I didn’t see it coming, either. And a nasty surprise it is, for like Britain’s vote to exit the European Union, the vote for Donald Trump was a huge step forward for the far Right despite whatever attempt there was to strike back against elites, however incoherently.
Perhaps we should never under-estimate the Democratic Party’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Before we dwell on the backlash, a quite possibly violent backlash, sure to come down on the heads of activists, there are two unanswerable questions to ask.
First, what would have happened if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic standard-bearer instead of Hillary Clinton? Polling during the primary season consistently showed Senator Sanders doing much better than Secretary Clinton in theoretical head-to-head general-election match-ups. There are many who believe the former would have so slandered as a “socialist” that he’d have had no chance, but the power of that word to be a bogey is waning, particularly among younger voters. He described himself a “socialist” (even if he’s not) during the primaries as well.
A rally against Donald Trump in New York City on March 19, organized by the Cosmopolitan Antifascists
Mr. Trump did not win with only White supremacists, tea partiers and the rest of the Republican base. He wouldn’t have won without the surge of support he received, particularly in the Midwest, from people who were just plain old pissed off and wanted a change, any change. Many of these voters would likely have gone to Senator Sanders as the vastly more rational and coherent candidate. Secretary Clinton was the embodiment of the establishment in a year when elites are in the cross-hairs. Misogyny surely played a significant role here as well, and perhaps that in itself was enough to make the difference.
Second, did Mr. Trump actually win? Let’s ask this question seriously. Many states use unaccountable electronic voting machines with no paper trail, and these are mostly supplied by a small number of manufacturers who closely guard the software code. Mark Crispin Miller, in his book Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election amassed a wealth of detail to argue that George W. Bush’s re-election was stolen via voting machines in multiple states. Some of those machines are still in use. Then there were the attempts across the country to suppress voter turnout, in North Carolina and elsewhere.
Could a couple of percentage points here and a few percentage points there have tipped the difference in enough states? We’ll never have a definitive answer, but it might be said that if the race hadn’t been close, there would have been no opportunity for any such cheating, if it happened. In 2008 and 2012, were there any such tampering, the result would have been no more than a reduction in Barack Obama’s margin of victory.
The egomaniac and the thugs who follow him
Regardless, Donald Trump is president. I never imagined writing or uttering such words. His first target may well be the Republican Party establishment, against whom he is likely to wreak revenge for not supporting him. That, however, would provide no more than a brief respite. For we know who his real targets are — he made it abundantly clear throughout his campaign. And remember the thugs who hang out with him — the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie.
A criminalization of dissent is coming our way, and if I had to guess Black Lives Matter is a likely candidate to be the first target. There will be many more, ranging across the spectrum of Left activism, from Dreamers to abortion-rights activists to environmentalists to organizers fighting racism and police brutality.
Make no mistake: Those on the Left who blithely declared Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump the same, and maybe the former even a little worse, are likely to find otherwise. Secretary Clinton is a war-mongering Wall Street-pandering technocrat who, rightly or wrongly, accrues some of the fallout from her husband’s presidency, when he proved to be the most effective Republican president we ever had, implementing policies Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush could have only dreamed of doing. Of course she is no choice. But had she won as expected, the room of grassroots activity would have been larger than it will be under a Trump White House.
Given the enormous number of areas where vigorous defensive actions will be necessary, and the heavy police-state repression that is sure to rain down on dissenters, there will be little if any opportunity to go on any offensives.
Consider this statement by Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, who said of the election: “I am not voting for candidates. I am voting for terrain.” National Women’s Liberation said: “Under Clinton the terrain will be difficult for us, as well as the targets of her hawkish foreign policy. To get the things women need, we need a lot more than a woman president, we need a strong movement making bold demands, much bolder than anything in Hillary’s platform. But making bold demands under a Hillary Clinton administration will be a lot more likely to build into a powerful, effective force than it will if Donald Trump is elected.”
Let’s not sugar-coat this: The next four years are going to be very dark. Although I wouldn’t call the Trump campaign fascist, I do believe we can see it as constituting the seeds for a potential fascist movement. That is more than scary enough — and that retrograde movement will now have the power of the state behind it.
