Video | Trump, the US elections, fascism
DK Renton •DK Renton unpicks whether Trump will rule as a fascist and suggests that the US election was more about continuity than many commentators have suggested.
The video is from a public meeting held by Edinburgh rs21 on 4 December 2024. In it (and in the subsequent discussion at the meeting) DK Renton explores some thoughts about the aspects of continuity in the Trump election. The discussion is work in progress for a more developed analysis of the threats that a Trump presidency represents which will be published in 2025
Transcript
A couple of weeks ago I was asked by Spectre, one of the main socialist magazines in the US. to write a piece for them taking seriously the argument which came very strongly from the Democrats during the election that if Trump was elected essentially that would be the end of elections in America. He would rule as a fascist. So, what you’ve got isn’t the full version of that article when it’s written. I’m afraid I’m using you much more as a testing ground to help me formulate some ideas and some points for that. It will be out in due course.
I want to start with this graph here, which I’ve chosen because of what it shows. If you look at it, on the right-hand side is just a representation of the last 7 elections in the United States, who won them, how many votes they got, and how close they were. I’m hoping that the one thing you really notice about that is that since 2000, a long period, essentially every American election has ended in more or less the same result. In every single election the winner has got between 48 and 53% of the vote, the loser has never got less than 45% of the vote. That’s really quite important because if you look at all the commentary that’s coming out from the United States, the message which everyone’s giving is that this election was shocking, it was transformative, people voted in a completely different way from how they voted before. But the truth is that American elections are in essence no swing elections. Very few people in any election actually change sides, so if you look at the one election where the winning party got comfortably more than 50%, that’s 2008 blue, so it’s Democrat, it’s Obama. He got something like 53% of the vote. In the current election Kamala Harris lost she got 46% of the vote.
That sounds like a catastrophic collapse of Democrat votes, but actually in terms of the total system the overarching message is of continuity. Essentially every party is always going to get 45% of the vote, they might get a little bit more than that, they’re not going to get a lot more than that, no matter what actually happens in government. In the context of global politics, thinking about other political systems and how they’ve governed, who’s challenging for power – you might think for example about France where very few of the political parties which exist today even existed 20 years ago. There’s a different party on the centre right, there’s a different party on the left, there’s a different party at the centre, the far right – same party but it’s changed its name. Actually, all round in most relatively affluent countries what’s happening is we’re seeing a process of absolute electoral upheaval, the destruction of the old parties, their replacement, new forms of politics emerging.
One place that does not happen in the United States, so whenever anyone says this election produced a really significant result you have to take a step back. The most significant thing is that most voters voted for the parties they always vote for. There’s another thing which follows from that, the primary political lesson of the actual campaign is that you had a Democratic Party which said, if you look at Donald Trump he’s a different kind of person from anyone who’s been a Republican leader for such a long time, he’s got a different social base, he’s got a different programme, he stands for different things. Obviously therefore if we campaign about trying to detach Ronald Reagan voters or George Bush voters and get them to come over to become anti-Trump voters, there should be an electorate of people who although they’ve always voted Republican and now never Trump, if we just get them, that’ll take us over from the 45% or 48% we are guaranteed and take us to the 50% we need for victory. Short answer that did not happen, it didn’t even happen one little bit. The extraordinary story of the election is how the Republican voting base held up despite all the things that you could say about Trump.
