By Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: https://thewire.in/89510/us-politics-trump-clinton-sanders/

The past year has stood for the exposure of the fundamental contours of a capitalist democracy that relies on state welfare for big corporations.

For many, 2016 has seen a turn for the worse in American politics, mainly due to the victory of Republican President-elect Donald Trump.

But here’s some feel-good news on which to end the year, an alternative interpretation of the events and processes in 2016, providing hope and encouragement for better things to come. To be sure, the world has changed, turned some kind of corner and placed us in dimly-charted territory.

But some things are clearer:

Wall Street lost the presidential election. Conservative ideology lost out to massive demands for bigger government for the people and heavier taxation of the corporate class and the very rich. The American establishment, it’s billionaire class, was, and is, on the ropes – its principal candidate, Hillary Clinton, was found guilty by the American electorate of standing for the status quo among other ‘crimes and misdemeanours’. A self-declared socialist won over 13 million votes in the primaries and is building a progressive campaign to change the US by inaugurating a new post-partisan politics.

Millions voted for candidates who demanded the US step back from its global policeman role and reduce its military footprint. Its post-1945 global military and other alliances were challenged and questioned and its Middle Eastern wars denounced, especially the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. The US’s ineffectiveness and role in fighting the so-called ISIS was brought into public debate. The very grounds of the Pax Americana were interrogated for the first time by one of the main contenders for the presidency.

Protests over the election of Trump criss-crossed the nation and funds began flowing in their millions to campaigns against intolerance, hate crimes and xenophobia. The politics of progressivism has taken a huge leap forward. It looks like it’s going to continue to do so. At the local level, where ordinary Americans actually live, millions voted to raise the minimum wage in many states. US politics has been changed for the better in 2016 and 2017 is likely to be even better.

In Britain, leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn was returned to lead the Labour party by an even larger margin than in September 2015, damaging the campaign of Blairites and their ilk to return the party to the failed policies of austerity, mimicking the Tories draconian attacks on working and middle class people.

The long-awaited Chilcot Report into the Iraq War provided a damning indictment of the leadership of Tony Blair and the doctoring of intelligence to support a prior commitment to wage illegal aggression on Saddam Hussein’s regime and the ordinary people of Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands in the process, displacing millions, and opening up a fertile space for the rise of ISIS. “Never again” was the principal message from that report, echoed across Britain, Europe and the US. No more neo-colonial wars was the rallying call of groups like ‘Stop The War’ and the families of soldiers killed in illegal conflict.

In Austria, the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen defeated the hard right’s Norbert Hofer decisively and helped stem the tide on the populist right movement across Europe. In Germany, millions supported taking in a million refugees fleeing oppression, hunger and war in Africa and the Middle east.  The nuclear agreement with Iran remains intact and avoided a (nother) major war in the region, and ISIS suffered major setbacks and defeats in its bid for a so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

In Italy, millions voted against the centralisation of power and a further erosion of popular sovereignty. The left remains strong in Spain and in Greece.

All over the world, ordinary people’s voices are being heard and making a difference. New forms of campaigning are taking off using digital platforms and social media designed by corporations that collaborate with powerful states to curb freedoms.

Julian Assange’s Wikileaks goes from strength to strength, exposing the corruptions of the corporate class and its political allies; Edward Snowden remains in exile, but free to critique the surveillance powers of the American state.

Senator Bernie Sanders has not stopped campaigning, nor have his millions of supporters. His various organisations are fighting to change American politics and wrest it back from the clutches of big corporations.

Brand New Congress will stand over 400 candidates for congress in the 2018 mid-terms; candidates will be drawn from outside the established political class and from any movement that rejects the established order, whether they be from the Tea party or Occupy Wall Street. They just need to be people who have serve the community well and place the collective interest above their individual interests. BNC is well on its way to selecting candidates for election and is raising large amounts from numerous small donations from ordinary people – just as Sanders crowd-sourced his own election campaign.

The Sanders Institute has begun ideological work to initiate study, analysis and discussion of the roots of inequality and what might be done about it.

Our Revolution – Sanders’ campaign at local level America – wants to bring ordinary people into local government and school boards and so on to change politics from the grass roots.

This is what 2016 stands for and should be remembered for: the exposure of the fundamental contours of a capitalist democracy that relies on state welfare for big corporations and corrodes democracy from within and without. For all their money, they still lost the election.

And that’s why elite candidates have to pretend to a politics of anti-elitism to get anywhere, why Trump could only win because he, rhetorically, socked it to the establishment. And it explains why Sanders got as many votes in the primaries as did Trump and why his new post-partisan politics threatens to challenge the corporate culture and colonisation of American government.

The American people showed they would not stand for more elite politics and narrow economic agendas of the hard right. A great foundation upon which the politics of the next decade is to be built.

One could quote some inspiring liberals at this point but a socialist who saw through the subterfuge and rhetoric of elite demagoguery is more appropriate: Eugene Debs, who despite all the odds fought against imperial war and for socialism a century ago. His analysis of the two main American political parties is as true today, and thoroughly exposed as such in the 2016 elections, as it was a century ago: “The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties — differing only in being committed to different sets of capitalist interests — they have the same principles under varying colors, are equally corrupt and are one in their subservience to capital and their hostility to labor.”

And he condemned the poverty of the many and wealth of the few: in a land of great resources, he argues, and willing workers, want was the result not of God or nature “but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity”.

2016 showed that the majority of Americans have had enough of capitalist elites who care not a jot for the interests of Americans let alone for the very planet itself.

As Bernie Sanders declared: “Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.”

Thank you, 2016!

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/84531/trumps-taiwan-call-signals-the-gops-resurgence/

Trump’s recent choices show he’s abandoning the anti-establishment rhetoric that won him the election in favour of the GOP’s traditional policies.

