Donald Trump, climate change denier, supporter of abortion bans, friend of killer cops, who promises to deport millions of immigrants and plunge the world into an economic conflict with China, is now preparing for another four years leading the world’s most powerful and aggressive imperialist power.
Trump’s decisive victory was made easier by the bankrupt liberal politics of the Democratic party. Kamala Harris read from the same losing script as Hillary Clinton in 2016: a galaxy of endorsements from Hollywood and the political and business elite were no match for Trump’s populist campaign inciting all the real and imagined grievances and reactionary prejudices in US society to clear Democrats out of office across swathes of the country.
Trump promises to ‘make America great again’. But this ‘greatness’ means defending the dominant position of the US ruling class against rising competitors like China and Russia who aim to overthrow US hegemony and install themselves in its place.
Trump’s presidency will not be a stable road to making America great: on the contrary, it will inaugurate a new period of global instability, social and political conflicts, with the urgent need for globally coordinated action on climate change relegated to a distant memory.
But we can’t place any confidence in the self-described opponents of Trump: the neoliberal politics of the US Democrats and their imitators in the British Labour party played a major role in creating the fertile conditions which the new far right populism is exploiting.
It is the absence of a real alternative to the establishment parties who all defend the economic and political status quo, that enables politicians of all parties to blame migrants, refugees or other countries for the problems caused by the long term crisis of the capitalist system.
The mass social movements against racism and sexism that rose up under the first Trump presidency subsided and collapsed as the leaders of the US progressive and labour movements led their supporters into backing the political dead end of the US Democrats. Without making a clean break from the Democrats and building a real workers’ party committed to revolution and socialism, efforts to defend democratic and social rights against Trump will be drowned by a MAGA movement waiting for the signal to crush any opposition.
Around the world, the most reactionary forces will be given renewed confidence from Trump’s victory. Netanyahu will use the months before the inauguration to speed up his genocide of the Palestinians and his wars against Lebanon and Iran. In Britain, we have to organise against those who want to repeat his playbook, like Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.
A Labour government will be no more protection against this rising tide of the far right than Genocide Joe was in the US. Climate change, the war threat with Russia, the national oppression of the Palestinians and others, the inhuman treatment of millions of refugees from the ravages of climate change and poverty; none of these problems can be solved without uprooting the system that causes them.
With Trump’s election a new, sharper phase of the crisis of capitalism has begun. We must redouble our efforts to organise internationally to rally the world’s working class to the struggle for international revolution and socialism, the only way out of the new age of barbarism.