OK this data might be slightly harder to read but again I’ll try and talk you through it because it tells us something important. The thing that I want you to notice is how this is basically a map of all the elections in developed countries since 1950, so a very long period of time. One thing you might notice is that for a very long time, essentially between about 1950 and 1990, it didn’t really matter whether you’re an incumbent or not. In other words, if you look at the graph, essentially some incumbent parties increased their vote and that’s why they are above that zero mark in the middle of the page. Some did worse that’s why they’re below. But in principle if someone was the governing party and they governed well they could increase their vote, if someone was the governing party and they governed badly all that could happen is they could only lose their vote. 1992 is an interesting year because just focusing around 1992/93, you might see that in that year there was a real trend of many governing parties doing badly, more than doing well. So, there are moments in history; around that time, it’s Thatcher being removed in Britain, John Major just about holds on to power but his vote goes down. It’s going to be things like black Wednesday, there’s a period of economic turmoil. Governing parties do badly. But the two things I really want you to take out of this graph is, if you look right across to the right-hand end of the graph, the right column you’ll see two things about 2024. The first one that’s worth noticing is that in 2024 every single party that stood in a developed country for election as a governing party has seen its vote fall. So that’s Britain, that’s France, that’s India. All those governing parties have seen their vote fall. It’s the first year in history where no governing party’s vote goes up. In other words, you can draw the conclusion that there is something going on in the world economy right now which means that incumbent parties aren’t likely to win elections. Because just in general the world economy is not growing very fast, there’s not a lot of wealth trickling down to poorer people. People don’t feel that governments are delivering. But the other thing you’ll notice is that within that band at the right-hand edge, all the 2024 results, the red dot is America. In other words of almost all incumbent parties standing for election in 2024 the Democrats did about the best. So, in other words in a moment where the world economy is doing badly, where incumbents can expect to lose and at a time when everyone is saying my God there’s extraordinary things going on in the American election, actually the general pattern is, the rule of American politics is, essentially no matter what happens, lifelong Democrat voters will not stopping voting Democrat, even when they don’t feel their party is doing well. Lifelong Republicans won’t stop voting republican even if they’re being told that the leader of their party is a criminal, is a felon, he’s going to be a dictator. Actually, the votes of both parties hold up.
Now the next thing I wanted to bring along, just again to help understand the election, particularly what was going on, is this graph here, which if you look at the graph on the left and you see basically the green trend line and the pink trendline and then the green trend line afterwards, what you are seeing there is something extraordinary that happened in America that hasn’t had enough comment, which is essentially this, from about 1920 to 1970 America was a growing producer of crude oil, it was one of the main oil producing countries, and around the time of the oil shock essentially it looked like American oil reserves were declining. You need massive new expansion of technology to make oil production viable, the environmental costs would be so great that it’s something which could just couldn’t possibly imagine anyone doing. So, America goes from being a huge oil producer to being a relatively smaller producer up to essentially the early 2000s and a series of policy changes that were made after 9-11. They have the result from 2010, and very extremely so since Biden was elected, year by year America has been producing more crude oil than ever before. The rate at which its producing oil is growing and there has been in the United States a very considerable oil boom. Again, one of the real senses of anger and frustration you get when listening to Democrats strategists talk about the people, they say why aren’t people more generous towards us, why don’t they cut us some slack. We’ve delivered this oil boom to them which has made the country richer, jobs have grown, salaries have grown, surely in those contexts we should have won the election, because the people should have been happy with us, we made the average American citizen richer. And against that you’ve just got to point out some really basic things, which is yes high status American jobs are now incredibly well paid by global standards, jobs like being a lawyer, jobs like being a university professor, they are now really well paid, and because those people are so much better paid than they used to be, the average pay is also going up. But in practical reality two things are worth saying about this oil boom. Firstly, there’s been a very polarised experience in terms of which jobs have got the benefits of the extra money in the economy, certain people are a lot richer. The richer someone was to start off with the more they gained, the poorer someone was to start off with the less they gained, and of course more and more people aren’t in employment aren’t in the world of employment. For example, people are on long term sick because of COVID. But the other thing that’s happened associated with them getting more money, there’s also been loads of inflation in the system, so even where people see a modest uptick in their wages, very often that hasn’t kept pace with inflation. So, a large set of voters just saw this Biden boom as all about the rich, not about them and not delivering for them.
