Trump, Brexit and the working class.

 An Essay

1. Where are we?

After decades being told by academics, by scornful right wing politicians including social democrats like Tony Blair, that the working class had disappeared in the west, the working class is back - with a vengeance!

First they have emerged as the absolute majority of the potential voting population in both the US and the UK (not ignoring the fact that working class votes split in both countries, and more profoundly over Brexit in the UK.) Second, while racist and nationalist politicians have led this renaissance, the working class has also made a central aspect of their political expression the demand to end the power of the political elite in both of their two societies. France’s elections will soon see if all, or only some, of these moods travel beyond the Anglo Saxon world.

Despite the deep class anger reflected in the voting in the US and UK, this phenomenon has been harnessed to a substantial gearshift of western society to the right. Right wing, racist, nationalism has become the initial, but for now predominant, solution to the west’s unraveling political crisis. In two cases the working class left-based challenge to neo liberal globalisation in the west, has faltered. First in Greece, the Syriza government collapsed backwards in the face of the millions of Greeks’ unexpected challenge to neo-liberal EU mandarins. Second in the US, Bernie Sanders tied his challenge, and the momentum of his popular anti-establishment movement, to Hilary Clinton and the Democratic Party – and thereby shared in its catastrophic attachment to the status quo and in its collapse.

However, the political crisis in both the UK and the US (with France, Italy, Spain and even Germany next in line) is still evolving in the west in general and in Britain and the US in particular. Trump’s pre-presidential antics may be amusing, but behind them is a savage regroupment of the ‘Grand Ol’ Party’ Republicans, and epic battles still to come in the headless chicken that is now the Democratic Party. In the UK, Prime Minister May is about to enter her own sea of troubles, with unfulfilled sharks snapping at her heels and without the life belt of any sort of mandate from anyone. In other words the new stage of the west’s political crisis, a stage where the momentum at leadership level has shifted to the right, has only just begun. And behind all of that is yet another after-shock in the seemingly endless crisis of international finance capital.

Meanwhile the working class movement is aroused in many European countries and testing out radical solutions and those politicians that promote them. The fundamental contradiction for the political right in all this is that its future, a future where it leads the whole of society, depends utterly on two conditions being met. For the radical right to truly succeed the working class need to be divided. And although misogyny, racism and anti-immigration have struck a cord, even pumped up racist attacks etc., as yet the popular majority according to social attitude polling in both the US and the USA tie opposition to immigration to the loss of jobs or in Britain to the deeper and deeper rationing of social services and housing, rather than commitment to segregationist and superior ethnicity type arguments. After dividing the working class, the radical right then has to break to pieces any and all independent working class organisation - in order to rule society. In other words rightwing politicians in the west, basing their popularity on the political arousal of the working class, are in danger of producing the conditions for their own destruction. They require an all out offensive against the very forces they have partially marshaled into mainstream political life. We have seen the prolonged agony of government and state produced by this contradiction in the case of Berlusconi’s Italy. But we shall see how this plays out much more rapidly in the case of President Trump and Prime Minister May, as history speeds up, as new economic crises bite and as the population tests and rejects its political choices with greater and greater speed.  

The success of the right so far in the ruling classes’ political crises, means that the next stage of the battle in society will inevitably be defensive and predominantly marked by the success, or otherwise, in building a new, coherent and united policy and program supported by the working class movement as a whole. Such a program has to be based first on the defeat of the traditional political elite and the root and branch reform of political life; second on support for refugees and immigration and fair trade not free trade; and third on a massive commitment to investment in both social and technical infrastructure including improved living standards for the majority. In many respects, as will be seen, such a program grows out of key aspects of the class insurgency and consciousness as already witnessed. But such a program has simultaneously to be accompanied by the defense of the political and social independence of the working class, from billionaires, from racists and their organisations and from any attempt to return to previous versions of the old and failing traditional working class parties. And that struggle is not based in theory or programs, but in mass action.

2. Marxism – (sort of) out of the mouth of Republicans!

In one of the ten thousand and two celebrity TV debates about the future of the US, pre Trump and post Obama, an old reptile called Ed Emmett Tyrrell Junior, Editor of the American Spectator, poked out from under his rock into the Trump sunshine, to denounce Marxism’s ‘theory of false consciousness’. This particular oddity will pop up again and again, albeit taking different shapes and forms, as the general debate in political circles focuses on the growing class conflict that is bound to arise as the post WW2 political system’s tectonic plates in the west continue to shift. Old Ed touched on a significant issue as he got his anti Clinton, anti women and anti black poison out. He implied that his fellow debater could not separate and distil the working class vote for Trump into an anti elite vote alone. Ed was right. It is unacceptable to isolate one component from the stew from all of its characteristics. And those socialists in the US (and elsewhere) who try to separate out the mucky racism, sexism and nationalism of the working class vote from its insurgent, anti-establishment, anti-elite radicalism, imagining that the former can simply be explained away as ‘bad’ media, as the result of ‘tricks and smokescreens’, will fail at the first fence. The meaning of the working class vote in the West has to be faced full on.

Some socialist commentators especially in the US still argue their own version of the false consciousness idea that working class people who voted against immigration etc are the ‘victims’ of the lack of information, of right wing media, of lies and propaganda. No. That is not it. A change of media would be delightful. Socialists swamping the Internet more so. But ‘sorting out the mistakes’ in peoples’ minds will not resolve the question of class consciousness for the majority of people who have already in any case a deep and healthy cynicism for all sorts of lecturing, media and messages. A serious argument and an argument in practice, through action and experience will be needed to test and resolve whether, objectively, billionaire and banker leaders, racism and anti-immigration, are in the working class interest or not.

Working class consciousness has little to do with daily routine displaying its contradictions. Even in the days when millions of workers from the West went into the giant factories in Detroit, Northern Italy, France and the North and Midlands of the UK, their burden was dunned into the pattern of their minds. Many on the lines were annoyed when the endless routine of their labour was halted by a technical stop. Relentless activity at least sped the working hours away. Regular union meetings were a sacrifice when they cut into your time, the time for eating, rest and family. But most accidents, which invariably went back to reckless employers, would start up class-based thinking. First there would be a ‘whip round’ if the injury was bad; the poorest supporting each other in the knowledge that the employer would not. Second there would be anger against the bosses. On the shop floor circles of workers would start arguing about what had happened and who was ultimately to blame. Collective action might start. Then the union might be called in. This is the actual process of emerging class-consciousness. This is how disgust with popular media begins. This is when you see who are your friends and who are your enemies. Class-consciousness grows from a class in the active process of becoming itself.

‘False consciousness’ on the other hand emerged from Engels’s pen in 1893 when he was dealing with the more instrumental end of what he thought Marx’s ideas meant in practice. Indeed Marx did open out and cut through the great frauds and mysteries of the capitalist system - in its world beating march across the globe. (Today apologists for capitalism still try to tie capitalism’s functioning to some twaddle about the basic nature of human beings, or try to explain its ‘inevitable’ human progress as anything other than the desperate episodes of class struggle and sacrifice that have been required to take children out of chimneys and the old and ill off the scrapheap.) But Marx, in his ruthless exposure of capitalism’s realities, did not ever use the term - false consciousness.

One good reason to be suspicious of the term is its use in the building of political parties that claim to ‘really’ represent the working class. Famously, Marx proposed that existence proceeds to consciousness; that is, it is the experience of material life that creates the conditions for its understanding. And that means ideas and attitudes are woven in the minds of people from their interactions with reality, albeit mediated in a myriad of different ways, historically, psychologically, etc, etc, and most of all through the experience of existence as part of a social being, mainly, but not exclusively, in the case of the working class through its labour. But, argue Engels’s would-be followers, when US workers vote for Trump or UKIP in Britain it is because, in some sort of way, they have been brainwashed out of their own experience. And that is where some alarming theories of ‘the working class Party’ come into their own. False consciousness means that the working class must rely on the creation of distinct political machinery to create a full picture of the ‘real’ class-consciousness that the working class should have. In this scenario the working class cannot assemble and express its own interests. It needs to donate that role to a separate entity.

Any critic of revolution by the majority can immediately see the role in this ideological construction for a self identified elite, who exist in order to spot the true interests of the working class. Perhaps this model of a working class political party could be argued as necessary in an illiterate population ruled by a Czar, or under Fascist conditions. But under universal franchise, not withstanding its limits and corruption, it appears arcane, dubious and even reactionary.

Existence does proceed to consciousness. There is no need to return to religion or some other version of ‘the spirit’ to amend the now generally accepted idea that human behaviour and thought is, ultimately, deeply and irretrievably attached to the material conditions of life.  But existence does not simply proceed to consciousness. On the contrary, human experience, the human connection with the material world, including other humans, is refracted through an immense kaleidoscope of history, of personal and collective psychology, of work, of love, of media, etc, all of which mediate experience and the consciousness of that experience.

All classes’ experiences are fashioned, at the broadest level, by their ultimate relations to the means of production and reproduction; how they are able to live and recreate themselves. But this broad determination is a multifaceted experience of the most complex kind. It rarely becomes deeply collective unless the basic elements of society become revealed through crisis, and fundamental collisions across that reality have produced a telling clarification of life and times. Social conditions mostly reveal themselves through social conflict and class conflict reveals most. It is a creative paradox that social truth, including what is the working class interest, is won mainly through struggle. And it is that function, which can be ‘remembered’ by political organisations and programs, as ‘normal’ daily life returns workers to their ‘normal’ world.

With this outlook, specialized cadres do not determine working class interests. Real working class interests come to full revelation through the struggle between classes, in which parties have to sink themselves. In the context of this struggle the memory of previous battles, the study of similar conditions across the world and through time, play an indispensable role in helping to clarify and promote ‘the new’. But they cannot and do not produce it. Working class parties can play the role of a centre of class memory and international experience. But all the great social revolutions of the last 150 years have been new. All of them expressed working class interests in entirely new ways – often with working class political organisations acting as a drag – until they too managed to learn the new working class interest (or not.)

