flocksy takes

Now is the time of monsters.

Mon 11 November 2024

"To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see our selves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away." —David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years

To say that the electoral win of the 45th US president, Donald Trump, on November 5th 2024 was a surprise or a shock would only suffice to show how detached from reality one was before the election. This was likely to happen. Which isn't to say that many, myself included, didn't have hope that it wouldn't, but one can only have hope if one already acknowledges the very real possibility that the other candidate could win out.

And win he did. However, this isn't merely a repeat of 2016 where many people around the world surely were surprised or shocked by Trump's win. This time no one can claim that he didn't win the popular vote, that this is just a hiccup due to the arcane electoral system of the US, or that his voters didn't actually know what he stood for and what a Trump presidency would mean. This time, Trump won the presidency, the popular vote, and his party gained the majority of both parliamentary houses. This time, voters knew exactly how a Trump presidency would look like and they voted for him, not despite that knowledge but because of it: As the 47th president, Trump will be the first US president in the 250 years of the US democracy to have been criminally convicted before the election.

A lot has changed in the eight years since Trump became the 45th president of the USA. The Republican party - although already far removed from its Nixon, Raegan, Bush heyday - is virtually unrecognisable from how it looked in 2016. While polarisation of US politics has been ongoing for decades, it is now a distinct Us vs. Them that does not compromise on its political agenda. And why should they when they have captured the Supreme Court to repeal popular cases as well as ensure the legal unimpeachability of their chosen candidate and still have the majority of its populace behind them?

Now, a few days after the election, punditry of all colors try to explain the results. And while I have no capacity to engage with whatever nonsense right pundits have to say, I bring these words down because I do have many things to say about what left or even center pundits have to say. For there is one throughline that repeats over and over again, and that is to blame the Democrats, the new and old opposition, for this election's outcome.

A non representative sample:

This is all insane.

The Democratic Party lost because the Democratic Party is over. And the Democratic Party is over because US hegemony is over. Or inversely, the Republican Party won because it saw the signs of the time and acted accordingly. Specifically, Donald Trump was elected because the majority of the USian population is racist and misogynistic, or - at the very least - is very comfortable to ally themselves openly with both. And it is a paternalistic insult to the intelligence of that majority to pretend otherwise.2

So much so obvious. But if you actually want to understand what happened in the US you have to look outside of the US and how its grip on the world order has waned since the 2000s. Millions of people in democracies the world over - not only in the US, not just Western countries - are currently voting actively for more authoritarian, exclusionary, oppressive policies. Why? That is the question that should be asked by leftist, left leaning or even centrist (and one might even include conservative) pundits. The election results of this November should be analysed through the lens of this question. Surely, no one would honestly argue that these results all over the world are, too, because specifically of how the US Democratic Party is doing politics, would they? Surely, we can all agree that there are larger things afoot here?

Now I am not claiming that no one has ever tried to find similarities in the general political trajectory of democratic countries the past decade. But it is astounding that time and again national elections are only ever analysed in national or regional matters or just entirely focused on the candidates and seemingly never with regards to global processes. The majority of the US population voted for Donald Trump, if not precisely because of the racism and misogyny he represents, then at least because their allegiance with Trump offers a vision of a powerful USA in the uncertain future of the global tomorrow.

That is a vision the Democratic Party cannot provide. But - and that is incredibly important to understand - not because it is incapable of providing good candidates, or flops on policy making, or is too stupid to game the system, or fumbles the messaging. It cannot provide a vision for a powerful USA in the future because it cannot but operate in the old but dying political system. The USA is not anymore one half of a bipolar world order nor is it the hegemon of military and economic world power it was for 30 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Just as the US had to unilaterally end the world's Gold Standard - which was the basis for much of the global economic system after the second World War, including even partly for the East Bloc - because the Vietnam war ballooned the government's budget and endangered the US' economy, so too did it try to hold on to its hegemony by increasing the drag of its twin deficits (the trade deficit and budget deficit) on the world after the 2008 financial crisis even though, as Yanis Varoufakis so eloquently put it, the Global Minotaur was dealt a lethal blow.

It is no understatement that for the past 50 years the USA held the world's economy at gunpoint. That hegemony built on (probable, and sometimes active) violence ensured that the global economic system kept going, extracting natural resources from the global south, to be transformed in the industries of the global north and to be traded and sold in US dollars. And we have to concede that, for a time, the system worked - at least for a handful of countries in the global north. That system was sustained, though, by feeding the military apparatus of the US continuously - that is why the US was holding its twin deficit: it spent massively into its gigantic military, thereby grossly spending more than it could possibly recuperate through taxes or tariffs (the budget deficit), and by so doing ensured a steady and high demand for the products of other countries (the trade deficit). Everyone in on the racket profited, not just capitalists, but entire countries. It is that system (and that of the Marshall Plan after the second World War) that kept the USA wealthy and powerful for almost 100 years. It is the same system the Democratic Party - and until 2016 the Republican Party largely too - is representing and upholding. And that system is already dying.

People voted for Trump because he represents an alternative to that system. Unfortunately for everyone, Trump's alternative is based on jingoistic bullying and the narcissistic belief that it will ensure prosperity in the future. Any leftist with a little sense of history of course knows that that is not where the US will end at. If anything, here is where I am paternalistic and claim that most of those who voted for Trump have no idea what kind of repercussions that vote will have in the future. But I cannot blame them, for they simply chose that which they have learnt is always a viable strategy when dealt a losing hand: Pull out a gun and play an entirely different game.

