By Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: http://thewire.in/79998/the-deepening-crisis-plaguing-the-uss-political-parties/

The moral and political decay within both the Democrat and Republican establishments is symptomatic of the crumbling US-led, post-1945 world order.

Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party’s leadership may blame everyone but themselves for their spectacular defeat in the US presidential and congressional elections, and the GOP’s oligarchs may congratulate themselves on an unexpected victory, but both would be deluding themselves.

The crisis of both political parties has just deepened and exposed their political and moral decay. The American electorate, whose disillusionment with politics-as-usual propelled Donald Trump to the White House,  is unlikely to find much in its 45th president’s actions that will satisfy its hopes and dreams. It is already evident that Trump, the anti-politics non-politician, has been preparing to betray his working-class political base for several months now. The US is in for a very rough time over the next four years.

Since Clinton’s unexpected defeat, leading Democrats and liberal commentators have identified several blocs of voters to hold responsible for her loss: millennials, African-Americans, women and even those who voted for the Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green candidate Jill Stein.

But they have yet to identify the class factor in the presidential election – why did so many white and black working class men and women either stay at home or vote for Trump?

Class: the unspeakable factor

To the Democratic party, class is a force that dare not speak its name, especially the working kind. For many, the working class does not even exist, let alone possess any political saliency. The democrats have adopted in toto the politics of identity – women/gender, black/race, LGBT – and consigned the working class to the political dustbin.

Yet, they embrace with a passion the interests and ideas of the billionaire class – centred on Wall Street banks, investment firms and hedge funds. This class of people has supplied billions to the Clintons – $3 billion over the past four decades – and to the Democratic party since the 1970s. As then-presidential candidate Barack Obama noted in his book, Audacity of Hope, released before the 2008 presidential election, Wall Street bankers, as a class, think only of their own interests and have little empathy for anyone else.

Obama also noted, with a hint of disappointment, that he spent so much time with such people that he began to think just like them.

In 2012, the New York Council on Foreign Relations, the elite think tank at the heart of the American establishment, declared that Obama was in practice a traditional Republican candidate for the presidency. Wall Street had two candidates in 2012, therefore, the other being the former head of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney.

Clinton and her husband Bill’s dance with bankers and financiers has been a longer affair than Obama’s, the first African-American president who delivered little to black Americans over the course of two terms. Indeed, young African-American men are being gunned down by police at rates that have been declared a national epidemic by Harvard’s medical researchers. The politics of identity, around which Democratic politics turns, has proven to be a dead end for minorities. Obama has been a lame duck for eight years as far as the US’s minority communities are concerned. The opportunities available to their communities diminished steadily while Wall Street banks and corporations were bailed out using trillions of US taxpayer dollars.

Clinton promised nothing more than the continuation of corrupt, money-soaked politics, with all the frills of identity politics and schmaltz about diversity and unity wrapped around it – that effectively meant politics as usual. Yet, the politics of class and inequality stared the Clintonites in the face – they either could not see it for the salient political factor it had become or they defined their strategy as one designed to protect the billionaire class by focusing on the abundant negative characteristics of the Republican presidential candidates’ campaigns, Trump’s in particular.

The Democrats played court politics while the American electorate demanded radical change. How else to explain the fact that the Democratic Party organised this Shakespearian tragedy of a campaign. According to a batch of emails released by Wikileaks that contained emails to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager and intellectual-political guru or simply her personal Machiavelli, the Clinton camp’s preferred Republican candidate was Trump, someone who probably had no serious idea that he would get anywhere in the GOP’s primaries.

Clinton’s team acted accordingly, gratuitously name-checking Trump and increasing media coverage of the controversial candidate, along with Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, people who would shift the Republican campaign even further to the right and play into Clinton’s grubby hands.

Similar sabotage tactics were deployed against Clinton’s main challenger for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders – his economic plans were declared naïve by Clinton spin doctors, he was denied full access to party voter data by the Democratic National Convention, debates were scheduled at odd times, college voter registration drives weren’t conducted with vigour as students were backing the socialist and the superdelegate system was used to build belief in the inevitability of a Clinton win.

Had Sanders’ candidacy been seen as an opportunity to galvanise the party’s base and message to all those who were screaming for change and respite from the power of Big Money, rather than a block to the insatiable political ambition of the Clinton dynasty and its acolytes, the US would likely be in a very different position today, one that would not involve the riots and protests that have attracted thousands since Trump’s victory on November 9.

