By RUI ALEX ABREU*
Trump is riding on our inability to compete with social majorities that do not see themselves in the system, which in these last elections are two thirds of the population: one third who voted for Trump and one third who abstained.
More than two weeks after the US presidential elections, Donald Trump's resounding victory is undeniable.
Three hundred and twelve electors, fifty-three senators, seventy-five million votes (victory in the popular vote), twenty-seven governors and six Supreme Court justices of the United States appointed by Republicans; these are some of the numbers of the new institutional and political legitimacy that sustains Donald Trump in this new political cycle.
After losing his reelection bid in 2020, how did the people restore their political trust to a former president who violated the basic rights of women and immigrants, who has dozens of lawsuits against him in the courts (including several convictions), and who contributed to the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens during the COVID-XNUMX pandemic? After all, why did Donald Trump win?
Neoliberalism is its name
Ronald Reagan's rise to power in 1979 brought a deepening of capitalism in a neoliberal format that placed the state entirely at the service of big capital, particularly financial capital. He reduced the state's capacity for economic dynamism in recessions, handed over strategic sectors of the economy to the private sector, cut social support programs, dismantled labor laws and organizations defending the working class; he lowered the living conditions of the population, leaving the working class in greater social vulnerability; he created mechanisms to steal from the federal budget through public debt. It was within this economic and social structure that the North American GDP multiplied by nine, growing from three trillion dollars to twenty-seven trillion in the last forty-five years.
In terms of sectors, the United States led important transformations in the economy worldwide, based on a globalization that fueled the profit rates of its mega-corporations. The Bigtechs, which were growing at the time, implemented the digital economy, and industry relocated to the South and East in search of cheaper production factors, especially labor. Financial capital occupied increasingly larger parts of the economy, relegating the role of the state as a driving force and subjugating the primary and secondary sectors to the logic and practice of financial capitalization.
The working class's condition was accompanied by these structural economic changes, being pushed into precariousness without unions and workers' committees having the capacity to resist the changes in production relations imposed by neoliberalism. Real wages were falling, currently standing slightly above 1980 levels, removing from the labor factor the share of the immense wealth created over the last forty-five years. All this with the complacency of the left, which in the center of the empire was (and is) almost non-existent in organized terms and did not want to provide responses to the difficulties imposed on the people. This North American neoliberal economic framework was replicated by Western economies, giving rise to similar situations of intense capital accumulation and widespread impoverishment of the population in Europe and the rest of the Americas.
It is in this context that Donald Trump emerges and far-right movements re-emerge to gather support from the state of despair of the working population who do not see this neoliberal system as an improvement in their living conditions, having guaranteed themselves and future generations worse living conditions than their parents, identifying the left (normally anemic in its proposals) as an integral part of the system. A capitalist system that dumps its crises on those who work with increasingly draconian fiscal adjustments supported by an ideology that individualizes problems and solutions, which has not been adequately contradicted in the debate and proposals of the left in recent decades.
The class struggle that is not fought on both sides creates fertile ground for the far right and conditions for the continued degradation of the living conditions of a working class that is increasingly politicized by neoliberalism and neofascism. Without an alternative on the left and with limited prospects for struggle, “Trumpisms” emerge as catalysts for general discontent, being the political option that seems most likely to change the current state of affairs.
Joe Biden's Economy
The indicators show an economy recovering at the end of Joe Biden's term. Inflation, reflecting the disruption of economic circuits due to the war in Ukraine, reached 9.1% in June 2022 (the highest in the last forty years), and stood at 2,4% in September of this year. The unemployment rate also remained stable between 3,8% and 5% during the Democratic term, and is considered by liberal analysts to be a situation of full employment. GDP grew 6,1% in 2021, benefiting from the negative growth of -2,2% in 2020 caused by the impact of the COVID pandemic. From 2022 to 2024, it grew between 2,5% and 2,9%, which gives the same analysts the discourse of a strong economy with solid growth.
What the liberal indicators do not show is the 25% increase in the cost of basic food products and the 30% increase in the cost of energy. After all, inflation is not the same for everyone. They do not show the forty-one million American citizens who are in poverty. After all, GDP does not grow for everyone. They do not show a real estate market inflated by banks and investment groups who see real estate as yet another source of speculation and profit, making prices unattainable for most workers. They do not show a working class crushed by its working conditions, which, in order to meet daily expenses, accumulates two or three jobs in order to bring home a decent wage. After all, Joe Biden's full employment is full of precariousness and misery.
