More words to inspire
Once again I expected/hoped that Donald Trump would lose to a woman candidate, and once again I was disappointed that this did not happen, so once again we have to endure four more years.
There was reason to think Trump would lose. Polling showed a close election with a slight edge for Harris in the swing states. Plus, Trump had been convicted of felonies and sexual assault, and even narrowly escaped an assassination attempt (by a Republican voter!), plus is four years older and crazier, plus spewed one crazy and offensive rant after the next. Despite all of this Trump benefited both from a right-wing political infrastructure that put its thumb on the electoral scales, and from a right-wing media apparatus that has grown in reach and stature particularly in the collapse of local news. In contrast, the Democratic party was hobbled by its classism and lacking a comparable unified outreach mechanism.
Eight years ago on the night of the 2016 election, I wrote some words to inspire that helped prove eerily prescient (I gave a heads-up about a possible pandemic and was unfortunately proved correct) and which I think still holds, for better and for worse. "An increasing repudiation of corporate neoliberalism", "the less-than-unified front of the Republican party", "we've won before even when things looked bad", and "the population will not be restless" -- it's been nearly a decade since I wrote those words and they hold now, maybe moreso, as they did then.
It sure seems depressing, that after all this time and all this work it looks like we've gotten nowhere. And yet we have no choice but to work and to hope. Months before the 2024 U.S. election, my son asked me, "What are you going to do if Trump wins?", I replied immediately and simply: "Fight."
Frankly, I think that there is reason to hope, and this is where I'm going to delve into some thoughts on capitalism and fascism and history.
I'm borrowing much of the following analysis from the excellent book The Capital Order by Clara Mattei. The book discusses the origins of what's called "austerity" in the early 1920s. People were told that the economy was locked in and forever unchanging, and yet during the Great War (World War I) people saw that the economy changed quite dramatically and quickly. That inspired people to organize to change their economies (coupled with a revolution in Russia) during the years 1918 to 1920, what were called the "Red Years" or the Red Scare.
That revolt had to be beated down, and in the capitalist countries it was, but to ensure that it stayed down, government planners in the early 1920s in sessions in London and in Brussels worked to plan out what we know of as "austerity": depriving the poor and working classes of resources as a means of discipline. The problem with that is that those classes then channeled their outrage into supporting and empowering fascist demagogues, most notably Hitler and Mussolini. It then took another world war to defeat those fascist demagogues.
Powers in the west rallied to win those wars, and used the totality of their societies to do so (one headline in The Onion's mock history "Our Dumb Century" for 1942 read: "Ladies, Negroes Momentarily Useful"). That temporary transformation of the society left a residue of equality that helped galvanized popular activism in the United States in the subsequent decades, leading to victories in civil rights, women's rights, consumer rights, and the Great Society. Those movements for democracy caught the ire of tobacco-lawyer-turned-U.S.-Supreme-Court-justice Lewis Powell, whose infamous memo galvanized a counter-response from businesses involving pro-business media propaganda and a reprisal of "austerity" now falling under the misleading term "neoliberalism".
And it was under the neoliberal regime that the United States been under since, launched in earnest under Ronald Reagan but continuing on a bipartisan basis. To be sure, there have been organized efforts during neoliberalism to fight back: the battle for Seattle and anti-corporate-globalization efforts, the struggle against the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, and efforts in the electoral sphere exemplified by Bernie Sanders, among others. Since 2020, there has been some anti-neoliberal policy reversal, represented by government assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Biden administration's support for poor and working people. This adjustment in policy resulted in record lows in unemployment, record highs in wages, and some infrastructure investment.
But overall the austerity/neoliberalism continues, perhaps now transitioning to a fascist phase as exemplified by the 2024 electoral results in the United States and to some extent elections worldwide. It also means that the electoral rise, election, and re-election of Donald Trump represents a symptom of deeper problems, and that a positive economy is now no longer a guarantor of electoral prospects. Given the much-improved economy, Harris should have won in a rout; she didn't.
What would it take now to reverse austerity/neoliberalism? It took a world war to reverse course the first time, but such an alignment seems unlikely given that countries and peoples worldwide are now more alike than unlike. What may prove critical is a new kind of struggle, not between groups of humans, but between all humans and our shared environment. We're all in this together now (and really have been the whole time, but keenly so in this era), what with the emergence of global pandemics (like COVID-19) and the increasing worldwide calamities caused or exacerbated by global heating (the wildfires around Los Angeles being a prominent example at this writing), plus things we can't yet foresee (my money is on coronal mass ejections). Any divisions among humans will prove counterproductive to trying to survive in the years and decades to come.
That means that we will have to look for new social structures that foster coordination and cooperation. This is what I've been working on in recent years with the Participatory Economy Project and which is now being amplified with the newly-formed International Network for Democratic Economic Planning. It can seem futile fighting against something big and hopeless, especially given the immediate threats from the forthcoming Trump administration. But we are living in "interesting times" as the adage goes, and the possibilities for real bottom-up change are much greater. What is marginal now may be central later; the heresy can become the orthodoxy. May we press on and continue to work.