The 1st International of Marx and Engels did not invent the Paris Commune. Nor did Lenin and the Bolsheviks create the soviets, nor Mao invent the red bases and the extension of anti-colonialism only being fully resolved by social revolution.  

The point of all this is to reject the idea of false consciousness in the working class votes for Trump (or that section of the British working class that voted for UKIP). The panoply of thoughts and feelings and political choices made by the working class in the face of Trump’s Presidential campaign were not shoehorned into working class heads. They were not a result of false news on Google, or an effect of the narcissistic antics of FBI chief James Comey.  They were the summation of what they took to be their experience. All of it. The ex miners and their families in Arkansas took stock of their own situation, and ransacked recent history for a better time. That time was worse for others, but better for them. It was a real, lived experience. So they want that back – and the removal of anything that gets in its way. Because they know in their hearts that the political system has always been against them, and is getting worse, they have started by getting rid of that, which is what they hope voting for Trump will do. And voting for an ‘all-powerful’ outsider-President is a very big deal indeed.

What will therefore change those conclusions into a line encompassing full class unity, regardless of gender or legal status or colour, is not just another vote, but a deep and prolonged struggle for working class objectives for a better life, for well paid work, where those who share their conditions and their struggle become allies and those who do not are exposed. And from such a start that is what would-be working class parties, including Sander’s ‘revolution’, need to fully embrace, independently of a failed political system and its parties, and develop into new action and organisation.

3. But capitalism works; doesn’t it?

The vote for Trump by millions of US workers, despite their general hatred for the political system based in Washington, was not an accident. It is true that voters often said that they despised him but he was better than the Clintons. And his rallies showed that Trump did move tens of thousands into the type of ecstasy associated with potential Nuremburgers. Overall then, the Trump vote demonstrated a relatively small bloc of hysterical support, large support for the lesser of two evils but, most significantly, it showed general support for a successful businessman who was outside the ranks of the big corporations, corporations that had run American politics and had sold off the working class of the country to the world. (Equally, working class votes in the UK for a half-baked banker showed that hostility to the political system did not extend for most UKIP voters, to indigenous businesses.)

Underpinning the vote for Trump for many voters was therefore the idea that Trump had become successful outside traditional politics and outside the influence of multi-nationals, and that his success as a billionaire showed his competence and potential power ‘to get things done.’ He did not have to pollute his political decisions by the need for any payback. Trump’s local, US based, success in the market apparently inoculated him from the ‘political swamp’.

Nationally focused, and purified from politics, global corporate business and the world market, Trump’s appeal appeared to many to stand for one of the principles on which a return to a ‘great’ America could be based. (Leave aside that every politician since JFK called on voters to ‘make America great again.’) The benefit of a ‘purified’ market, the market in principle, rather than the actual market, even had echoes in Bernie Sanders’s campaign, where the villains of the piece, multi-national corporations, were on the same list that some of the Trumpites might have drawn up.

After WW2 it was the failure of ‘planning’ in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China to provide the living standards then available in the West that weighed most heavily with western workers when they compared the ‘socialist and communist’ countries to their own. Increasingly from the 1960s and the Vietnam War, the traditional politics and parties of western societies were held in growing cynicism. By the 1980s, even given expanding political disenchantment with political system and after the major assault on workers rights and conditions in the West, the western working class still did not shift in their negative view of the economic life of the USSR, Eastern Europe or China. The world’s experiment with a fully planned economy finally finished with the long car crash of the USSR and Eastern Europe and then the second ‘great leap forward’ in China, this time towards the market. Today even the ‘new’ socialists of Podemos, or Corbyn’s Labour Party have a timid reaction to any extensive plan for state control of key parts of the private economy; including some of those parts, like the power industry, which were only recently sold off.

The apparent historical failure of planning creates a vacuum where the rational choices of an economy organised for the benefit of humanity should naturally stand. Trump’s plan boils down to the use of the US’s political strength (once its political system is ‘freed’ from Clintonesque links to multi-national banks etc.,) to force unfavorable deals on the rest of the world and meanwhile to rebuild US infrastructure, reopen traditional industries etc  – with private finance. Trump’s plan will fail spectacularly and quickly. The real tragedy in all this is where we have actually reached with the planning principle.

Is there something about the future of working class economics to learn from the attitudes and experiences of the Trump voters (or even those who voted UKIP in Britain) despite their support for at least their own domestic market organisation?

Trump voters join a long list of peoples and protests against globalization, which is not working for anybody except millionaires and billionaires. Social Democratic economists and political pundits like Picketty have it round the wrong way when they insist that something must be done about modern Capitalism’s monstrous distribution of wealth (or lack of it.) What must be dealt with is the new, global ruling class and the way they make their money. Globalisation does not work for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population, including the western working class. Why is it not working? The Trump voters understand why. It is because ‘ordinary’ (read working class) people can have no power, no control indeed no purchase, of any sort, on it, no matter how often they vote. The conclusion that the working class voters for Trump have come to is that globalization has bought and paid for politics in the US; that they can change that through voting Trump and that they want an economy based in the US over which they can have some influence and even control; especially if the political swamp is drained.

US workers who voted Trump will not expect that the Globalistas will give up their political property without a fight. They will expect to have to fight. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions could be mobilized – should Trump do the unexpected and seriously try to ‘drain the swamp.’ At least that might ‘free up’ the American political system to be ably to act in defense of the majority of its people – if it so wishes. Global trade and finance will continue, but the economy entirely based in particular countries, especially as it can only be based in those countries, as the weight of the service sector grows, is accessible to at least partial control via political action.

Yet the nationalisation of Google or Goldman Sachs or the Chinese Sovereign Wealth Fund, even by a US President, would be a ridiculous proposition. But the use of economic and political planning - on an international level - is not.

Trump voters want an end to what they see as unfair trade deals between the US and other parts of the rest of the world. Given that nobody in the US (yet) believes that they should just shut up and go on their own, how can Trump’s voters’ demands be realised?  Free trade deals are mainly savage instruments designed to pit lower priced labour against higher priced labour; to dig private ownership into companies and services where social ownership still exists; to prevent political action saving jobs or paying for services and to put all to the sword of the marketplace. Free trade is simply a clarion call to defend the most powerful private owners winning all.

To get where the Trump voters want to be then trade deals should at least start from the best conditions, the safest practices and the highest possible living standards for all engaged. These are Fair Trade deals; deals attached to which are minimum wages for all workers involved; where common tax bases in all participating countries are established, where types of ownership are allowed the widest possible scope; where conditions are equalised drawn from the highest pertaining levels; where free movement of labour is standard and an agreed tax regime adopted by all parties to the agreement. This might all start from a charter of principles for international Fair Trade deals. The power of the US and the depth of its market make all this entirely viable – if, first, the political swamp is genuinely drained and second, Trump sets up Fair Trade instead of Free Trade deals. And all this would be a new planning principle ‘invading’ big capital, and forcing drastic inroads into the dynamics of the current global market place – where everything and everyone is currently for sale.

The tragedy in all this is that while a desperately underdeveloped, even colonised nation, that successfully overthrew the thrall of international capitalism in the first part of the 20th century was forced to establish economic planning under the most brutal, war-like, scarcity – which eventually failed. Today economic planning is more and more essential across the globe, especially in the most developed nations, in the light of global warming, global finance, with its endless crises, and the universal, exponential growth of inequality. If international capitalism (as it has been literally forced to do in the case of modern, state capitalist China) had abandoned its policy of invasion at the beginning of the century (Russia was invaded not once but twice) and instead had been forced by the international working class movement in the early years to allow Russia to keep political and state control in the hands of the Soviets, then the use of the market to promote initial capital accumulation in Russia would have been possible. Under such conditions a fully financed, working class led, democratic and creative, planned economy could have been built. It would still have faced the enormous power of global capitalism and have been restricted in its potential. But in 1948, with the victory over Hitler and the successful Chinese revolution, the comparison between the market and that sort of planning, incorporating the market if required but subordinating it politically, might well have turned modern history inside out.

4. Ok. What now?

But the working class in the West in reality is still unconvinced by the planning principle (at least outside of social services) in light of the actual history of the 20th century. Nevertheless the connections and insights from the millions who voted for Trump are part of the logic of a class in movement. This logic will of course be tested to distraction when Trump and his Alt Right Republican allies try to deepen the political swamp and increase the wealth of the wealthy. (He already has the wealthiest Cabinet in US history.) He will move first by accelerating the divides the working class have already had brought out, between American white workers and the Mexicans and the African Americans and Latinos. And then Trump will try to bust up the momentum of the US working class - that the US election itself has started. But beginning with the need to mobilise – in action – three real and deep concerns of the US workers who voted for Trump (and, to an extent, some of those who voted for Brexit in Britain) can be still be addressed and even still be led – from the left.

First draining the swamp (ending money’s lordship over politics); second mobilising to use the vote, using politics to attempt to control and reorganise the economics of daily life, jobs, living standards and economic security; third, intervening into globalisation in the direction of the defense of working class standards and conditions; these are potential platforms for the left. First comes the demand on the new administration to deliver on these promises. Second comes the need to mobilise and organise to get what was voted for – regardless of Trump and his pals. Micah White, co-founder of Occupy Wall Street, states that street protest is broken and that now what is needed is a movement connected to new parties, aiming for political sovereignty.) And third comes international deals to guarantee the equality of workers across countries and continents, as the only way to ensure that capital does not use these deals to drive workers down to the lowest level that they can find.    

Racism and misogyny have to be confronted head on, but starting from a common base that the left can share and develop with Trump (and in different ways UKIP) supporters. These key base lines would be completely unobtainable without the defeat of racism and misogyny; without overcoming working class division.  

The paradox of a defensive period, now opened up by right wing political success in the West, is that defense can succeed best when it uses its bridgeheads (in Britain the NHS, welfare, the terrible record of the privatizations etc) but also to defend and provide succour to the best features of what the western working class is newly creating in its own challenge to globalisation. And although the working class movement into mass politics has been used by the right (to the working class’s detriment) - forcing the contradiction between what working class people need and the current leaders who appear to offer it, will explode today’s (fragile) political alliances. But because the working class in now moving to political solutions for its bleak future, this will work if, and only if, there is an alternative and independent political point of departure. The political focus in the West is now indispensable to the working class and to the left. And there are critical preparations that the left have yet to make in order to make their defense and then to win the ‘new.’

