Voting for Trump to solve the problems of the living conditions of the U.S. working class is like leaving someone in the desert because he is thirsty.
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
Immigration, abortion, wokism, the Ukrainian war, eternal wars, reindustrialization and protectionism. With the exception of abortion and Wokism (identitarianism), which are matters concerned with each one’s conscience rather than about structural policy, they all represent, in some way, some of the most brutal consequences of neoliberalism in the U.S., and are among the major causes of Kamala’s defeat and Trump’s victory.
Deindustrialization, blamed by Trump as one of the major causes of America’s loss of power, happened as a direct result of the financialization of the economy (accelerated by Republican Nixon) making the Wall Street casino business the economic engine of the USA. Without industry came the deterioration of real power resolved through the creation of eternal conflicts. Eternal wars take a heavy toll on the Western economy (also in Europe) and hamper public investment in infrastructure and other social necessities. The loot they make possible for Blackrock, Monsanto, Golden Sachs and others does not go back to the American people, but to the accumulation of a few.
As a way of diverting attention, frightening and anesthetizing the masses, Russophobia, the Cold War and identitarianism are being revived, causing social atomization and the fracturing of social movements that could consistently and coherently challenge this situation. The result is a humane feeling of instability and precariousness about all aspects of life.
Trump has emerged as the solution that will fulfill the aspiration for stability and a certain “normality” in customs, the economy, work and the family. Kamala has never been free from the accusation that she wants to keep untouched the factors that cause this social breakdown.
Trump’s announced victory shows that Biden’s economic “successes” were not recognized by the population. The oligarchic gains never reached the pockets of working people. The Democratic Party refused to acknowledge this fact, and in doing so guaranteed Trump’s victory.
Having explained the cause, we now need to establish its constituents, which I will list at random:
- The role of eternal wars
Trump has used this banner masterfully, capitalizing on factors such as the fear of a world war, the opacity of the military-industrial complex, its lack of control over spending and the fact that it operates beyond democratic rules, without auditing, scrutiny or the need to justify spending.
NATO’s more than predictable defeat in Ukraine brings with it another novelty, which is a certain discrediting of the mythical – but never proven – U.S. military capacity. Trump presented himself as the candidate who would solve the eternal conflicts, freeing the American people from this burden, but at the same time recovering the lost military mysticism. A kind of nationalism typical of empires that are on its way to an end.
There are two problems about this assumption: the first is that the discourse of peace and the end of war should, conceptually, be on Kamala’s side; the second is that believing that Trump will even succeed in putting an end to U.S. militarism is laughable, to say the least. Trump may even cool down some conflicts, but he will aggravate others, in line with his arrogance and narcissism, not because he is Trump, but because he shares the U.S. ideological providentialism.
As will be seen, however, Trump will not only increase military spending, in line with the Heritage Foundation‘s Mandate 2025, but he will also have to fuel conflicts to justify them. Probably more cold conflicts than hot ones, but conflicts nonetheless. Europe will be one of the biggest victims of its own cowardice. Trump will not stop extorting European cowardly politicians out of what he considers to be their fair contribution to a NATO that only works for the U.S. and no one else.
Trump feeds off the lack of a pacifist discourse, advocating the end of eternal wars, which doesn’t mean “the end of wars” and certainly doesn’t mean “the end of conflicts” and military tensions.
- Immigration blames the wrong people
This flag is not new. However, as everyone can state, what Trump doesn’t say is that the employers themselves are the ones who demand that Western governments open the migratory “doors”. No migrant moves to a country if he thinks that won’t find work there. It is the likelihood of finding work that attracts migration. This information circulates through the trafficking networks and reaches the poorest people, who seize the opportunity.
And who spreads the information? Just look, for example, at the position of European employers’ associations on the subject. They believe that more migrants are needed. After all, they need cheap, available, well-behaved, disposable labor that puts downward pressure on the wage costs of local people. Trump, the far right, says nothing about this.
The far right does capitalize massively on the problems of social exclusion linked to the flow of migrants and their descendants’ poor living conditions. And this social exclusion is once again Democratic Party’s fault. The Democratic Party responds to employers by maintaining or increasing the migratory stock, but the money that should be used to integrate these people and their children actually is used for war and to finance big corporations. Biden’s anti-inflation package (the Inflation Reduction Act) has financed hundreds of billions of dollars in stock market capital purchases done by the corporations themselves, so that they are artificially valued. This money was not used to improve access to health care, housing or social security, all flagships used by the Democratic Party. This party has been penalized for treating migrants the way the Republican Party treats them when it is in power.
- The Democratic debacle on the Palestinian question
The Democratic Party has lost a lot of the trust that American youth from urban areas placed in it, on the Palestinian issue. If until now, whether badly or well, young progressives and anti-Zionist adults saw the Democratic Party as a kind of appeaser – at least – in the face of Republican anti-Arabism and zionism, with Biden and Kamala, everything has gone up in smoke.
It was under Biden and Kamala that the world witnessed an unacceptable Genocide live. It is under a Democratic administration that the U.S. has embarked on a war on two fronts, one of which is waged against a defenseless people, and one of which has the most unpredictable consequences.
