Donald Trump will be the next president. What was unthinkable has become all too real. We anticipated as much in the editorial in our last issue, which we encourage people to read still.

Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote by more than 2 million, once all the votes have come in. As we write this, the margin is just over 1 million. Thus, this was not exactly a mandate for Trump. The country is no more or less divided than it was before Election Day. Trump starts out by being viewed as illegitimate by a large mass of people, evidenced by the protests that have occurred across the country and the proliferation of plans for various kinds of popular defense of individuals who may become most vulnerable if some of his schemes are hatched.

Trump’s promises to the workers who voted for him will not materialize to any important extent; in our view, that’s where a real opening might occur. Seventeen percent of the people voting for Trump had supported Sanders before. One hundred million did not vote—the majority party of nonvoters. We don’t know nearly as much as we should about why they don’t show up. It’s our best guess that they are simply too busy dealing with the realities of everyday life—working too long, taking care of kids before and after work, falling in and out of love, going in and out of jail, taking care of sick and elderly family members and relatives, dealing with hard episodes of dependence on drugs of various kinds, combatting the demons that lead all too many to suicide. It’s hard to imagine that too many of them didn’t vote because they thought that things were just fine the way they were. In all likelihood, they almost certainly thought that the outcome of the election wouldn’t matter all that much.

We have heard from a friend who has followed the hard right for years that many people attracted to it could, alternatively, be attracted to a consistent vision of an alternative to capitalist society, which up till now has not existed. They will not, however, be attracted to a defense of the existing state of affairs—no matter how dressed up in liberal notions of understanding, tolerance and opportunity. As a West Virginia friend wrote: “Racism was the icing on the ‘fuck you’ cake.” We think that’s right, and a reason not to despair too much. It will be necessary to defend all those who are attacked. But such defenses will not get anywhere if they are done in a preachy, moralistic way; such a defense strategy has to be coupled with an outreach to working-class and poor people who (as with Brexit in the UK) voted as a left-behind group. No major contender for the presidency had ever addressed workers in the ruins of the Rust Belt the way Trump did, even if the reasons he gave (China, trade) are spurious. Much of the liberal/soft-left alliance is covertly or even overtly anti–working class and it shows. There are people in the Hillary camp who are our enemies, and there are people in the Trump camp who are our potential allies, if a proper strategic outreach is developed. From the beginning we must reject the phony “left-right” spectrum defined by mainstream politics, the media, etc., and orient to “recombining” the forces across the spectrum against our enemies in both camps.

We asked Dave Ranney, the author of Global Decisions, Local Collisions and New World Disorder: The Decline of US Power, to comment on how the election looked from Wisconsin.
–The Editors

For the past 10 years or so I have been spending most of my time living in a small rural town on an island in Northeast Wisconsin (the other time is spent in Chicago). Based on that experience I would like to make a few points.

There is a strong sense of who belongs and who does not here. Those who are from the Island can be anything from survivalists and militia wannabe’s to liberals who read the New York Times. There are also a lot of retired people from Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Madison here. So there is an unusually large group of transplants. None of us are considered “Islanders” and never will be. Our house is referred to by the name of the family that owned it 25 years ago or even by the name of the family that built and lived in it 75 years ago. The category, “rural non–college educated white” is, like alt-right, Latino, Black, woman, too broad to be useful. I am accepted because I do a lot of things in the community―on the board of the Maritime Museum, work with school kids on dramatic arts, etc. People know my politics and don’t care. I spent a lot of time when my 2002 book came out traveling around Wisconsin talking to mostly white workers…places like LaCrosse, Oshkosh, Green Bay and, of course, little Washington Island. I also went to Madison and Milwaukee. In all these places deindustrialization had decimated their communities and their unions were under attack and not fighting very hard on their behalf. They were angered and bewildered at this point. I would bet most of the people I talked to who were very angry at Bill Clinton and the Democrats voted for Trump.

I have also spent a lot of time in the past working in coalitions against the trade agreements―principally anti–NAFTA, WTO and IMF/World Bank Conditionalities. Now there is TPP and a host of bilateral trade agreements. This was always a tricky business because it attracted right-wing populists (it was Perot when I was active in this) and also attracted the unions. It was necessary to clearly establish what we were saying that was different from them in a way that wouldn’t make our politics marginalized. This was difficult but worthwhile because it was an area that a broad array of the working class could relate to.

Of course, I have had much more recent discussions on the Island where Trump won by about 40 votes out of 400 cast. Many people pulled their Trump lawn signs after the famous bus remarks. I suspect many of these people still voted for him but were embarrassed to admit it. Almost all up here are white. There are two churches―one Lutheran and one Evangelical Christian which most certainly divided evenly between Hillary and the Trumpster. Young people on the Island are hugely under-or unemployed and have few prospects. They are very, very angry. I think they were for Trump. Older Islanders who did not simply retire here like me were for Trump. These folks work sporadically as carpenters, on small farms, for the electric co-op and phone company, grocery store, bars and restaurants. They feel left out by the official parties and want something to change. Those that know about the Electoral College do not want to get rid of it because they fear their voice would be even more marginalized by the big cities on the East and West Coasts.

Taxes for many of these folks are a real issue. A worker who worked at Bata Shoes or OshKosh B’Gosh work clothes (now in China) with living wages and benefits and is now working (and her/his kids are working) at Walmart, may well have family land that used to be small farms. They can’t pay rising taxes, have had to sell off some of the family land. They saw Walker’s austerity as a way out of this mess. Liberals and Democrats have been telling them to suck it up―we need money to pay for education and highways. What do we have to say about this? Nothing right now! But a campaign that directly takes on the notion of trickle-down and proposes to abolish the property tax in favor of a highly progressive income tax might find some traction. Maybe it could have a less reformist element by a property-tax-refusal action.