The breakdown of an economic consensus
As awful as Secretary Clinton is, a Trump White House will be something beyond the ordinary neoliberal prescriptions. The first election I ever voted in was Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory, one also unexpected. That had been a dead heat going into the final weekend, in days when polling was nowhere near as obsessive as today. I still remember the chill of horror that went down my back as I emerged from an event to look up at a television announcer proclaiming a “tidal wave of red” spreading across the map. I had not thought United Statesians would really vote for him, but they did, lulled to sleep by his ability to tell people what they wanted to hear, no matter how at variance with reality.
Looking back across the decades, as immediately disastrous as the Reagan years were, we could not grasp the enormity of what had happened: His election, along with Margaret Thatcher in Britain the year before, inaugurated a whole new era, one that would later be coined “neoliberalism” as the post-World War II Keynesian consensus definitively was brought to an end and class war sharply intensified. The world’s capitalists brought about this change in response to their no longer reaping the profits they were accustomed to in the 1950s and 1960s. Reagan and Thatcher were the human material embodying a new era and dragging the political sphere into a tighter domination by industrial and financial elites; an era when the traditional balance between industrialists and financiers was upended and financial capital gained the upper hand among elites.
Neoliberalism is now breaking down. Rosa Luxemburg’s formula looms large for us today: socialism or barbarism. Or call it a better, more democratic world or barbarism if you prefer. As neoliberalism begins to break down, and working people around the world increasingly chafe at their conditions, they are seeking to punish elites with whatever limited means they have. This justifiable anger could be channelled into organized activity, in which social movements cohere and join together to effect the structural changes that are necessary and eventually push toward a wholly different system.
In the absence of such movements or a coherent Left, the Right fills the vacuum, lashing out at scapegoats and seeking saviors in demagogues, even a demagogue whose real estate career is based on screwing working people like those who voted for him and not paying taxes, again unlike those who vote for him but have so much less.
The Right has the money, control of the corporate mass media, institutional support and vast means of decisively influencing opinion-making. Mr. Trump received more than a year of favorable publicity by the corporate media, but nonetheless his ability to bamboozle so many is a monument to the lack of education and anti-intellectualism that is so prevalent in the United States. Given his own ignorance and lack of any program beyond enriching himself, coupled with his open racism, appalling misogyny, virulent nationalism, shallowness, lack of maturity, thin skin, inability to empathize with other people, encouragement of violence against opponents, eagerness to give carte blanche to the police, encouragement of nuclear-weapons proliferation and outright denial of global warming, it is no stretch to declare Donald Trump the biggest danger we’ve ever faced in the White House.
Barbarism has become less theoretical. The time to begin organizing is now, before he takes office and command of the world’s most deadly security apparatus. We either demonstrate strong resolve against authoritarian rule, sure to be led by some of the most vicious right-wing operatives around, or a Trump White House is going to unleash repression on a scale not seen in decades. There is no more room for indulging ultra-left phrase-mongering: We have a clear and present danger. Stand up for whoever is first in line, for eventually they may be coming for you.
Systemic Disorder 
Chilling. All we have to do is look at who was on stage with him last night: Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, Reince Priebus … A veritable Little Shop of Horrors. I’m sure Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin were lurking in the shadows. And Paul Ryan, who couldn’t even say his name at times, was practically flush with giddiness today. Chilling indeed.
Chilling indeed. And probably more nightmare cabinet members to be named.
“Let’s not sugar-coat this: The next four years are going to be very dark. Although I wouldn’t call the Trump campaign fascist, I do believe we can see it as constituting the seeds for a potential fascist movement. That is more than scary enough — and that retrograde movement will now have the power of the state behind it.”
You have little idea of how dark it will. More than any time in my life since the Cuban Missile Crisis have we come so close to going over the edge into the void. We have never had a loose cannon in “charge.” Our national and global end is up to chance now because people misunderstood the nature of the choice and the risks.
