By HUGO DIONÍSIO*
Harris' defeat is the victory of political demagogy, providentialist messianism and supremacism, from which the Democratic Party has not freed itself and which it has also contributed to normalizing.
Immigration, abortion, wokism, the war in Ukraine, eternal wars, reindustrialization, and protectionism. With the exception of abortion and wokism (identitarianism), which are issues of conscience rather than structural politics, all represent, in some way, some of the most brutal consequences of neoliberalism in the US, and are among the major causes of Kamala Harris’s defeat and Donald Trump’s victory.
Deindustrialization, which Donald Trump has cited as one of the major causes of the loss of power in his America, occurred as a direct result of the financialization of the economy (accelerated by Republican Richard Nixon), which turned the casino economy into the economic engine of the United States. Without industry, there was a deterioration in real power, which was resolved by the creation of eternal conflicts. Eternal wars have a heavy cost for the Western economy (including in Europe) and hinder public investment in infrastructure and other needs. The plundering that Blackrock, Monsanto, Golden Sachs and others make possible does not benefit the American people, but rather the accumulation of wealth by a few.
As a way of diverting attention, frightening and anesthetizing the masses, Russophobia and the Cold War are revived and identity politics are promoted, causing social atomization and the fracture of social movements that could consistently and coherently contest this situation. The result is the installation of a feeling of instability and precariousness in all aspects of life.
Donald Trump has emerged as the solution that will bring about the aspiration for stability and a certain “normality” in customs, the economy, work and the family. Kamala Harris has never freed herself from the accusation that she wants to maintain the factors that are causing this social disintegration.
Donald Trump’s announced victory shows that Joe Biden’s economic “successes” were not recognized by the population. The oligarchic gains never reached the workers’ pockets. The Democratic Party refused to acknowledge this fact, and in doing so, it guaranteed Donald Trump’s victory.
Having explained the cause, it remains to establish its constituents, which I will now list, in random order.
The role of eternal wars
Donald Trump has used this banner masterfully, capitalizing on factors such as the fear of a world war, the opacity of the military-industrial complex, its lack of control over spending and the fact that it operates outside democratic rules, without auditing, scrutiny or the need to justify its spending. In addition, the more than predictable defeat of NATO in Ukraine brings with it another novelty, which consists of a certain discrediting of the mythical – but never proven – military capacity of the United States.
Donald Trump presented himself as the candidate who would resolve eternal conflicts, freeing the American people from this burden, but at the same time recovering the lost military mysticism. A kind of nationalism of the end of empires, which everyone goes through.
This assumption has two problems: the first is that the discourse of peace and the end of war should, conceptually, be on Kamala Harris' side; the second is that believing that Donald Trump will be able to, or even want to, put an end to American militarism is, at the very least, laughable. Donald Trump may even cool down some conflicts, but he will aggravate others, in line with his arrogance and narcissism, typical of the American ideological providentialism common to all its powerful factions.
As we will see, however, Donald Trump will not only increase military spending, in line with what the Mandate 2025 da Heritage Foundation, as it will have to fuel conflicts to justify them. Probably more cold conflicts than hot ones, but conflicts nonetheless. Europe will be one of the biggest victims of its own cowardice. Donald Trump will not stop extorting cowardly European politicians for what he considers to be their fair contribution to a NATO that only benefits the US and no one else.
Donald Trump feeds on the lack of a pacifist discourse, defending the end of eternal wars, which does not mean “the end of wars” and, certainly, does not mean “the end of conflicts” and military tensions.
Immigration, blame the wrong people
The use of this flag is not new. However, there as here, what Donald Trump does not say is that it is the employers themselves who are demanding that Western governments open the “doors” to migration. No migrant will move to a country if they believe they will not find work there. It is the possibility of finding work that attracts them. This information circulates through the trafficking networks and reaches the poorest people, who seize the opportunity.
And who is spreading this information? Just look, for example, at the position of European employers' associations on the subject. They believe that more migrants are needed. After all, they need cheap, available, well-behaved, disposable labour that can put downward pressure on the wage costs of the indigenous peoples. Donald Trump, the far right, says nothing about this.
The far right does indeed capitalize on the problems of social exclusion linked to the flow of migrants and their descendants on a massive scale. And this social exclusion is once again the fault of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party responds to the bosses by maintaining or increasing the migrant stock, but the money that should be used to integrate these people and their children is used for war and to finance large corporations.
Joe Biden's anti-inflation package (the Inflation Reduction Act) has financed, with hundreds of billions of dollars, the purchase of stocks by corporations themselves, so that they can artificially increase their value. This money has not been used to improve access to health care, housing or social security, which are the Democratic Party's flagships. This party has been penalized for treating migrants the way the Republican Party treats them when it is in power.
