Return of the beast

With the second election of Donald Trump, the US far right has cemented itself at the apex of world power. That the repugnant billionaire’s ascension to the White House is a defeat for US workers and progressive forces everywhere is nowhere more evident than in the spectacle of the anti-working-class scum celebrating his political resurrection.

From Gina Rinehart and Andrew Bolt to Nigel Farage and Elon Musk—around the world, a who’s who of the “let them eat cake” set are beside themselves with glee that tens of millions of Americans venerate a wealthy and powerful con artist because he makes outlandish promises of national revival.

Trump’s victory, they believe, has given them a renewed license for open and public bigotry. They can even say that bigotry and fabrication make for a winning political strategy, which is the only thing that seems to matter in capitalist politics. Their voices will now be amplified: it should be mandatory for any conservative party worth its salt to run like Trump. No more wet Liberals, just hard men and women who aren’t afraid to punch down.

Anyone displaying the remotest sensitivity to the oppression or exploitation of their fellow human beings can now be publicly mocked, derided, beaten down—and labelled a communist of course—just as the oppressed and exploited ought to be mocked and beaten down for their weaknesses. Welcome to the new world order.

As if to prove the point, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a moment’s break from overseeing the holocaust in Gaza to gush about the “huge victory” in America. Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orbán called it “a much needed victory for the world”.

Wall Street then predictably surged, the Dow industrials index registering its biggest gain in two years on 6 November as the wealthiest 1 percent salivated at the prospect of yet more tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations while women bleed out in hospital parking lots, having been denied lifesaving reproductive care. Maybe Joe Rogan will dedicate a podcast to how these pathetic bleeders ought to toughen up, while he and his buddies banter about how funny a wounded vagina is.

Trump’s victory cannot be written off as a fluke, like in 2016, when he miraculously walked the narrowest of paths through the Electoral College to defeat the second most unpopular presidential candidate in recent history, Hillary Clinton. This year’s race was high turnout—not as high as the last presidential election, but it is projected to be the second highest voter participation rate since 1908. Compared to the results in 2020, Trump gained in many demographics, according to the exit polls, and in almost every geographic area, according to county returns.

He gained among Latinos and in the suburbs, among majority-white counties and majority-minority counties, among the old and among the young. He even gained in the big cities—fortresses of the Democratic vote such as New York City cracked or, in the case of Miami-Dade in Florida, crumbled. In fact, Trump won the popular vote, something considered almost impossible even for “moderate” Republicans in this age. And he won it despite a majority of the electorate openly admitting that they view him unfavourably.

The Republicans gained control of the Senate. Potentially, they will win the House as well. If so, far-right reactionaries will control all branches of the US government—executive, legislative and judicial—from January next year.

What of the Democratic Party? No one should shed a tear for that odious billionaire-driven killing machine. Kamala Harris ran the most right-wing Democratic campaign in recent history, first trading on fears of a Trump presidency to mobilise core party constituencies, then strutting her bonafides as a prosecutor, before pivoting to a love fest with the Cheney family in an effort to win over conservatives.

Like Hillary Clinton, she failed. But like a terrorist bludgeoned by Bruce Willis at Dulles International Airport, she failed harder.

“We’re not going back”, the vice president said repeatedly on the campaign trail. Well, the US is going backwards. As Lance Selfa explained recently, that’s in no small part because of how the Democrats have governed in successive administrations: presiding over the economic ruin of communities and shifting politics to the right by constructing the worst sort of dog-eat-dog society at the behest of Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce.

Moreover, in this election, while Harris was parading her war criminal friend Dick Cheney’s endorsement and stumping over tea with his warmonger daughter in affluent suburbs, much of the electorate was pleading for economic relief. If you believe in fairy tales, then all the workers received magic puddings from the Democrats. In the real world, they were left drowning in debt and struggling to buy food while hundreds of billions continued to be siphoned to the military industrial complex and Liz Cheney’s friends.

If there was any positive news on Tuesday, it came with reports that Green Party candidate Jill Stein was challenging Harris in Dearborn, Michigan, where more than 50 percent of the population is of Middle Eastern descent and aghast that their own tax dollars are being used by the Biden-Harris administration to slaughter their friends and relatives in Palestine and Lebanon. Stein reportedly ended with 18 percent of the vote to Harris’s 36 percent, which was down from Joe Biden’s 69 percent—a stinging rebuke for her support for the genocide in Gaza.

Small consolations aside, there was always going to be a fight after this election, regardless of the winner. While Trumpism might appear a uniquely American phenomenon, it is a symptom of a world in decay­. A tiny number of people living gated from the rest of the population have accrued obscene amounts of wealth while so many live in squalor and struggle. The parasites at the top, like Trump, deliver imperialist wars and increasing military budgets, environmental crisis and global warming, working- and middle-class debt bondage, health crises afflicting billions, migration crises, divide-and-rule politics, and far-right parties that have become normalised on every continent. The entire globe is a shitstorm.

There’s probably no country in which Trump’s victory will have a greater effect on political sensibilities than Australia. Not because this continent is primed for Trumpism, but because no other political class has such reflexively derivative political impulses. The political right here has no ideas of its own, even going so far as introducing the war on “woke” despite the word never having been part of the left’s lexicon. Exhibit A is the Herald Sun’s Bolt, who says that Harris’s defeat “is also a defeat of the horrendous woke army that’s run riot in the West for years” and that “Trump will now be the enemy of the woke”.

“Woke army that’s run riot” is a euphemism for people having more progressive and accepting social attitudes, being more sensitive to the oppression of Indigenous people, being open to ideas about social solidarity and opposing imperialism and genocide. That’s what Trump and his acolytes globally want to wage war on: decency and working-class solidarity.

So it is utterly sickening, though unsurprising, to watch Labor politicians fall over themselves to congratulate the president elect. At the end of the day, they are all part of the same club. From Washington to Canberra, London to Beijing, competing cabals of rapacious ruling class thugs who ultimately share the same sensibilities: wealth and power for a few, work and drudgery for the rest.

That’s why this wasn’t just an American election, and it won’t be simply an American fight. It’s a worldwide contest for the soul of the societies in which we all will live.