Trump’s victory will spark global storms

Principal Speaker Felicity Dowling looks at the conditions of the American people which led them to vote for Donald Trump.

If a butterfly’s wings can spark a hurricane, then Trump’s victory in the USA elections will spark global storms. Poor and working people across the globe will feel the impact, but so might the fragile global economy. As Brexit fed reactionary beliefs and behaviours this too will feed reaction, not just in the US but across the world. Industrial production is a global enterprise, finance spans the globe, the products in our shops come from across the world. The interests of working people too now are global. No economy stands alone.

Just as there are huge problems for poor and working people in all continents, there are huge problems for poor and working people in the USA. It was not the very poor who voted for Trump. Reports say that 128.8 million Americans cast a ballot in 2016, out of 231 million eligible voters — a turnout rate of 55.6 percent. It looks, as I write this, that most of the poor who voted, most of the black, Asian and Latino voters voted for Clinton. Some sections of white blue collar workers voted for Trump, along with the white middle income groups. How many of those voters wanted a Trump presidency, and how many just wanted to give the establishment a bloody nose, we may never know.

We do know that horrible attitudes, and repulsive language were used in Trump’s campaign to women, to blacks, to Muslims, to Asians, to Latinos, to Jews, to people with disabilities and to people who dared challenge him. We know he boasted of abusing women. This will empower and entitle the lowest forces in society. We know self-defence will be required.

Trump’s campaign was right wing and populist. Just as ultra-establishment Farage managed to convince people in the UK that he was anti-establishment, the lie that billionaire Trump was somehow anti-establishment was sold to millions in the USA.

A lot has happened in the years since the end of the Soviet Union, and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”. In the book, Fukuyama argues that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. The smug assurance of those days is long gone.
There is good reason to be deeply angry with life in the USA. What has happened to the working people of the US? Why have some of them at least voted for this reactionary billionaire?

Wages have fallen quite dramatically. It now takes two incomes to keep a family, and then not well. Wage levels do not match the value of wages in 1970. Wages have been stagnant for forty years.

“In 2007, the last year before the Great Recession, the average income of the middle 60 percent of American households was $76,443. It would have been $94,310, roughly 23 percent (nearly $18,000) higher had inequality not widened (i.e. had their incomes grown at the overall average rate – an overall average buoyed by stratospheric growth at the very top). The temporary dip in top incomes during the Great Recession did little to shrink that inequality tax, which stood at 16 percent (nearly $12,000) in 2011.” (http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/).

Dereliction is widespread, especially in older industrial areas, people are left to live in it. Schools in poorer areas have been churned up to give money to the big corporations. Working people are barred from the top universities by the extra-ordinary cost. Health care is expensive, not universally available, ineffective and still the largest cause of bankruptcy.

Women have carried a heavy burden in this avalanche of living standards. Maternity leave and child care are very poor. Many women return to work still bleeding from child birth. Welfare is very difficult with food stamps and other demeaning tactics being used to dissuade women from caring rather than working in the jobs market. Abortion might be available (for now) but there is no support for the choice of actually having a baby.

What once were good jobs in the car factories have disappeared, shipped out to once cheaper workers in China, Mexico, Vietnam and more.

Prisons have become a huge industry which incarcerates black people in massive numbers. There are more African American men in prison and jail, or on probation and parole, than were slaves before the start of the Civil War.

The mortgage fraud that lead to the 2008 financial crisis first persuaded people to take on impossible mortgages and then left people in the streets while their houses were locked and left to rot.

Environmental degradation, polluted drinking water, fracking and unregulated, industrialised agriculture have all caused huge problems. We have also seen damage to the seas, with oil spills like the 2010 Deep Water Horizon spill, off Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico, which caused a slick with a surface area larger than that of Great Britain.

Climate change has sparked extreme weather. Huge inequalities exist.

Black lives, as we have seen, have mattered little to a rampant and out of control police. Black people carry undue levels of poverty, of ill health or criminalisation, bad housing and more. Yet the youth have stood up and fought back and the tradition of struggle is still strong.

The institutionalised neglect of children is a sure-fire way of knowing a society is in crisis

“About 15 million children in the United States – 21% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold, a measurement that has been shown to underestimate the needs of families. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses.” (http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html)

“11 percent of young children (0-9 years) live in households with incomes below 50 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL), up from 9 percent in 2008. The percentage of young children in deep poverty varies across the states, from 5 percent in North Dakota to 18 percent in Mississippi, 16 percent in South Carolina, and 14 percent in Kentucky and West Virginia.” If Alabama were a country, its rate of 8.7 infant deaths per 1,000 would place it slightly behind Lebanon in the world rankings, according to the Washington Post.

US foreign policy has caused vicious havoc in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Yemen, and Syria. But it has caused havoc at home too with 22 veterans committing suicide every day.

Globalisation and the neo conservative era have brought real pain to working people and to the poor across the world. It has also knit the interests of working people closely together. More of the world’s people are now workers than ever before.

Trump is a triumph of reaction and hate and there will be a new establishment based on racism and intolerance and hate.

Clinton was no advocate for working people or the poor.

How do the Democrats relate to working people in the USA? In Britain, there is at least a folk belief that Labour looks out for working people, a memory of a time when in each small community there were Labour men and women who helped organise resistance and helped defend individuals. Labour has close links to the trade unions. Labour used to publicly aspire to Socialism. None of this is true of the Democrats. Some democrats like Obama cut their teeth on community campaigning, but the Democrats are not from the working class as Labour once was.

There is a political elite in the USA, cartel parties where politics is a business, and the members of the cartel slip between big business, politics, government, academia, big charities and regard the voters as means to an end. There is no concept of building a social movement against capitalism, because the Democrats, like the Republicans are capitalists, they constitute the high priest caste of capitalism. This cartel has made alliances with some progressive interest groups, and bowed to some strong campaigns, but nothing has been allowed to get in the way of ripping off working people and the poor. Nothing blocks their foreign policy alliances and their excursions into countries they wish to discipline.

The economy is far from strong. “In one way, the next US president faces a worse situation than Obama did in 2009 at the depth of the global financial crash. This time there is no way to avoid a slump by printing money or cutting interest rates; or by increasing government spending when public sector debt has already doubled to 100% of GDP. Those economic policy tools have been used up. The chalice will have to be sipped.” (https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/)

Despite it all, the US has some of the bravest fighters against capitalism and for the planet. The water protectors of Standing Rock, the Angola Three, the women who campaign for water in Flint, the Black Lives Matter campaigners. The working class of the USA is potentially one of the strongest working classes in the world. The unions do little to represent that class and the working class has taken a pounding but the potential remains. Of course, sexism, anti LGBT sentiment, racism and xenophobia operate to break that power.

Campaigns for improved wages for low paid workers and pop up unions are growing. People are not taking their problems lying down. The ideas of socialism could ignite these struggles.

Bernie Sanders campaign showed what could happen with a social democrat or socialist campaign. It will be a heavy load to build and develop socialist movements in the US but we can’t do socialism without them. It will be for the Americans to decide but it seems that linking struggle to the Democrats is counterproductive.

Between now and another election social movements must be built and political ideas fought for. If the left are to be successful in the next election, then it is essential that politics reconnects with communities and individuals who are in day to day struggles to survive and thrive. This is as true in the UK as it is in the US.

“All wheels stand still at the workers will”. If the giant working class of the US organised for itself, to defeat reaction, to improve work and wages, to defend the planet, no power on earth, save that of the Chinese working class, could match it. We face a battle with reaction, war and even barbarism, but that battle has scarcely yet been joined by the working people of the USA.