We could get out of the Cuban missile crisis because there was leadership on both sides rational enough to extricate themselves after getting themselves into crisis. One of Khrushchev’s aides, Fedor Burlatsky, said in memoirs many years later that he was always confident that a way out would be found because Khrushchev was pragmatic and believed Kennedy to be so as well. Now? Shudder.
absolutely agree on this point, Pete. I wish I could be as optimistic about our future. We have the perfect storm of events- a Left soon to be checkmated by a right-wing GOP dominated Congress and president, and a Supreme Court that promises to be packed with ideological Neanderthals. This means an extremely bleak future for impact and class action litigation to the Supreme Court, including writ of cert actions. It will be too expensive and risky for most grassroots groups to try and get a favorable opinion. This all will be occurring against a backdrop of increasingly horrific tropical storms, polar vortexes projected to last through March and jut into April, soaring summer temperatures bringing more forest fires, and soon to be rapidly rising sea levels. Lower Manhattan is predicted to be submerged by 2020, if not 2018. That will mean Brooklyn will be severed from Manhattan, and there aren’t enough ferries and bike paths to get all 2,600,000 Brooklyn residents to and from Manhattan with a flooded Battery Tunnel and flooded subway system.
Given how long it and has taken NYC to build the Second Avenue subway system, and the cost, not to mention the 11 years it took to revamp the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel back in the 80s, and the cost, the loss of mass transit to and from Brooklyn to Manhattan would have disastrous, unimaginable social and economic consequences for people in Brooklyn, with possibly the L train the only viable connection.
The continued global practice of factory farming and slaughter of 50 billion animals each year necessitates more and more grazing land, creating more desertification, waste of water resources, drought, pestilence, and starvation. It also adds to global methane emissions, which will soon be rapidly increasing as the Arctic and Greeland ice sheets melt.
The impact of global warming on the bees and crops worldwide is going to be disastrous, with scientists and intellectuals including Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky predicting massive collapses in worldwide agricultural output and possible collapse of . Rooftop, hydroponic, vertical, and indoor gardening are all going to be essential measures to ensure a food supply in the coming years.
In addition to climate change, no one ever talks about contingency planning for earthquakes. According to the November 1997 issue of New York Magazine, which consulted with the leading seismologist at Columbia University, NYC is long overdue for a major earthquake on the NY-Boston axis, with major fault lines running through Manhattan. A worst-case scenario in a 5.0 or higher earthquake, which would be largely survivable in LA and SF which are prepared for major earthquakes, would be 200,000 to 2 million dead, with not enough fire and rescue personnel to deal with the bodies. The last major earthquake in NYC was approximately 1884, 5.0. A 6.5 earthquake hit Boston in 1755, which is even more vulnerable to a massive earthquake and tsunami than NYC. A major earthquake between 5.0 and 7.5 is overdue to hit NYC and the closer we get to 2035, the greater the odds of it occurring. http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2006/05/28/bostons_earthquake_problem/?page=3
We have just crossed the threshold of 400 ppm of CO2, which means we’ve officially entered the anthropocene. We will be experiencing events and conditions we cannot imagine, with a President who denies climate change and is devoid of emotional sensitivity, caring, or ability to deal with crises. The prospect of living through the onslaught of climate change and natural disasters can be overwhelming. The tasks before us are daunting.
When I was a little girl, I used to always ask my mother why people would live near Mt. Vesuvius when it was known to be such a deadly volcano. She explained that people become acclimated to their habits, and the force of inertia keeps them from dealing with the situation and dangers at hand. We are all living on the slope of Mt. Vesuvius, and I agree, Pete, we need to mobilize before Trump gets into office.
“In the absence of such movements or a coherent Left, the Right fills the vacuum, lashing out at scapegoats and seeking saviors in demagogues.”
I think this is true, but the pressing question on my mind is – how do we (can we) build a coherent Left? I can’t even have a coherent conversation about politics with my own parents and they consider themselves “progressive”. We are constantly talking past each other it seems.
My hope is that we’ll stop talking past one another and start learning how to work together when we have differing perspectives as if the future depended on it, because it does.