Kamala and the Democratic Party thus failed to make a substantial difference to Trump, and if anyone capitalized on this, it was the latter’s candidacy. At least he will have captured some votes that he would not have had access to before. The fact that he advocates an end to perpetual wars and says he doesn’t want war with Iran ended up making an important difference on this issue too.
- The antipathy generated by the figures who are now the face of the Democratic Party
The establishment was convinced that the American people liked Hillary Clinton. They were wrong. Hillary was “Killary” and there was no special sympathy for her. They were also convinced that Kamala would not fail. Just put her in front of a teleprompter and it was done. She didn’t have to talk much, and think even less. No one was able to capitalize on anything positive about Kamala. The times she was left without a teleprompter, her improvisation was appalling. Her oratorical, rhetorical and theoretical incapacity was made obvious.
But the fact that she is a woman, combined with the fact that she is “Brown“, could not fail. The card had worked with Obama, why should it fail now? Obama was the most likeable genocidal politician in history. While he was showing off his enormous capacity for discourse, he was locking up children in cages on the southern border, threatening Syria with invasion, creating the conditions for the Islamic State to enter Syria and Iraq, destroying Libya and supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
This bet on an innocuous, lackluster and incapable figure is not new and represents a huge void of real leadership. Biden was the last of the leaders behind the U.S. Democratic machine. People like Cornel West, Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders were prevented by big donors from giving voice to the popular anxieties important to young people and workers. This is American “democracy” in its entirety.
- Capitalize on dislike in the system and about the state of affairs
The precariousness of life, the harshness of living conditions, the ideological stagnation of the political system and the dimming of the lights that can pave the way to an alternative, and with stagnation, rot and deterioration, combined with the absence of alternatives, create the ideal contradictions for the emergence of movements that defend, even if only apparently, that alternative. It’s a law of life. If the water doesn’t go one way, it goes the other.
However, the Democratic Party, like the social democratic parties in Europe, is controlled by neoliberalism. The deterioration of public services during their terms in office has become evident, resulting in the ideological demoralization, not only of social democracy, but of all progressive and democratic forces considered “moderate”. The radicals are persona non grata and no longer constitute an effective difference to the other forces of the right.
When we have a Democratic Party defending neoliberal hegemony and globalism, a socialist or social democratic party defending neoliberal Europe and historical revisionism, allying itself with neoliberals and neoconservatives, the space opens up for the appearance of an alternative to the far right. Reality never stops.
Trump is emerging as an alternative to the system that builds and feeds him. And it succeeds because the establishment has transformed the Western party system into a broad neoliberal and neoconservative right-wing camp, in which different figures parade in appearance but the same in substance, tamed by the elites, with the sole aim of maintaining the appearance of a democratic movement, when in practice it doesn’t exist.
After all, it is JD Vance, Trump’s Vice President, who appears to oppose corporations’ displacements to Mexico and China. Shouldn’t the Democrats have done it? When we see Biden applying tariffs so that Chinese brands don’t enter the U.S., it’s worth asking whether he shouldn’t have remembered to do so to U.S. companies that were closing in the country and opening overseas. Why was the Democratic Party complicit in the destruction of U.S. industrial capacity and, with it, the destruction of the American working class ways of life?
- Abortion and concern for the living
It wasn’t just abortion, a flag that can be capitalized on in a reactionary and very religious society. There’s no point in the Kamalas of the world coming out and saying that a Trumpist or a traditional Republican cares more about human fetuses than the lives of those already born, if they then keep wages frozen for more than 40 years, allow wealth to concentrate again at the level it did in the 1930s, don’t create a network of cheap or free childcare, don’t support the formation of families and the birth rate grow, and so on. Their discourse contradicts what they actually do.
Where is the morality in defending abortion in a situation like this? Even if it exists, it is very much conditioned by the failure of the DP’s social policies. How can you say that abortion can be defended as a last resort, when you are directly responsible for not creating the conditions to support the birth rate, which make this “last resort” the first resort?
- The defense of “normality”
The linking between neoliberal Wokism (identitarianism) and LGBTQ propaganda to left-wing movements, is also the fault of the Democratic Party and of the social democratic parties, which have given up on universalism in favour of an atomization of identity and gender liberalization.
Women, homosexuals, Latinos, blacks, trans people are chosen just because they are what they are, and not because of who they are as persons, as human beings. Choosing an incapable homosexual, just because he is homossexual, is a huge disservice to the homo movement, choosing an incapable woman, just because she is a woman, is a disservice to the cause of women. Someone like Von Der Leyen, being a woman, perpetuates the war. Someone like Paulo Rangel (Portugal’s Foreign Minister), being a homosexual, perpetuates war. What is the advantage that this policy brings to society? We have to eradicate discriminatory ways of doing things, not introducing others.
Used as an opportunistic banner, wokism atomizes identity, atomizes society. Woke propaganda is used as a political banner and a sign of sophistication and mental freedom, but its effect is to convey to society that its “normality” is at stake. We can question whether or not “normality” includes other identities, but always as part of a whole, of course. The system simply has to ensure that, whatever you choose to be, you are naturally entitled to the same living conditions as everyone else.