Fissures in the GOP

The GOP’s crisis also continues and runs as deep as that of the Democratic Party. The Republicans have won both houses, and nominally the presidency, but have paid a very high price. Their candidate won 5 million fewer votes than Romney in 2012. Trump ran a campaign that gained ballast from anti-conservative ideological positions; he declared Muslim immigrants terror suspects and Mexicans murderers and rapists; he treated and spoke about women in the most sexually aggressive terms and boasted about numerous acts of sexual assault he had carried out. Trump’s promotion of violence at his rallies and his cult of personality, declaration of complete knowledge of every subject and solution to every problem, and refusal to accept that he could lose a fair election brought into disrepute the party’s leaders who refused to repudiate him.
The US’s soft power has been severely damaged, its image tarnished, its credibility questioned by allies. Few welcome a Trump presidency but ISIS is among his champions; how many more jihadis will Trump recruit for their cause?

But the GOP will pay a high price for victory. Trump is unmanageable – by his family, his campaign team, close advisers and his vice president. He has already rowed back on abolishing Obama’s landmark Affordable Care Act, which the party has made a centrepiece of its campaign. People backing Republican candidates for Congress did not support their conservative programmes.

What will further damage the Trump presidency and the Republican party is the betrayal of Trump’s supporters. He has forgotten his promises to white workers to hike up taxes for the rich and deliver more welfare to the needy. His attacks on free trade have softened into talk about how smart his trade deals will be and the likely pick as his commerce secretary is a steel magnate who has no time for trade unions. Trump’s options for treasury secretary are hedge fund managers. The economic and financial core of his programme centres on massive tax cuts that will largely benefit the super-rich.

An impending betrayal

The betrayal of Trump’s core voters in the US’s rust belt began some time ago when he courted the Heritage Foundation – the heart of conservative ideology in America – and sought out Ed Feulner, the think tank’s former president, to head his transition team. Feulner is drawing up lists of appointees – hundreds of them – for the major departments of Trump’s administration.

The anti-politics, anti-conservative Republican president-elect seems also to have retreated from his ‘isolationist’ reputation and adopted the Heritage Foundation’s military policy – to strengthen the US’s firepower in all armed services around the world to counter threats to American power.

That is not what Trump’s supporters signed up for. They may not care for a while and give their man a chance to find his feet. But they will be watching and waiting for some concrete actions to deliver on promises made during the campaign that might not make it through a hardcore right-wing congress.

The moral and political decay of the US’s two main political parties contains many dangers for its people, and for the world, over the next several years. Their decay is symptomatic of the crumbling of the very foundations of the post-1945 world order built by the US.

This is evident in the vote to Brexit and the crisis of the EU’s legitimacy; in the popularity of the hard right in Europe, the rise of leftist movements in Greece and Spain and, more patchily in Britain; and in the demands of China, India and other emerging powers for a greater voice in the halls of global power, while they themselves sit on the powder-keg of popular discontent from the impacts of globalisation. And it is evident in the flow of refugees flooding into Europe due to American and other western interventions in the Middle East – Iraq, Libya and Syria, among others.

But Wall Street has found a new friend in a de-regulator president – banks are safer from regulation, as are oil and gas corporations once a climate-change denier is appointed to the Environmental Protection Agency.


Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City, University of London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.

By Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: http://thewire.in/78491/us-election-elite-referendum/

Whoever wins the US presidential election on November 8, the result will reflect a verdict of the American people on their political and economic elites.

Make no mistake, the elite, the establishment, ruling class, oligarchy, fat cats, billionaire class, Wall Street – call it what you will – has been on trial for the past 12 months and has been found guilty on all counts. All we are waiting for is the sentence. It could be the harshest one for the US and the world – a Donald Trump victory, however narrow. Or it could be a final health warning – put your house in order or face a total shutdown of America, Inc.

It is telling that when it looked as if the Democrats could take control of the House of Representatives, the Wall Street Journal lamented the possibility of an end to congressional gridlock. Why? Because, for US corporations, political gridlock and government shutdowns are functional. Big energy corporations, major pharmaceuticals and Wall Street finance houses do not want the sort of government that responds to popular demands for reform and corporate regulation.

They want to drill where they want, sell overpriced drugs without fear of effective monitoring by the federal government, and continue playing roulette (why blame the Russians) with people’s hard-earned pension funds, to hide away money in tax havens, pay little tax, enjoy the trappings of super-wealth without democratic oversight or moral conscience.

