What Trump Teaches, Again

 What Trump Teaches, Again

Jim Kavanagh

 

It happened, again.

After the Trump victory in 2016, I wrote an essay with the title, “Ship of Fools: What Trump Teaches” and it’s the basis for what I’ll say here, with appropriate updates and additions. See the original for a fuller analysis.

As in 2016, except worse, Donald Trump won the presidential election because of the rage of working people—of all colors and genders—over the Democratic party and administration’s failure to substantially improve the material conditions of their lives.

Working people were fed up with watching the party that claims to represent their interests allow their material conditions to worsen, even as that party lavishes attention and resources on foreign wars for “democracy” and domestic programs for “inclusion” while castigating them for not being woke enough to embrace those virtues that don’t pay the rent.

David Axelrod, an architect of the problem, described it nicely on election night on CNN: “The Democratic Party has become more of a suburban, college-educated, professional party and it still feels allegiance to working…But it approaches working people like missionaries or like Margaret Mead would approach the natives.”

Well, the natives are restless. “Democracy” means people having and exercising power. They just did. And the missionaries just got cooked. 

I really hate to say it, but even conservative commentator David Brooks can see the problem. His latest NYT op-ed, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” has a slew of cogent zingers like: “As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet…His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot”; and “The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it…Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself”; and even “Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”

Bernie Sanders himself, who two weeks ago said Biden "has been the most progressive, pro-worker president since FDR," now recognizes, and is in high dudgeon about, the problem with the Democratic Party he surrendered his “disruptive” movement to:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right. 

Too bad, as Bernie admits in his statement, the Democratic Party is not going to confront and rectify this problem, because it’s not a “problem” but an effect of the party’s fundamental mission—to preserve capitalism (and Zionism).

The Democratic Party takes any disruptive threat to the prerogative of capital in its false “embrace” to kill it—which is precisely what they did with Bernie’s “disruption,” and with Bernie’s help. 

To revise Brooks’s line: the job of the Democratic Party is to keep inequality at a level that forestalls any rebellious political movement that would interrupt capitalist self-enrichment, let alone threaten ruling-class rule—to be, as Obama defined himself to the bankers, “the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” Unfortunately, the U.S. oligarchy has become so gluttonous, and the Democrats so bereft of talented con-men and women like Obama, that it makes the job more difficult to do without turning to explicitly repressive (some would say “fascist”) tactics like censorship and RICO prosecutions, which is exactly what the Democrats are doing (and Republicans will do, as Trump promises). 

Of course, Donald Trump is not a tribune of the working class. He’s another  example of the process Christopher Hitchens, in his better days, called “the essence of American politics…the manipulation of populism by elitism,” and Paul Street restates as: “the cloaking of plutocratic agendas, of service to the rich and powerful, in the false rebels’ clothing of popular rebellion.” 

We’ve seen this repeatedly, and Trump is the latest example. Trump is going to bring his version of a billionaire-demanded “economic storm” of “hardship” to the majority of people, as Elon has already promised—but don’t worry, it’s only “temporary” and won’t affect Elon and his fellow billionaires. It’s all about cutting spending, you see—but don’t worry, not military spending—because the deficit and debt are bankrupting us and the federal government has to balance its books like a business—a set of assumptions Democrats share (and all progressives must learn to reject). 

Trump will bring us his version of war to protect Zionist apartheid and genocide, and to preserve American unipolar global hegemony, at the cost of American workers’ lives and treasure (which Davids Axelrod and Brooks will cheer on, and Bernie Sanders will do nothing to stop). 

Almost everybody now can recognize the legitimacy of the populist anger against the elite and why it was expressed in a vote for Trump, who has been relentlessly constructed by the American political and media elite as their mortal enemy. Trump Derangement obsessives over the past eight years could not get how much that strengthened him. As one of my readers explained her reason to vote for Trump: “The fact remains that there is something in Trump that the deep state thinks it cannot control.” And as Michael Moore forcefully put it in a 2016 talk that Trump used, verbatim, as a campaign ad: “Trump's election is going to be the biggest 'fuck you' ever recorded in human history and it will feel good.” 

Those of us on the absolutely-nothing-to-do-with-the-Democrats left can also understand the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire [“capitalist” in the original],” Shark-Tank flavor of capitalist ideology that has such a persistent hold in America, and leads working-class people to be as fooled by a crude-talking “He tells it like it is!” character like Trump as PMC “progressives” are by a smooth-talking “Yes, we can!” character like Obama. 

The nasty thing that this Trump victory has shoved in our face, again, is how impotent and effectively invisible any such left is. When Trump, when anyone, can, without being laughed off the public stage, repeatedly attack Kamala Harris as a “communist,” the left is invisible.

"The US couldn't choose the Left: there wasn't one. When there's no more Left, there's no limit on the Right. When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation" pic.twitter.com/d6XL3jT8P8

— David Broder (@broderly) November 6, 2024 

That means, as Adolph Reed, Jr. says: “The crucial tasks for a committed left in the United States now are to admit that no politically effective force exists and to begin trying to create one.” The left agenda is to end imperialist war, end support for Zionist colonialism, and change our social economy from one in which the first priority is that individuals are entitled to accumulate as much wealth as possible, to one in which the first priority is that everyone has economic security and social dignity. That’s a radical change about which we have not succeeded in persuading the majority of the American people. We better start figuring out how to do that.

It seems an impossible task. We know the entire ruling class and establishment media, most definitely and effectively including the Democratic Party, will mobilize to prevent it. You mean like how impossible it was for Donald Trump to become President?

Here’s a lesson everyone on the left should learn from Donald Trump: The establishment powers are not as omnipotent as they and we think they are. Trump has been under incessant attack by the political and media establishment for eight years—Russiagated, impeached (twice!), portrayed as a “fascist” and Hitler, convicted of felonies and still being prosecuted in multiple jurisdictions, and targeted in two assassination attempts—and he was able to build a successful, popular political movement.

Yes, he had a lot of money behind him. But not as much as his opponent. And look at those swing states.

Open Secrets

Axios

If you have a political movement with determined leadership, that persuades working people you will fight for the things that will improve their lives materially, representing the bottom 90% against the top 10%, and you convince them that you will not back down—then, to paraphrase the man, What always seems impossible, gets done.

It is disgraceful to cite Mandela with the example of Trump, but sorry, leftists, that’s the shit we have to eat. Per Brooks: “Those of us who condescend to Trump should feel humbled — he did something none of us could do.” He built a multi-racial working-class political movement that won the presidency. That movement will, we are convinced, dissolve in anger as his true agenda unfolds, but he has got a mandate, and we all have to choke on that even as we fight it. The job of the left is not to condescend to him, but to do what he did, better.

The first thing any serious American left has to realize, once and for all, is that the kind of movement and leadership we need will never come from the committed-to-capitalism-and-imperialism, counter-revolutionary, neo-liberal identity politics Democratic Party. That Party will vie with Trump for working-class support, but only to maintain ruling class power. 

We don’t have much time. The demise of America (and its Zionist ward) is underway, and it’s pushing us toward wars of desperation on multiple fronts. Let’s make sure the disasters that will surely come from the Trump administration don’t just lead to another flip of the duopoly see-saw. We have to make sure the working class of America is prepared to say: “Fuck that!”