Category Archives: US election

Politics of the Lesser Evil- Harris and Trump

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In a two-horse race where you want both to lose, the crumb of comfort is that one of them will.  In this case the ‘lesser evil’ was an accomplice to genocide, which rather raises the question what the greater evil might possibly be?    Tested to destruction, the politics of the lesser evil failed spectacularly and all those US leftists who defend it have lost both the election and lost the argument.

Of course, this will be the beast that will not die and will raise its head again elsewhere, in, for example, the French Presidential elections.  We have already experienced it in Britain where Starmer’s Labour was the lesser evil alternative to the Tories; except that after a few months in office opinion polls show that its support has collapsed.

Trump now has the potential to control Congress as well as the Presidency, having packed the Supreme Court.  Only the permanent state apparatus lies between him and his implementation of policies most of the capitalist class opposes, and the US system already allows political appointments to the state bureaucracy.  The BBC quickly reported that he intends ‘an aggressive plan to restructure the federal bureaucracy, replacing senior career government employees with political appointments.’

An initial question arises – how did he win?  This is usually framed on the left as – how did she lose?  The answers overlap but are not the same.  The support base for Trump has been well enough analysed and includes the significant reservoir of racism that exists in the US, as well as the incorrigible reactionary petty bourgeoisie and other demoralised layers of the population.  It also includes many who are alienated from what they see as the rigged political system that the Democrats call democracy, and which they called upon voters to come out to defend by voting Kamala Harris.

This was a key part of their campaign after an initial tack to the left, as reported by the US publication Jacobin.  The magazine reported that, what they call ‘populist ‘ and ‘progressive’ policies, were more resonant and popular than calls to protect democracy from the threat of Donald Trump.  Yet Harris pulled back from them, confirming her as being as untrustworthy as the system she was defending.

The Democratic Party had already tried to foist a cognitively impaired candidate on the electorate before unceremoniously dumping him, but only after months of denying there was a problem.  The Party machine and big donors proved that they control the ‘democratic’ process, not the millions of members who voted for Biden in the primaries.  The origin of this problem goes back to their necessity to defeat Bernie Sanders, who might have raised expectations of some genuine progressive change had he been the candidate. 

Not all of this will have registered with voters, but the alternatives were a false and lying claim to be the champion of ordinary Americans against the elite with its corrupt and rigged system; and a defender of the system on the equally false claim that it is democratic.  Of course, Trump will advance an attack on democratic rights but the US has already fallen from a ‘full’ to a ‘flawed democracy’, according to that shrill defender of US capitalism ‘The Economist’, and this fall didn’t just happen under Trump.

Having tried to hide Biden from the population, the Democratic party tried to do it again with Harris.  A US commentator in ‘The Irish Times’ noted that ‘after a month in which Kamala Harris was shot to the top of the ticket by her party elites, and in which she did no substantive interviews, she was clearly leading. She then spent a month introducing herself to the public. This was her big mistake. Thereby she fell backwards into a dead heat as Americans concluded she’d be better off not speaking.’

He summed it up by saying that ‘What we can say is that the 2024 election is between a man whom Americans know far too well and a woman Americans would rather not get to know.”

The top-down manipulation of the Democratic party’s traditional base failed, encapsulated in the failure of the leadership of the Teamsters Union to endorse Harris.  She didn’t give them any reason to do so.    Even the issue of abortion rights was not nearly enough to propel her to victory, while the identity politics so beloved of the Democratic party, especially parts of the left, also failed it.  

Trump targeted a lot of his media propaganda against the Democrats’ transgender agenda, which they then also retreated on.   Trans activists complained that ‘in a recent Gallup poll, transgender issues ranked dead last (out of 22 total areas) in importance to voters’, but don’t seem to realise that it is precisely its unimportance to many that meant that its previous prominence for the Democrat’s showed how out of touch they were.  This is only confirmed by the irrational and harmful demands previously championed; ranging from men in women’s sports to unproven or harmful medical interventions on vulnerable young people.

There is no reason to lament the defeat of Kamala Harris – the candidate of the war party and of genocide; of the biggest part of corporate United States; of a corrupt and rotten political system, and of fake progressive politics and truly reactionary identity politics. That a figure as repulsive as Donald Trump defeated her is testament to her and her party’s own abominable character.

The resistance to the Trump agenda will not advance through the politics or organisation he has just defeated, but through a critique of both, and working out how to break US workers from both Trump and the Democratic Party.  This involves bottom-up organisation and alternative politics to the fake claims of corporate-approved progressiveness.  The alternative is politics that puts forward what unites the working class, that opposes what divides it, and is clearly in their interest. This politics isn’t ‘populist’ or ‘progressive’. It’s socialist.

Learning from Trump? Don’t think so.