Which takes us to the next slide I’ve brought along. What I want people to notice here is what this graph tries to track is two different things going on at once. It tries to map out how the United States has been polarised in terms of voting around education and how the United States has changed in terms of the relationship between wealth and voting. First on education, there’s a really strong process by which the more educated people are the more likely they are to vote Democrat, the younger they were when they left full-time education the more likely they were to vote Republican. These processes have been going on for a long time, there’s essentially been a massive swing, more than 10%, in terms of how higher educated people are now more likely to vote Democrat and therefore people who left education earlier are less likely to vote Democrat. And obviously that’s a partial proxy for class, it’s only a partial proxy. It’s still the case that, for example, most managers in the United States who work in any old job across the whole country, most of them don’t have first degrees. It’s still the case there’s awful lot of people who do white-collar working-class jobs like nursing, for which you need a lot of education, but you don’t get a lot of pay. So, there’s a really big polarisation around education and that drives all the things we’ve seen around the culture wars that we’re all familiar with. There’s been a smaller polarisation around wealth but even there there’s an unmistakable pattern and if you just fix at the top right-hand corner what’s happened is that the gap around wealth is not as big as the gap around education, the gap to the parties is a lot smaller. But if you just focus on the top right hand of that graph what you’re seeing is essentially a story of how the Republicans were in 1996 the kind of party which people in Britain would assume them to be. A party of people who have got high education and high income and what’s happened is over a period of 30 years that’s flipped, and essentially the much bigger gap over education, over income, the gap around income is small but it has become the case that the Democrats are now fractionally a party of people who have higher education and higher income. You could say that they have become like a Brahmin party – a phrase you often hear being used about the Democrats. And you know given that the Democrats are supposed to be a left liberal centre to left of centre party it should be obvious centre left parties which lose significant parts of their working-class electorate lose elections and that’s exactly what we’re seeing in this graph the Democrats essentially losing a group of voters because in practice they had very little to offer.
Now you might notice that up to this point I haven’t said anything about fascism, the way I’ve presented the election is that in voting terms it’s just a really simple straightforward US election with the centre right party doing better than the centre left party. There are things more important than that and it’s why I think Marx has got something distinctive to say. Because of this argument that the Democrats were making that Trump was a fascist, he wanted unchecked power and that if he was elected, he would rule in a way which is unlike all previous US presidents. Now I mean, Kamala Harris’ explanation was not that persuasive or that rational, it wasn’t persuasive it certainly didn’t motivate voters. But it’s also the case that when she put the argument she pulled together a bunch of different things, some of which were rational and serious and some of which were likely to antagonise voters and were badly thought through. Obviously, she’s making allusions to what had happened at moments like Charlottesville 6 January, the march from Capitol Hill, those were the moments where Trump had governed previously and felt like a fascist and she was alluding to them. But the stuff that you see in the middle of that page where she starts quoting – well we know he’s a fascist because his chief of staff said this thing at a private meeting, that was a really stupid piece of politics. It was about thinking that if you just trade on insider gossip that proves who someone is really, and you’re talking about someone, Trump who has been a president for four years, whose preferences are very well known to the American people. They weren’t going to believe insider gossip over what they saw of him personally. I’ve put up Robert Reich who tried to kind of fill in the gaps to Kamala Harris by putting out a much more coherent model, but still essentially for people care about fascism in the end if you look at his five factors at the left of the page it’s all about fascism’s ideas and this just isn’t a sensible way of understanding fascism. Fascism distinguished itself by the way it uses political violence, particularly using political violence out of power against the left in power, through genocides through wars, that’s what fascism offers people; it always has an extremely eclectic pick and mix attitude towards ideas. Those 5 things you see on the left aren’t typically good descriptions of fascism at all and if you look to the right he said I’m drawing on these people, he’s drawing on Umberto Eco who was writing about the 1990s, Ian Kershaw who’s a historian and didn’t make a list, certainly not any list remotely like that, Roger Griffin who probably thought 3 was important but doesn’t think Trump is a fascist and Madeleine Albright whose basic model seems to be that anyone who disagrees with the current drift of US foreign policy is a fascist. If you read her book that’s essentially what it says. They don’t add up to any coherent analysis or anything.
Now with this slide I’m trying to make some really obvious points about fascism and this idea has the US now gone fascist. I’ve just made a point that what’s true on the far right is a truism we also know on the far left. If we want to have a fully Social Democratic society, Communist society we know that that takes more than electing 325 people and parliament giving them a majority. And actually, the same is true in the US. If Trump was serious about introducing fascism, he needs to do more than simply have a fascist programme he needs to purge the unelected elements of the state, that’s a bit easier to do in the States than it is in Britain, but it being about things like concretely taking over the US generals, replacing anyone who disagreed with him. That’s not something that realistically Trump is actually planning to do. Introducing fascism isn’t really something you can do just in one country at a time, it’s something that comes about because a series of countries all adopt fascism all at once. Now again we’re in a moment where the far right is holding power and doing consistent things with power across a series of countries, but that’s not yet crossed the border into fascism. I put the point at the end – the third bullet point, you know it requires real strategic thinking, desire to purge the state etc. Those aren’t things which Trump has yet.