On the external front, due to imperial obligation, the strategy of the economy of chaos was imposed, promoting instability and conflicts as a method to delay Chinese growth. The economic war against China has created inflationary repercussions due to the strong interdependence that exists between the two economies. The largest trading partner of the United States has been China, which was only replaced by Mexico after the start of the war in Ukraine. The American demand to economically separate the powers and their spheres of influence is consummated through the warmongering policy and the various economic wars that the White House promotes. The confrontation with China promises to increase with the election of Trump, as well as the economic contradictions that this foreign policy causes internally, with inflation being a real threat to the purchasing power of the working class.
Why didn't the left win?
The analysis of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the resulting political disorientation that it caused throughout the global left is tired. The most striking feature was the left's accommodation to the positions it won through elections and its distancing from the working class.
Liberal jargon has taken over the discourse of the left and radical proposals have been replaced by technical competence, as if the role of the left were now to manage neoliberal budgets better than the right, establishing a measure, a social welfare or a subsidy here and there. The left has become a defender of a humanized capitalism, an entity that managed to exist in the bygone days of the Cold War and materialized in the European social democracies of the second half of the twentieth century. In today's global politics, "capitalism with a human face" has no place whatsoever, and its advocates are an endangered species.
Participating in the global movement that politics made to the right, the left lost its ideological anchors, its political references and its grassroots work that allowed it to have social penetration.
Increasingly distorted diagnoses of the current situation are being developed by liberal indicators, which are considered to be reliable translators of the population's living conditions. GDP growth is seen as the absolute determinant of good policy, ignoring the details of who benefits from this growth; the unemployment rate is presented as a rate of job satisfaction, even though extreme precariousness is camouflaged in these figures; inflation is used as a measure of purchasing power, without comparing its weight with incomes as unequal as those that currently exist.
The objectives have shifted from the political struggle for power to the election of representatives in bourgeois democracy. The proposals have inevitably become unclear, following the diagnoses made incorrectly. Increasingly mushy programs emerge from the inability to communicate with the working class, trying to use liberal measures to achieve some decisive vote. Neoliberal proposals such as financial education in schools, PPPs and concessions of public services to private companies have become commonplace in left-wing programs and governance. The left has not only stopped presenting a proposal for a different society, but has also been assimilated and is currently identified as “the system”.
Even in self-criticism, the reference has been lost (I include myself here). Terms such as “institutionalization”, “decharacterization”, “loss of identity” and “distancing from the base” have overshadowed the good old “bourgeoisification” that so well defines the process through which the overwhelming majority of parties and cadres of the Western left have gone.
The left's incapacity for transformation is well known per se, unable to overcome the time of class struggle with its voluntarism. It is the class contradictions that determine this time of struggle. But Donald Trump and his “little Trumps” only prevail because of our inability to question and propose the overcoming of capitalism, which today, in the face of the clash of the sociosphere with the bio and geosphere, assumes the form of extermination. Neofascism only grows in the mix of the left with neoliberal capitalism.
It is also known that neofascism, which appears to be anti-systemic, is nothing more than a political hardening of the liberal project, creating a stronger relationship between the state and the working class, guaranteeing greater profit margins for billionaires and consolidating social inequality as an objective to pursue. It is therefore not possible to defeat neofascist politics without combating the liberal economic base that sustains it. The strategy of the broad front to defeat the far right suffers from this original sin: it tries to defeat the neofascist political head by feeding its neoliberal economic body.
Donald Trump is running on our inability to fight against social majorities that do not identify with the system, which in these last elections are two thirds of the population: one third who voted for Donald Trump and one third who abstained.
This is a phase of the struggle of theoretical demands, values and practices. Clarity in the social and economic proposal is essential to overcome the Trumpist world that is being built. Fear and bourgeoisification will only guarantee that neo-fascist regimes will impose themselves in the times to come.
*Rui Alex Abreu was elected mayor by the Left Bloc in Oeiras and Lisbon.
References
https://pt.tradingeconomics.com
https://pt.countryeconomy.com/governo/pib/estados-unidos
https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cz0m3l7r5yko
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-283.html
https://www.statista.com/chart/26882/us-energy-costs-natural-gas-gasoline-electricity
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