Donald Trump is not a political aberration but the product of a American capitalism in decline.
A FRIEND and comrade in Los Angeles told me she stuck a wet finger out her apartment window and concluded that the wind of change is beginning to blow through the land of the free. Something is in the air, she said, and it isn't just car fumes. She's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America which decided not to endorse Joe Biden.
My friend was of course referring to the presidential election. All the US polls, both nationally and locally, show Joe Biden holding a modest but steady lead over Trump. I think the lead would be far greater still if the Democratic Party establishment hadn't picked someone as lightweight and centrist as Biden but the fact remains a mild breeze (we're talking Biden after all) is threatening to blow Donald Trump right out of the White House and back to Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Its hardly breaking news that over half the United States hates Trump. The orange man, of course, doesn't care about any of that - because he's always right - but his dilemma is that his support base, fraying at the edges, won't be enough to carry him back into the White House for another four years of chaos and carnage. And he knows it. Trump is already rehearsing his defence with incoherent rants about voter fraud and suggestions that he might not leave the White House even if he does lose.
Trump is a malevolent force but he was also once an entertaining malevolent force who had yet to win the presidential election. In 2016 his many failings were ignored because he was the unpredictable showman who provided good sound bites and good ratings for news channels like CNN. It was Amy Goodman of Democracy Now who observed that CNN provided more airtime for an empty stage waiting for Trump to arrive compared to the coverage it supplied of the campaign rallies held by Bernie Sanders. Now CNN, which did its own little bit to push Trump into the Oval Office and still won't acknowledge it, now hates him with a passion.
But there was supposed to be a safety valve, because he would never win the presidential election. The political establishment could provide him with extensive media coverage safe in the knowledge he would never defeat Hilary Clinton. It was, after all, time for America's first female President. But this cosy conversation was happening within the bubble of the political and media elites. It ignored people like film maker Michael Moore who repeatedly warned of the widespread anger and discontent among the working class communities of industrial America. The rest, as they, is history.
It was Karl Marx who said that history repeats first as tragedy, then as farce. It would tempting to think that the United States- and the world - might have been hit with the jab of tragedy but can avoid the right hook of farce, simply by picking Joe Biden as the next President.
But this is based on the false premise that Trump is merely a political aberration. He isn't. Trump is the culmination of over thirty years of neoliberalism that has mercilessly carved out a progressively more unequal and unjust America. At the same time a democracy captured by the wealthy one percent has failed to represent the interests of the ninety-nine percent and denied them a political voice. Trump posed as their saviour: the conman and grifter as working class hero, the man who would 'drain the Washington swamp'If there is hope for America it lies with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her generation. While Biden, the career Washington politician, might be instinctively seeking a return to the pre-Trump order, AOC has pointedly commented that there can be no turning back of the clock.
'As horrific as this president is, he is a symptom of much deeper problems,' she said recently. 'Removing Trump will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; income inequality; the online radicalisation that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified and reanimated. In order for us to heal as a nation, we all must pursue the hard work of addressing these root causes. It’s not as easy as voting.'
As we watch Donald Trump and Joe Biden slug it out in four televised debates, we should remind ourselves that we are also witnessing the last gasps of a liberal order on its last legs.