I love you Pete, but if you think many voters (in the Midwest) would likely have gone to Senator Sanders as the vastly more rational and coherent candidate, you are barking mad. I live with these people and they will NEVER vote for ANYONE who even slightly resembles Sanders. If you underestimate that fact, then you aren’t paying attention to what is really going on in the Midwest and the South. So how is NYC reacting to this shit? RegardsRich
Good to hear from you, Rich. In response, I would note that Sanders defeated Clinton in Michigan in a big primary upset, and won some other states. Those votes aren’t enough to win a general election, true, but with so many people wanting change, it does not seem unreasonable to me that some who weren’t Democrats would have taken a look at him, and that the Clinton voters would have voted for him in the general election. Sanders spoke plainly and directly to people, and that is a winning speaking style.
As to how New York City is reacting, I can report that at least 10,000 people marched tonight from Union Square all the way up to Trump Tower in Midtown, taking the streets and blocking traffic all the way. This was a young, energetic crowd; likely the kind of folks you’d see on a Black Lives Matter march. Impressive for an event that was called this afternoon. The first of many, surely.
The Guardian is reporting that large protests are happening tonight in cities across the country: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-us-election-2016-live-reactio
All 12 Step programs have slogans. One of them is that expectations create resentments. I’ll modify that one this way: Expectations + Resentments = Trump.
Back in the hey day of the middle class, there were expectations of a stable life with a better future for the kids. That is obviously no longer true. Resentment has built up for many years and now we see the result: Trump. What is terrifying to contemplate is what will happen after a few years of a Trump presidency with the establishment still firmly in control and business as usual. I will be as shocked as I was this morning if, in two years, Obamacare is dismantled (the insurance companies wrote the law) or a border wall is built (to keep us from going to Mexico?).
Trumpists have to rank as the most deluded group of people ever. They think that if we bring back the good old capitalist days, where everyone can be a millionaire if they just work harder, that America will be Great Again. Incredible. Tip to Trumpists: the jobs aren’t going to come back, African-Americans aren’t going to get less “uppity”, women aren’t going to accept increased discrimination, people of color aren’t going to go away and the liberal elite will continue blame your racism/sexism/ignorance as the cause of the problem. Your hero can’t do anything to solve the fundamental problem because he is the problem. But you’ve bought into the capitalist propaganda so thoroughly that you can’t even begin to think that the economic system might be the problem.
Hint to liberals and “conservatives” alike: America is a fearful place and with Fear in the driver’s seat, we are in for a very rough ride. Trump is just the beginning. Maybe, just maybe (I know, I’m smoking wacky tobacco again), more people will realize that capitalism is the problem. Stop scapegoating everyone and everything and look at the fundamental problem. I’ll repeat myself again: “There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” – Henry D. Thoreau. Marx was absolutely correct when he wrote about the base and the superstructure. A capitalist base, given enough time, will produce the horror that is Trump.
I strongly suspect Trump voters are going to find themselves very pissed off again before four years are up. This will be a very unfortunate way for people to learn that there are no demagogue saviors, assuming they will be willing to observe what they see.
The Trumpists were unable to clearly observe what they saw before they voted for Trump; what makes you think that they will be able to clearly observe anything in the future? Trumpists will learn nothing – they are incapable of that. The convulsions have just begun.
The Democrats had the prodigal son in the palm of their hand but decided to crush him through ignorance, hubris and lack of imagination. Sanders would have beat trump but was told to stand down. Although he should have led the charge regardless, he didn’t. So, we get the next best thing which will have to do until a third party can emerge. Blowing up the status quo was mandatory for the American people and it could only have ever been Sanders or Trump. Knowing this should have taught us that CLINTON was DOA. What a shame. The lesson is to never keep a good man and his movement from reaching its potential. The Democrats killed the goose that was about to lay the golden egg. Pity
Sanders as a third-party candidate would have split the vote, ensuring that Trump would have won comfortably. Political mathematics dictated that Sanders get behind Clinton, and as he sees his political home being aligned with the Democrats, it wouldn’t have been realistic for him to have done otherwise.
Unfortunately, third parties are not viable in the U.S. due to the winner-take-all, single-seat district system. What we really need is proportional representation. What we really need most of all is to get rid of capitalism and institute a system of economic democracy, without which there is no political democracy. In the meantime, we’d better be busy organizing outside political channels because, as you noted, the Democratic Party will not save us.