On the other hand, retired liberals including businesspeople, college professors, schoolteachers, scientists and at least two retired CIA agents voted solidly for Hillary. They, of course, are not usually in dire circumstances economically.

Basically what I’ve heard is a desire for some sort of change and many were convinced that Hillary was more of the same. This accounts more than anything else for pro-Trump. The “icky” factor seemed about evenly divided. Hillary was not only more of the same but seen as a money-grubbing crook in bed with the bankers. Of course, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-all-things-not-white played a role, but not the only role, in determining who is less icky. I think the idea that it is simply racism, sexism or stupidity is being overblown. Of course there is more of that than we would like but I don’t think that is the heart of it. I think it is more the result of a rejection of all public policies and political parties of the last 25–30 years and a failure on the part of the left to offer any alternatives.

The best opportunity we had in Wisconsin was when Scott Walker was elected governor and began to push an anti-union austerity agenda. Many people went to Madison from around the state to protest and even occupied the Capitol building. There was a great deal of anger throughout the state. But there was no left with a program or a strategic direction that most of these could relate to. So into the void stepped the AFL-CIO and proposed a recall campaign that wanted to replace Walker with a mainline Democrat. All the energy and anger went into the campaign. Young people went door to door with union funding. But “rural whites” were able to unite around the notion that they didn’t want a mainline Democrat as governor and voted the recall down. Not only did the unions shut down the impulses of thousands of Wisconsinites but they also provided the groundwork for the sort of organization that eventually assured a Trump victory.

Trump stepped into a void. Categories like “Latino,” let alone “Hispanic,” are useless. Thirty percent of such voters went for Trump. Some of them are established in the United States with papers to prove it and don’t want others to enter and compete for the crumbs. I heard one person described as “Hispanic” say on public radio: “We are not monolithic.” Working class and de-classed Black people have been screwed as much if not more than the so called “non–college educated whites.” I would bet when the dust settles we will discover that many of them joined me and George Carlin on Election Day, and stayed home.

In the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney won the state with 62 percent of the vote to Obama’s 35 percent. Donald Trump won the vote in West Virginia with 69 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 23 percent in the 2016 election. Before picking apart the minutiae of West Virginia and giving personal anecdotes and observations, I’ll start with my provisional opinion of the Trump phenomenon. At its core, Trump’s campaign from the beginning generated the kind of sycophantic idolatry of the group known as Palinistas: the devoted fraction of the Republican Party base for Sarah Palin. It’s like they’re zealots for the Führerprinzip but can rarely locate an individual leader to shower with their bottomless well of trust and sincere admiration. Trump largely inherited the Palinistas and made them his own.

In addition, before he ran for president, Trump was the most prominent spokesman for the racist claim that Obama was not an American citizen. Immediately after launching his presidential campaign, what set him apart from the rest of the Republican field were his immediate and explicit appeals to racism and xenophobia. The long list of white supremacist groups and subdivisions therein found a champion in his campaign that legitimized their long trumpeted, core messages. Overlap in the orbits of the most extreme wings of the Republican Party with all segments of the white nationalist and fascist milieus (best personified in David Duke, who mixes in all of these nominally separate circles) led to a seamless integration of militant white supremacy into a high profile national political campaign.

That Trump was an outsider who had never held office and bloviated endlessly about his refusal to act like a “real” politician let him tap into the much broader anti-establishment sentiment that has been fermenting since the 2008 crisis. This led more people to consider him a viable candidate, particularly compared to the response of the general electorate to Sarah Palin in the 2008 election cycle. I think this is the bloc and context which gave birth to and sustained Trump from the beginning of his campaign straight to his victory last week.

But sycophants and fascists and a general anti-establishment mood don’t explain his convincing electoral victories, even among populations he disparaged and promised to harm if he won. As time went on his campaign consistently promoted the image of Trump as a kind of swashbuckling Abraham Lincoln with the acting talent of Ronald Reagan, to be loved and feared, the great emancipator who doesn’t take any shit. But there was never really a push to define particular, concrete and realistic policies. I think the electorate largely projected what they wanted to believe when casting their vote because of this gaping hole in his campaign. For his core constituency, this was the anti-immigrant and overtly racist rhetoric along with his promises to lock up Hillary Clinton and punish the media; for others, it was the call to renegotiate or tear up trade deals that are linked to the postindustrial turn across the country (and the new career opportunities of collecting government checks for disability or unemployment, using opiates or working at Wal-Mart), or the seductive promise to gut taxes, or the promise to resume the offensive in the culture wars, or a “Killing is my Business, and Business is Good” foreign policy, or any of the other individual issues representing the buckshot of campaign promises that resonated to different degrees in different groups and regions around the country.

In West Virginia, voters saw the only issue that matters to them in national politics: the promise to protect and then revive the American coal industry.

West Virginia is unique in a variety of ways. It leads the country in nearly every metric of catastrophe on every conceivable issue. Economically it is at or near the very bottom in terms of growth and development and it leads the country in the ratio of part-time to full-time jobs. Its education apparatus consistently ranks at or near the bottom and has fewer college-or university-educated residents per capita than just about every other state. It has the highest percentage of residents receiving Supplemental Social Security benefits (about 1 in 4). More people die than are born here, more people move out of state than move into it, it ranks among the highest in infant mortality and has the largest proportion of tobacco users in the country. It’s one of if not the oldest state (average age for a resident is between 40 and 42 years old). Crime rates and especially violent crime rates are rising dramatically faster than in the rest of the country. In addition to Social Security, all forms of welfare programs (food stamps, unemployment, etc.) are overrepresented among West Virginians to an absurd degree. African-Americans make up the largest minority group in the state at approximately 3 percent of the total population, while no other racial category (including biracial and multiracial) makes up more than 1 percent of the population. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer, similar to many other states that have seen their traditional industries shrivel up through mechanization (meatpacking, steel, coal), stagnate (auto, refining, defense) or offshore (everything else). It’s a state under a dramatically permanent siege by the evolution and trajectory of contemporary capitalism.