Gridlock is only a problem if you want a government that actually responds to people’s needs and demands – for better infrastructure, a school system that doesn’t fail its children, a healthcare regime run for patients rather than profit, a university sector that gives young graduates a chance for a future unencumbered by massive indebtedness and a globalised economy that provides adequate support to domestic industrial workers and communities. Forget the plight of the US’s minorities, the levels of police violence against young African-American men that Harvard medics have suggested be declared a national epidemic in need of statutory investigation and remedial action by the Centers for Disease Control, the near-total lack of gun control that kills around 30,000 Americans annually and the fact that the US has the highest numbers of people in prison in the world.

The oft-used quote from either Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine, or Henry Thoreau – that he “who governs best, governs least” – has passed its usefulness in the US today. Its rejection is written into every line of every sentence, and the 26 million primary election votes, of the major insurgent campaigns this year – against the wishes of the Democratic and Republican party leaderships – of near-victor socialist senator Bernie Sanders and the billionaire self-styled man of the people, Trump.

Hillary Clinton stands as the last line of defence of the American political and economic oligarchy today. Millions stand behind her to be sure – not principally millions of people but Wall Street’s dollars that bankroll her campaign, rebuffed Trump and did not give a cent to Sanders. As usual, Wikileaks tells the story – of Clinton warning Wall Street banks that some popular reforms are needed to placate the dangerous classes, the 47% that Mitt Romney dismissed in 2012 as yearning for government handouts, all the while soliciting donations to the Clinton Foundation and millions in speaking fees for the family’s bank account.

And Trump has been right to call out the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for its sabotage of the Sanders campaign. Clinton may not have been involved but, as a leader of the party, her campaign had a privileged position with the DNC, hence the removal of it chair last summer.

The email saga, which should never have been an issue in this election, has remained one not because of its own uniqueness or its implications for national security. Plenty of public officials have destroyed, lost or kept hidden government papers and emails – former President George W. Bush is reputed to have ‘lost’ 22 million emails, some from the critical run-up to the illegal aggression against Iraq in 2003. But in the context of the longevity of the Clinton dynasty, its immersion in Wall Street dollars and the use of the family foundation in a complex system of charitable donations in return for political favours, lucrative government contracts and personal income, operating a personal email server smacks of prior right of ownership of the state and the privatisation of a public office – the US department of state.

It is frequently asked how the US has arrived at this point – a country with vast resources, wealth, opportunity, some of the best universities and minds in the world. The answer is quite simple – its two main parties are machines with the sole aim of winning power for its leaders, financed by corporate donations in return for laissez faire from state regulation, a beneficent tax regime and generous government subsidies won by armies of paid lobbyists in Washington, DC.

Pollsters tell us that around 13% of the electorate is either undecided or is leaning towards voting for third party candidates – that is almost three times the usual percentage in the week running up to the election. It was around 19-20% just a few weeks ago. What are they waiting for in order to decide? The answer is quite simple – they can’t decide which candidate is worse so they swing on the basis of the latest scandal or leak. They are not so different to those who’ve decided on their candidate, or rather, on who they dislike more.

Clinton and Trump are considered the two most disliked candidates for the White House in living memory. One poll indicated that over half of Trump voters do not believe he will make a good president – but they could not stomach a Clinton presidency. Most Clinton supporters are trying to prevent a Trump victory.
The American jury – actually about 70 million of a total of 220 million eligible voters – will send its verdict in a matter of hours in this most exhausting, exhilarating, fascinating and shocking of elections. Whoever wins, there is no question that American society is unravelling, the domestic political order is falling apart.
Let’s leave the last word to political thinker Antonio Gramsci who, in a Mussolini prison, could see beyond its walls and produce timeless insights:

“At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic “men of destiny.”

Win or lose on November 8, Trump will cast a shadow over the US and directly or indirectly, the world, for a long time to come.

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City, University of London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.

by Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: http://thewire.in/77865/trump-people-gop-politics-white-identity-class-gender/

Donald Trump has fused economic worries, and racial and gender resentment into a politics of fear and revenge, a tactic that is not new to the Republican Party.

Why are so many white women supporting Donald Trump’s bid for the US presidency instead of that of Hillary Clinton, the first female major party candidate for the White House? On top of everything that Trump has said about some women in particular and others in general, he also repudiated Roe vs Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that enabled women’s right to abortion – a right that the GOP has chipped at for decades.

Why are so many white workers supporting a billionaire elitist who exploits his own workers? Trump uses illegal immigrants in his various companies, undercuts wages and uses Chinese steel to build his hotels in spite of his complaints about China dumping goods in the US.

Why are so many relatively affluent Americans backing Trump?

