A friend pointed out to me today
that the main benefit of the Trump victory in the US presidential election is
that the left will no longer be able to blame ‘the media’ for its lack of
support in the main imperialist countries. Despite near universal ridicule and
rejection by the established pundits, especially those outside the US, The
Donald has won. More importantly, the result reflects broader developments.
Even before the election result,
Trump was seen as having voiced the concerns of the (white working class) mass
of the electorate in the US, and of taking votes from those who were
understandably less than enthused by Madame Clinton. But for him to claim
basically half the electoral vote on a programme that was fronted by building a
wall on the Mexican border, protecting US jobs against the nefarious schemes of
domestic capitalists and foreign countries, and to ‘Make
America Great Again’, reveals more than a little about the political outlook of
the voters. More than half of the voters, one would have to say, given that
Clinton also felt the need to shadow some of Trump’s policies. It is an outlook
that will support the revival of economic nationalism by the US as an
imperialist power, and it will encourage others to do the same.
In that respect, the US election
has similarities with the Brexit vote in the UK. It is not so much that the
incumbent political class has ‘lost touch’ with the masses, and must move aside
or reconnect, although this view is supported by the presence of dumb elites
who have still not really figured out that their comfortable maxims no longer
work as the capitalist crisis becomes entrenched. It is more that a political
system only works if votes can be accumulated to support particular policies.
But maintaining the previous policies has less and less political support. In
north-west Europe and in the US, the masses are revolting – in both senses of
the term, as far as the elites are concerned. The politicians must, and will,
adapt. Yet, they will be adapting not to a burgeoning protest about the evils
of capitalism, but to a demand that privileges must be protected in a stagnant
world economy. In other words, they will respond to reactionary popular sentiment.
It should be little surprise
that the Brexit vote is seen as a marker by many commentators. After all,
Britain is a key part of the existing structure of world power – of trade,
financial and security arrangements – despite weighing far below the US.
Another interesting, historically more distant, marker is the devaluation of sterling
on 18 November 1967, an event that was a watershed in the later collapse of the
Bretton Woods world financial system of fixed exchange rates. Ironically, the
14% or so devaluation then is similar to the devaluation of sterling after the
23 June 2016 Brexit vote! This also reflects the pressures on the system of world power and the trouble faced by the Anglosphere
today.
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