In the US, Micah White’s political insight and Bernie Sanders ‘revolution’ as he calls his movement, have to fuse. Sanders’s emphasis on winning Democratic Party posts, to make the revolution inside the Democratic Party, is not starting from tens of millions of ordinary people demanding from their move into political life that their leaders ‘drain the swamp.’ The Democratic Party, even given the millions of its voters who held their noses, is part of the problem. Neither of the old parties now really represents virtually anybody in the US besides millionaires and billionaires, including the millions of working class and middle class women that were offered a woman candidate in the last election. It is that fact that produced Trump’s victory. And the left in the US have to start from that fact.

In the UK, the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party is an immense victory for the left. That victory emerged from a radicalization erupting from years of mass action against austerity, led from outside Labour Party. But, again, hundreds of thousands of people realised that the key to anti-globalisation economics was political so they joined Labour and voted for a left MP as leader who had sat in the tiniest of margins of the Party since the 1970s. But, of course, this can only be the beginning. However, the pressure inside the old official labour movement, including key trade unions, is to attempt to unite the Parliamentary part of the party and that has meant that Corbyn’s politics are essentially silent to the public in order to ensure that no obvious divisions within his new ‘shadow’ cabinet emerge in the media. Why? Because the cliché that divided parties do not win elections has primacy in the conditions where the likelihood of an early General Election is quite strong.

This would be a mistake normally. In the current situation it is a serious error. In the first place the bulk of Labour MPs are hostile to Corbyn, including some inside his Cabinet, and they will howl their hostility to Corbyn from the rooftops if there is a General Election – to prevent, as they see it, the certain loss of their seats in Parliament if they are associated with him. Second it does not allow Corbyn to speak directly to the concerns of millions of working class people, including the 4 million that voted UKIP in the 2015 Election, if need be over the heads of his utterly immovable MPs. Critical in this is his complete silence on the need to ‘drain the (British) swamp.’

Britain has its own political swamp, which, in its latest iteration, looks to the rest of the interested world like a scene from the Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan. Discussed in previous blogs, the absence of root and branch political reform, a part of which, after the Scottish and the Brexit Referendum must be fair votes for all, this absence from a Corbyn led Labour Party policy, cuts bridges to millions of working class voters. Included in such a policy would of course be the top to bottom reformation of the Labour Party itself, which would take account of its own six hundred thousand members, the million Green voters and the millions of Scots who want a left nationalist answer to austerity and to Britain’s war machine.

Traditional liberal politics on immigration will not do either. And racism has to be faced down. Yet, again, all is quiet on that front. If the Corbyn leadership were speaking regularly on that question then there would be no lack of public debate. A clear plan for a massive increase in health facilities, schools and housing, nailed down, area by area, year by year, would begin to reduce the impact of the racists and start to isolate them in the arguments about immigration – especially when richer areas with better facilities were opened up. And, again, this needs the political courage to step away from the large number of Labour MPs who want to get in a competition with the Tories over immigration cuts and step towards the large bulk of members at the base of the Labour Party.

In other words we are in a fast moving intensely political period. Great gains for the left in the West are still available, despite the right’s current status, if bold moves are made. Corbyn and Sanders need to turn towards a western working class that is itself moving out of apathy and quiescence and into mainstream politics, while already creating a new canvas for its new political designs.

 

Trump's victory? Not all that it seems.

This is a blog by Mike Davis - a leading US intellectual, writer and socialist'


Not a Revolution – Yet

By Mike Davis / 15 November 2016


We should resist the temptation to over-interpret Trump’s election as an American Eighteenth Brumaire or 1933. Progressives who think they’ve woken up in another country should calm down, take a stiff draught, and reflect on the actual election results from the swing states.

Data, of course, is incomplete. The leading exit polls, like Pew and Edison, are hardly flawless in their harvesting of opinion and the final word on the turnout and its composition must await the Current Population Survey’s reports over the next year or two. Nonetheless, the county-level returns authorize some pertinent observations.

1. Turnout was initially reported to be significantly lower than 2012, but late returns indicate the same percentage of voters (app. 58 per cent) although with a smaller major party share. The minority parties, led by the Libertarians, increased their vote from 2 to 5 percent of the total.

2. With the exceptions of Iowa and Ohio, there were no Trump landslides in key states. He polled roughly the same as Romney, making up smaller votes in the suburbs with larger votes in rural areas to achieve the same overall result. His combined margin of victory in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania combined was razor thin, about 107,000 votes.  

3. The great surprise of the election was not a huge white working-class shift to Trump but rather his success in retaining the loyalty of Romney voters, and indeed even slightly improving on the latter’s performance amongst evangelicals for whom the election was viewed a last stand. Thus economic populism and nativism potently combined with, but did not displace, the traditional social conservative agenda.

4. The key factor in carrying the Republicans was Trump’s cynical covenant with religious conservatives following the primary defeat of Cruz. He gave them a free hand to draft the party platform at the Convention and then teamed with one of their popular heroes, Pence of Indiana, a nominal Catholic who attends an evangelical megachurch. At stake for right-to-lifers, of course, was control of the Supreme Court and a final chance to reverse Roe vs Wade. This may explain why Clinton, who unlike Obama allowed herself to be identified with late-term abortions, underperformed him by 8 points amongst Latina/o Catholics.  

5. The defection of white working-class Obama voters to Trump was a decisive factor mainly in a lakeshore rim of industrial counties in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — Monroe, Ashtabula, Lorain, both Eries, and so on — which are experiencing a new wave of job flight to Mexico and the US South. This region is the most visible epicenter of the revolt against globalization.

In other depressed areas — the coal counties of southeastern Ohio, the former anthracite belt of eastern Pennsylvania, the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, the piedmont textile and furniture towns of the Carolinas, Appalachia in general — the pro-Republican blue-collar realignment in presidential politics (but not always in local or state politics) was already the status quo. The mass media has tended to conflate these older and newer strata of ‘lost Democrats’; thus magnifying Trump’s achievement.

6. I’ve been unable to find reliable data about the turnout of non-college whites in key states or nationally. According to the dominant narrative Trump simultaneously mobilized non-voters and converted Democrats, but the variables are independent and their weights are unclear in states like Wisconsin or Virginia (which Clinton narrowly held) where other factors like Black turnout and the size of the gender gap were likely more important.

7. A crucial cohort of college-educated white Republican women appeared to have rallied to Trump in the last week of the campaign after having wavered in previous polling. This has been attributed by several commentators, including Clinton herself, to Comey’s surprise intervention and renewed skepticism about her honesty.  Disapproval of Trump’s rapist behaviour, moreover, was counterbalanced by disgust at Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner and Alan Grayson* (the wife-abuser who was Rubio’s Democratic opponent in Florida). As a result, Clinton made only modest gains, sometimes none at all, in the crucial red suburbs of Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.  

8. A fifth of Trump voters — that is to say, approximately 12 million voters — reported an unfavorable attitude toward him. No wonder the polls got it so wrong. “There is no precedent,” wrote the Washington Post, “for a candidate winning the Presidency with fewer voters viewing him favorable, or looking forward to his administration, than the loser.”

Many of these nose-holders may have been evangelicals who were voting the platform, not the man, but others wanted change in Washington at any price, even if it meant putting a suicide bomber in the Oval Office.

9. Even the Cato Institute seems to believe that election should be interpreted as Clinton’s loss, not Trump’s win. She failed to come close to Obama’s 2012 performance in key Midwestern and Florida counties.  Despite his strenuous last-minute efforts, the president could not transfer his popularity (now higher than Reagan’s in 1988) to his old opponent.  Ditto for Sanders.

Although the findings are controversial and perhaps misinterpreted by David Atkins in the American Prospect, the Edison/New York Times exit polls indicate that Trump relative to Romney achieved only the slightest improvement amongst Whites, perhaps just one percent, but “bested him by 7 points among Blacks, 8 points among Latinos and 11 points among Asian Americans.”

10. Whether or not that was actually the case, the lower Black turnout in Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia alone would explain most of Clinton’s defeat in the Midwest. In south Florida a massive effort improved the Democratic vote but that was offset by reduced turnout (largely Black voters) in the Tallahassee, Gainesville and Tampa areas.

11. Not all of this diminished Black turnout, to be fair, was a boycott of Clinton. Voter suppression undoubtedly played an important if yet unmeasured role. “Some states,” reports one study, “have closed polling places on a massive scale. In Arizona, almost every county reduced polling places. In Louisiana, 61 per cent of parishes reduced polling places. In Louisiana, 61 percent of parishes reduced polling places. In our limited sample of Alabama counties, 67 percent closed polling places. In Texas, 53 percent of counties in our limited sample reduced voting locations.” There is also evidence that discriminatory voter ID requirements — the jewel in crown of Scott Walker’s counter-revolution — significantly reduced the vote in low-income precincts of Milwaukee.

12. An alternate explanation of Clinton’s underperformance in Wisconsin and Michigan was the alienation of millennial Sanders voters: in both states Jill Stein’s total was greater than the margin of Clinton’s defeat. The Green vote was also significant in Pennsylvania and Florida (49,000 and 64,000 respectively). But Gary Johnson, who won 4,151,000 votes nationally despite his cluelessness about world politics, probably harmed Trump much more than Clinton.

13. Since the 2004 insurgency of Howard Dean, progressive Democrats have fought uphill against Party regulars for a full 50-state strategy that invests in base building in otherwise gerrymandered red congressional districts. The consistent failure of the DNC, for example, to make a major commitment to Texas Democrats — a state that is now majority minority — has long been an open scandal.

The Clinton campaign, flush with funds but obviously short on brains, compounded a disastrous strategy. She failed for example to visit Wisconsin after the Convention despite warnings that Scott Walker’s fired-up followers were fully enlisted behind Trump.

