The election of Donald Trump in the United States marks the definitive change of a political cycle in that country, and if not, in the world. While eight years ago it was thought that Trump was just a political anomaly, something like a strange detour in the path of democratic life, and that after four years everything would return to the “normality” of the Obamas and the Republican institutionality, at this point no one can insist that Trump is just a rare exception.
By Martín Vernier
We are already close to a decade of this new reality that no one knows how long it will last, either through the exercise of Trump himself or for what his government leaves behind.
If, on the one hand, it is a whole new scenario, on the other, it is also a reflection of a world that ended up eroding, deconstructing itself, and leaving on the side, political parties, unions, churches, and even the media in the way. In the face of this cruel erosion, those disenchanted with the system and uninterested in identifying themselves with the old referents emerge. Voters emerge who have nothing to do with demographics (in this election there were many African-American and Hispanic voters who, out of all calculations, voted for Trump, as well as many pro-abortion women who also voted for him), but who are voters who share the feeling of being left behind by the system, which curiously is nothing more than feeling at the tail end of capitalism in its current development.
This was a virtue of Trump’s campaign. He painted very well the disenchantment of current capitalism. He painted it in unemployment and inflation, in the over-indebtedness of the middle class, in the indifference of the historical elites to safety in the streets, to the fragility of the sources of labor, to the threats of migration and the world at war. He was even bolder. Being a millionaire enriched by real estate speculation, he hit hard at the free market -increased tariffs-, and despised the international trade system built since the end of World War II. Incidentally, he included in the same bag of threats the emergence of gender diversity as a product of a globalized world, which, in his opinion, threatens the traditional family (in value issues is where he invested more money in advertising). In this scenario, the most absurd and paradoxical thing is that he, a guy built based on the most brutal exploitation of the system, has set himself up as the only savior of that same disenchantment: Ouroboros.
For that, he hatched the perfect plan: he filled the average American voter with dread, he took advantage of Biden’s stagnation and Kamala’s anxiety, who wanted to replace chaos with hope and democratic participation with the agreement of the elites -as was his nomination-. With her strategy, Kamala only reached out to the favored groups – to those satisfied with the system – to the university students of the best universities, to the big cities on both coasts, to those with the highest education, and the beneficiaries of the bourgeois tranquility of the suburban neighborhoods. It spoke to privilege.
Trump’s virtue was that he dared to present himself as the savior of a system from which he always benefited without the average voter seeing any contradiction in that. The dialectical solution was hidden, or resolved, under a cloak of paternalism or messianism embodied by the newly elected.
How did he do it? In the way he knows best, with image management and manipulation of the news -he did not have the support of the media industry, but he knew how to control the news agenda of social networks but from power (one more proof that the political use of social networks when done without having “power” is only political illusion) which facilitated the deployment of disinformation always put in his favor. On the other side, the Democrats were immobilized and had no way to react.
As Bernie Sanders says, the great mistake of the Democratic Party was that it abandoned its essence, in being a permanent critic of the system, in identifying with the working class and its causes, as every left-wing party should be. On the contrary, the Democrats were the administration of the status quo. That was the unoccupied space previously left to Trump and his supporters. There, his campaign filled it with fear and lies, and it is clear that there is nothing more mobilizing than fear and lies. That was proven, just as Milei, Bolsonaro, Bukele did before, and Kast wants to copy in Chile.
Now, a world of uncertainty is opening up in the United States (and clearly on the planet). Just as during the campaign today, there is no clarity about what is coming. Only speculations are made based on the possible cadres with whom he expects to occupy State positions (and where it is presumed that radical sectors will take the front line only to nod their desires and with no real capacity to stop it). The most pessimistic see how the scenario for the development of authoritarianism very close to the one built by his ally Putin is opening up in the main democracy of the world.
In a context that is far from optimistic for humanists, ecologists, socialists, and all kinds of progressives, the only thing left to learn from what is happening is to learn from what is being experienced. For example, do not forget that the main task of the left is to be on the side of those who suffer most from the system, with this or any other, and that the effort must be to put the intention to identify with their demands and their daily life. Above all, to identify with their “feelings,” with their anger, but also with their hopes and their faith in the future (Kamala did not connect with that). That must be the purpose. Complex days are coming, but in the Rome of our days, it is clear above all that Trump is no longer just a harmless anomaly.