November 2016
Post-Traumatic
Election Shock
To
Defeat Trump … And the Democrats
Fight for
Workers Revolution
Internationalist Group protests Trump and the Democrats, Los
Angeles, November 9.
(Internationalist
photo)
NOVEMBER 10 – The effect of Tuesday’s
election was a thunderbolt in the night sky. After all the
media happy talk, even into the early evening, that Democrat
Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in – the first woman president
following the first black president – suddenly it was clear
that Republican Donald Trump was elected. The racist, sexist,
immigrant-bashing, woman-molesting Trump would be the next CEO
of the United States and commander-in-chief of U.S.
imperialism. By the next morning tens of millions were asking,
in deep shock and disbelief, how could this happen? And in
Muslim, Latino, African American and immigrant families there
was raw fear.
So what is to be done? The big business media are all
praising the “orderly peaceful transfer of power.” President
Barack Obama says of Trump, “We are all now rooting for his
success.” In her concession speech, Clinton said, “We owe him
an open mind and the chance to lead.” That tells the
billionaire bully he can walk all over opposition. We say hell
no! Those who are targets of the victorious race-haters
and labor-haters must fight them down the line, or else we
will pay “big league.” The Democrats hand over the reins of
power “graciously” because they and the Republicans all
represent the same capitalist class against us, the
workers and oppressed.
For many the election result was like a horror film, a scene
out of The Night of the Living Dead. The message: Be afraid,
be very afraid. In school Wednesday, Latino students fearfully
asked their teachers: what will happen to me, will my parents
be deported? Immigrants rights activists reported a torrent of
phoned death threats. Groups of racists yelled “time to get
out of this country” at random Middle Easterners. Muslim women
feared to wear the hijab, the Islamic head scarf. A
prominent African American spokesman, former Obama advisor Van
Jones proclaimed it was the #Whitelash, recalling the racist
backlash against the civil rights movement.
Soon protests began: thousands of young people across the
country have been marching. The most common slogan was “Not My
President,” along with “Dump Trump” and “Racist, sexist,
anti-gay, Donald Trump go away.” But Trump is the
victor in the bourgeois elections – always rigged to ensure
the selection of a defender of capital – and he isn’t going
away because thousands or tens of thousands chant it. The
slogans showed a yearning for Clinton (sometimes explicit,
like numerous signs in New York, “Still Stronger Together”).
And they expressed patriotic liberal democratic illusions –
the idea that this is “our country” when in fact it belongs to
the capitalists.
So the issue is posed: it is urgently necessary to
fight back, but how? With right-wing Republicans
in control of all three branches of government (executive,
legislative and judicial) – from the White House to both
houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and most state houses –
even staid Democratic politicians and pundits are talking
about electoral “disaster,” “apocalypse” and “resistance.” But
here there is a fundamental class difference: for
working people and the oppressed it is necessary to oppose all
parties of capital, to dump both the Democrats and The
Donald. So in order to resist, we must first understand
what happened, and why.
Ask yourself: would there be this traumatic shock, would
there be these mass protests if the Democrat had been elected?
Of course not, because for many of those marching, even if
they didn’t vote for her, Hillary Clinton was in some way a
“lesser evil” than the consummately evil Donald Trump. Not so.
As the Internationalist Group said on our website, it was “the
‘choice’ between the candidate most likely to set off a racist
pogrom (Donald Trump for the Republicans) and the candidate
most likely to start World War III (the Russia-phobic Democrat
Hillary Clinton).”
So why was Trump elected? Liberal commentators portray it as
simply the victory of rampant racism, particularly of white
workers. No one could miss Trump’s blatantly racist appeals,
and the 50% of voters who voted for him at the very least went
along with that. The Ku Klux Klan and various Nazi outfits
enthusiastically backed him. But the hard-core racist vote is
much smaller – maybe a quarter of the electorate – and has
been violently attacking Obama since 2008. Trump also won the
votes of better-off middle class sectors (the average Trump
voter had a family income of $72,000), as the Republicans
generally do.
But what put Trump over the top were the others, residents of
rural towns whose youth are leaving because they have no
future there, and workers who have seen their industries
decimated and their cities devastated. The rage against
Washington comes from victims of the 2008 crash and continuing
economic depression thrown into permanent unemployment or
reduced to part-time jobs at Walmart wages. This revolt by
small town America and Rust Belt workers is against
“free-trade” policies of both Democrats and Republicans. They
are not all racists: in fact, millions of them, 12% of all
Trump voters, also voted for Barack Obama. They are victims of
capitalism.