President-elect Donald Trump is now in the full embrace of the principles of the post-Reagan era Republican party. His telephone conversation with the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was most likely a calculated message meant for China, to say that it should expect a much harder line from Trump compared to current US President Barack’s Obama’s ‘rebalance’ or ‘pivot’ to Asia. Trump’s rhetoric echoes that of Mitt Romney, a 2012 GOP presidential candidate who was recently nominated as secretary of state, and Senator John McCain, who contested elections in 2008. Placed alongside Trump’s raft of cabinet and other senior appointments, and policy-oriented declarations, all indications now point to a Trump presidency, with due regard to his own idiosyncratic style, almost entirely in line with what would be expected of a conservative nationalist Republican chief executive.

This leaves Trump’s white working and middle-class supporters high and dry with respect to expecting an anti-establishment presidency from Trump, but with the not-to-be-underestimated psychological wages of white empowerment and minority marginalisation to take comfort in.

The impact of this material betrayal may well be offset by the psychological profit yielded by white identity gains, much as African-Americans remained loyal to Obama despite his failure to curb police violence against Black men or to elevate the community’s economic or financial conditions. The chasmic character of American racial and class politics remains essential to understanding American society.

Signals to Beijing

The call to Taiwan may appear to be a relatively minor infringement of diplomatic protocols, but it signals that Beijing should not expect business as usual. Taiwan was long recognised as the official Republic of China after the Chinese revolution of 1949 while the mainland Peoples Republic of China under Mao Zedong was denied diplomatic recognition until the 1970s. After Mao’s death and the opening of China, the US officially recognised Beijing as the legitimate and sole sovereign power and Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be reunited with the mainland. The telephone call, then, provided a level of legitimacy to the ‘president’ of Taiwan that the position has not received since the mid-1970s.

Trump maintained a level of anti-Chinese rhetoric throughout his election campaign – China was accused of currency manipulation and dumping cheap steel into the American market, for example. China’s biggest offence, however, is its alleged but incomprehensible desire to be the new regional hegemonic power in the Asia-Pacific region, challenging and displacing the US, which the latter has long regarded as an Anglo-Saxon lake.

The ‘rise’ of China is constructed as a threat to US power as part of its long-term plan for global domination, the ‘China Dream’ of President Xi Jinping. China’s increasing economic power and the growing level of economic and commercial dependence of the US’s regional allies like Taiwan, Philippines, Australia, India on China is viewed as part of the country’s bid to eject the US from its position as a regional hegemon. Trump, to make America great again, is reasserting the US’s power to show China the shape of things to come. Hence, the dangers of greater confrontation, including military conflict – by error or design, are likely to increase.

The Taiwan call may also have come about due to the strong relationships between some of Trump’s key appointees and Taiwan. In particular, Trump’s White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has firm connections with Taiwan’s political leadership. Meanwhile, Edwin Feulner, a senior adviser to Trump and former founding president of the Heritage Foundation, is hawkish on growing Chinese ambitions. Heritage is also rumoured to receive generous funding from Taiwanese sources. Feulner is said to have played a key role in facilitating the Taiwanese phone call.

Trump has also adopted the think tank’s suggested military policy as his own and is set, therefore, to significantly increase military expenditures – larger army, navy, airforce and marine corps. Trump’s proclaimed ‘isolationism’ now appears to be a distant memory as he prepares for power. His nomination of retired General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis for secretary of defense suggests a traditional policy of respecting alliances and allies across NATO, the Middle East and Asia. And retaining the centrality of the global war on terror in American strategy.

Trump’s voter base is destined for disappointment

Trump’s other appointments seem destined to disappoint his struggling and anxious working and middle-class voter base. Steve Mnuchin, for treasury secretary, stands squarely against Trump’s anti-Wall Street rhetoric. Mnuchin, like his father before him, has been involved with Goldman Sachs, hedge funds and financial institutions, a far cry from the rust belt workers whose swing away from Clinton put Trump across the electoral college finishing line on November 8.

Another billionaire financier is nominated for commerce secretary – Wilbur Ross, formerly with Rothschilds, and apparent saviour of coal and steel firms. Ross possibly represents a ray of hope for Trump’s supporters – that he will similarly save miners’ and manufacturing jobs in the rust belt. Yet, as the World Socialist website argues, Ross “made his fortune buying and closing steel mills, putting steelworkers out of work and dumping the pensions of retired workers into the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which pays only a fraction of what these workers actually earned in a lifetime in the mills.”

With his cabinet of billionaires and millionaires, overwhelmingly white and male, promising multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, Trump’s administration and policies will become indistinguishable from previous Republican administrations, especially those from the pre-civil rights and women’s freedom movement eras. His cabinet members’ total personal wealth is said to be worth around $35 billion, demonstrating that Trump’s administration will be one represented by the rich and, most likely, work for the rich.

From a campaign for change to an administration of billionaires, Trump has apparently saved the Republican party and built a coalition of white workers, middle class voters, the very affluent, a smattering of minorities and a majority of women – a combination that could make the GOP unassailable for the presidential elections in 2020. A great deal depends, however, on the delivery of material gains, especially to rust belt workers and minorities or the mid-terms in 2018 could be brutal for the GOP’s new found self-confidence.

Those who took Trump seriously but not literally may well be upset with Trump’s performance in office since he’s embracing the conservative principles people voted against. Trump the isolationist also seems unlikely to appear during his time in office, so we should expect a drift, if not a stampede, back into the presidential fold of those ‘respectable’ conservative Republicans and think-tankers who declared Trump a racist warmonger unfit to serve as America’s commander-in-chief.

It’s morning again in a resurgent, amnesiac, Reaganesque America.

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.