Trump’s huge margin of victory in West Virginia masks the more important dynamics in local politics here. Since the 2000s, the state has progressively grown to be solidly within the Republican camp in presidential elections. In 2008, McCain won West Virginia with 55 percent of the vote to Obama’s 42 percent. Republican margins have increased exponentially since then on the sole basis of the real and perceived effect of climate change legislation and environmental regulations on the coal industry. However, West Virginians elected a Democrat, a coal operator named Jim Justice, to be the next governor at the same time that they voted for Trump. Justice’s campaign included a pledge to repeal the recently passed right-to-work law and restore the recently removed state prevailing-wage law—it looks like these will take the form of a referendum. Bill Cole, the Republican candidate for governor, was extremely close to Scott Walker and was instrumental in passing both right-to-work and repealing the state prevailing wage. Cole even brought Walker to West Virginia to campaign for him, touting Walker’s record as a blueprint and promising to bring Wisconsin-style business-friendly “reforms” to West Virginia (both men were forced to use the back door to enter their own campaign event in the state Capitol because of union protestors out front). Both the United Mine Workers of America and the West Virginia AFL-CIO enthusiastically endorsed Jim Justice for governor and campaigned heavily on his behalf.

As the Democratic Party has increasingly emphasized climate change as a core issue, it has further alienated itself from coal country. All of the talk about a green economy, twenty-first century energy and massive job expansion in a kind of Green Keynesianism has proven to be ideological bluster with no basis in fact. This sense of being suckered by Washington is absolutely pervasive here. Highway welcome signs at the state borders could add a helpful note:

Welcome to West Virginia, and also

Coal—Don’t Fuck Me On This.

On a personal level, the most striking thing to me about this election cycle was that at work the day after the election was over, the subject didn’t come up once. It wasn’t until the following day that it came up briefly in the break room, and even then it was solely about everyone’s particular fears for the consequences of a Trump presidency and anger at Clinton for having the audacity to run in the first place. This combination of apathy and frustration has been far more common in casual conversations on the subject than any overt support for either candidate or party. During the long campaign season, the overwhelming majority of campaign signs here were reflective of local races (sheriff, county offices, state delegate and senator, governor) rather than the presidential election. Visible markers of Trump support have been notably absent in the area of eastern West Virginia, which is one of the most prosperous parts of the state and has high concentrations of traditional factory, warehouse and trucking jobs due to its proximity to the Mid-Atlantic transportation network and West Virginia’s low-wage status in the region. The volume of Trump campaign signs, bumper stickers and T-shirts struck me as far lower than what is being portrayed in the media.

When it comes to West Virginia, and I suspect the Rust Belt states as well, what translated into votes wasn’t the conversion of huge swathes of white workers into Trump’s own Palinistas, or the activation of a collective David Duke lurking in their subconscious, but the lack of a precise platform and peculiar populist spirit of his campaign, which allowed him to sway voters by only providing vague, unsubstantiated, circumstantial promises rather than an articulated programme. The region that seems to exemplify “Trump country” to me is across the Potomac River from West Virginia in the three western counties of Maryland that are considered part of Appalachia (Allegheny, Washington and Garrett). The town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, in particular represents a Trump town. It’s a Mayberry without even a single stoplight, the archetypal American small town with nothing but small business storefronts and modest (but well-kept) homes on its main street. Despite having a population of just 700, the town has been in the epicenter of Klan and fascist activity in the region for many years. Trump signs, banners, stickers and billboards of all kinds and sizes line both sides of the town, on every car, truck, home, business and virtually any other space. Agriculture is the most important local industry with a large number of small businesses, civil war memorial parks and prisons in the area providing employment.

A picture emerges from all of this. Trump’s core constituents are the small shopkeepers, farmers, segments of the rural professional strata, law enforcement and those cast out by or born unnecessary to capital. It’s extremely interesting that in the American cities that represent the twenty-first-century economy of high-tech manufacturing and an ever more educated and skilled workforce (described very well in John Garvey’s recent article “Notes On A Future Politics—Part 1”), which are flaunted to the rest of the world as symbols of American capital’s dynamism—Seattle, Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc.—all erupted in mass street demonstrations against the 2016 presidential election results, including burning Trump in effigy.

Things are simpler here. A spent shotgun shell or $10 stamp bag of heroin could have won similar numbers against Hillary Clinton in this election in West Virginia for the same reason that Donald Trump did: they also have no prior record of harming the coal industry and if anything, due to the spiraling suicide and addiction rates here, either inanimate object would have been more representative in their victory than was that of Donald Trump.

1. A majority of voters disliked both candidates. Six of ten thought both were dishonest. Clinton won the popular vote. She received at least 500,000 more votes than Trump, and by the time all the votes from California are calculated she may have as many as 2 million more. To put this into perspective, John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election by just 112,827 votes. Barack Obama won his first election by 10 million votes. Although people obviously know about the Electoral College this is all still pretty notable and for many startling. This is only the fifth time in the 240-year history of the United States as a country that a president won an election without winning the popular vote. Two of those instances came in the last 20 years. The first three times it happened it caused major political crises. In 1876 the crisis was protracted and resulted in the end of Reconstruction in the post–Civil War south with old elements of the defeated slavocracy returning to power. The potential difference between the popular vote and the votes of the winner in this election is unprecedented, yet this is not considered particularly newsworthy by any major publication or media outlet let alone the Democratic Party and its candidates. At most it gets passing mention.