I’ve put up here some of Trotsky’s classic quotes on fascism, the top two are the most important, they both make the point that essentially what fascism is about is the smashing of all independent and voluntary organisations of the working class, demolishing all the defensive bulwarks of the working class. Leftists always have to take seriously an argument that what might happen is fascism because in a sense when fascism comes to power our organisations are destroyed and that makes all the difference in the world to us. I’ve also put the third bullet point about Hitler’s base mapped around the petty bourgeoisie. It would be interesting to try, could anyone map Trump’s social base and say that’s exactly his social base? I’m not at all sure that it is. Trump’s first period in office leads to an awful lot of continuity with classic positions of US power, deportations much higher under Biden than they were under Trump, more Mexican wall built by Bush and Obama than Trump, although Trump did build slightly more than Biden. The number of black inmates in U.S. Federal prisons fell under Trump, even executions overall in the United States, federal executions i.e. the number of people killed by the central part of the state go up under Trump but what happens once he’s in power there’s this kind of faction fight within the American ruling class and large parts of the state essentially the states which are Democrat run try not cooperate with Trump and become less authoritarian. And meaning that overall, his attempt to make a much more authoritarian, racist and nasty society first time round largely fails.
I come to my last slide. The problem with talking about what Trump will do next is that there are a series of things going on around his administration which might well have the effect that this time around he’s to the right, maybe even considerably to the right, of where he was in his first term. Two most obvious things which are going to serve as radicalising dynamics, the first obviously at the end of his first term his supporters tried to stage their march on the Capitol, they did in fact storm the Capitol. Trump obviously has a debt to that party social movement; he is planning to pardon all the people involved in that. They’ll be making demands of the regime; he’ll probably want to have some relationship back with them that will radicalise him. He will also be radicalised by the experience of having been through various trials, he wants revenge on the people who embarrassed and humiliated him. Third which could well radicalise him is the role of events. Trump has a series of political alliances and one of course is with the regime that’s just been involved in a process of genocide, something criticised for it, but the international rules based order has largely buckled and accepted the Israeli killings in Palestine. That clearly will have an effect back in the United States in terms of legitimising the most chaotic and destructive bits of Trump’s presidency, so there are ways in which Trump may well radicalise to the right. It’s wrong to think of Trump as just this stable person who is a thing and represents a form of politics at all times. Even the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s didn’t start off as fascists but were brought there by events. So the regime could well radicalise. It’s not impossible or stupid or reckless to say it could be significantly worse than last time around, and parts of the States it is going to be even worse than last time around. And yet the big picture is that so far he has not governed as a fascist, significant events need to happen before that becomes something real and imminent and immediate. And really my last question, I want to put it back to the room, there’s no easy simple answers here, in the 1920s and 1930’s the overreach by a generation of fascists who went far beyond what people in most countries wanted, created anti fascism, created mass resistance, created huge anti-fascist majorities in countries like initially Austria, France, Spain and Britain. We saw united fronts in some countries, popular fronts mobilising hundreds of thousands of people to reject those sorts of politics. In lots of ways we didn’t have a left before the 1930s, we didn’t have a left as a single organic collective in which different strands of opinion would look to each other and expect each other to unite when they felt that we’re under attack. There’s an awful lot of historic anti-fascist message which hasn’t cut with ordinary voters in many different countries in the last 10 years. The place where that message has connected to some extent is France. It might be that some of what we thought of as classical anti fascism has to significantly evolve in a period where opponents are capable of winning elections. So anti fascism work will have to change but it is the case that as this sort of politics grows it will create people who are absolutely hostile to it, absolutely opposed to it, looking for something better and there will be opportunities for a principled left to say look, you know, we stand for something that is the complete utter opposite of Trump and his allies and all they stand for.
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