Clinton seems to have established a commanding lead over Trump in the contest for the US presidency - at least in the opinion polls. Trumps's barbaric treatment of women seems a tipping point for now. Trump's latest demand, that Clinton take a drug test before the last debate, comes from the sniffiest political candidate that has ever put themselves in the TV circus ring. And so the carnival continues.
There are many commentators on the US election that start their pieces with words like 'unparalleled' and 'without precedent'. What they mean is that Trump has turned this campaign to be US President into a unique, political farce in modern times. But they are wrong. Figures like Trump have popped up across the world in various countries in the modern era, including in the USA. They commonly erupt into the top of the political maelstrom at times of acute crisis. And they do exactly what Trump is doing. They seek to tie together an utterly disgusted and despairing base in the population, who have not defined either the root of their decline or a line of march to resolve their problems, with the most marginal, least integrated and buccaneering section of the ruling class; a group that define 'their' nation as the beginning and end of all wisdom, and who are savagely jealous of their richer, global relatives and the control they exercise over the state. These events are the initial makings of a genuine political revolution.
In countries with the full franchise, the political revolution (the mechanism by which one faction of the ruling class 'overthrows' another) travels first via the vote. It does not stop there - as we shall see in the case of Trump. (And as we have already seen in the case of Berlusconi and many others.) It always feeds most off marginalised groups and disaffected layers of the population - as they constitute the necessary cannon fodder in the battle for the leader's dominance.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European periphery, which was nailed indelibly by those who could afford a voice in western society as the equivalent of the end of the socialist 'experiment,' the ideological conditions were laid for marginalisation of huge sections of the traditional working class in that region of the world. These ideological conditions obviously depended for their impact on the material conditions of the day. They did not spread uniformly across the globe. In Latin America, the Cuban example had greater weight in radical politics. Working class and poor peasant movements continued to grow in parts of the sub continent in both their independence and power. In Asia the Chinese experience played a key role. The anti imperialist wars in Southern Asia had success, but now the Chinese market can seek its hegemony over South East Asia. The Russian and European experience were not themselves critical among the potentially insurgent classes in that region. It was to be the opposite in Africa. In Africa, both the South African and the Nigerian labour movement had their directions changed by leaderships that, after 1989, turned definitively to national solutions focusing on indigenous capitalist development (unsuccessfully.) It was a reverse turning point across that Continent.
In the West, particularly in the USA, where the new ideology was materially underpinned by the reality of globalisation and the change in the contract between the worker and capital, increasingly insecure layers in society among the working and middle classes were driven lower and lower in their wealth and self organisation. Accordingly they became more and more vulnerable to the politically frantic and irrational bombast offered by giant, wealthy, and crucially 'succesful' egos. The political psychology that attracts the Trumps of this world is not difficult to understand. These new 'heroes' are flushed with resentment having been sidelined by the 'real' establishment in their countries and despised among their traditional elites. Regarded with contempt themselves, they describe to their crowds of followers how they are loathed and rejected - but 're-imagined' by them as the dreadful experience of 'the common man' (and women when they remember.) This poisonous brew is sometimes literally enhanced by the hi-jinks and loss of inhibition by its creator as s/he 'tests the limits' of established political systems and social mores. Starting in the mid 19th century and Louis Napoleon, political history is 'entertained' by such figures regularly, whenever the traditional rulers are fragile, fracturing and failing, but their opponent classes are angry but still uncertain.
But what of Hillary?
She is also, in her way, at the extremes of the traditional political world. Before her shot at the White House the next Clinton is already drenched in the riches accumulated from her efforts to become the leading mascot of the US's big corporations. A few months after Clinton left her office as Secretary of State she began to sweep up over $26 million in speaker fees alone. The price of Hillary's wisdom was a lot to do with who she found it most important to talk to. Wall Street Bankers, Goldman Sachs and the rest were privy, until Wikileaks, to her thoughts. And her thoughts were wide ranging. Lloyd Blankfein, the Chief Executive of Goldman Sachs was told that Hillary favoured intervening (militarily) in Syria secretly. At another conference she told her listeners that the US might have to 'control' North Korea.