2. Although George W. Bush’s 2000 victory was widely seen as illegitimate since he lost the popular vote by around 550,000, Trump’s victory was quickly announced and congratulated across the board. Newspapers, television stations, Clinton, Obama and even Bernie Sanders fell all over themselves to congratulate Trump for his victory and promise to support and work with him. This despite months of every newspaper, every Democratic politician, major figures in the military and government bureaucracy, and even huge sections of the Republican Party establishment claiming that Trump was unfit for the presidency and would ruin the United States of America. This despite Trump stating time and time again that voting was being rigged, and that he may not accept the outcome of the election. If things would have gone the other way with Clinton winning the election despite Trump winning the popular vote we could expect a major uproar to say the least.

3. Trump won less popular votes than Mitt Romney secured in the 2012 election against Obama. In other words, Trump won an election with less votes than the loser in the last election was able to score. Trump secured the lowest total number of popular votes of any candidate since George W. Bush in 2000, hardly a ringing endorsement or mass mandate.

4. Voter turnout fell drastically in this election. The number of people eligible to vote has increased by millions since Obama was first elected in 2008, yet the total number of people who cast ballots this time around was down by around 10 million. Nearly 100 million of the 218.9 million eligible voters selected neither Clinton nor Trump by voting third party or staying home. With all said and done, Trump will have won the presidency with the votes of only 19 percent of the total population of the United States.

5. Clinton won 2 million fewer votes from women than Obama won in the 2012 election. The push to elect the first female president on the basis of her being a woman and basically nothing else did not motivate women to vote. Nearly half of women eligible to vote decided to stay home instead. Clinton won 3 million fewer votes from black people than Obama won in the 2012 election. She won a nearly identical number of Latino votes as Obama won in that same election even though the number of eligible Latino voters has risen since that time.

6. Trump won the votes of about 27 million white men. In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney won the votes of about 27 million white men. Trump gained at most 1 percent on Romney’s share of votes from white people. Trump won a higher percentage of votes from every other “racial group” in the United States than Mitt Romney did in the 2012 election. Trump won 7 percent more blacks than Romney. He also won 11 percent more Asians and 8 percent more Latinos.

7. In exit polls, more than half of voters said that the main issue for them was “the economy.” Neither race nor gender was given as a reply in enough numbers to be statistically significant. Many voters went out of their way to say it wasn’t. Seven of ten voters said undocumented immigrants should be allowed to apply for legal residency. More voters opposed building a wall on the border with Mexico than favored it.

8. “Due largely to the dramatic movement among whites with no college degree, the gap between college and non-college whites is wider in 2016 than in any past election dating to 1980.” The biggest swings, in terms of income, came from people who make $30,000 a year or less. Trump won 10 percent more of these voters overall than Mitt Romney did last time around. In historically industrial states where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been done away with in recent years the shift was even more dramatic among people making $30,000 a year or less. Trump gained 19 percent from this income bracket in Indiana, 18 percent from this income bracket in Pennsylvania and 17 percent from this income bracket in Wisconsin. These three states helped to cement his win. Trump also gained big in the $30,000–50,000 a year income bracket nationwide, which it would be fair to imagine would contain a lot more workers than shopkeepers, managers and big wigs. Conversely, Clinton made gains among voters making over $50,000 a year. Her most pronounced swings came from voters earning more than $250,000 a year. She gained 11 percent among that affluent income bracket. She mainly promised more of the same “recovery” overseen by Obama, which saw one of the biggest shifts of wealth from the lower to upper classes in US history, the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, the destruction of pensions of retired workers and the compulsory purchase of overpriced health insurance, and came complete with the vast expansion of the electronic big-brother spy state, drone strikes and assassinations of citizens, and murderous military interventions in foreign lands. There is also the underreported issue of the announcement made just prior to the election that insurance premiums would rise an average of 25 percent across the United States. Pennsylvania was said to be on track for an increase of over 32 percent. This is the legacy Clinton, already hated and despised as a soulless and corrupt apparatchik beholden to Wall Street and the security state apparatus, proclaimed her eagerness to continue.

9. “Whites” between the ages of 24 and 59 have the highest death rates caused by suicide, drugs and alcohol of any “racial group” in America. Some groups of such as middle-aged, low-income white people, have seen death rate surges of up to 25 percent in a handful of years. This has never been seen in a developed country (let alone the richest country in the world) and is comparable to the results of the collapse of the USSR and “Eastern Bloc.”

10. Obviously, other “racial groups,” or more precisely the workers who have been categorized into various racial groupings, have also been hit hard by the financial collapse of 2008 and subsequent devastation. Contrary to the popular narrative, Trump was the only candidate to really address this. He said: “We’re going to rebuild our inner cities because our African American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before.” The White House denied the decline of conditions for black people, saying black people were “better off” under Obama despite all indications to the contrary. Clinton, put forward as a candidate of minorities, but who in the 1990s demonized black men as “superpredators” and helped consigned untold numbers to prison, agreed.

11. With the exception of Bernie Sanders, Trump was the first candidate to go to the industrial heartlands where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost and specifically say: “We will rebuild the factories” since the collapses and liquidations of 1970s and ’80s. This should not be underestimated in places where whole cities have been destroyed after plant closures, with the people left in them to rot away and die. During the primaries, as the coal industry plummeted, mines scaled down or closed, and courts allowed mine operators to cancel retired miner’s pensions, Clinton said “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right” before making some vague promises about “clean energy” coming in to save them at some point in the future. In actual practice, she planned to continue Obama-era laws that would lower states to consume less coal and shift to things like natural gas. The short-lived natural-gas boom has driven down the price of coal and has combined with shifts in investment and a decline in Chinese consumption to decimate the coal industry which in many places is practically the only industry that exists.