It is crucial to recognise that the Kamala Harris presidency wouldn't have staved off the decline of US hegemony. For that it would have been already far too late, and, ironically, any possibility Barack Obama had during his presidencies to transition the world to a system not dependent on US militarism was undermined by Capital and the Republican Party already at the time.3 So, yes, of course people weren't excited for and by the Democratic Party. How could they have been? It literally was a choice between "let's move forward into our steady decline" and "let's make america great again by threatening to bomb everything in sight and shake hands of unscrupulous autocrats". There never was a realistic or sensible option on the table. And given these two options the people voted for change, a New World Order. To blame all that on the Democratic Party is laughable.

However, the myopic focus of so many pundits to latch on populism scorecards of the Democratic Party in the pre-election political circus is very telling about the state of the leftist and centrist worldview: Just as the Democratic Party they cannot but think about the future in other terms than those of the past 70 years. Any rationalisation of the Democratic Party failing to address the economic situation of the populace by not putting forth social welfare policies is operating under the idea that the US could return to its Marshall Plan roots of the 1950s and 1960s. How should that ever be a possibility? By simply conjuring up as much money as needed?4 The geopolitical situation the US is in is the result of decades of political decisions and shifts in global economic and military power. You cannot simply wish yourself into another economic position in a world economy so as to spend yourself out of the hole you dug yourself into. The Democratic Party knows that, and the Republican Party knows that, too, blocking any attempts of legislation. Any such talking points would have been entirely baseless and ephemeral. No one would have believed them, including the voters. A leftist analysis of the current political situation must be able to not partake in endless naval-gazing but be able to look into the abyss that is the future, unflinchingly, and provide answers for questions on the levels that they are happening in.

The people are (rightfully) scared of the future. But that angst is far bigger and related to far bigger processes than can be fixed by changes to welfare or economic policy. Arguments, like those made by Bernie Sanders about wealth disparity or lack of paid family or medical leave, are factually true, but is the conclusion that if the Democratic Party had run a socialist-democrat platform they'd have won just as true? I highly doubt that. Sure, a Green New Deal could have been the basis for other radical changes to how the global economy worked5, but that future we will never see anyway.

Besides, there have always been historical materialist reasons why the US does not have basic social welfare systems despite being the richest country in the world to have ever existed. One is that the budget deficit of the US government cannot be endless and so it also has to partake in gross austerity politics as demanded by the high priests of monetarism. Alas, contrary to other countries, the US' austerity program is mostly concerned with social welfare and infrastructure policies because it cannot curtail its military spending lest the system collapses. Second, and more importantly, if the USA would, for instance, provide health care to all universally, that would - by its very nature - provide health care to Women as well as Brown, Yellow and most of all Black people. Too many USian people have simply not forgiven African Americans for slavery to ever allow that.6

In this new world order that is unfolding right before our eyes, the global left has to change up its game. We cannot be content anymore to merely demand more inclusion at the table where pittances are dealt out. Capitalism is over. But many never considered that that also means the end of the illusory dream that is welfare for all. So what to do?

So where does that leave us? Only with the realisation that the world now is as unpredictable and dangerous as in the 1930s when fascism rose to power in Europe or the later 1940s when the two superpowers of the Cold War began to form and amass an armory of nuclear weapons. As The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

But in times of great unknowns there is always the possibility of great wonders and hope. We only have to think as big as the changes we are facing. It's up to us to provide the means to defeat the monsters of our times and be the midwife for a new world that is better than the last.

  1. Though truth be told, my most favourite ludicrous explainer is at least not blaming the Democratic Party but "a worldwide wave of anti-incumbent sentiment". I haven't seen such a beautiful non-answer in a while (although the article goes on to later point to inflation, seemingly all too aware of the fact that "anti-incumbent sentiment" is not even the beginning of an analytical explanation). ↩︎
  2. I get why they cannot argue that way, though. It is uncomfortable to claim that millions of people are supposed to have morally abhorrent values. Moreover, isn't it also paternalistic to denigrate them so? The problem with this line of thinking is that it claims that people are either good or bad, they are either racists or they are not, they are either for equality and bodily freedom of women or they are not. But that's not how it works. We all hold on to values that are, on reflection, actually not that helpful. More often than not we hold multiple values at the same time that are, factually, contradictory. Working through these contradictions, or working at all to change the value you've absorbed as a child from family, friends and environment is hard. This is why often people rather try to look away from these contradictions. Furthermore, that's also the reason why no one likes to get called a racist, because we certainly do hold the value up that racism is bad, even when we certainly hold up racist beliefs also. Simply believing in the fact that racism is bad does not make us not racist, though. The issue here is that racism is always thought of as a property of people, something that a person can either opt-in or -out of. The truth is that racism - like misogyny - is a system that informs our reality. Since the world is built on racism, of course we are all racists. You, me, your neighbour, the person on your television or phone. How could we not? We wouldn't even begin to understand our world if we hadn't internalised racism and misogyny. To paraphrase Ibram X. Kendi, the question is never are we racist? but rather do we choose to be anti-racist? The world around us makes us oppressors, the only thing we can decide is whether we accept that or if we actively decide against it. ↩︎
  3. If there ever was a chance Barack Obama would have wanted to make progressive changes to a new world order, to begin with. ↩︎
  4. Which isn't to say that that isn't exactly what the US and other Western countries have done during the financial or the CoViD crisis. But that magick only worked because it was backed by an unfathomable military might - and that military needs sustaining first and foremost. ↩︎
  5. Itself another big If. ↩︎
  6. The astute reader will notice how Friedmanim/Raegenism/Thatcherism/monetarism/financialisation/neoliberalism (all words meaning the same thing) as well its austerity politics and the exclusion of large parts of the populace from state welfare programs go hand-in-hand and sustain each other. It is far from a coincidence that neoliberalism was inaugurated just a few years after the civil rights movement. ↩︎