Instead, the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be caught up in the idea that the most important thing is to be able to assert your identity, and even to do so with outrage and pamphleteering. What matters is that you can choose to be trans, homo or non-binary, even though you may have to live on the street and without a job. This is an inversion of priorities. In order to guarantee effective freedom of choice you need first to provide the basic universal conditions necessary for survival with dignity. And not the other way around. Defending the former, to the detriment of the latter, sends out a message that means the subversion of things, which destroys the appearance of normality and the idea of social stability.
Wokism consists of a set of principles that are the direct result of liberalization of individual identity and the possibility of choice from a set of marketed identities, in disconnection from one’s material and biological existence. In a way it means the freedom from biology and from each one’s material condition. No one has to be imprisoned anymore behind his or her biological condition, you can go beyond that, since you can choose from something like an “identity market”. It’s the application of consumerism ideology to the human biological condition. It is therefore a divisive individualism, an idealism. The Democratic Party should never embark on idealism. You don’t discuss each one’s likes, conditions or ways of life, you just have to guarantee that by choosing one or another, one doesn’t suffer discrimination in any form. The rest is up to you. By stating the difference every step of the way, you start dividing society into small tribes, breaking social links between people. So, it’s not hard to understand why, today, you find more and more bigotry.
By introducing wokeism and exacerbated individualism in its program, the Democratic Party has contributed to the division amongst society. A more fragmented society plus harder living conditions, plus the destruction of working class grassroots organizations (substituted by CIA NGO’s), you get the ideal playground for far right populism.
In doing so, it has allowed Trump to sell himself as the guarantor of normality. The far right sells itself as the guarantor of normality!
- The error of the Zelensky card against Trump
Trump’s association with Putin and Russia was intended to capitalize on a Russophobia that has never really caught on, except among those who feed and live off the establishment. On the voting day, in the state of Georgia, Putin was back on the scene. There were supposedly bomb threats from Russia. No one believes this any more and the results in Georgia demonstrate a certain and growing popular immunity to the scams made by the corporate press.
The truth is that few believe in Zelensky anymore, and even fewer are able to hear him speak. In total disconnect with popular sentiment, they believed that putting Trump against Zelensky would affect Trump. On the contrary, it reassured many who doubted that Trump would end the war that it was the right vote.
Like the Ukrainian people, we Westerners have had enough of this war.
- The discrediting of the Mainstream Press
The entire Western mainstream press, even those aligned with the Republican Party, was pushing for Kamala. Kamala had the hawks on her side.
Kamala’s defeat is the defeat of the corporate press. Kamala’s defeat is the defeat of the narratives commissioned by Wall Street, the Pentagon, the CIA or the White House. Today in the U.S., according to Gallup, there are already more Americans who don’t believe the mainstream media at all than those who believe it at all.
Trump has used it exhaustively. From the post-truth of his first term, to the total discrediting of his second, Trump beat the Mainstream Press. Elon Musk and his Twitter account played a key role here. Twitter was Trump’s online propaganda force. No human being should have as much power as Musk, but one of those responsible for manufacturing these “neofeudal” powers is no one but the Democratic Party itself.
In conclusion:
Kamala’s defeat is thus the victory of political demagoguery, providentialist messianism and Supremacism, from which the Democratic Party has not freed itself and which it has also helped to normalize, allowing Trump to win despite it and in despite of the exacerbated way in which he defends it. The Democratic Party could never dismantle it in its essence, because the Democrats also defend “American leadership”, the “indispensable nation”, all the triumphalist and neo-colonialist slogans of the U.S. elite, manufactured under Clinton.
Trump’s victory is the defeat of polling companies, denounced as instruments for constructing the desired results.
Democracy is understood as a superior system in which informed and conscious people make conscious choices, according to programs that have been discussed, reflected on and debated. The parade of Trump supporters without the slightest political, intellectual or ideological decency, or the parade of Kamala supporters without the slightest ability to convey ideas, in either case only called to the limelight because of their popularity, is one of the sad episodes of this decadent circus show that they call “democratic elections” in the U.S.
Lastly, Kamala this time prevented the Democratic Party from capitalizing on her disintelligence: the votes related to limiting the use of weapons, since she presented herself as someone who uses them, talking about it with pride, which will not have failed to shock a lot of good people; the votes of migrants and descendants of migrants, concerned about the constant aggression by the U.S. against their countries of origin (the case of the Chinese, Iranians, Cubans, Arabs and many others); the pro-Palestinian votes and many votes from the working classes.
She has failed to make a real difference to Trump’s policies and has thus either demobilized her supporters or, due to the factors I’ve mentioned, caused many to switch to the other candidate. The weight of international issues may not be very great, but from them we can see that very little distances Kamala from Trump. This is unacceptable in a democracy.
In the end, there can only be one conclusion: no matter who wins, the American people will always lose. Voting for Trump to solve the problems of the living conditions of the American working class is like leaving someone in the desert because he is thirsty.
Look at the desert we’re in!