How many of you voted for Clinton or a third party when you shouldn’t have voted at all.
Clinton and Trump are the same; they are cut from the same cloth, their rhetoric notwithstanding.
Many of you have spoken about the politics of fear motivating the Trumpists, but you are also responding to fear and jumping to the same old conclusions and reacting with the same old tactics.
Can we come up with more effective movement building tactics besides marching through the streets, blocking traffic, shouting ridiculous slogans? Is this the way to try to reach the people who voted for Trump? The so-called American left is every bit as predictable as the right.
I wrote: “America is a fearful place and with Fear in the driver’s seat, we are in for a very rough ride.” Contrary to your assertion, I did not differentiate between Left and Right. I simply said that Fear is in the driver’s seat. Speaking only for myself, I am not “responding to fear and jumping to the same old conclusions and reacting with the same old tactics.”
The women who will be denied abortions and might die because of that, the immigrants who will have to spend more of their lives in the shadows, those on the margins and the people of color who are at greater danger of being attacked by Trump supporters would disagree with you. My partner talked after the election with a prominent feminist activist of color who gets her insulin through Obama’s Affordable Care Act and is worried she will lose it, without which she can’t survive. Go tell that activist that her life doesn’t matter.
As to tactics, if we do nothing but march and block traffic, then we’ll have little impact, true. But demonstrations are not ends unto themselves, but a way of organizing people, of letting others know they are not alone, of showing people they can fight back and demonstrating to the authorities that they can’t run roughshod over us. So I will continue to march in the streets. How we organize and what we do later will be the test of the effectiveness of resistance.
So, I’m trying to understand, how would you have reacted to a Clinton win? Would you be just as outraged? Would your reaction and your tactics be the same? A lot of the evil things Trump will do I feel like Clinton would also have done if she were elected, but she’d just blame the Republican controlled congress for it. We know that Obama deported more immigrants and drone-bomb assassinated more people than Bush. You may be right, but it just seems like we’re stuck in this vicious cycle of back and forth tug of war between the repubs and the dems. Maybe we just need to step back and cut the rope. Maybe it’s time to think about the problem a bit differently and come up with a new strategy and tactics.
I’d have reacted the same. In fact, the first anti-war demonstration against Clinton took place the Saturday before the election with a march to her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, which I participated in. Activists against the Trans-Pacific Partnership had been gearing up to fight Clinton on this issue for months, for another example — not a one of us believed Clinton’s magical transformation to opposition.
Again, tactics must go well beyond taking the streets, although that shouldn’t be under-estimated as a way of energizing people.
Speaking of the American left, I thought of this article which I hope will provoke some serious reflection:
http://journal-neo.org/2016/11/04/top-secret-there-are-still-socialist-countries-left/
I am with Prole. There is an activism fetish that compels people to rush out with the same old, exhausted activist playbook and start chanting the same empty slogans. I say, don’t just do something, stand there. The legitimacy of liberal democratic capitalism has not faced a test like this in many generations. If we take some time and not panic and not rush in to every manufactured fray, we might come up with effective strategy to widen the cracks. The worst thing the left can do is go totally Alex Jones/chicken little and start running in circles.
I believe we’re all in basic agreement here. Although I have been marching since Wednesday, these demonstrations represent a start and nothing more. Demonstrations are the easy part; organizing and creating the social networks and movements that will create the strategies and tactics necessary are much harder.
The anti-war movement during the first Bush II/Cheney administration is a good example of what we need to avoid. The liberal United For Peace and Justice coalition refused to work with the other coalitions to their left, such as Answer, and wound up steering anti-war demonstrations into support for pro-war Democrat John Kerry (his candidacy itself the product of the “Anybody But Bush” mentality). The anti-war movement fizzed out and eventually even the demonstrations ceased.
If we do nothing but march in the streets, then nothing will change because Trump and the corporate elite who are rapidly coalescing around him don’t care about our opinions. It is, however, important to send a strong signal and provide energy for opponents of Trump to get them out of despondency, and marching, for now, does do that. We shouldn’t under-estimate the necessity of that, nor should we think we can march in the streets continually for four years or that it is effective in itself.