'So China, come on. You either control them or we're going to have to defend against them.' (This apparently meant US missile defenses in the region.) At another time she explained that you had to have one approach for the inner circle and another to the rest. Bang on.
The US public would expect Hillary would think and act in a hawkish way about the US's approach to its perceived international interests. What is more surprising to them and to the rest of the world is that she chose to lay all these policies out, in some detail, before she had any position, over several months, to bankers, for money! In this case they are literally getting what they paid for. For millions of people in the US, this is too much to stomach. Hillary Clinton has not only acted as many prospective Presidents may have acted in the past, she has gone further, been specific and explicit about what the bankers can expect for their buck and ended up rubbing the ordinary Americans' noses in it.
At one time it was too much for Bernie Sanders. He demanded the tapes from those very meetings during his own nomination campaign for the the Democratic Party's presidential candidate. Although Hillary's managers denounce the Wikileaks revelations as a Russian intervention into the US Presidential election - that is only so because Hillary refused American Bernie Sanders' demand to see the transcripts. The decision by the Sanders camp to endorse Hillary Clinton was a mistake, if for no other reason than it damaged the credibility of Sanders own criticisms of Hillary and her corrupt relationships with big money.
Hillary Clinton is not going to contest with the political system and its surrounding 'scene' on behalf of anybody else than those who already dominate its stage. It seems that the last chance for that hope died during the eight years of Obama's presidency, when he refused to mobilise his popular support against the hardening rightwards of the Republican Party, as it started to build its bunker to protect itself and its wealth against the results of the economic crisis and China's growth. Her 'message' to the US population is the weakest of any Democratic Party candidate since WW2. She wants to 'unify' people. She wants to maintain women's rights and civil rights and individuals rights. And she wants the US to get back to sorting out the world. Her hard core comments on international politics are not unrelated to the world wide grip of many US based corporations. Her defense of individuals, and groups and genders and ethnicities is not unrelated to a desperate desire in the US's hierarchy to avoid facing or even naming the increasingly obvious, growing, gangrene of inequality between the huge social classes who have to work - and the super rich. Trump may not have the slightest interest in changing that -though he plays with it. Hillary Clinton wants US voters to look elsewhere and pretend that the system is ok.
Traditionally radical socialists both inside and outside of the US argued that the critical step in US politics was the formation of an independent political party that would represent labour. In this perspective both the Democrats and the Republicans represented branches of the US ruling class, and neither of their Presidential candidates should be supported. The US Communist Party altered their view when they believed a 'reformer' had been chosen by one of the main parties, and later in the 20th century if a candidate appeared more inclined to 'peace', (with the USSR.) There has been a powerful argument among Sanders' initial supporters about voting for Hilary. His positive endorsement of Hilary and his claim that after his agreement with her that she is the most radical Democrat Party contender for years, has stilted the momentum of the movement that Sanders had begun to build. Most importantly his nomination has undermined its fiercely held independence. A better stance from the point of view of the importance of a new, radical independent movement might have been not to have endorsed Hilary Clinton but simply to have called for a vote against Trump. In current American politics that would not be seen as the same thing.
A position of a 'no' vote either for the Democrats or for the Republican Party presidential candidates is understandable and defensible from a radical perspective. Such a view would give precedence to the emergence, development and most of all to the independence of the movement that first grew around Bernie Sanders. But whether people vote for 'none of the above' or, holding their noses, for Hilary Clinton - as a vote against Trump - a great victory would be gained if a genuine and self-organised, mass action movement was able to begin the battle against the billionaires, their government and their system, thereby creating real hope and new ideas among the millions of Americans who already know that something is seriously wrong.
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