The Democratic Debacle on the Palestinian Question
The Democratic Party has lost much of the trust that American youth had placed in it on the Palestinian issue. If until now, for better or worse, progressive young people and anti-Zionist adults saw the Democratic Party as a kind of appeaser – at least – in the face of Republican anti-Arabism, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, everything has gone up in smoke.
It is under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris that the world has witnessed an unacceptable genocide live. It is under a Democratic administration that the US has embarked on a war on two fronts, one of which is against a defenseless people and one of which has the most unpredictable consequences.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were unable to establish a substantial difference with Donald Trump in this way, and if anyone won votes on this issue, it was the latter's candidacy. At least he will have captured some votes that he would not have had access to before. The fact that he defended the end of eternal wars and said he does not want war with Iran ended up establishing an important difference on this issue as well.
The antipathy generated by the figures who are today the face of the Democratic Party
O establishment I was convinced that the American people liked Hillary Clinton. I was wrong. Hillary was “Killary” and I had no sympathy whatsoever. They were convinced that Kamala Harris would not fail. All they had to do was put her in front of a teleprompter and that would be it. There was no need to talk much, and even less to think. No one managed to capitalize on anything positive about Kamala Harris. The times she was without a teleprompter, her improvisation was astonishing. Her oratorical, rhetorical and theoretical incapacity was made evident.
But the fact of being a woman, associated with the fact of being “brown”, could not fail. The card had worked with Barack Obama, why would it fail now? Barack Obama was the most likeable genocidal maniac in history. While he paraded his enormous speaking ability, he locked children in cages on the southern border, threatened to invade Syria, created conditions for the entry of the Islamic State into Syria and Iraq, destroyed Libya and supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
This bet on an innocuous, ineffective and incapable figure is not new and represents a huge void of real leadership. Joe Biden was the last of the leaders of the Democratic and American machine. People like Cornel West, Jill Stein, or Bernie Sanders, were prevented, by big donors, from giving voice to the popular anxieties of young people and workers. Here is the “democracy” North American in all its extension.
Capitalize on antipathy towards the system and the state of affairs
The precariousness of life, the harshness of conditions, the ideological stagnation of the system and the fading of the lights of alternatives, and with stagnation, decay and deterioration, associated with the absence of alternatives, create the ideal contradictions for the emergence of movements that defend, even if only apparently, the alternative. It is a law of life. If the water does not go one way, it goes the other.
However, the Democratic Party, like the social democratic parties in Europe, has been controlled by neoliberalism. The deterioration of public services during their mandates has become evident, which has resulted in an ideological demoralization not only of social democracy, but of all progressive and democratic forces considered moderate. The radicals are persona non grata and these no longer constitute an effective difference to the other forces on the right.
When we have a Democratic Party defending neoliberal hegemony and globalism, or a socialist or social democratic party defending neoliberal Europe and historical revisionism, and allying itself with neoliberals and neoconservatives, space is opened for the emergence of appearances of an alternative to the right. Reality never stands still.
Donald Trump ends up emerging as an alternative to the system that builds him and feeds on him. And he succeeds because establishment transformed the Western party system into a broad field of neoliberal and neoconservative right-wing, in which figures different in appearance but equal in substance parade, tamed by the elites, only with the aim of maintaining the appearance of a democratic movement, when, in practice, it does not exist.
After all, it is JD Vance, Trump's vice president, who appears to be opposing relocations to Mexico and China. Shouldn't the Democrats have done so? When we see Joe Biden applying tariffs to prevent Chinese brands from entering the US, it is worth asking whether he should have remembered to do the same with US companies that relocated to Latin America and Asia. Why did the Democratic Party condone the destruction of US industrial capacity?
Abortion and concern for the living
It wasn't just abortion, a capitalizable flag in a reactionary and very religious society. It's not worth it Kamala's of the world come to say that, to a Trumpist, or traditional republican, human fetuses are more important than the lives of beings already born, if they then keep wages frozen for more than 40 years, allow wealth to become concentrated again, at the level that happened in the 30s, do not create a network of free education, do not support the formation of families and birth rates, and so on. Their discourse is contradictory to what they actually do.
Where is the moral ground for defending abortion in a situation like this? Even if it exists, it is heavily conditioned by the failure of the Democratic Party's social policies. How can one say that abortion is defensible as a last resort when one is directly responsible for not creating conditions to support birth rates, which make this “last resort” the first resort?
The defense of “normality”
The connection of the wokism (identitarianism) neoliberalism on the left, and LGBTQ propaganda to left-wing movements, is also the fault of the Democratic Party and the social democratic parties that have dropped universalism, starting to bet on the atomization of identity and the liberalization of gender.
Women, homosexuals, Latinos, blacks, and trans people are now chosen simply because they are, not because of who they are. Choosing an incapable homosexual just because he or she is one is a huge disservice to the movement. homo, choosing an incapable woman, just because she is, is a disservice to the cause of women. A Von Der Leyen, being a woman, perpetuates war. A Rangel (Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs), being homosexual, perpetuates war. What do the people gain from this?
