The victory of Joseph Biden means that the world can breathe a sigh of relief because the "authoritarian bigotry" of Donald Trump has been rejected. The outcome of the election, however, is cause for concern because Trump won 11 million more votes than in 2016. He has increased support in struggling communities, where unemployment and poverty rates are high and health care is inadequate, says Senator Bernie Sanders.
He believes that the Democrats must win over that segment of the working class that still thinks that Trump is defending their interests.
"For a president who constantly lies, perhaps Trump's strangest lie is that he and his administration are friends of the working class in our country. The truth is that Trump has brought more billionaires into his government than any president in history," Sanders writes.
He says Trump has given big tax breaks to the rich and big corporations while proposing big cuts in areas such as education and health care.
However, as the senator from Vermont points out, a certain segment of the working class still believes that Trump is on their side.
At a time when millions of Americans are living in fear after losing their jobs to unfair trade deals and earning less than they did 47 years ago, supporters have seen him as a strong fighter.
He used racism, xenophobia, and paranoia to convince a huge portion of the American people to care about their needs, which, according to Sanders, “couldn't be further from the truth. "His only interest, from day one, was Donald Trump," the senator points out.
"If the Democratic Party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future, it must help our nation's working families who today face the greatest economic despair since the Great Depression. "Democrats must show in words and deeds how dishonest the Republican Party is when it claims to be the party of working families," said Sanders, who participated in the race for the Democratic nomination for the US president.
To that end, Democrats must muster the strength to deal with the powerful special interests that have been at war with the working class in the US for decades, Sanders says.
"I mean Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military, the private prison industry, and the many for-profit corporations that continue to exploit their employees."
If Democrats don't show they will stand up to those powerful institutions and aggressively fight for working families, they will pave the way for the election of another right-wing autocrat in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump, Sanders concludes.
Biden called for unity and healing and promised to work to earn the trust of the entire nation. If he really means it, he hasn't learned anything since Barack Obama gave almost the same speech in 2008, says "Guardian" columnist George Monbiot.
The US is divided between exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed. Unity cannot be achieved with kleptocrats and oligarchs. Any attempt to pretend that it can will lead to political failure. It will not lead to healing, but to Americans being polarized against each other, instead of against the plutocrats, Monbio believes.
He says that Obama's attempt to reconcile irreconcilable forces paved the way for the election of Trump. Obama failed to stand up to the banks whose “reckless greed” caused the financial crisis, his Justice Department blocked efforts to punish financiers for apparent wrongdoing, he made trade deals that undermined workers' rights and environmental standards, and he witnessed widening inequality and the concentration of wealth. "In other words, it did not break the consensus that has emerged around the dominant ideology of our time: neoliberalism," writes Monbio.
He says that the professor at Goldsmiths College, William Davis, well described neoliberalism, as "the disenchantment of politics with economics". Politics is perceived as an ineffective or illegitimate means of social improvement. Decision-making should be transferred to the “market”, which is a euphemism for the power of money. By buying and selling, we establish a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Any attempt to interfere with that natural order - such as taxing the rich, redistributing wealth and regulating business - will block social progress, writes Monbio.
"Neoliberalism disenchants politics by draining power from the people's voices. When governments abandon the ambition to establish social justice, politics becomes irrelevant to people's lives. It is perceived as the chatter of a distant elite. Disappointment becomes disempowerment”.
Before neoliberalism caused the financial crash of 2008, its doctrines were widely accepted across the political spectrum. Obama had a chance to get out of it, to oppose the forces that the "market" concealed and the social divisions that arose. However, he decided not to use it, writes Monbio.
"Trump has fallen into a political vacuum. Chaotic and unscrupulous, in some respects it has undermined the neoliberal consensus, tearing up trade agreements, while in others it has strengthened it. However, the important thing is that he was the monster that consensus created. His success was the result of false unity and false healing of elite political agreement. When mainstream politics offered only humiliation and frustration, people turned to poisonous, demagogic anti-politics”.
Monbio adds that there are some strong policies in Biden's program, but that there is also a determination not to break that consensus by directly confronting the donor class.
His measures to support small businesses are positive, but they won't mean much if they don't stand in the way of big businesses, Monbio says. The new president has promised to raise taxes on the rich, "but the plutocrats will laugh at him if he doesn't declare war on tax havens and secrecy regimes, starting with his state of Delaware," writes a British journalist.