To the high-flying “neo-liberal” elite, these are “forgotten
people,” the residents of “fly-over” country between Wall
Street and Hollywood whose money men finance Clinton and Obama
Democrats. The arrogant policy wonks of Bill Clinton Inc. see
those who voted for Trump as the “losers” in the globalization
of “modern” capitalism, while the “winners” are the Silicon
Valley venture capitalists. Having lost their jobs, their
homes repossessed by the banks, makes them easy prey for
demagogues selling the fool’s gold of anti-immigrant racism.
The fact is that the Democrats pushed millions of workers into
the arms of Trump.
The Democratic politicians won’t and can’t admit this,
writing off white blue-collar workers as racist, because it is
their policies that are responsible. Liberal pundits like
Thomas Friedman who pushed these policies are thrown into
despair: “I am in anguish, frightened for my country and for
our unity. And for the first time, I feel homeless in America”
(New York Times, 9 November). Pseudo-radical leftists
who spout theories of “white skin privilege” likewise seek to
make white workers responsible for black oppression, when it
is this racist capitalist system that profits from dividing
white against black workers.
While the “neo-liberal” liberals are in despair, various
reformists and liberal “progressives” are arguing that the
problem is that Hillary Clinton was the wrong Democratic
candidate. They say it should have been Democratic Party
“socialist” Bernie Sanders, who posed as a “friend of labor”
and in early opinion polls did far better against Trump than
friend of Wall Street Clinton. But Sanders (who fulsomely
supported Clinton) didn’t have a very different economic
program because “neo-liberalism” is not a policy it is the
current phase of decaying capitalism, in which driving
down wages is dictated by the same falling rate of profit that
set off the 2008 crash.
Various reformist left groups pushed Green Party candidate
Jill Stein, whose eco-capitalist program offered nothing to
workers, spelling calamity for steel and coal workers in the
name of supposedly fighting climate change. Others put forward
their own candidates with a laundry list of illusory demands
on the capitalist state (see “Left
Green Dream of People-Friendly Capitalism,” The
Internationalist No. 45, September-October 2016). The
Internationalist Group uniquely fought in the unions to break
with the Democrats, Republicans and all capitalist parties and
build a class-struggle workers party.
This program, supported by the Painters union in Portland,
Oregon is what could offer a real answer to Trump demagogy. It
should be fought for in the labor movement throughout the
country. But now we are going to face the attacks of the
triumphant Trump forces, which pose an ominous threat to
oppressed sectors in particular. To fight the impending
attacks, it is necessary to put forward a program to mobilize
the power of the workers movement. If the new regime
seeks to reinstitute raids in the urban centers, there should
be workers mobilizations to prevent deportations,
including blocking them by flooding the area with defenders of
immigrant rights.
As
violent racist and outright fascist forces are emboldened by
Trump’s victory, Muslims and Middle Eastern immigrants in
particular may be singled out for attack. Class-conscious
militants should begin the work now of building workers
defense guards, based on the mass organizations
of the working class and oppressed, to counter this threat.
Police killings of African Americans and Latinos should be
met with massive labor mobilizations against police
terror, such as that led by the ILWU dock
workers in Oakland, California on May Day 2015 (and the
example of the Labor Against Racist Police Murder contingent
in Portland that same day).
Education workers should prepare to stop any attempt to seize
undocumented students and their families. If a school should
shut down, and be backed by others, in response to the seizure
of an immigrant family, it would send shock waves across the
country. And Marxists not only defend the right of free speech
and assembly, we stand for the right of black
self-defense against racist attacks, in opposition
to liberal gun control advocates. In the present atmosphere,
African Americans and others would be well-advised to prepare
to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
All of these practical steps for resistance against racist
reaction on the march can only be a partial answer and point
to the ultimate solution: workers revolution.
Whether a Donald Trump or a Hillary Clinton (or Barack Obama)
is in the Oval Office, the capitalist system will inevitably
continue to generate racism, poverty and war. We
denounced Clinton’s policies in Syria and Ukraine for
threatening military confrontation and even full-scale war
with Russia. Trump is making nice with Putin, but at the same
time threatening trade war and worse against China. As
Trotskyists, we emphatically defend the Chinese
deformed workers state against imperialist attack.
The upset election of Donald Trump has shocked many opponents
of racism, sexism and anti-immigrant chauvinism to the core.
It has dealt a body blow to the Clintonite Democratic Party.
It has not only thrown the capitalist political establishment
into disarray, it has led many to question the whole political
structure (including the Electoral College, a bastion of the
slavocracy up to the Civil War, due to which Trump can lose
the popular vote but still end up president). But what this
shock to the body politic poses is not a phony “political
revolution” like Bernie Sanders and his acolytes preached, but
full-blown international socialist revolution.
That is the answer to Trump … and to Clinton, the Democrats
and all the bosses’ parties and politicians!■