The answer, according to new research by Gallup economist Jonathan Rothwell, is a lethal mixture of financial anxiety, fear and hopelessness for the future – of immigrants, globalisation, job security, health – and the politics of the white identity.

They yearn for a mythical golden age of 50 years ago. White Americans, especially men, are intending to vote for Trump not because they believe he is going to solve their problems but because they believe he will reverse the privileged treatment bestowed upon those who have destroyed white supremacy – the outsider, the foreigner, the immigrant, the asylum seeker, the terrorist, the African-American enemy within and even the highly successful white women who challenge white male supremacy.

In 2008 and 2012, the outsider – Barack Obama – was black. Now the outsider is in a woman’s body and on the verge of electoral victory.

Women who are supporting Trump tend to be those who occupy the weakest position in the labour market, which often then leads them into seeing themselves in traditional gender roles of nurturers and carers. The corollary to this is that they see their men as being responsible for protecting them and professionally successful women as competitors for the jobs of those men.

According to women’s historian Stephanie Coontz, the highest proportion of women in the US who are stay-at-home mothers reside in the bottom 25% income bracket. Their households need two incomes but when these women go out to work, they find only low-paying jobs that do not cover child care costs. They are locked into a position of being subordinates in male-dominated households, resentful of two-income families and strong, successful women.

Combining all this with anxieties about the looming spectre of a US dominated by non-whites – by 2050, the US will be a majority-minority nation – leads many into fearing that their country is facing an existential crisis.

Fears about globalisation, free trade and immigration are real enough as sources of economic insecurity. But combined with white hyper-ethno-nationalist identity politics, those fears become a major threat to US society as a whole. It also then becomes a threat to the US’s global authority – its identity as a land of immigrants, of opportunity based on merit and not race or colour, its democratic and egalitarian ethos and image, its attractiveness to the world as an advanced society, its soft power.

Trump has fused economic worries, and racial and gender resentment into a politics of fear and revenge, and into a politics fuelled by a desire to “take our country back” from enemies – domestic and foreign – and from the elites who gave the US away to Mexicans, Muslims and minorities.

But Trump was not the one to invent the politics of white identity, the GOP has framed the issues of gender and race in such terms for decades. In the 1960s and 1970s – during the rights revolution – the Republicans, along with their Dixiecrat allies, contended that unpatriotic blacks, students, pacifists and uppity women were destroying the fabric of the US that was based on family, religion, nation and hope.

When right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater won five southern states in the 1964 presidential election by opposing civil rights and de-segregation, he blazed a trail that was followed by successive GOP presidents. It is said that Goldwater lost the election but won the future. The lesson of 1964 led to the racist ‘southern strategy’ of Richard Nixon and to Ronald Reagan’s coded racism that was apparent in his call for the restoration of ‘state’s rights’ – the slogan of southern slavery and segregation – in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1980.

This call attracted non-conservative working class white voters to the party of low taxes and small government, but it only gave them a psychological wage. Economically, they lost ground due to de-industrialisation, globalisation and cuts to welfare programmes, as did, to an even greater extent, African-American workers.

The GOP’s coded racism divided black and white workers, and offered only hyper-anxiety about others taking what whites were supposed to have by prior right. From that politics of fear and resentment, the Republican Party developed a discourse that has damaged the basic tenets of democratic Americanism. It has been racist, xenophobic and misogynistic. Now it has sprouted a movement with the hallmarks of a “last stand” against a changing US – one that would declare an election stolen before a vote’s been cast and demand their opponent be jailed like a common criminal.

Trump’s rhetoric, however, is not new. He is just more open with it. Trump’s language, his coarse vulgarity and his lack of recognition of the legitimacy of the opposition is not his invention. It was pioneered during the 1990s by Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America – a declaration of war against the Democratic Party, bipartisanship and the Clintons.

Trump’s talk of ‘crooked Hillary’ and ‘Lying Ted’ is part of a rhetoric that began in the 1990s. The GOP employed Orwellian PR men like Frank Luntz who changed the language and imagery of politics and attached epithets to everything they opposed – corrupt, greedy, lazy. Luntz’s claim to fame is that he invented “climate change” as the neutral-sounding term to replace “global warming.”

No matter who wins this election, the country is in for a very tough time. The US will survive Trump, but at what price? And how will a changing world react – a China that still champs at the thought of its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of colonial exploitation, a Middle East seething with the lethal and illegal exercise of US military violence, an India trying to shed its colonial past and enter the top table of world politics – still dominated by the US-led West?

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City, University of London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.