Likewise she disdained Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s advice that she set up a ‘rural council’ such as had served Obama so well in his Midwestern primary and presidential campaigns. In 2012, he managed to add 46 per cent of small town vote to his urban majority in Michigan and 41 per cent in Wisconsin. Her desultory results were 38 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively.  

14. Ironically, Trump may have been advantaged by his poor backing from the Kochs and other conservative mega-donors, who switched priorities to invest in saving Republican congressional majorities. In the event Comey’s letter to Congress was the equivalent of $500 million worth of anti-Clinton ads while down-ticket Republicans received an unexpected financial lifeline.

15. My emphasis on the contingent and fragile character of the Trump coalition, however, needs to be accompanied by a warning about the toxic contents of his politics. As I’ve argued in another note, Trump is less a loose canon and opportunist than usually portrayed. His campaign systematically pushed all the buttons associated with the white-nationalist alt-right whose godfather is Pat Buchanan and would-be Goebbels is Stephen Bannon.

Trump, President Obama consoles us, is ‘non-ideological.’ Ok, but Buchanan-Bannon have buckets of ideology and it’s called fascism. (For those who think this is an exaggeration and that fascism is passé, please go to Buchanan’s site and scroll to the list of his most popular columns.  One blames Poland for the start of World War Two and another basically claims that Blacks should pay reparations to whites.)

16. David Axelrod claims that it has taken only a week for the Republicans to fully ‘capture’ Trump and Robert Kuttner agrees. Perhaps.

Certainly Trump will attempt to honor his commitment to the Christians and give them the Supreme Court — a goal that Mitch McConnell may facilitate with the ‘nuclear option’ in the Senate. Likewise Peabody, Arch and the other coal companies will get new permits to destroy the earth, immigrants will be sacrificed to the lions, and Pennsylvania will be blessed with a right-to-work law. And, of course, tax cuts.

But on social security, medicare, deficit spending on infrastructure, tariffs, technology, and so on, it’s almost impossible to imagine a perfect marriage between Trump and the institutional Republicans that doesn’t orphan his working-class supporters. Mortgage bankers still rule the universe.

17. Therefore it would not be difficult to imagine a future scenario where the alt-right ultimately splits with or is expelled from the administration and quickly moves to consolidate a third political force around the expanded base it has won thanks to Trump’s demagoguery. Or, another possibility, that Trump’s incendiary trade and contradictory domestic policies plunge the country into a new depression and Silicon Valley finally steps up to the plate to save the center-left Democratic Party.

But whatever the hypothesis, it must take account of the real revolution in American politics, the Sanders campaign. The downward or blocked mobility of graduates, especially from working class and immigrant backgrounds, is the major emergent social reality, not the long agony of the Rustbelt. I say this while recognizing the momentum given to economic nationalism by the loss of five million industrial jobs over the last decade, more than half of them in the South.

But Trumpism, however it evolves, cannot unify millennial economic distress with that of older white workers, while Sanders showed that heartland discontent can be brought under the umbrella of a ‘democratic socialism’ that reignites New Deal hopes for a Economic Bill of Rights. With the Democratic establishment in temporary disarray, the real opportunity for transformational political change (‘critical realignment’ in a now archaic vocabulary) belongs to Sanders and Warren. We must hurry.

More in #2016USElection #Trump

Is Trump going soft?

President to be, 'the Donald' as he likes to be known, appears to be taking the edge off some of his more radical plans. We will see when his first 100 day plan is launched, but so far he says he is going to stick by 2 parts of Obama's health policy, that he does not give priority to jailing Hilary and his earliest aim is to get people working on his new infrastructure projects.

What is missed in the vast speculation around Trump's mellowing - or not - is the real political dynamic underway at the heart of the US's political system. And this new dynamic is going to make life worse for tens of millions of Americans; worse than the Trump programme.

Extreme, not to say rabid, right wing Republicanism dominates the House of Representatives and the Senate. These are the people who all but destroyed Obama's 8 year presidency. Trump ran his own election campaign against most of the Republican leadership but the relations between the new President and Congress  are completely different. 

Unless Trump, unlike Obama, mobilises his social base then he will become the prisoner of his reluctant Party.  

On some matters (hopelessly narrow minded judges on the Supreme Court etc) there will be no problem. But there are still major divisions ahead. The right of Republicanism wants to reduce the state drastically and regards the deficit as a mortal sin. Trump needs to borrow massively and most economists thought his programme wildly more expensive than Clinton's. He needs to water his ground with millions of better paid jobs. Private wealth will invest, especially after huge tax breaks, but nothing like enough to get anywhere near 5% growth that Trump would need just to prevent the deficit rising. 

All in all a great collision is rising up in US politics. And it is only 2 years for the swath of new Republican buccaneers to cut back the state before the next elections change a third of them. 

Which is why Trump is as conciliatory and as reactionary as possible on all the social issues as is seen by his proposals for the new members of the Supreme Court. He needs to court the Republican right, in order to have the slightest chance of any leeway with his spending plans.

All the commentators have been stressing how Trump has always run his own show. Well, Congress has been running its particular political show for some time and it is extremely unlikely to give its power up to a lucky billionaire charlatan that, up to now, has managed to dodge the Republican's silver bullet. 

Trump's victory; the world shifts on its axis again.

Trump's victory in the US elections will change many things. But whatever else it produces, Trump has opened another tectonic crack in the world's political system. Special note here must be made of the particular disaster for women, globally, as decades of struggle for respect and equality have been turned into marginalia, as the main political leader in the world dismisses his 'locker room' talk and is able to face down with ease a dozen women who he sexually assaulted. Hidden misogyny undoubtedly payed a role in Trump's victory.

Trump won the argument that the US political system is busted and corrupt. He won that argument among the majority of the poorest and working class people in the US. And he won it because they had experienced 25 years of falling living standards while the governments did nothing for them. Under the earlier Clinton, the two Bushes and 8 years of Obama, the government appeared to make things worse. The rich got richer. The government and both main parties' leaderships backed globalisation. The US political system, including its military, was the main international bulwark of the global corporations. Trump appeared to oppose all that. Clinton on the other hand appeared to be its latest and greatest friend. 

Trump used racism, sexism, homophobia and hostility to the disabled in his campaign to make sure that while he held the leadership in society, the US working class that largely supported him, could and would never, never, ever speak for itself. Instead Trump's attacks on some parts of the poor and some sections of the oppressed are designed to prevent any emergence of real working class independence as a whole emerging in the US. We will see how long his designs in that regard hold up in the face of reality (whether it is the Mexican border wall or the 'special vetting' of Muslims.) But the purpose of these projects could not be clearer. The 'enemies' that Trump has identified to the US's return to greatness are to be understood as the main obstacles to progress. Not the House of Representatives or the Senate; most importantly not the $billionaires: they are going to get a monstrous tax rebate as a stimulus to growth (and as 'Obama Care is torn down.) Not Wall Street. Not the corruption of day to day politics across the country. No. The danger lies in certain sections of society and within parts of the working class itself - according to Trump.

This is all an old, old story. From the point of view of the history of the US and Western Europe there is nothing amazing, incredible or riveting here. But there are some novel features of Trump's 'achievement' that do need to be brought more into the light, and the impact he has already made and will make on the world's politics also needs early attention.

Despite the divisions that Trump tried to sew among the US's oppressed and working class people, his appeal was, overwhelmingly, a 'class' appeal. The first Clinton supposedly had the message 'It's the economy - stupid!' hung up on his door. The equivalent for Hillary was reported to be 'It's the demographic, stupid!' That proved to be a false guide. More Hispanics voted for Trump than voted for Mick Romney in 2012. Poverty, insecurity and the class divide expressed its powers over demographic 'certainties', over the idea of 'safe, Democratic Party States, like Pennsylvania, and over traditional blue collar support for Hillary, as claimed in the Democratic primaries against Obama in 2008. Trump talked more and more frequently about the 'working class' while Hillary Clinton hung on to the standard 'middle class' designation traditionally given to US workers.

It is more than interesting to see a parallel political development between the British Brexit campaign and the role of Trump in relation to the US two party system. Trump was a complete outsider in the Republican Party. There was barely a traditional Republican Party leader left standing beside him at the point of Trump's election night. Trump invented his own Republican Party. He created an almost entirely new base for his own support. In the case of Britain's Brexit, the formation of Farage's UKIP exerted the same sort of pressure on the traditional Tory Party. UKIP had become the 'provisional wing' of the Tories, by the British General Election in 2014, as with Trump, increasingly rooted in a working class constituency that felt unrepresented. A similar movement has taken now place at the base of the traditional Labour Party, albeit from the left.

These developments in the 'anglosphere' are echoed (or are echoes of) similar developments across the West in the last decade. The creation of new and independent parties, or of the appropriation of older, hollowed out, traditional parties, rooted, in most cases, in the mobilisation of independent or semi-independent mass movements that seek a genuine popular representation, has become a growing response to the political crisis in the West.

The implications of all this for the Sanders' campaign are telling. Sanders appeared to get his orientation to the class question and the need for class unity right in his speeches during the Primaries, when contesting Democratic Party leadership with Hillary Clinton. However, that approach was shelved by both Clinton and Sanders when she won, despite her concessions to him. Equally, Sanders' complete endorsement of the Clinton campaign has proven to be a serious error. (Many previously pro Sanders voters ended up voting for Trump as the only 'anti-ruling class', anti traditional Parties, candidate.) More significantly, there was no alternative voice to Trump heard on how the US political system needed to be changed and why the Democrats could not and would not be able to do it. Those who wanted and went on to vote for a system change did not believe for an instant that Hillary's presidential term would challenge the system. They might have believed Sanders, but he gave away his most precious possession as an independent voice for the unrepresented. Maintaining his independence and his movement for 'our revolution', in complete distinction from the Democratic Party, would have made it indispensable and increasingly followed and supported by those betrayed by Trump in his days of triumph and disaster to come.