With few exceptions, local politicians, especially of the Democratic variety, have consigned the coal industry to disappearance. When a mine closed in the heart of southwestern Pennsylvania’s coal country last year, the Democratic county commissioner gathered them all together and said: “A lot of you aren’t going to get back to the mines. That’s just the way it’s going to happen.” Coal miners with years underground were told to “be realistic” and “come back to the real world,” which meant retraining for jobs in fields like healthcare that pay less than half of what they made in the mines. Trump, on the other hand, promised to “bring coal back!” When companies announced that they were shutting down plants in the United States and moving them to Mexico, Trump immediately and publicly condemned them by name and blamed it on trade policies of both major parties. He said he would hit the companies with huge tariffs on any products they tried to import back into the United States for sale, and make them beg to reopen their factories. Sanders was able to ride this kind of rhetoric to primary victories over Clinton in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. Trump rode it all the way to the White House. Previous candidates made vague promises about “job retraining” or other benefits and help as they have done for decades. They rarely talked about “the working class” and they never talked about bringing back factory jobs. Obama traveled to Pittsburgh at least twice to praise a supposed “technological boom” going on there without mentioning that it employs none of the thousands of former mill and mine workers who were forced to migrate for work, take on low-paying service industry jobs or go out on disability even though they’re physically fine. In between giving private speeches to Wall Street executives, Clinton went no further than giving the occasional talk about inequality (while wearing a $12,495 designer jacket). Of course factory jobs are not coming back. We know that. A lot of workers probably do too, but they’re desperate. Trump made empty promises as all politicians do. Things will never be the same. Even where some industrial production has trickled back into the United States it has brought little in terms of actual jobs thanks to technology (or the organic composition of capital for you Marx readers). Manufacturing jobs only grew by about 86,000 between 2011 and 2016 while manufacturing output grew by more than 20 percent over the same period. This is what Wall Street and the workings of capitalism demand. Look at the US-based Duraflame company for an example. They manufacture 36 million fire logs every year, accounting for almost half of the total market. How many people do they actually employ? A whopping 201. This doesn’t even get into the matter of wages. Wages for manufacturing workers, when they can still find work, have fallen year after year after year. And communists don’t even want things to be the same with whole towns and generations slaving away in filthy dangerous factories. This is not the point. The point is that Trump actually dared to talk to these people and addressed their conditions which in itself is totally new and would help explain his victory, driven as it was by gains among low income people in states with totally ruined industrial sectors like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. These are, or should be, some of the people communists look to the most, as opposed to the soft left-lite which had all but disappeared the working class before this election in favor of focus groups of ideology-driven students pushing for “safe spaces” on college campuses so they could live in their isolated suburban islands without danger of being potentially offended. None other than AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka (who is the biggest union leader in America for those unaware) raced to the front of the line to congratulate Trump on his victory and pledge to work together with the new commander in chief. Trumka proclaimed “The President-elect made promises in this campaign—on trade, on restoring manufacturing, on reviving our communities. We will work to make many of those promises a reality.” This is the same guy who recently branded Native American anti-pipeline protesters facing down the same private security and police who break union strikes as enemies of workers, saying the protesters “hold union members livelihoods and their families’ financial security hostage to endless delay.” United Auto Workers (UAW) president Dennis Williams crowed about Trump too, saying: “I think his position on trade is right on…. I see somebody who made a lot of commitment to workers about fairness and being part of the American dream, rebuilding the American middle class, creating opportunities.” Williams is now trying to sit down with Trump to help implement an immediate tariff against cars made in Mexico. This is the same sort of UAW leadership that pushed anti-Japanese rhetoric to the max in the 1980s and whipped workers up into a violent frenzy that led directly to violent attacks (and even murder) of totally innocent Asian people in Michigan, but wouldn’t dare lift a finger to reach out to Japanese autoworkers for joint activity or challenge the Big Three bosses as they dismantled factories across America. Union officialdom in the United States has been pushing nationalist poison for years and years. Rather than try to organize immigrants and build working class solidarity across international borders to do battle with the multinational corporations that drive working people into the dirt everywhere, Trumka and his ilk push for “partnerships” with the billionaire bosses and blame job and income declines in America on low paid “foreign workers.” Sound familiar? It should; it was the bedrock of Trump’s appeal to the workers in places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. If you think it had no effect, or that it had less effect than hate spewed by marginal racist grouplets like the KKK or individuals like David Duke which haven’t been able to make any real inroads for four decades, even though the facts1 and the people who voted themselves tell you otherwise2 (with more than half saying “the economy is the main issue”), then I don’t know what to tell you. When so-called communists find themselves repeating the arguments of the bourgeois opinion-making media mouthpieces and academics scorning the “racist and backward” members of “the white working class” you may think they would want to reconsider their positions, or at least stop pretending to be on our side. Especially when even the “liberal elite” New York Times is able to see the reality, at least once in a while.

• 1A black candidate was elected president twice in sweeping victories, interracial marriage rates have tripled over the last 30 years to almost one in five today, and acceptance of both interracial and gay marriage has become widespread and normalized; meanwhile, David Duke went from winning 39 percent of the vote in 1991 to 19 percent in 1999 to 3 percent in 2016. “The largest KKK group in the country” has a whopping 150 members, and there are now less Klan members than members of insignificant Leninist groups nationwide.
• 2“A worker at a plastics factory nearby, Mr. Link noted that a Hispanic family recently moved in next door, and he said he was pleased that blacks and whites now socialize in ways almost unimaginable decades ago. ‘It pains me to see this country divided by race,’ Mr. Link said. Nevertheless, he voted for Mr. Trump. Mr. Presley, the 59-year-old white Crawfordsville steelworker who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 and Mr. Trump in 2016, was even more emphatic that racial resentment or ethnic bigotry was not behind his support for Mr. Trump. ‘I grew up on the West Side of Indianapolis in a racist environment,’ he said. ‘But I went to a high school that was 57 percent black, and I played football with a lot of black guys and we became close friends. I learned not to be racist.’ ” Nelson D. Schwartz, “Can Trump Save Their Jobs? They’re Counting on It,” New York Times, November 12, 2016.

