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
Wednesday 16 November 2016
Saturday 12 November 2016
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.
Wednesday 9 November 2016
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.
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.
Sunday 6 November 2016
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.
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.
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