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trump2Donald Trump was elected as the candidate of the Republican Party, one of the two main capitalist parties in the US.  He is a billionaire and could afford to self-finance his campaign.  He was also a TV celebrity before a politician so already had recognition.  His unpopularity with much of the press and media was beneficial, firstly because it gave him the coverage needed to make him a leading figure, and then was concentrated on individual attributes that did not fundamentally challenge his politics – he was not demonised.

His fame and money made him a credible candidate in the money and celebrity world that is US politics.  His capture of the Republican nomination made him electable.

He fought the election by picking up a minority of endorsements by leading Republican figures and rallying around him extreme racists and reactionaries, of which there is not an inconsiderable number.

He fought a campaign that tapped into deep and widespread reactionary views with a long tradition in the US, including racism, nativism, sexism and religious bigotry coagulated together by xenophobic nationalism – ‘making America great again’.

He faced a notorious political insider, an establishment figure detested by many and unpopular among more; one who personified the last thirty or so years of economic policies that has supported deindustrialisation, stagnant or falling living standards, urban decay, increasing inequality, obscene wealth growing beside desperate poverty, and racist repression by the state.

In her campaign Clinton was clearly the candidate of the party establishment and was exposed as talking out of both sides of her mouth in order to speak to the incompatible demands of different strands of the Democrat vote, which became stretched apart by the Bernie Sanders campaign for nomination.

Trump won the election but lost the popular vote, by over 1 million and rising last time I looked.  His election is bereft of democratic legitimacy exposing the sacrosanct US constitution for the travesty of democracy it has always been but whose legitimacy has survived the open domination of money and vote suppression.

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Out of all this some people opposed to the Trump victory are telling us that “if there’s one thing that we can learn from the unexpected result on Tuesday night it is that Jeremy Corbyn can win here in the UK. This is not about left and right, as such; it is about a willingness to stand up to the status quo and call for a genuine change in the way we do politics.” Quoted and rightly ridiculed here.

An ultra-reactionary with all the benefits I’ve noted above wins in the US and we’re supposed to believe it means Jeremy Corbyn can win in Britain!

And Trump is an example of, or an invitation to, or in some way relates to “a genuine change in the way we do politics”!

Of course, this is all nonsense, except it’s a bit more widespread than it should be.  It’s the sort of nonsense that I’ve looked at before; an attempt to see some progressive resonance to Brexit for example.  No surprise then that before I came across the passage above I came across this statement from the People before Profit organisation in Ireland.

Their statement seems to present the Trump victory as primarily “a rage against ‘the establishment’” that will be betrayed.  It makes assessments of the nature of the vote that are one-sided and ignore the reactionary features of the Trump vote – its retention of the Republican party vote and its attraction to those who saw immigration and terrorism as the main issues, just to note two of its features.

Perhaps as an immediate assessment it can be given some latitude for inaccuracy but, coming from those still supporting Brexit, it wouldn’t be surprising is this approach persisted when it becomes even clearer (I suppose it actually can become clearer) that the vote is utterly reactionary.

Aside from saying that “Trump will instead turn on the people who have elected him and try to make them pay the price in the same way that Hillary Clinton would have done had she won”, which isn’t true; what took my eye was the conclusion – “Trump’s victory is also evidence in a perverse way that if we do seize the moment anything is possible.”

“Seizing the moment” is precisely the electoralist, short term, get-rich-quick, short-cut to success politics that has infected the so-called revolutionary left since I first got involved in Marxist politics in the mid-1970s, and it didn’t start then.  It directly contradicts the duty of socialists, that “in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.” It is close to being a definition of political opportunism which has failed the socialist movement.

It fails utterly to recognise the fundamental social change that socialists want and which is required and the preconditions that are necessary for it to come about, preconditions not reducible to a moment seized that make “anything possible.”  Electoral victories do not make “anything possible.”

A left electoral victory, built on similar misconceptions to those of many Trump supporters, not only makes genuine steps towards socialism not possible but is actually dangerous – exposing socialists to taking office in circumstances in which they simply cannot advance their cause, because socialism is working people emancipating themselves.  It’s not even people voting for someone else to free them.  If this is their idea of socialism they’re never going to see it.

It wasn’t “a moment” that led to Trump but a long history of working class political weakness and of reactionary ideas that suffuse wide sections of US society.  We simply cannot “seize the moment” in any way illustrated by the Trump victory.  From its political roots to its reliance on the inequality and venality of today’s US politics to its failure even to register an electoral majority – it’s nothing to emulate.

The Trump victory is illegitimate.  It lacks democratic validation.  It is built on racism, class prejudices and class oppression that no electoral mandate could render acceptable.  The reaction of many Americans who have demonstrated against Trump, who don’t want him as President, is much better than ‘hey, we can do that too.’

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