1. Trump Is Not A Fascist But He Has Given Fascists Comfort

Trump is an opportunistic right-wing populist with a contradictory class base of support. He is not himself a fascist. He has not threatened the bourgeois order nor has he marshaled extraparliamentary forces to destroy it. His politics will be a mix of the Republican and Democratic approaches to policy developed in the last forty years. As such, the establishment will have a hard time defining him clearly as either a Republican or Democrat. Liberals who underestimated Trump’s support during the election are now overestimating his commitment to the toxic mix of white supremacy, misogyny, and racism he spouted during his campaign. Accusations to that effect overlook his appeal based on the economic apocalypse facing many white families today, his promise to rebuild the country’s decaying infrastructure, the power of an anti-establishment vote, and the shocking inability of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to defeat someone openly saying any of the things Trump said.

As Trump and his administration begin carrying out their own form of class warfare in the coming years, they will use laws and policies that the Democratic Party itself adheres to or has created.

2. Anti-Trumpism Is a Dead End

There is something to be said for a vote for Trump. Even if the claims of a millionaire to be an outsider ring hollow, a protest vote of this magnitude against the political establishment should be welcomed by the left. In spite of the opening in bourgeois politics the Trump vote represents, interpretations of Trump’s election seem to fall into two camps, neither of which holds much hope for a proletarian vision of politics. On the one hand is the apocalypse: race war without end, beginning now. On the other, moderation: the notion that all politicians are liars or that existing institutions will smooth Trump’s rougher edges. But apocalyptic visions are not useful organizing tools, and moderation at its extreme can give people a false sense of security.

The challenge for revolutionaries is to avoid both of these interpretations, and remain committed to a political vision in which every cook can and should govern contemporary society.

3. Internationalism From Above and Below.

Trump is part of a global development of right-wing populist governments. After Brexit and now Trump, Sarkozy in France seems to be following Clinton’s electoral playbook to defeat. In this context, it’s unclear what Trump will do internationally as president. He has run on a platform of isolationism and America first. His other priority seems to be crushing ISIS at any cost.

One thing is certain: his administration will face the challenges of governing that all governments—right and “left”—have faced since the economic crisis of 2008. It is easy to talk about pulling out of NAFTA or NATO, but doing so will prove extremely difficult economically and politically. The geopolitics of the bourgeoisie will be in crisis if Trump goes through with destroying any of these global institutions. It is not clear that Trump has the will or principles to carry out this part of his program.

Meanwhile, the proletariat has yet to break out of the containers of class struggle defined by nation states and put proletarian internationalism from below back on the map.

4. Liberalism’s Hatred of Democracy and Workers

When Hillary Clinton blamed James Comey for her electoral defeat, she essentially admitted that the Democratic Party offers nothing for the working class of any race. Across the Midwest, white people in counties that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 chose Donald Trump in 2016. Forced to choose between a party that counts their votes but ignores their plight and one that actively seeks to strip them of the right to vote, Black folks stayed home. Their refusal to participate in this election, an act of courage that few have reckoned with, represents a political reality that liberals like Clinton continue to overlook at their party’s peril. Meanwhile, early reports suggest that almost 30 percent of Latinos and Asian Americans voted for Trump. By blaming Comey, Clinton ignores her own role in what must be considered one of the biggest electoral defeats in US history, as well as the role of the Democratic Party in that defeat.

The working class seems to have recognized what liberals failed to see: the Democratic Party is deeply implicated in the crisis working-class people face today.

5. Zombie Liberalism

Hope among the liberals is already in the air for the promise of Michelle Obama running against Trump in 2020. The nation, they seem to think, will be saved by Michelle. There is some truth to this, as US political institutions seem infinitely malleable. Progressives are arguing for eliminating the Electoral College, rebuilding the Democratic Party, and building a left version of the Tea Party. For them, the distortions within an otherwise acceptable system are the issue.

But Obama’s America was no racial utopia. The United States remains, before and after Obama, a viciously racist society. After Trump’s election, it seems the only people that forgot this were white liberals. Election-night coverage of Trump’s election demonstrated this, as Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert publicly dealt with their grief over Trump’s election, and Colbert’s planned celebration turned into a funeral.

Liberal hysteria over Trump only hides liberals’ complacency and acceptance of Obama’s America. Would any of these people have come out if Clinton won the election? The arrogance of people in California or New York in condemning states that voted Republican brings to mind Malcolm X’s attacks on northern liberals, who behaved as if the North was some paradise for Black people. Twenty years of political struggle by black people destroyed that illusion, and revolutionary forces should not revive it.

Liberalism should be a zombie ideology at this point. But as we have seen across the world it will not go down on its own. It will have to be dragged into its coffin by a social movement from below. While not being sectarian towards the masses of people who entertain liberal ideas, revolutionaries should criticize liberalism at every turn.

What this election revealed was a Democratic Party in shambles. While many of us thought that Trump’s nomination would undermine the Republican Party, it turns out that Trump may have undermined the Democrats. What is clear is that the electoral coalitions of both parties have changed fundamentally.

6. Against Racial Essentialism

The death of identity politics is pronounced every few years, often by people like us. It seems the structure of our society, our actions, and our thinking constantly reproduce identity politics, only to have the logic of capitalism eviscerate those same identities in turn. In the cracks that form, new identities emerge and the process begins anew: some of us are elevated in this society, becoming its managers and administrators, at the cost of betraying those who raised us, befriended us and loved us, laughed with us and died alongside us.