And I’m with Troutsky and Systemic Disorder: demonstrating in the streets is a way to build community, though I’m not sure that it is the most effective way. We cannot succumb to Fear and run around in circles as Troutsky so cogently wrote. We on the Left find ourselves under assault by the Trumpists in this country and the only way that I can think of to respond is to withdraw financial support from them. Demonstrations will, in the future, become much more hazardous to life and limb due to the hatred spewed by the Trumpists which will generate severe repression. We have to find another way to weave our community together. I would suggest reaching out to people of color who have endured repression for hundreds and hundreds of years. How to do they cope with the hate-mongers and sexists? Not by demonstrating – that only draws attention to groups of people who the Trumpists want to exterminate. Demonstrations assume that the people in power have some sympathy for the position being addressed in the demonstration. Do not have any illusions: these people despise us and would just as soon drag us to our deaths in the dirt from a truck bumper as look at us.
Another approach would be to use the knowledge we have accumulated through various forms of community-building to cement and expand those ties. I would start by excluding Trumpists from our lives whenever and wherever possible. An example: I had some electrical work done last week and was horrified to find out that the electrician was a Trump supporter. No doubt, he voted for Trump. When I paid him yesterday, I was thinking that I would never have him on my property again. Was the quality of his work good? Yes. Was his bill reasonable? Yes. But I am so repulsed by Trumpists that I want nothing at all to do with him again. I will find another electrician to continue the work that I am doing.
If we can build an “Angie’s List” of sympathetic people, I think that would be a good thing. Leftists speak of community but give it lip service. It is time to put our money where our mouths are.
We are living in a third-world Fascist country now and we need to act accordingly. There have never, to my knowledge, been street protests against a president-elect in the history of this country. Do not advertise your political stance and do not do anything to bring the hammer down on yourself. We need to build our own country/community and leave the racists/sexists/hate-mongers to stew in their own juices. It is impossible to enter into a rational conversation with any of them as most of us know or have discovered. We have joined, in ways unimaginable before November 8, the community of people of color.
One more thing: I wrote that American is a fearful country and that Fear is in the driver’s seat. Any anti-capitalist who has a passing familiarity with the ideas of Marx will grasp that Fear takes over the driver’s seat as soon as labor becomes a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. Fear of survival, fear for your children, fear of everything. This is why capitalism is such an evil economic system. In a capitalist economic system, the worker always looking over his/her shoulder, fearful of what might be coming to get them. The Trumpists are fearful but they are deluded by thinking that more capitalism will solve the problem. We, on the Left, should know that capitalism, green-washed or not, has to be rejected.
Solidarity Networks
I don’t often read what Chris Hedges has to say, but I think he is spot-on in his most recent essay. It’s worth a read.
IMHO, we dodged one bullet and stood in front of another. I suppose that
it might be better to have gone with the neo-con Clinton regarding many
issues. But pushing Russia or China to the brink is certainly NOT a good
idea. I am of the opinion we are doomed either way.
My hope, frankly, is that Trump will provoke a revolution from the left
… invigorate people who really want the Oligarchs out. Sadly, it won’t
happen because fundamentally we are a rightest nation with a veneer of
something else.
Ultimately, the empire must collapse … or we are simply doomed.
So, I agree to disagree … or disagree hoping to agree?
We are a long way indeed from a revolution from the Left, but perhaps a combination of a Trump presidency and ongoing economic stagnation and the looming crisis of the environment and global warming might get people moving, finally. Maybe. Given all the damage the U.S. has done to the rest of the world, people there owe it to humanity to put an end to empire.
“A criminalization of dissent is coming our way, and if I had to guess Black Lives Matter is a likely candidate to be the first target. There will be many more, ranging across the spectrum of Left activism, from Dreamers to abortion-rights activists to environmentalists to organizers fighting racism and police brutality.”
Which brings to mind the old saying, “We hang together or hang separately”. A united front is the only chance. Being picked of one at a time is no chance.
Oh so true, Pinchme. We had better hang together.