lesser extent, to the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of American (SDA) and Party representatives like Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes, in that they too, have fed illusions in Joe Biden and the Democratic Party platform of 2020.
What is the future for a Biden administration?
Biden will now be under enormous pressure to adopt the most conservative policies, as indeed he will. He is the consummate conservative politician and his calls for ‘unity’ and ‘healing’ will be the rationale for his abandonment of any semblance of progressive social policies, be it on health, housing, wages or on democratic issues like the unfettered right to vote, so much restricted in recent years. The demands of the Democratic Party’s radical wing will count for nothing.
During the election, particularly for Congressional seats, the more the Democratic Party moved away from its radical stance, the more it lost votes, but that will not stop the leadership around Biden, supported by Republicans and the media, from campaigning against its radical wing. The political establishment will seek to marginalize or root out the Democratic Party ‘left’ and demand the abandonment of what they call ‘socialism’: universal health care and the Green New Deal particularly. Right-wing Democrats have already blamed the left for the loss of Congressional seats.
In the coming months and years, therefore, we will find that Biden will be utterly unwilling to defend the rights and interests of workers. He is in place to act as the saviour of US capitalism from the lunatic Trump. In regard to trade with China, workers’ rights, taxation and many other issues, he will follow the same policies as his predecessor. The anger, resentment and hatred that built up against the ‘system’ will not be abated by Biden. He might deal more effectively with Covid – we’ll see on that – but he will make no impact on the other crucial issues like Black workers’ rights, de-funding the police, unemployment or living standards. If anything, his presidency will signal a period of greater and more frequent political convulsions than ever before.
Trotsky on the problems of US workers
Yet opinion polls have shown that socialist ideas have never been more popular, particularly among young voters, than they are today. It is the task of socialist activists in the DSA and in the trade unions to fight to make these ideas meaningful and relevant to American workers. It was no accident that Trotsky, in 1938, wrote his Transitional Programme in the context of US politics, because it is here more than in any other part of the world, that socialist ideas have to be made to resonate with the day-to-day needs of working people.
It is on the bread and butter issues above all, that socialists must fight inside the DSA and among groups of workers and youth who have supported Sanders and Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes up to now. Issues like climate change, the rights of Black workers, wages, universal health care and jobs.
It is likely that there will be a fight on policies in the Democratic Party between the demands of the radicals on the left and the right wing behind Biden, and that will lead at some stage to organisation splits, as significant sections of the left, including well-known personalities, split away or are forced out.
When that happens and only when that happens, it will be the prelude for a large-scale discussion within the working class – and for the first time in a century – around the question of an independent party of labour. Socialists will participate in that discussion and they will fight, above all, inside the trade unions for an independent voice for working class people. It will be on the issues of Black rights, climate change, wages, livelihoods and jobs, and showing how those issues are inextricably linked to the need to change society, that they will win their argument. Biden will get to the White House, but as much as it was under Trump’s administration, that place will be in the eye of a political hurricane.
November 9, 2020
