By LUIS FELIPE MIGUEL*
From Donald Trump's term, based on the signs presented so far, we can expect an attempt to organizationalize the American political system.
I avoid making bombastic projections, but it is difficult to resist in the heat of the moment: the new election of Donald Trump has hit, I won't say the last, but one of the last nails in the coffin of liberal democracy as it was built throughout the 20th century.
Donald Trump's victory is not exactly unexpected. The old orange fraud has never lost the support of his original base — workers and rednecks and impoverished, who feel increasingly excluded and without prospects in today's United States. And it has grown both among big money and among black and Latino voters.
Among billionaires who were previously sympathetic to the Democrats, Donald Trump has gained open support, discreet sympathy or at least neutrality. Among blacks and Latinos, there is a growing distrust of the “progressive neoliberalism” discourse offered to them by the Democratic Party.
In fact, the Democratic Party seems to not know what to offer the electorate. In 2020, Joe Biden won a narrow victory — in a country plunged into the chaos of Donald Trump's first term, including a management of the pandemic that was as criminal as Jair Bolsonaro's.
As president, he seemed to believe that a return to “normality” (i.e., to the same old politics) was what the people wanted. He tried hard to improve economic indicators, without realizing that their electoral impact was no longer the same.
At the beginning of his term, in a bold gesture, Joe Biden supported the strike by Amazon workers, who were demanding the right to unionize. But the result was not to garner support from the vast precarious sector (those portrayed in the Oscar winner nomadland) and rather to garner the antipathy of the barons of the “new economy” — reinforced by the timid attempts to regulate big tech.
It is worth remembering that Jeff Bezos, from Amazon, determined that the The Washington Post, the newspaper he also owns, broke with tradition of supporting Democratic candidates and declared itself neutral in this year's election.
When Joe Biden's physical and mental incapacity to run for reelection became all too evident and — after a long and exhausting process — he had to be replaced, the choice of his vice president seemed “natural,” but no less wrong for that.
She seemed to be the quickest solution, capable of uniting the party. But, apart from that, she was admittedly an unskilled politician, a bad speaker and lacking in charisma, her only asset was being a woman of African and Indian descent.
With the identity appeal proving increasingly counterproductive, alienating more voters than it brought in, and having to be pushed into the background, Kamala Harris ran an erratic campaign.
It was the same old lukewarm policy of making gestures in multiple directions to ultimately keep everything as it is.
From Donald Trump's term, based on the signs presented so far, we can expect an attempt to Orbanize the American political system. In other words, to follow in the footsteps of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and eliminate all controls on his personal power.
This outcome is the result of the crisis of the liberal democratic model.
The secret of this arrangement lay in the working class's ability to impose limits on the functioning of the capitalist economy. In other words, historical democracies are not defined as a set of abstract rules of the game, as is often presented in political science, but as the result of a certain correlation of forces.
The accommodation of liberal democracy allows, on the one hand, the dominated to have some voice in the decision-making process and, on the other, the dominant to know how to calibrate the concessions necessary to guarantee the reproduction of their own domination.
One necessary component in this equation is, of course, the regulatory capacity of the State. Another is its relative autonomy in relation to property owners, so that measures can be adopted that counter them in the short term.
The current crisis is marked by the erosion of practically all the pillars of this arrangement. “Right-wing populism” provides answers to it — illusory, false, but answers nonetheless. The center and the electoral left do not even reach that level. And, without the recovery of the pressure capacity of a transformed working class, the model of liberal democracy will inevitably deteriorate into an open oligarchy, with a fragile electoral veneer.
We are talking about the United States. But, as Horace said (and Marx liked to quote): from you fable narratur.
* Luis Felipe Miguel He is a professor at the Institute of Political Science at UnB. Author, among other books, of Democracy in the capitalist periphery: impasses in Brazil (authentic). [https://amzn.to/45NRwS2].
Originally published on Boitempo's blog.
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