Globally, Trump's election begins a potentially huge shift to the right and a real return to the 1930s. Trump has not invented some grand historical novelty in the history of capitalism; but rather it's just that he has adopted one of the increasingly diminishing and historically worn out options available to stave off the growing crisis of a fragile social system - albeit in one (very powerful) country. National protectionism and ultra low tax rates for the rich are no more a solution to the impact of globalisation than Clinton's continuation of the status quo. Key social and political rights are under threat in the US and right wing populist parties throughout Europe will be able to establish more credibility for racism, for active hostility to immigrants, for nationalist 'solutions', based on the US experience.

Gone are the days when the US could simply act a the unfettered world's policeman. But the consequence of Trump's retreat into solely the defense of the US's interests (rather than the protection of its US based global corporations and their expansion across the world) will be a massive rearmament, particularly in Europe and the extension of nuclear weapons programmes generally. On top of which, the inherent and inevitable slow down in world trade will hasten recession across the planet and particularly in its weakest, most vulnerable links, like Britain.

Brexit and sovereignty

In one of those apparently increasing contradictory political developments in the post USSR world (like the growth of Chinese capitalism under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party or the support of a large swathe of the US working class for Trump) the British High Court has decided that Parliament (MPs and their Lordships) is the only institution with the sovereign power to make or remove a law, in this case the removal of a law that allows the initiation of Britain's departure from the EU. Brexiteers are furious.

Among the multitude of contradictory elements that have emerged since the Brexit vote, like a spray of sparks as a hollow log collapses in the fire, we have now a new set of democratic tribunes. Meet the Daily Express, the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph, all demanding that the High Court plutocrats (including a foreigner!) retreat against the tide of the Peoples' wishes as expressed in the June EU referendum. All four papers are owned by multi-millionaires. All four have a rank record in regard to the working class interest and have bitterly opposed anything emerging from the 'Peoples wishes' in the past - including every government elected that was not Tory (with the exception of Blair's).

But this is not just another convoluted mess that confounds traditional 'left' and 'right' approaches to its resolution. There are echoes of two different class struggles going on in this latest melee about Brexit.

The first is created out of a very old but uncompleted class struggle. The High Court judges are not holding the ring for Parliament's sovereignty against 'the People.' They are defending it - against the King! That was the major political gain won by the English Civil War in the 1640s, expressed in legal terms. What the wretched May and her Cabinet had supposed is that they would initiate the official exit procedures from the EU via an order in Council. This is the Queen's Council; the Privy Council. In the mess of compromises and ambiguities constructed by the new ruling classes in England following the 1660s 'Restoration', the Privy Council was set up to be a collection of the great and the good, centred round a pliant monarch, acting as the political and moral centre of the nation, should ever again Parliament become subject to unhelpful and unworthy pressures from below. Today orders in Council are strictly speaking executive powers that prevent and override Parliamentary decision making. And they are required now to prevent the British Parliament being tied up for a decade in the removal or amendment or the reaffirmation of the laws tied to EU membership. The reason for that is that Parliament is now and for the foreseeable future, a very unsteady ship of state indeed.

For many decades most serious business dealing directly with Britain's wealth and power has been removed from Parliament's orbit. But Brexit was unforeseen and old instruments had to be dusted off and prepared for the new conditions. There was a howl of anger focused on the High Court from those who voted for Brexit. But the British ruling class's most powerful legions, who opposed Brexit, are now congratulating the judiciary in its historic defence of the powers of Parliament against the executive! (Read - the power of MPs to delay Brexit.)

This is a typical confusion of the modern age. To unravel its meaning, a deeper reference must be made to the nature, composition and evolution of a very different, significant and contemporary class struggle.

This is the (hidden) struggle for a different type of sovereignty altogether, going on in Britain (and, in different ways, across large parts of the globe.) It is nothing less than a potential, political convulsion of momentous significance - now covered in Britain by the flurry over a High Court ruling. In reality the modern struggle over sovereignty contains the seeds of a total transformation of British politics.

It is useful, in the effort to solidify and identify the emergent shape of this transformation, to start from a powerful historical abstraction, rooted in the history of the most advanced capitalist society in a social system that remains dominant across our planet. The US anti-colonial and then its anti-slavery wars produced the ultimate version of sovereignty yet established by the capitalist social system (and it is unlikely to be surpassed now in the days of decline!)  The US's 'Founding Fathers' did not use the term 'sovereignty' when describing their own base for rule, as they had just defeated the world's most powerful country and that country, Britain, was headed up by a titular sovereign. A hundred years later Lincoln, speaking at Gettysburg, expressed it perfectly in his resounding phrase of 'a government of the people, by the people, for the people'.

This is not a piece of empty rhetoric. Its perceptive originators meant that the rulers of the nation should be from all classes - not just from the old aristocracy of heritage or the new one of wealth; that government should not be overwhelmed or sidelined by other, unofficial, shadowy, or official but unaccountable - as with the civil service -, institutions or forces, and lastly that the purpose of government should be the promotion of the means by which the interests of the people together were advanced. This was a bold, victorious capitalist class taking on the leadership of society as a whole.

The overwhelming fact that Lincoln's great proposition failed is the story of the ensuing century and a half. The fundamental reason why it failed was the central dynamic of history that followed Lincoln's address. It was a relentless, universal and over-determining struggle between the Capitalist class and all of the other classes which the Capitalist class first created, periodically re-organised and subordinated, in the US and across the globe. Because 'the People' were divided into contradictory camps, the vast majority of the world's population - whether under despotic or Parliamentary rule - were prevented from being in government; were excluded from governing and faced a politics and economics totally inimical to its interests.

The strains and contradictions of this reality are still obvious across the world, most brutally in Syria in a struggle against tyranny and barbarism but also apparent even in the West, including in the USA. The newly characterised 'political class' is despised by millions of working class people in the most advanced capitalist countries in the West. (While economic development in China, India, South Africa and Brazil has been novel and rapid, so too has been the growing sense of political alienation by the mass of the working class people in those societies.) In Britain the same process has taken on its own, unique shape.

As the big majority of UK citizens have had little to do with the Queen and are encouraged to see her role as 'good for tourism', they have little interest in the High Court Judges' battle in defence of Parliament against the monarchy (or its executive.) This particular battle is past its sell by date. A new arraignment of the classes in society has changed the focus for the majority of 'the People.' The judges are seen as part of the problem in the conflict between 'them' and 'us.'  Their support for Parliament is seen as a stick to beat 'the People.' Attitudes towards the British Parliament are more critical today among the British population at large than at any time since the adoption of universal franchise. As a consequence for anybody who appears to resist the results of the EU referendum, the first political act that appeared to be a real example of mass democracy, they face sharp rebuttal. Alongside Parliament the main political parties are similarly despised and the growing support for Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party has more to do with the idea that he has to transform his party into something completely different, than any return to 'traditional' party loyalties.

From this polarisation, between a large majority of working class people and the political institutions that are supposed to rule, emerges new political facts and conditions. And the British experience may be locally specific but it is not unique.

Because the US is still the most powerful nation and the most nakedly and overtly driven by Capitalist wealth and the market, the conditions of the battle over sovereignty (over who rules and how they rule and to what ends they rule) are much more explicit. What Trump's support shows among millions of his supporters is their hatred for a political system that does not work for workers and their families. Because Trump has no intention of breaking that political system (its debt to the wealthy, its place-people, its roots in special interests) he ties his vitriol for the establishment to racism and nationalism, as though these were the solution to the failure of US politics and its traditional parties. In fact it is these latter two causes that Trump will draw on - precisely in order to save the political system (the heart of the establishment) and its $ Billionaire bosses, from the anger of the working and unemployed poor.

In the US, the only alternative to Trump is Bernie Sanders, who also thinks and says that the US's political system must be overturned but is genuine. He calls for a political revolution, which, unlike racism and nationalism, does have the potential to benefit the working class rather than politically destroy it. Sanders's emphasis on class politics to unite the poor is a valid response to Trump's racist hysteria. His two proposals so far are deeply radical in that they would take big money out of national politics and maintain and grow a mass movement to promote change. (Exactly from that point of view, what ever decision Americans make about voting against Trump, it was a mistake in Sanders own terms to endorse the Clinton candidacy which stands foursquare for big money and against the influence of mass movements.)

In the UK today it is only the new Labour Party leadership that has the political weight for its voice to be heard in the real, essential argument over sovereignty - if it really understood its significance and its role in the reorganisation of the country's working class movement and its potential to make a breakthrough into the leadership of the whole of society. It is the absence of that voice, and the thought that goes with it, which is the most obvious weakness and danger facing Labour's new leaders.

The Labour Party now has a front and centre position to take on Britain's rotten political system. Alongside the evacuation of austerity, a policy designed to save and then enrich the bankers and their system, consciously based on the reduction of living standards for the rest, Britain has a Prime Minister without a single vote cast for her or her policies, a corrupt and self-serving Parliament that does not represent those who voted in the last election and a voting system that produces more and more of the same.

Just as Trump's candidacy is a deliberately false, racist and nationalistic perspective on how 'Americans can get back their country' (currently owned by $Billionaires) so Brexit in the UK plays the same role. The tragedy is that everybody knows in their hearts that there is absolutely no chance that more governmental power and sovereignty will flow back to the British people as a result of turning off the EU. Worse, in any case most of the British people rightly despise the Westminster Parliament into which all this fictitious new power would settle! As the results of Brexit (which will be the same, albeit at a different tempo, as the 'results' of remaining in a crisis ridden EU) become more obviously a blind ally in this regard, so the opportunity for the Labour leadership to announce its own political revolution becomes more pressing.  And that would mean embracing those partial steps already taken by the Scots and the Welsh who now have the ability to oppose by their governments, albeit partially, all the trappings of austerity and the new corruption in Westminster. But the chance for such a bold initiative and the alliances it would create will not last long.

Welcome to the new President of the USA?

Trump's threat to deny the legality of the outcome of the election for the US President is the big news after the candidates final TV debate (19 October.) In fact there were several moments that might cause a shudder and they will be picked up below. However, Trump's facetious remarks that he would
'Tell you at the time; I will keep you in suspense' when the Fox News Chair of proceedings pushed Trump on his acceptance, or not, of the General Election result, has resulted in a real dither in the US establishment - and much wider.

