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Writer's pictureMichael Laxer

Establishment "liberalism" fails yet again: On the victory of Donald Trump



A The Left Chapter Editorial.


In the end it was not even close. The overtly fascistic and authoritarian Donald Trump easily defeated Kamala Harris, the Hail Mary last ditch attempt by the Democrats to avert defeat after the disastrous Joe Biden.


As in every election the Democrats campaigned as the "lesser evil" and in this case did so --with no sense of irony -- with the support of past Republican war criminals like Dick Cheney, who, of course, they frantically had positioned themselves as the lesser evil against when trying to defeat him and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.


Liberals will shift as far to the right as necessary to try to hold "power".


Harris was a status quo, establishment candidate in an era where the status quo is obviously and clearly only beneficial to the establishment. A status quo based on grotesque levels of inequality. A status quo where tens-of-millions of working people in the US lack adequate access to education or health care, are a pay cheque or two away from destitution, cannot find affordable housing and face day-to-day economic insecurity and feelings of precarious powerlessness. Live literally at the mercy of their employers and the landlord class.


Far from inspiring, the Harris campaign and the Democrats entirely abandoned the political terrain of "change" and left it to Trump. That Trump's veneer of radicalism -- as is always the case with the far right -- is based on a combination of lies, scapegoating and fear-mongering that will deliver little to no change actually beneficial to the many millions of working and middle class Americans that voted for him meant little. He is an oligarch who seeks to shape an even more oligarchic, authoritarian US where power will even more explicitly lie in the hands of corporations, the wealthy and the state institutions of the police and the military as enforcers.


Yet, unlike Harris, he was able to mobilize and inspire. A disturbing fact only possible due to the lack of any meaningful, mass anti-capitalist alternative.


Liberals and people on the left often forget that right wing populism always embraces some elements, at least rhetorically, of anti-capitalism and anti-elitism and this embrace of this rhetoric is all the more effective if the left has ceded much of the ground on this front.


American liberals and liberalism have done precisely that. For decades.


It is a long road that has led here. As the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) noted in a statement on election day:


The inter-bourgeois conflict is also reflected in the donors of the two candidates, i.e. the legitimate lobbying and the attempt of the monopolies to determine the outcome. To illustrate: Kamala Harris receives donations from Microsoft, Netflix, Meta, big capitalists like George Soros and Mike Bloomberg, etc., while on the other hand Trump is supported by Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, Tim Mellon (billionaire banker), Palantir Technologies, Johnson & Johnson, etc. There are hundreds of capitalists and monopolies donating millions of dollars to the campaigns of one or the other or even both candidates, e.g. the war hawks of Lockheed Martin, who will secure billions in military arms contracts no matter who becomes president.
Democrats and Republicans have alternated in government for over 150 years (!), complementing one another to ensure the continuity of reactionary policies. Their victims are first and foremost the US people, regardless of colour, religion or origin, tens of millions of whom today live in widespread poverty, millions are homeless, and even more are completely excluded from the fully privatized health care and education systems. At the same time, millions of African-American and Latino workers continue to suffer from racism, police brutality and discrimination. But the victims of the imperialist policies of both parties are also dozens of peoples around the world who have suffered imperialist interventions, massacres, coups, blockades and sanctions imposed by the interests of the US monopolies.

Meanwhile -- all while reassuring the corporate and billionaire class that she would do nothing to threaten their power -- Harris continued to support the horrific, daily genocidal slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon and supported sending the billions of dollars in military aid without which it could not have continued. She supported as well the squandering of many billions more on the NATO proxy war in Ukraine, doing everything possible to prevent a peace deal.


Now the working people of the United States, as well as people of colour, women, immigrants and millions of people in marginalized and racialized communities, will face a new and very dangerous level of authoritarian, reactionary viciousness and brutality both politically and, when they resist, more explicitly.


Right-wing liberalism has failed yet again. Never has the need for a new, radical, anti-capitalist mass alternative in the streets been more clear. Waiting for the ballot box to stop fascism will end in certain defeat.


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