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.
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