Loren Goldner On the Current Situation in the U.S.
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 18th century to ensure that small (mainly agrarian, and at the time, largely slave) states could check the power of the larger
urban industrial states. 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 U.S., of whom 90 million did not vote at
all, and studies have generally shown that the non-voters are overwhelming in
the poorer half of the population and on specific issues (health care, welfare,
etc.) are to the left of both the major Democratic and Republican Parties.
Non-voting in the U.S. 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
U.S. president in memory. Far more important was
the success of Trump is 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 1980’s
became “Reagan Democrats”, i.e. workers voting for Ronald Reagan’s promises to
“rebuild America” after the crisis and stagnation of the 1970’s. 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 1960’s. 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. 53% of voting women voted
for Trump, as did 30% of voting Latinos.
No question that
Trump’s rise and victory unleashed hard-core 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 U.S., including among people with
established middle-class lives and U.S. 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 2008-2009 meltdown and thereafter; a
Secretary of Education, the billionaire Betty 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 Secretary of the Environment
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 U.S. infrastructure, thus potentially, a 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% 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 U.S. 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 progaganda
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 smoke screen 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 U.S.. 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.
March 7, 2017