If Trump wants a future after a defeat in his run for the Presidency, he needs to dent the legitimacy of the vote. Nothing is more important to him than his own place as front and centre of the political stage. In the highways and byways of the US his supporters may well carry out their own, more physical, reaction to any irritation which crosses their path - as Trump has called the government a tyranny and, according to the Declaration of Independence, it therefore should be overthrown. But Trump simply wants to remain in the limelight, and to keep together his social and political base for (an early if possible) second attempt at what he believes and hopes to make, through forcing the Republican block in Congress, his ownership of the Presidency. He does not plan to go away.

There were other comments over the ninety minutes that are worth consideration.

For example Trump put forward the astonishing proposition that the corporations, directly, through their own chiefs, should rule the world. He pointed to this particular gang as having the intelligence and heft that went well beyond the wit and wisdom of the pusillanimous representatives of the elected US government when it came to dealing with the rest of the planet - making deals - pushing enemies back into their place  - and making allies pay for that privilege.

Trump also took the abortion debate to new depths. From his pulpit he denounced the
'Ripping of babies out of the womb at nine months.' The phrase obviously tickled his righteousness as he rolled it around his mouth several times, shouting across at Clinton as though she personally was responsible. More worryingly, opposition to a women's right to choose was clearly the major criteria for any new Trump Supreme Court appointments. (There could be three or more necessary in the next four years.)

Meanwhile Clinton talked about the military leverage that she thought was necessary to deal with Syria and 'force' Russia into a pro-peace position. The US military are buzzing to go while the Mosel offensive is underway. Pushing back IS in Iraq is clearly the starting shot for a new US led Syrian and thereby Mid East offensive, according to Hillary.

And the Clinton's involvement, close relations with and support for America's super rich, was painfully obvious in virtually every round of the discussion. Trump was right when he asked rhetorically and repeatedly who had made the laws that had allowed him, a billionaire, to pay no taxes.

All in all the debate was a dismal affair. In the end most mainstream commentators scored it for Hillary as Trump lost his cool and went too far upsetting the established norms in the US's 'good loser' policy. What stood out was that to be a President you need to be super rich, and if you want anything, including any sort of decent life if you are poor and working class (or middle class, as Hillary insisted) then you need the super rich to do it for you. Hillary Clinton talked about standing up to the big corporations, but it felt more like the argument she might have for her speaking fee than any serious shift of wealth and power. She is very lucky that Trump is so awful. If she wins the Presidency it will be because of Trump. Neither candidate had any big idea whatsoever of the crisis of the working class, or negative effects of the world that the US leadership has created or the failure of the political system to deliver government - of the people, by the people and for the people.

Bernie Sanders view of the future

An Interview with Bernie Sanders from New Republic

- Years ago, there was an old guy in my neighborhood named Pete. His hair was white and disheveled, and he liked to wheel his small shopping cart up and down the street and hand out political flyers to everyone he met. Some days the flyers were about the dangers of nuclear power. Some days they were about the perils of free-trade agreements. But they were always handwritten, they always took up both sides of the page, and there was never a margin in sight. For Pete, margins were a missed opportunity, a plot by the establishment, an artificial convention created by a world that mistook the urgency of the situation. The truth has no use for margins.

Bernie Sanders is a little like Pete. He doesn’t have a shopping cart, and his political positions are significantly more coherent. But like Pete, he has no patience for anything that threatens to distract him or others from the pressing matters at hand. When I arrive at his Senate office for an interview, he does not want to chat about the last time we met, at a tribute in Vermont to the late journalist Michael Hastings. He does not want to look back at his historic campaign for the presidency and consider what he might have done differently. He does not want to talk about Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings or the incivility of some of his supporters. He does not mention that tomorrow is his seventy-fifth birthday. He wants to talk about policy, and the nuts and bolts of organizing, and whatever else is needed to bring a greater measure of justice and equality to human affairs. He lives by the Marxist-Calvinist tradition of everything for the cause. He doesn’t have time for roses. Too many people need bread.

BS; Should we have done things differently, in retrospect? The answer is, of course.

- This single-mindedness of purpose is at the very heart of his appeal. Other people live in this world, and abide by its niceties. Sanders looks forward to the world yet to be, the world as it should be. He set out to lead a revolution, and he nearly succeeded. His agenda is a cross between Das Kapital and Deuteronomy. He rails against the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the same hatred that the rest of us reserve for the New York Yankees, or the New England Patriots, or some other, more leisurely expression of American empire.

Now, after laboring for years as a lone voice on the left, Sanders suddenly finds himself speaking for millions. It’s an unexpected role, and not without its pitfalls. Having won twelve million votes in the Democratic primaries—a showing that exposed the deep rift between younger voters and the party establishment—Sanders faces a new challenge: how to continue to pressure the party from the left without tearing it apart in the process. The internal tensions have been apparent from the start: In August, when Sanders launched his new organization, Our Revolution, key staffers resigned in protest over the group’s structure, which permits it to accept contributions from billionaires without revealing the donors.

On a hot afternoon in September, we speak for nearly an hour in his office on the third floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Whenever the conversation turns to something he doesn’t care about, Sanders doesn’t nod politely, or find a way to change the subject. He looks away, or scowls, or dismisses it out of hand. But when the talk turns to tax policy, or student debt, or the minimum wage, he leans forward and speaks with passion and urgency. He looks like a man who sees a margin that needs filling.

- Let’s start with a postmortem on the extraordinary campaign you ran. You came very close to defeating Hillary Clinton, who’s the closest thing America has to a political dynasty. Looking back, is there something you wish you’d done differently? Something that might have put you over the top and enabled you to win the race?

BS; Well, I think every day we all wish we had done something different yesterday—certainly in something as complicated as a presidential campaign. Of course there were things I wish we had done differently. But at the end of the day we did much, much, much better than anyone dreamed we could have. People who study the campaign will see that it was a very, very effective campaign. Should we, in retrospect, have done things differently? The answer is, of course we should’ve.

- Give me an example.

BS; I don’t really want to do that type of postmortem. It doesn’t matter. We put together a great campaign with some fantastic people, given the time constraints. But the difficulty is that in a campaign, you’re moving very, very fast. You are starting with three or four people, and then within a few months suddenly going up to a thousand people in many, many states throughout this country, hiring people you really don’t know, trusting that they will be able to do the kind of work they need to do. Corporations do this slowly and steadily, but you don’t have that option in a campaign. And of course you’re running not one campaign, you’re running 50 campaigns, and hiring this state leader here and that one there. So not every person we brought on was of the quality, in retrospect, that we would’ve liked to have had.

In retrospect, you also always think, “Should I have spent more money in a state on television? Should we have spent less money in a state on television?” There’s always that kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking. But at the end of the day, we showed that there are millions of people in this country who are sick and tired of establishment politics, who want real change, and who are prepared to stand up and fight for that. My hope is that that movement continues to go forward.

BS; We showed that the gap between Democratic leaders and grassroots folks is very, very wide. (From a Sanders Rally in September.)

- After 35 years in politics, this was your first campaign at the national level. What surprised you most about the whole process of running for president?

BS; One of the disappointments—not really a surprise—was the media. The very great reluctance of the media to cover the serious issues facing the American people. There was a study that came out a couple of months ago, which showed that only 11 percent of the campaign coverage dealt with issues. For much of the media, coverage was all about the ups and downs of a campaign day, which obviously benefits somebody like Donald Trump very, very much. He’s great for the media, because you don’t know what he is gonna say. So I found it disappointing that we had a hard time getting some of the very serious issues we were trying to raise out through the media.

On the other hand, I was also surprised and gratified that CNN would sometimes cover an entire rally. That would give us an opportunity to beam out directly, through television, to people in many parts of this country who had never heard a progressive message before.

The other thing that I would say is that I left the campaign, quite honestly, more optimistic about American politics than when I went in. We went to 46 states, and I saw great people. That’s not just rhetoric—that’s reality. Just wonderful, wonderful people in all walks of life trying to do the right thing.

- You fared badly among black voters during the campaign. Fewer than one in four supported you. Why do you think that is?

BS; The answer is not complicated. The answer is a fairly simple one: Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have developed very strong roots within the African American community over decades. They are very popular within the black community, and that’s that. Among older African American women, it was like ten to one. We were really getting decimated. But by the end of the campaign, we were winning a majority of young black and Latino voters, which was very, very impressive. In fact, in some communities we wound up winning the Latino vote overall.

- I’ve spoken with longtime supporters of yours who feel that you lost in part because despite your own record in civil rights, you didn’t seem comfortable talking about race in a way that—

BS; [Interrupting] OK, see, this is an issue I’m not really—what I don’t want to do is get into me.

- I’m not raising this to talk about you. I’m interested in hearing your take on racism. Do you see it as primarily a class issue—a by-product of economic injustice? Or is it a separate and distinct problem of its own?

BS; It’s a complicated answer. It’s a good question, but I prefer not to get into it right now. [Stony glare, followed by silence.]

- All right, let’s talk about the young voters you mentioned. During the primaries, almost three-quarters of voters under the age of 30 cast their ballots for you. What do you say to your younger supporters who don’t plan to vote for Clinton because they see her as too establishment-oriented?

BS; Look, I ran against Hillary for over a year, so I understand where she is coming from. For me, this is not a tough choice. I am a United States senator, and I know what would happen to our government if Donald Trump became president. I think Donald Trump is the worst candidate for a major party that has surfaced in my lifetime. This guy would be a disaster for this country and an embarrassment to us internationally. A man who is a pathological liar. Somebody who, to the degree that he deals with issues at all, changes his position every day. That is clearly not the kind of mentality we need from somebody who is running for the highest office in the land.

What is particularly outrageous and disturbing is that the cornerstone of his campaign is based on bigotry—trying to turn people against Mexican-Americans or against Muslims or against women. To my mind, it’s very clear that Donald Trump would be an incredible disaster to this country, and I will do everything I can to see that he is defeated.

- But is there a case to be made for Hillary, solely on her own merits?