This election has raised the same dynamics. The link between a person’s identity and his or her politics has once again received a body blow as Trump’s right-wing populism attracted not only the vote of disaffected white people, but a sizable portion of the Latino and Asian vote and even a small part of the Black vote. We ignore this reality at our own peril. With identity politics staggering, how will the left and everyone else opposed to Trump approach the matter of identity and politics in the future? We should be guided at the outset by a simple principle: It does not matter what your race, religion, nationality, or gender is; it is what you do in class struggle that counts.

7. Bourgeois Fault Lines Are Not For Us to Mimic

Revolutionaries seem as shocked as liberals about Trump’s election. Their desperation reveals that their elitism and cluelessness rival that of the liberal media that floundered on election night. The revolutionary left has accepted many of the simplistic analyses and treatment of the white working class that liberal commentators spew. Trump supporters are turned into caricatures while Clinton supporters are profiled in all their complexity.

If this continues, revolutionary forces will quickly become obsolete. New social forces and new organizations will emerge in struggle. These social forces will largely be unrecognizable to the revolutionary forces. Sections of a future left-wing movement will not come only from the Democratic Party and may not even predominantly come from it. We should remember the nearly 50 percent of eligible voters who refused to cast a ballot for either candidate. These people are not fools and nor are they necessarily apolitical. We should welcome them to work alongside us in the practical movement that opposes Trump’s vision for our world.

8. No Lives Matter

An unknown percentage of Trump supporters are virulent and dangerous racists. Fear of indigenous and Black people has been a crucial part of American politics. While the core of this fear emanates from the possibility of Black revolt, it is easily applied to other social groups. As society crumbles, fear of the other could prove to be a rallying cry for racists and those seeking stability. Today, part of Trump’s support and base certainly wants to destroy Black Lives Matter. Currently, white supremacy is most evident in the policing and incarceration of Black bodies. It should be no surprise that we have seen both riots and backlash around this question.

At the same time, we are skeptical of claims that paint all Trump voters as racist. We have seen no one who has made such claims actually talk to Trump supporters or produce a sophisticated knowledge of who these people are. As far as we know, everyone’s source is the media and their coverage of Trump rallies. While the past is always present, and race is always with us, we do not dogmatically assume that the racial dynamics of slavery, Jim Crow, or mass incarceration alone can explain the diversity of reasons people voted for Trump. The gains of the Civil Rights movement and Black Power not only changed Black people themselves, but also white America. The changes which have happened to the latter are largely unknown to the metropolitan revolutionary left.

Black Lives Matter as a mass movement has been cornered into becoming defenders of unarmed, “innocent” and straight Black men. This has been a huge political mistake, although organizations and individuals might have more sophisticated politics. The mass movement component has spoken by whom it shows up for.

Black Lives Matter is a profoundly limited argument. It assumes that white lives matter to the political order we live in. We know this to be false, not least by the tens of thousands of heroin deaths white people have experienced in recent years. While Black Lives Matter can be seen as a “powerful liberal critique” of the bourgeois order, the dilemma of any liberal critique is that it accepts all the core assumptions of bourgeois society itself. The path to revolution will not lie through a liberal critique.

If whiteness has been correlated with upward mobility, jobs, homogeneity, neoliberalism has shattered many of those assumptions. Whiteness has also cracked in tension with people of color (and specifically Black people), but also in tension with the chasm between the white bourgeoisie and the white proletariat. The last forty years have broken the New Deal compact where the white elites were seen as part of an American nation of productive labor. With income inequality, automation, and offshoring, the compact that white workers believed in has been broken. The crisis of whiteness is twofold—one inside the community and one in relationship to Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, etc. So the attempt to put whiteness back together is not only an anti-Black project at its core, but also an anti-elitist project. This can begin to explain the right-wing populist nature of the white vote.

The feeling so many white working-class voters have of being left behind in this economy is a real process that has occurred. It should not be discounted. Doing so only accepts the neoliberal story promoted by the Obama administration. Considering the irrelevance of the revolutionary left, it is no surprise that it has taken on a right-wing momentum. Sharp-minded readers will know of the devastating critiques conservatism can have of liberalism. We are not the only ones who have something to say about the failures of liberalism and Obama’s government.

The swing to the right by some white voters can perhaps be read by how such voters saw Obama as an outsider who promised hope and change. All of it turned out to be empty. In a way that Black voters are not beholden to the Democratic Party, these white voters went with Trump; with Trump’s racism and patriarchy being secondary for them—anyone to blow up the establishment. Such voters are also the ones who also grasp that politicians say one thing in election times and one thing to rally the base, but governing is something different. There is a level of sophistication to this strategy.

The use of cheap and undocumented Latino labor has been a priority of large sections of American capital for the entire twentieth century. Undocumented status has been a powerful way to defeat class struggle potentials and solidarities. The citizen versus noncitizen remains one of the most decisive divisions of politics that gets mapped onto to class struggle. It is no surprise that the growth of the Latino population is driving Trump’s voters. This has happened in small towns and cities and suburbs. It is not only the perception of job competition, but also the fear of crime, and the destruction of white culture that is driving a part of the Trump vote.

The fear of Islam is certainly felt by Trump’s base. Twenty-five years of war against North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia are going to produce Islamophobia. Asymmetrical attacks against the United States will not go away, only proving the fears of liberals and conservatives. The fault line of all social struggles in the United States is the acceptance of patriotism, citizenship, and the United States military. Unfortunately it is usually large wars, where casualties amongst Americans are high, which prove to be the basis for challenging these beliefs.