If Biden does not unite the people against the oligarchs who dominate the nation, Americans will remain divided among themselves, Monbio assesses.
It may sound strange to think that the US is lucky to have Trump, but even though he was obsessed with power and completely devoid of conscience and empathy, he is impulsive and incompetent and did not exactly follow the program. “In other words, he was a hopeless dictator in the making. He was also unlucky: had it not been for the pandemic, he might have won. However, he paved the way for someone even more effective: someone with Trump's lack of moral restraint, but with a determined agenda and a cool, strategic mind. If Biden does not break the political consensus, he could open the door to a more capable autocrat in 2024, warns Monbio. He sees the solution in the fight against billionaires, huge money in politics, embezzlement, and in advocating for a radical redistribution of both wealth and political power.
"Although Biden is a political chameleon, it is hard to believe that he will fulfill that role. Maybe I'm too much of a pessimist, but to us at this early stage, his presidency looks like a transition between something terrible and something much worse," points out George Monbiot.
Economist Branko Milanović says that Trump brought to politics all the skills he perfected in business for almost half a century and he was the "ultimate triumph of neoliberalism".
"He saw the citizens as employees whom he can bully and fire as he pleases. He saw the presidency as Bezos sees his position at Amazon: he can do anything, unfettered by any rules and laws," says Milanović.
Trump lifted the curtain that separates the citizens, as observers of the political game, from the rulers, and in the most direct way showed scheming, exchange of favors, used public functions for personal gain. Milanović says that during the past administrations, such illegal and semi-legal actions as receiving money from foreign powers, moving from one lucrative position to another and tax evasion were done discreetly with the curtain down so that viewers could not witness the malfeasance. “We are so thankful
To Trump, we could see deep corruption at the heart of the political process," writes Milanović.
In his view, Trump's successors will do their best, not to change it, because it has become a feature of the system, but to cover it up.
Trumpism is a global phenomenon
The roots of Trumpism do not begin and end with Trump or even with American politics, but are closely related to economic and political currents that affect most of the world, according to Daron Acemoglu, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He does not see much room for optimism after the US election because the autocratic and populist turn of the Trump presidency has emerged from deep cracks in American politics and society.
"The US was ripe for a populist movement until 2016, and it remains so today. In the past four decades, a huge inequality has been created between the highly educated and the rest, and between capital and labor. As a result, average earnings have stagnated for about 40 years, and real earnings for many groups, especially men with less education, have plummeted. No serious discussion of America's political ills can ignore those economic trends, which have hit the middle class and contributed to the anger and frustration of some voters who have turned to Trump."
Acemoglu points out that determining the root causes of these inequalities turned out to be surprisingly difficult. The rise of new technologies such as computers and artificial intelligence coincided with a period of extremely low output growth, and analysts have not convincingly explained why these technologies benefited capital owners and not workers.
In an analysis for "Foreign Affairs", it is stated that another culprit that is often mentioned - trade with China - certainly contributed, but that Chinese imports exploded only when inequality was already on the rise and American production was already on the decline. "European countries with similarly large trade inflows from China do not show the same degree of inequality as the US." Nor can deregulation and the demise of unions in the US, for example, explain the disappearance of manufacturing and clerical jobs, as these losses are essentially common in all advanced economies.”
Acemoglu says that economic inequality, regardless of its origin, has become a source of cultural and political instability in the US. Those who did not benefit from economic growth became disillusioned with the political system. In areas where Chinese imports and automation have led to the loss of American jobs, voters have turned their backs on moderate politicians and voted for more extreme ones.
Acemoglu says that right-wing populism in the US had revived as a potential political force at least two decades before Trump took over the Republican Party. The phenomenon is present around the world, not only in mature democracies recovering from the loss of manufacturing jobs, but also in countries that have benefited economically from globalization, including Brazil, Hungary, India, the Philippines, Poland and Turkey.
"Trump and Trumpism are American phenomena, but they are emerging in a context that is undoubtedly global," says the MIT professor.
Those who want to strengthen democratic institutions must build new ones that can better regulate globalization and digital technology, changing their direction and rules so that the economic growth they encourage benefits more people, according to the American economist.
In order to build trust in public institutions and experts, it is necessary to prove that they work for the people and with the people, Acemoglu concludes.
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