It should go without saying: this election result is really bad, actually.
Kamala Harris, proud supporter of ongoing genocide though she may be, enthusiastic participant in the police state and generally vapid vessel for status-quo Democratic complacency though she may be... she's not a rapist with an endorsement from the KKK. In fact, her entire campaign, based stupidly, fatally, on the one selling point - "I'm not Trump" - does at least highlight the raw fact that Trump is indeed a particularly repulsive bit of bile for the American electorate to spew up into the blood-soaked walls of the "White House". Those who voted for Harris as a means to avoid the full-blown meltdown of democratic order Trump will inevitably unleash are not, actually, all terrible people who don't care a jot for the lives of Palestinians - many will be principled and active organisers against Israel who simply fear for what will happen to trans people, migrants, all women in America, and the entire planet under a Trump presidency. They're not all fascists, even if Harris is.
For the record (not that this means anything at all coming from a white English dude living in Ireland), I'd have voted Green, were I living in the US. I voted Green in the UK election, and would have felt no real moral conflict about that, even if somehow Sunak won. I believe we've got to try, as far as possible, to act as if our own morals are shared by more people than we think. Acting out of pragmatism rather than conscience is bound to simply further this insane 'two-party' death cult, in which each election provides one candidate who wants the world to burn, and another who wants the same thing, but will apologise a bit more while lighting the fire. The only way out of it involves eschewing the 'pragmatism over conscience' paradox that Starmer and Harris voters clearly still believe in - it's a paradox, because ultimately, pragmatism isn't practical.
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| Trump and friends |
Donald Trump being a rapist was clearly not only insignificant to American voters - it was, in my opinion, one of the reasons he won.
Modern-day America was born in blood. Here's what early Spanish colonisers had to say to those Native Americans in 1510 who didn't immediately submit to their total domination:
"[W]e shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church...; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them... and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can... and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault."
Those politics, of warfare, slavery, victim blaming, and genocide, never went away. They were chiselled into the structures of every American institution via hundreds of years of enslaving, raping and lynching Black and Indigenous people. Its entire economy, its constitution, its current neo-imperialist foreign policy, are all direct products of this heritage, and progressive movements have made only reforms to that structure (i.e. abolishing slavery in its previous form) - not complete systemic change (i.e. replacing carceral justice with transformative justice, or capitalism with socialism).
Whatever Trump's victory was, it certainly wasn't shocking. It's pretty par for the (tax-evading golf) course. The guy is America personified. He, therefore, had the backing of that American establishment he's supposedly out to expose: the world's richest man(child), the New York Stock Exchange, and the new dominant media personalities like Joe Rogan (the Ultimate Fighting Competition commentator currently responsible for shaping political discourse). All these people and organisations are invested in furthering the American status quo, as they're all doing quite well from it, thank you very much. In fact, they'd like to see some of those protections against violence, some of those few remaining laws protecting trade unions, some of those irritating environmental regulations, gone - so they can push their profit margins even further upward.
Trump didn't come from a vacuum - but he did expand into one. For while the entire American project since the 15th century has been to construct and empower white supremacist capitalist patriarchs like Donald, it's also a place where, like, lots of people live. People with critical thinking skills (no, really) - people with a common sense desire for peace, for stability and for affordable groceries. Support for a ceasefire in Gaza is bipartisan across America. The people who voted Trump did so citing, a lot of the time, his ability to "fix the economy". To bring down the price of groceries, for themselves and their children.
His conviction of a felony offense for paying hush money to a porn star didn't stop those votes. His multiple - and I mean multiple - sexual assault and rape allegations didn't stop those votes. The easily-accessible video of him laughing with Jeffrey fucking Epstein didn't stop the votes - putting the lie to that notion that all these MAGA men are in any way interested in the 'Epstein list' that Trump will supposedly publish upon entering office. He's on the list!
Those convictions didn't stop the votes, they in fact motivated the votes. For all the incel dude-bros wanting complete impunity for violence against women, Donald 'grab-her-by-the-pussy' Trump was the candidate, no question. But further than that, in the absence of media, mass movements, and institutions actually willing to advocate for measures that would dismantle rape culture, nobody was under any illusion that women would suddenly be safe from misogynists under Harris's continuation of the status quo. This rendered the issue worse than politically neutral - it in fact gave Trump the edge in terms of political optics. Trump is a guy who stands by his politics. He's not just pretending to be a violent prick to look good for the cameras:
he has conviction.
And that conviction counts for a lot when you then go on to say, to millions of desperate people unsure how they'll feed their kids if grocery prices go up any further: "We're gonna fix the economy".
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Harris's pragmatic pandering to the powerful killed her campaign. Her fawning for the liberal establishment, her outright refusal to give voters anything more substantial than brat, Beyonce and billions for bombs meant that she basically came across as a complete blank space. Trump's sewage-stream of policy proposals filled headlines, the internet, and clearly enough dinner-table conversations to ensure all eyes - as usual - were firmly on him.
He proposed the most policy. Probably more policy maybe than anyone ever, and people are saying "wow, that's a lot of policy." And it was, it was a lot of policy, got a lot of people talking, a lot of people saying "Donald, we like your policy, we like it a lot, but maybe it's even too much. Too much policy, we're tired of policy, we're tired of winning..."
The fact that you knew (hopefully) that I was copying Trump's speech patterns there shows a second important thing - the guy's personality is immediately recognisable and distinct. There is (thank god) nobody exactly like Trump in the whole of American politics. The violence, sure. The idiocy, absolutely (remember Bush?) - but not the whole orange mess. Harris gives the same vibe, speaks the same way, as the rest of the Democrat establishment from Clinton through to... all the other ones I can't remember because they're so forgettable.
Obama is a recognisable, memorable individual. Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez... the Democrats are capable of producing politicians with clear (moral and political) convictions, and Obama showed that those convictions can deliver landslide election results (even if they dissolve on contact with power). With such a brutal status quo, people will jump at the first consistent-seeming, human-seeming person offering 'change' - this can swing people just as easily toward "Make America Great Again" as "Yes We Can".
But their membership in the elite establishment has eroded even those seemingly-stalwart centre-left values of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, prompting both to endorse a genocidal candidate. Still, both would have an enormously greater chance at beating Trump than Harris did. Because they'd propose actual policy, and they'd do so believably.
Conviction is the great power, and the great responsibility, of anyone now wanting to change politics for the better. Saying something and meaning it. Saying something, not only unafraid of the consequences, but not even thinking in terms of consequences, or compromises, or what's gonna play better with which audience. Saying something purely because it is what you genuinely believe, and what you have always fought for.
Trump's many convictions are his great powers. His badges of dishonour. Evidence that what you see is what you get.
Jill Stein propelled the Green Party to a height it has never been so far in the US: somewhat influential. It's a start. She did so because she made an actual principled proposal to end the genocide of Palestinians. In a bizarre turn of events, this led former KKK leader David Duke to endorse Stein over Trump - but isn't that revealing? Even someone as invested in the white-supremacist project as Duke is willing to publicly endorse a candidate who actively despises him and his politics, purely on the basis of her moral conviction. It's a little glimpse into what might happen to all the MAGA-bros and Trump voters if the alternative option on that two-party ballot also had some conviction.
Until a politics of pragmatism is fully abandoned, and a politics of conviction is fully embraced, politicians like Trump will continue to run the world.
We outnumber them. As soon as we get some moral conviction, we will run the world. And we can make sure our conviction is a fundamental belief in the right of all to have a survivable, happy life - which is a much more powerful conviction than "I believe I can do whatever I want and get away with it". In other words, it's more powerful than Trump.
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