The only sensible answer at least in terms of propaganda and conversation is that the struggle for jobs, housing, and education will always occur. Under capitalism there is always a limited pie. What I get, you cannot. In the United States this takes shape in terms of race. Black success is white death and suffering. White success is Black death and suffering. We can accept this or fight and build an entirely new order: full communism/anarchism.

As of now the white workers who voted for Trump should not be automatically seen as a lost cause. It is too early to declare that. There will be a time when they are forever lost to the other side. This is not the time. Revolutionary forces must engage with white workers. Revolutionary forces are closer to liberal elitists in their knowledge, approach, and treatment of the white working class. We have lost our way and mimic the liberals.

Each “race” or section of the class in general stands alone in its fight against capital and the state. Solidarity is largely amongst intellectuals, NGOs, and revolutionary groups. Why these lonely battles? What will bring the multidimensional proletariat to the streets?

9. Queer Life Under Trump’s America

Trump’s Christian base is profoundly hostile to freedoms gained by the LGBTQ community and the capacity to choose abortion. Family, heteronormativity, and “life” are the rallying cries of the Christian base that voted for Trump.

Will Trump go after the right of Queer people to marry? What about bathrooms? Roe v. Wade? His own stance on these issues is not clear. This is part of his opportunism. Perhaps he will be pushed by the Pence wing of the Republican Party, or perhaps he will ignore them and leave those issues alone. These struggles are a part of class struggle.

What does Trump’s presidency say to young white men and men generally about how far a man can go while openly discussing sexual assault among other things? His presidency will most likely legitimize a frat-boy attitude toward women and queer people.

10. Our Defense Must Be Exemplary

Political violence, from below, has returned to US politics.

Trump’s hate-filled presidential campaign activated/reinvigorated profoundly dangerous dynamics in American politics. Already, incidents of racism and ethnic intimidation have been reported across the country. Given this, the question of self-defense is an important one for everyone in the United States to grapple with. Self-defense is a profoundly moral question, with practical implications for everyone: will we allow people in our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces to be deported? How will we stop them? Doing so will require direct action, maybe constructing physical barricades, maybe even engaging in street fights with organized racists and with government forces. To the extent that Trump accomplishes the mass deportation he proposes, he will rely on a policy and intellectual framework built by Republican and Democratic administrations. His proposal to deport mostly “criminals” pushes against a contradiction within the broad left-wing political spectrum regarding the rights of the incarcerated to due process and other protections of the judicial system.

To the extent that we prevent the mass deportation of millions of human beings living in this country, we will have to be organized. The left cannot accomplish a task of this magnitude alone. It will require an alliance with a proletariat willing to engage in direct action and even armed self-defense. Failing in this effort will constitute a defeat of historic proportions.

11. Symbolic Struggles

The limits of symbolic struggle have become apparent. The Oakland riot spectacle is the most extreme example of this. Questions of real disruption and destruction, of workplace occupations and violence seem to be hovering in the air. The common person is most likely to say that coming to protests is a waste of time because they do not accomplish anything. There is a deep truth to this insight. American protests are at an impasse. It is not clear if they can be resolved by the bold actions of the revolutionary forces. Would such bold actions be a spark to something bigger or failed ultra-leftist adventures?

At the same time, when people move, we should join them. Revolutionary forces should not abstain from anti-Trump struggles but participate in them as committed participants. Nor should we keep quiet about our politics. We should fight for reforms that grants practical benefits to people under attack while at the same time raising our politics and organizing around them.

12. All Laws Are Consequences of Class Struggle

Any social welfare the government provides to working people has been achieved by the class struggle of those people themselves. Since the 1970s, under Republican and Democratic administrations, there has been a renewed assault on those gains, and the vestiges of that struggle have been slowly gutted. Under a Trump presidency, despite his populist appeals to the working class, we can expect this trend to continue.

Trump’s presidency may be the most malleable by class struggle since Nixon. This is due to his own contradictory base and his opportunistic politics as well as to the robust social movement that has emerged during Obama’s second term. Whereas Obama’s presidency was defined by a conciliatory neoliberalism, Trump’s may be a feather in the wind shaped by forces much larger than him.

The danger is that an energized far-right movement may take the offensive and even have a profound advantage over the left. In this context, it is as much a possibility that class struggle end in large-scale defeats and even victories for the right on the street, at workplaces, and in neighborhoods. This is a reality the left needs to take seriously in the coming period.

13. Fundamental Questions of Politics Might Be On the Plate Again.

Revolutionary forces must pose them and act on them as clearly as possible.

The revolutionary forces are so removed from questions of power and violence that this phenomenon is part of the reason that we cannot pose any fundamental resolutions to the crisis. The victory of liberalism and civil society has also infected the proletariat where safety, family, the American Dream, etc., have all become priorities over fundamental political questions of life and death. All one has to do is look at the past to see how violence as a form of justice in daily life was a part of proletarian life to see the victory of the liberal order and how revolutionary forces as well have been broken by this. The law has become a prison. Trump’s victory might bring back such forms of politics on a larger order.

Black, LGBTQ, Latinx, Muslims, women, and working-class whites are scared and shocked. While we need not be cold, we need to throw some cold water on everyone’s faces. Coddling fear and shock are not the tasks of the day. We need to point out what others all over the world are doing to fight the old order.

When we talk about armed self-defense, about growing attacks on people of color, gender nonconformists and queer folks across the spectrum of sexuality, about the mass deportation of millions of people currently residing in this country, about the potential devastation that further retraction of the social safety net will have across the country in poor and working-class regions, we recognize that the direction of the country today is open. Trump voters wanted something other than the contending neoliberal visions of Democrats and Republicans and have received it. What that is exactly will be settled less by bourgeois political institutions or clever think pieces echoing through the internet than by social struggles, engaged in by millions of people, for a different vision of this world.