BS; On a number of issues, I believe Hillary Clinton’s positions are quite strong. I was happy to negotiate an agreement with her in the party’s platform which said that she would support making public colleges and universities tuition-free for families making $125,000 or less. That is pretty revolutionary. That will not only transform the ability of people to go to college, it will have an impact on kids in elementary school today who know that if they study hard, they can get a college education. She and I also agreed to a doubling of the expansion of community health centers. That’s tens of millions more people who will have access to primary health care and dental care and low-cost prescription drugs and mental health counseling. I want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and I think Clinton is open to moving in that direction, to at least $12 an hour. She supports infrastructure projects that will put millions of people back to work. She understands the significance of not acting on climate change, while Donald Trump does not believe that climate change is real, which is a real threat to the planet.

So what I would ask people is to take a hard look at (a) what a Donald Trump presidency would mean for this country, which in my view would be a disaster, and (b) how Clinton’s views on a number of issues are fairly good. That is what we should be focusing on—not the personalities of the candidates, but what their policies will do for the middle class and working families of this country.

- You certainly played a major role in pushing Clinton to the left on some key issues, at least in the party’s platform. But many of your supporters don’t believe that Hillary really supports those positions or will make good on those promises. They see it as something she did in the platform to appease the left.

BS; I think that Hillary Clinton is sincere in a number of areas. In other areas I think she is gonna have to be pushed, and that’s fine. That’s called the democratic process.

Right now, you have a majority of Republicans—of Republicans—who believe we should raise taxes on the wealthy. Do I think Clinton is prepared to do that? Yeah. Do I think she is prepared to do away with loopholes to get rid of outrageous tax breaks for large multinational corporations? Yeah, I do. Do I think she is serious about climate change, and that we can push her even further? Yeah, I do. Do I think that under Clinton we will raise the minimum wage? Yeah, I do. I’m not quite sure it will be 15 bucks an hour, but it will bring millions of people out of poverty.

Through the work of millions of people, we created a Democratic platform which is far and away the most progressive platform in the history of the United States of America for any political party. Our job the day after the election—and hopefully after Clinton is elected—is to make sure that that platform is implemented.

So what I would ask of young people is to turn off CNN. Let’s assume that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and you and everybody else are not perfect human beings, all right? Let’s take a look at the needs of ordinary people and which candidate will be better on that as president of the United States. On that approach, there is no debate to my mind that we should elect Clinton.


- Sanders supporters protest outside a Clinton rally in East Los Angeles last May.

- Let’s talk for a minute about that post-election process of putting pressure on Hillary. At the Democratic convention, things turned ugly. Some of your supporters disrupted speeches and heckled opponents. And it hasn’t stopped—at your latest rally for Clinton, some of your backers showed up to chant “Never Hillary.” It seems to me—

BS; When did this happen?

- On Labor Day, at your event with Hillary in New Hampshire.

BS; You see, it’s interesting that you mention this. Was this written up? This is again the media. We had 400 or 500 people there. It’s true that there were a few people there from the Green Party, but I don’t recall hearing anything.

- Well, let’s stipulate that only a small number of your supporters have engaged in that kind of disruptive behavior. Even so, it seems to me emblematic of the challenge you face. If Hillary wins, you need to challenge her strongly from the left to achieve your goals. But you also need to make sure that happens in a way that doesn’t tear the party apart or create an opening for the right. Is that a tension that’s controllable?

BS; Our campaign took on virtually the entire Democratic establishment. We had the endorsement of one United States senator. We had six members of Congress. We had zero governors, zero large-city mayors, zero state party chairs. That is what we took on. And what we showed is that there is an enormous distance between what goes on here, in the Democratic Party, and the real world out there. So the Democratic Party, if it is going to survive, is going to have to open its door to people who are a little bit louder, a little bit coarser than the fine men and women who go to the $10,000-a-plate fund-raising dinners. They are going to have to let other people in America in the door and start representing their interests.

The only way you make change is by rallying large numbers of people to stand up and fight back. And the day after the election, that is exactly what I intend to do. My job is to help rally the American people and say, “Yeah we’re going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, create a massive jobs program, rebuild our infrastructure, establish pay equity for women, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. We are going to double funding for community health centers and move toward a Medicare for all, single-payer program of health care. We are going to deal aggressively with climate change. We are going to demand that the rich and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.” Every one of those issues is a popular issue. And whether the folks here in Congress like it or not, the way change comes about—the way we were able to write the Democratic platform—is not because everybody liked Bernie Sanders. It’s because they realized, “Oh, we better do this, because there are people out there who believe in this.”

- I can’t think of a presidential candidate who has ever succeeded at turning their campaign into an ongoing movement. How will you succeed where everyone else has failed?

BS; I think your statement is probably right. It is very difficult. What we have done is taken the campaign and transferred the nuts and bolts of that, in a much reduced fashion, into an organization called Our Revolution. I am not a part of that. Legally, as a United States senator, I can’t be. But the goal of Our Revolution is to get people involved in the political process, from school board on up to the United States Senate. We are going to be working with organizations like MoveOn and trade unions to help people financially and give them the confidence they need to successfully run for office. We will also be working on state ballot items that deal with terribly important issues: Citizens United, automatic voter registration, controlling the cost of prescription drugs, Medicare for all.

- In some ways, you’re talking about building a modern political machine. Democrats used to have a structure that did exactly what you are describing—getting people elected, from the school board and dog commissioner on up. That really doesn’t exist anymore in the fashion you’re talking about.

BS; It’s a challenge, and I don’t want to suggest that it’s easy. One of the great crises we face—and what the campaign demonstrated—is how far out of touch most Democratic leaders are with their constituents. That we can go into state after state and take on the entire Democratic establishment, in some cases win landslide victories, tells you that the gap between the Democratic leadership and grassroots folks is very, very wide. It is enormously important that we revitalize American democracy, that we get people thinking about the issues that impact their lives and their families’ lives and their neighbors’ lives, and start figuring out the route forward to address those issues.

Now, you may think that’s pretty simple. If you are not feeling well, you go to the doctor, right? The doctor makes the diagnosis and provides the treatment. And yet that is not what we do in talking about politics. That is certainly not what television does in talking about politics, and Americans know it. What are the problems facing the country? Do we really even discuss them? One of the successes of our campaign is that we hit a nerve and said, “Yeah, these are the issues. Why isn’t anybody talking about them?”

- Sanders made a film about his hero, the socialist Eugene V. Debs:
BS; He was a man who had the common touch, who was very close to the people.

BS; When you asked before about economics and race—well, we have more people in jail than any other country on earth, and they are disproportionately African American and Latino and Native American. We have youth unemployment rates in communities which are 30, 40, 50 percent, yet we are shocked, just shocked, that when kids have no constructive opportunities to earn a living, they engage in illegal activity. Who talks about that? Who talks about the reality of what goes on in Native American reservations in this country? I have sat in a room with people who make $7.25 an hour, OK? You don’t see that on television. Somebody’s got to talk about what poverty means in this country, and how you cannot live on $8 or $9 an hour.

BS; In some areas, Hillary is gonna have to be pushed. That’s fine. That’s called the democratic process.”
So the strength of the campaign was that people turned on the TV and said, “Oh my God, somebody is talking about my life. Somebody is talking about what this country can become. Somebody is asking why the United States can’t have a national health care program when every other major country on Earth does.” It’s about putting the questions out there, getting people to think about it and say, “OK, I can do something about it.”

And in the midst of all of that, you are going to have to take on the Koch brothers and the billionaires who are spending huge sums of money to buy the elections. That’s also an issue that’s not being talked about. You tell me—do you watch television? Tell me if I am wrong. How often do you hear the words Citizens United? And you know why? Because Citizens United is the best thing that ever happened to television. Is it not? They are making God knows how much money.

When it comes to campaign finance, journalists always talk about who gives the money, and which candidates receive the money. But they almost never talk about where the money ends up. Candidates don’t keep the money that flows into political campaigns. Most of it winds up being pocketed by major media companies. It ends up in advertising.

It ends up in advertising, primarily television. Best thing that ever happened to television. So you need to break through that crap, break through the media, and get people to play an active role in resolving the issues that impact their lives and creating a democratic society.

- Your plans for Our Revolution remind me of what the Moral Majority and the far right did between Barry Goldwater’s loss in 1964 and Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. They did a lot of work at the local level to run people for school boards and get local candidates to focus on the issues that mattered most to them. That was a successful movement that emerged from a losing campaign—one that changed the course of a major political party.

BS' That is absolutely right—you have to start from the bottom on up. What the Democrats do now is, “Oh, we’ve got an election—how do we go out and raise money from rich people to buy television ads and pay for consultants so we can elect somebody to the United States Senate?” I understand that—that’s one way to do it. But there is another, more fundamentally important way, and that is to build a movement of people. The Christian Coalition in fact did do that.

I don’t think that anybody would debate that the gap between Democratic leadership and grassroots America is very, very wide, and that has a lot to do with the fact that over the last 30 to 40 years, Democrats have spent so much time raising money. People are just astounded by the amount of time somebody like Hillary Clinton spends talking to 20 people so she can walk away with a few hundred thousand dollars, rather than relying on ordinary people.

One issue that will affect working people is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade pact being pushed by President Obama. You tried to get a commitment in the party’s platform to not hold a vote on TPP, but you were unsuccessful. Are you worried that there is going to be an attempt to pass it in the lame-duck session of Congress?

Yes. The president has been adamant in his support for the TPP. I spent a half-hour with him on the phone talking about the issue. He is dead wrong, but he feels very, very strongly about it.

The corporate world virtually never loses on trade. Since I’ve been here, they always win. Wall Street, drug companies, corporate America—that is a very heavy-duty group. When they push with their unlimited sums of money, they can make things happen. I will do everything that I can to rally the American people to understand that TPP is a continuation of disastrous trade policies, and that it should not be passed.

- So why does President Obama think it’s a good idea?

BS; He sees it as a geopolitical issue. He does not pretend, as previous presidents have, that this is going to create all kinds of jobs in America. His argument is that if you abandon the TPP, you’re gonna leave Asia open to Chinese influence.