Used as an opportunistic flag, the wokism atomizes identity, atomizes society. Propaganda Woke It is used as a political banner and a sign of sophistication and mental freedom, however, its effect is to convey to society that its “normality” is at stake. We can question whether or not “normality” includes other identities, but always as part of a whole, naturally. The system must only ensure that, no matter what one chooses, naturally, one has the right to the same living conditions as others.
Instead, the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be trapped by the idea that the most important thing is to be able to affirm our identity, and even to do so with insults and pamphleteering. What matters is being able to choose to be trans, homosexual or non-binary, even though you may have to live on the streets and without a job. This is an inversion of priorities. What guarantees freedom in choosing one’s identity are the basic universal conditions necessary for survival. And not the other way around. Defending the former while relegating the latter to a secondary role sends a message of subversion, which destroys the appearance of normality and the idea of social stability. Provoking a reaction.
O wokism consists of a liberalization of identity and the possibility of individual choice, disconnected from its material existence. It is, therefore, a divisive individualism, an idealism. The Democratic Party should never embark on idealism.
In doing so, he allowed Donald Trump to sell himself as the guarantor of normality. The far right sells itself as the guarantor of normality!
The mistake of Zelensky's move against Trump
Donald Trump's association with Vladimir Putin and Russia was intended to capitalize on a Russophobia that never really caught on, except among those who feed and live off it. establishment. Yesterday in Georgia, Vladimir Putin returned to the scene. Allegedly, bomb threats had come from Russia. No one believes this anymore and the results in Georgia demonstrate a certain and growing popular immunity to the blows of the corporate press.
The truth is that few believe in Volodymyr Zelensky anymore, and even fewer are willing to listen to him speak. In complete disconnection with popular sentiment, they believed that pitting Trump against Zelensky would hurt Donald Trump. On the contrary, it reassured many who doubted that Donald Trump would end the war that this was the right vote.
Like the Ukrainian people, we Westerners are also fed up with this war.
The discredit of the mainstream press
All the press mainstream Western, even those aligned with the Republican Party (in the US they have to declare partisan bias), were pushing for Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris had the hawks on her side.
The defeat of Kamala Harris is the defeat of the corporate media. The defeat of Kamala Harris is the defeat of the narratives commissioned by Wall Street, the Pentagon, the CIA or the White House. Today, in the US, according to Gallup, there are already more Americans who don't believe the media at all mainstream, than those who believe something in it.
Donald Trump has used this to great effect. From the post-truth of his first term to the total discredit of his second, Donald Trump has defeated the Press. mainstream. Elon Musk and his Twitter account played a key role here. Twitter was Donald Trump's online propaganda force. No one should have as much power as Elon Musk, but one of those responsible for creating these "neo-feudal" powers is the Democratic Party itself.
In conclusion
Kamala Harris’ defeat is thus the victory of political demagogy, providentialist messianism and supremacism, from which the Democratic Party has not freed itself and which it has also contributed to normalizing, allowing Donald Trump to win despite him and the exacerbated way in which he defends him. The Democratic Party could never dismantle him in his essence, because Democrats also defend “American leadership”, the “indispensable nation”, all the triumphalist and neocolonialist slogans of the American elite manufactured during the Clinton era.
Donald Trump's victory is the defeat of polling companies, denounced as instruments for constructing results, of democracy understood as a superior system in which informed and conscious people make conscious choices, according to discussed, reflected and debated programs.
The parade of Donald Trump supporters without the slightest political, intellectual or ideological decency, or the parade of Kamala Harris supporters without the slightest ability to convey ideas, in both cases only called to the limelight based on their popularity, constitutes one of the sad episodes of this decadent circus spectacle, which they call the US elections.
Finally, Kamala Harris, this time, with her lack of intelligence, prevented the Democratic Party from capitalizing on: votes related to limiting the use of weapons, because she presented herself as someone who uses them, speaking about it with pride, which must have shocked many people; votes from migrants and descendants of migrants, concerned about the constant aggression, by the US, against their countries of origin (such as the Chinese, Iranians, Cubans, Arabs and many others); pro-Palestinian votes and many votes from the working classes.
She failed to establish a real difference to Donald Trump's policies and, as a result, either caused her supporters to become demobilized or, due to the factors I mentioned, many of them to move to the other candidate. The weight of international issues may not be very great, but from them we can see that they do not distance Kamala Harris from Donald Trump. Which is unacceptable in a democracy.
In the end, there can only be one conclusion: no matter who won, the American people would always lose. Voting for Donald Trump to solve the problems of the living conditions of the American working masses is like leaving someone in the desert because they are thirsty!
Look at the desert we are stuck in!
*Hugo Dionísio is a lawyer, geopolitical analyst, researcher at the Studies Office of the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP-IN).
Originally published in Strategic Culture Foundation.
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