The end of the Donald Trump presidency doesn't mean the end of Trumpism, especially if Joe Biden thinks his task is to restart the corporate-friendly centrist politics temporarily interrupted by Trump.
THE VIOLENT STORMING of the Capitol in Washington by pro-Trump extremists has laid waste to any further political ambitions that Donald Trump may still be harbouring, but it won't bring an end to the political crisis that the United States is confronting. Donald Trump might be leaving the White House but he will return to a civilian population that isn't as outraged by the storming of the Capitol as one might of expected. A YouGov poll conducted in the aftermath of Wednesday's events revealed that among Republican voters, 45 percent approved of the attack with 30 percent describing the offenders as 'patriots' - echoing the words of Donald Trump himself.
Its too easy and too convenient to simply blame the attack on Capitol Hill as the consequence of four years of a Trump presidency that has inflamed grievances and divisions within American society. If that was really the case then America should enter a phase of relative peace and unity after Joe Biden enters the White House on January 20. I think that most of us, instinctively, know that this won't be the case.
If there is to be a honest accounting of the Trump years then the Democratic Party itself - and those allied to it - will have to front up to their role in the rise of Donald Trump.
The Democratic Party laid the groundwork for the rise of Trump when, under President Bill Clinton, it effectively abandoned its white working class base in favour of Third Way politics and the promotion and defence of neoliberalism. And even though he is still regarded as politically progressive by many, Barack Obama tied the Democratic Party ever closer to the interests of Wall Street. It was, after all, Barack Obama - with Vice President Joe Biden by his side - who bailed out Wall Street after the 2008 financial crash while struggling working class Americans were largely left to fend for themselves.
Donald Trump, an instinctive populist, grasped that a path to power had been left open by the Democratic Party and it was one he was happy to walk down. Trump, the arch-capitalist, paraded as the champion of the American working class. He was the man, he told ordinary white Americans, who would shake up an elite Washington establishment that had abandoned them, he was the man who would bring back to America the jobs that neoliberalism had exported to other parts of the world. In stark contrast the Democratic Party couldn't even be bothered sending its establishment -approved presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, into the working class heartlands of states like Michigan and Wisconsin. The one man who did have substantial support among the working class, Bernie Sanders, was politically kneecapped by a Democratic Party establishment that feared his left wing politics more than it feared the right wing populism of Donald Trump.
So right wing Trump populism, with an authoritarian and anti-democratic impulse at its centre, will not go away of its own accord, especially if Joe Biden thinks his task is to restart the corporate-friendly centrist politics interrupted by the presidency of Donald Trump. Thanks to the lies and misinformation peddled by Trump and his cheerleaders, the overwhelming majority of Trump supporters do not regard Biden as a legitimate president and he will do little to counter act this view if behaves as a defender of corporate interests and the neoliberal status quo. Appeals to unity and 'the American ideal' - whatever that is these days - will accomplish nothing.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has warned that Joe Biden must get it right and if the lives of ordinary Americans don't substantially improve then other Donald Trumps will inevitably arise. She has commented that the Democratic Party's lacklustre results in the House of Representatives - where it lost seats - can be attributed to the party's timid centrist politics.
'You can't just tell working class people, Black, Brown and youth to save us at every election and then tell them to be quiet and not be their representative champions when they need us,' she said in December.
This is a lesson Joe Biden needs to quickly learn. But such is the political atmosphere within the Democratic Party itself, a socialist politician like Ocasio-Cortez and her comrades in 'The Squad' are still regarded with hostility and suspicion by corporate Democrats, some of whom will be sitting in Biden's cabinet.