- So he’s not making a NAFTA argument—that a rising tide of trade will lift all boats.

BS; After Obama became president, he severed his ties with the grassroots that got him elected.”
Right—that mythology seems to have disappeared. But one of the interesting things about the TPP, in particular, is not just that it’s gonna force American workers to compete against people making pennies an hour in Vietnam or slave labor in Malaysia. It also includes an investor-state dispute system. If my state of Vermont, or the United States government for that matter, passes a piece of legislation designed to protect the health of the American people or the environment, then that government entity could be sued by a multinational foreign corporation, because the legislation would impact the corporation’s future profits. As an example, Obama did the right thing in killing the Keystone pipeline, because he concluded that it would add to the crisis we’re facing from climate change. But the United States is now being sued for $15 billion by TransCanada, the owner of the pipeline, because NAFTA bars governments from taking actions that limit the profits of a multinational corporation. And the lawsuit doesn’t go to an American court. It goes to a three-person tribunal, which is made up of corporate lawyers.

Under these trade agreements, the president must accede to corporate profits. If a poor country wants cheap prescription drugs for malaria or for AIDS, and a corporation says you can’t use a generic product because we can make more money by keeping the brand name, then people will die in that country, and likely the tribunal will sustain that. This is a world of insanity, and it’s enshrined in the TPP.

- We are coming up on the end of eight years under President Obama. What do you think was his single biggest achievement, and what was his single biggest failure?

BS; There’s a criticism today that the economy is not where we want it to be; I make that criticism every day. But let’s not forget for one second, let’s never forget, where this country was when Obama came into office. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month. A month! We were running up a $1.4 trillion deficit, and the world’s financial system was fairly close to collapse. Other than that, things were pretty good when Bush left office. [Pause] That was a joke. In other words, the man came into office inheriting economic hardship, the worst since the Great Depression.

- And two wars.

BS; And two wars! And, on top of that, we had our Republican leaders meeting literally on the day of the inauguration and deciding that they would do everything they could to obstruct anything the guy wanted to do. That’s what he faced when he came in.

Now, you and I can acknowledge that this country is very, very far away from where we want it to be. But compared to where we were eight years ago, it is day and night. And to some degree, Obama’s intelligence and strength have made that happen. We are living in difficult times, but the stock market hasn’t collapsed, employment is not at 14 percent. So you ask me a major accomplishment? That’s a pretty good accomplishment.

On a personal level, I am always impressed by his discipline, his incredible focus, and his intelligence. When you are president of the United States and exposed to media 24 hours a day, it is so easy to say stupid things to get yourself in trouble. He has done that very, very rarely. No president I can recall has had the kind of discipline and focus that he has, and that is no small thing.

BS; The day after the election, we begin the effort of making Clinton the most progressive president she can become.

- So what do you see as his (Obama's) biggest failure?

BS; He ran in 2008 a brilliant campaign. One of the great campaigns in American history. He rallied the American people, he gave the American people hope. He put together, to some degree, the kind of Rainbow Coalition that Jesse Jackson had talked about. But what he did after becoming president was essentially to say, “Let me thank all the people who helped get me here, but I will take it from here. Mitch McConnell and I will sit down and work out the future.” He misunderstood that Republicans had no intention to negotiate anything. He severed his ties with the grassroots that got him elected, and you can’t take on the powers that be in this country—the power of the media, the power of Wall Street, the power of corporate America, the power of the drug companies—unless there is a mobilization of millions of people to demand fundamental change. Intellectually he understands that, but for whatever reason he did not implement that.

- At the same moment that Obama shut down his grassroots machine, Republicans were creating one of their own. But as we’ve seen with the Tea Party, it’s easy for that kind of operation to become a Frankenstein monster. Part of the challenge of organizing the dispossessed is that the pent-up frustrations you tap into inevitably take on a life of their own. Do you think you can tap into that energy on the left and make it productive?

BS; That’s a good question. Let me repeat: I think it is a very, very difficult task. I don’t say, “Hey, let’s snap our fingers and create a broad-based grassroots Democratic movement involving millions and millions of people.” It is a little bit easier to say than to do.

Somebody reminded me just the other day of something that happened during the Progressive era, during the early part of the century. The Progressives signed up 60,000 actual teachers to go out into communities and educate people about the issues of the day. Certainly social media and bright young people can play an enormous role in that effort today, in a way that we have never seen before. But the goal remains to educate and to organize. You are right in saying it is not easy, and no one can predict what the end result will look like. But it is absolutely imperative that we do that. Absolutely imperative.

- I can’t think of any presidential candidate, certainly in our lifetime, who has shared less about himself personally than you have. So let me ask you a personal question in the guise of politics. I know that Eugene Debs, the socialist organizer and presidential candidate, is a hero of yours. [Sanders smiles and points to a bronze plaque of Debs on the wall of his office.] When did you first come across him, and what effect did that have on you?

BS; When I was in college, I began to read a lot about socialism, and obviously Debs was right in the middle of that. Extraordinary man—people of his period described him as a Christlike figure who would literally give you the shirt off his back. He had money in his pocket, he gave it away. He was a man who had the common touch, who was very close to the people, who had incredible courage, who stood up and opposed the hysteria of World War I, when the government wiped out the Socialist Party. He ran for president when he was in jail—did you know that?

- It was in the 1920 election. He got a million votes while he was in jail.

BS; If they counted all of his votes, which we have reason to believe they didn’t. So this is a man of great integrity and great courage, and if you read what he wrote—wow, it still reads brilliantly today. In the mid-1970s, I did a video on Debs. I did that because I spoke at the University of Vermont during that time and I asked, “Has anybody here heard of Eugene Debs?” Very few hands went up. It just struck me how sad it was that our young people have very little understanding about American history. I would have continued making films like that if I hadn’t been elected mayor of Burlington.

-You’d be the Ken Burns of the left?

BS; That’s right. Or what’s his name, who died recently. The one who wrote that book.

- Howard Zinn?

BS; Yeah. I mean, it was just invaluable stuff, to take a look at American history in a way that most history books and PBS do not.

- Other than Debs, is there someone in politics past or present who you particularly admire?

BS; Yeah, I’ll tell you. The more I read, the more I was impressed with Martin Luther King Jr. Now everybody says, “Well, of course he was a great hero and he led the civil rights movement.” But what was extraordinary about this man was his incredible courage. The establishment said to him, “Congratulations, you got a Voting Rights Act and we’ve done away with segregation in the South—my God, what an unbelievable achievement. Now you can rest on your laurels.” But his conscience said, “You know what? I talk about nonviolence every day, and yet an incredibly violent and horrible war is taking place in Vietnam. And yes, that war is being supported by the guy who signed the Voting Rights Act, but I have to come out against it.” And then he said, “I get money for my organization from wealthy white liberals, but you know what? In this country we have an awful level of income and wealth distribution, and what does it matter if I integrate a restaurant when people can’t afford to eat at that restaurant? I am going to put together a Poor People’s March on Washington, even if the media does not pay any attention to me anymore, to demand a change in national priorities so we don’t give tax breaks to the rich, we don’t fight a war in Vietnam, but we pay attention to the needs of ordinary people.” Whoa! What incredible courage. That’s not what you are going to see on television, but that is the truth about the man’s life. He knew what he was doing.

- It goes back to the question I asked you earlier. King went from looking at racism as an issue unto itself, to seeing it as part of a system of economic injustice. People forget that when he was assassinated, he was in Memphis to support a strike.

BS; Exactly. He was there to deal with the garbage workers fighting for decent wages and working conditions. Which is of no interest to the media at all. So going back briefly to your question: Do you remember what the 1963 March on Washington was called? The full name of it? It was called the March for Jobs and Freedom. And “jobs” came first.

What King understood is, what good is it if you give people the right to go to Harvard University if you can’t come up with the $40,000 a year that it takes to attend? If you are sitting in a low-income community and youth employment is 50 percent, and your dad has no job and you have no money—that’s what matters. That it is not just a black issue, it’s also a white issue. One of the horrors in America today—and this is sad, but interesting—is that the life expectancy for working-class whites, especially women, is going down precipitously. That has a lot to do with despair: bad jobs, no jobs, turning to drugs, turning to alcohol, turning to suicide. So the ability of Trump to gain support among people by running a campaign based on bigotry has to do also with people hurting economically and needing someone to blame. The two things go together.

- Any final message you want to share with your supporters, who themselves feel some despair that their choice is between Trump and Clinton?

BS; I would ask people to take a look at history and to understand that change never, ever, ever comes about in a short period of time. To take a look at the struggles of the civil rights movement, of the women’s movement, of the union movement, of the gay movement, of the environmental movement, and to understand that all of those movements took years and years and are still in play today.

It’s not gonna happen overnight. You gotta put your shoulder to the wheel and keep going.
In the campaign, what we did is show the American people that the ideas the establishment had thought were fringe were really not fringe—that millions of people want to transform this country. It’s not gonna happen overnight. The fight has got to continue. And if you are serious about politics, then you gotta put your shoulder to the wheel and keep going. Sometimes the choices that are in front of you are not great choices, but you do the best you can. And the day after the election, you continue the effort.

Anyone who thinks that Hillary Clinton will not be more sympathetic, more open to the ideas we have advocated than Donald Trump obviously knows very little. So the day after the election, we begin the effort of making Clinton the most progressive president that she can become. And the way we do that is by rallying millions of people.

You ask me about my personal life. I’ve got seven beautiful grandchildren, and I want them to be able to grow up in a decent country. We all have the responsibility to work as hard as we can to make that happen—understanding, as has always been the case, that there are gonna be obstacles in the way. Look up what happened to Eugene Debs. He spent his life working to build a socialist movement, only to see it destroyed. Then ten years later, FDR picked up half of what Debs was talking about.

That’s how the world works. We don’t have the luxury to give up, OK?

-Thank you for taking the time to talk.

BS; Thank you very much. [Turns to his aide.] Well, Josh—any crises that we face? No? Well, you know where to reach me.

NOTE: Three comments on the Presidential debate to follow.