John Westmoreland assesses the meaning of the Democrats’ defeat in the US Presidential election

Donald Trump is now all but certain to win the US Presidential election. It is a victory for the right. At one level, it’s a victory for gun-toting, conspiracy-fascinated absurdity, and a defeat for washed-out liberal hypocrisy. At another, it is an indicator that Americans have displayed an unprecedented level of anger at a decaying system, with unconstrained corporate power and an out-of-touch political class.

The victory is historic. Trump’s victory speech started with a self-evident truth – there has never been a political victory like it in America. Trump, as he said, overcame exceptional difficulties, from being a convicted felon to an attempted assassination.

On the path to victory, he taunted rational discourse and pissed on political convention. Some of the notable absurdities that made headlines included unprecedented personal attacks on Harris, declaring that he intended to be a dictator and performing mock oral sex on a microphone. Harris and the Democrats thought every dumb thing he did meant votes in the bag. But the truth is, he was demonstratively mocking the smug American liberal consensus and graphically showing that he would be an alternative.

Liberal commentators complemented Trump’s absurd performance with their own uncomprehending drivel. They are so out of touch with what is happening among Americans that they failed to see what Trump is about. All Harris had to do, they thought, was be the grown up in the room, sound progressive and appeal to reason. It remains to be seen what they have learned from the results.

The liberal media have to work out why their warnings that Trump is an unstable, unhinged fascist went unheeded. This is important for the left to get to grips with too, because Trump not only won the decisive swing states. The Senate has gone to the Republicans and the House of Representatives may well follow. Not only that, but Trump looks to have won the popular vote too. Even in states where Harris has won, Trump has eaten into her majority, even in California.

Who voted Trump?

It is astonishing that a sizeable number of Latino voters have voted for Trump. A racist comedian at Trumps’s New York rally referred to Puerto Rico as ‘garbage’. A key Trump campaigner, Steve Miller, verged on Nazism in a rally where he had posters of Latino faces pinned to the walls as a way to distinguish ‘real’ Americans from immigrants.

The Harris camp thought that winning immigrant votes would be a slam-dunk, but they were wrong. Women too seem to have disappointed liberal expectations that they would vote Harris to restore Roe v Wade and strengthen reproductive rights. But again, many women had other voting priorities. Hispanic women, for example, seem to have supported the idea that family values are more important than reproductive rights. Being superficially progressive on race and gender, far from winning votes, provided a target for Trump, who used it to claim the Democrats have deserted working-class Americans.

Young men have also provided Trump with a good deal of support. And, disappointing as that fact is, there is little wonder that young males should reject Harris. The Democrats have presided over the decay of social infrastructure and done nothing about the low-paid insecure jobs with which young people struggle. The evidence suggests that young men feel abandoned by the system.

Trump began every rally with the question, ‘Do you feel better today than you did four years ago?’ and the crowd inevitably roared back ’No!’. The economy has been a big winner for Trump despite Democrat claims that Bidenomics has been a success. Workers are not looking at stats about economic performance, they are looking at long days and low pay. The outsourcing of jobs and the decay of former industrial towns proved to be easy meat for Trump who linked decline to immigration and simplistic solutions.

But the biggest factor turning voters away from the Democrats are issues that are normally the territory of the left – war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza.

Disruption worked

Trump is no peace monger. He boasted about dropping the biggest-ever bomb on Afghanistan and he is an ardent supporter of Netanyahu. That he could be seen as rescuing the world from war may seem absurd, but some voters took this at face value. This was made possible by the Democrats’ massive hike is weapons spending and sending bombs, missiles, ships and troops to conflicts across the globe.

Trump’s campaign was never about offering a peaceful alternative to the Democrats, it was about disrupting the consensus in the right-wing and liberal media that the USA’s role in the world was a positive one.

In interviews during the campaign, Trump was pressed on his stance on Ukraine along with his alleged friendship with Vladimir Putin. Trump refused to back down and turned his fire on Biden’s war mongering. His bullish approach reinforced his image as someone who would stand up to vested interests, and who put the economy before military ventures that are costing billions. He presented this as part of his plan to ‘put America first’, which chimes with his base.

It is unlikely that Americans voted for Trump because of his anti-war posturing alone. Most reporting outlets are saying that the economy was the key factor. But without doubt, for many voters, stopping another world war influenced their decision, even if it was only a justification for deserting the Democrats. Voter political intentions in this election are complex, and that is why the results in many states have surprised analysts. But we shouldn’t go along with some on the left who argue that Trump voters were voting for fascism. While it would be going too far to say that they voted against the system as such, it is probably accurate to say they voted against a system that had let them down. This is important because it means some will be open to political arguments about what is needed to change the system of which they disapprove.

For Americans who are horrified about the genocide in Gaza and Biden’s complicity in it, voting Trump was not that difficult. That may seem absurd, but it reflects the shallowness of US politics, where voting choices lie between two evils, each with their own dangers, and voters have to calculate which alternative will kill fewer innocent people.

Nevertheless, millions of Americans went to vote with the desire to end genocide in Gaza uppermost in their minds. If it couldn’t find a rational expression, that is because of the limited democracy on offer.

Where now for the left?

It is difficult to predict what we can expect from Trump’s victory. His promises to deport immigrants, disregard the danger of climate change, and cut back state agencies that offer some protection to Americans are all things we should be concerned about. He seems certain to use his victory to fill state agencies with his own right-wing henchmen.

There is likely to be a backlash against the Democratic leadership. Harris’ performance was pitiful, but it is more likely that hatred for Joe Biden will emerge among Democrats who have lost out.  Genocide Joe was, without doubt, the main architect of the Trump victory, and he will not be forgiven. But it’s more than that. The Democrats have all but convinced the American working class that they are not a force for radical change.

The so-called Left Democrats have also failed the test Trump set. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the pin-up for left Democrats, supported Biden to the last, even when Trump was surging ahead in the summer. Bernie Sanders, another left icon, never failed to apologise for ‘my friend’ Joe Biden. The left has to come to terms with the fact that the Democrats are not going to be the vehicle to take on Trump and the implications of his presidency going forwards.

The positive news is that Jill Stein, the Green candidate who stood on a clear pro-Palestine manifesto, did well in difficult circumstances, taking 22% of the vote in Dearborn, Michigan. Harris only got 28% of the vote there, in what should have been a secure Democrat state. The accusations that Stein paved the way for Trump winning Dearborn with 47% of the vote won’t wash. If Stein hadn’t stood, there is no guarantee that her voters would turn to Harris, because it is clearly an anti-Democrat vote. Stein’s vote should tell left Democrats what they need to do going forward.

Americans voted for Trump because they wanted a clear break with the past. Trump has not been given a free pass by American workers to do what he wants. Trump-voting workers will want better lives in a number of different registers, and the left can only build opposition to Trump by building on that. The vote for Jill Stein shows that there is a desire for a serious left alternative to the Democrats.

The impact of the genocide in Gaza and the rejection of ‘forever wars’ by voters tells us that a radical left party with internationalism at its heart has a very important role to play in the coming years. It is crucially important that this happens. Trump’s victory is going to thrill the right across the world, and socialist internationalism is the antidote to the contagion.