- The week before the election ended with the strongest possible signs of a Democratic wave, including record numbers at rallies for Kamala Harris and empty arenas for Donald Trump, record early voting tallies and reports from poll workers in Democratic precincts that that they counted more ballots than they have in living memory, and a final grudging admission from pollsters that they may well have been tilting their samples in favor of Republicans. Then came the Russian bomb threats –accompanied by software glitches in election management systems– across all of the most important swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. Finally, Russian state media welcomes Trump back to the White House, and then mocks him showing films of his wife naked. He asks Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine. Putin sends in another 100,000 troops.
Something is wrong.
The Right has spent the past four years doing everything it can to discredit claims of election fraud and manipulation (by making false and in fact incredible claims). And this is a tactic made for manipulating the liberal bourgeoisie and the professional middle class, which depends for its identity and self-esteem on recognition by authoritative cultural institutions. The law, furthermore, has, since the last big Republican steal at the national level in 2000, made it very difficult to challenge election results, and so facts, such as they are, will be hard to come by.
I am not advocating a resistance strategy centered on charges of election fraud. It is too early to settle on any strategy. But we cannot build our strategy around an assumption that the reported results are correct. That could lead to serious errors. And we need to do the best we can to determine if there was fraud, how it happened, and how we can prevent it in the future.
2. The Democratic Party has focused on answering Republican claims that people are currently worse off than they were four years ago. And on nearly every measure the Democrats are correct. But not all.
There is, first, of all, and there remains, the Pandemic. This was obviously not caused by the Democrats. And Biden and the Democratic Party certainly don’t bear sole responsibility for the way it was managed. They have nonetheless failed utterly to resist the bourgeoisie’s demand for a return to “normal.”
Four years ago, we were still in the early stages of the pandemic. Hospitals were still full of people suffocating to death. The economy was in shambles.
Shortly after the election, seemingly effective vaccines became widely available and the Biden administration adopted a “vaccines only strategy,” and chose to “take the win” rather than risking electoral blow-back from public displeasure over mask mandates, school closures, and other mitigation measures. As it became apparent that the vaccines, while helpful, were nowhere near sufficient given the virus’ evolutionary trajectory, the administration none the less doubled down on claims that the pandemic was over.
The electoral blowback came anyway in 2022. And since then, we have had wave upon wave of new infections, many as worse as all but the most serious of the early years. And we now know that repeated infections wear down our health globally, eroding immunity, causing enduring cardiovascular and neurological impairment. Our children are sick constantly and we are sick far more often than we can sustain. There have been days this autumn when up to 20% of the academic division I lead at a California community college has been out due to illness or illness on the part of family members. It’s not quite the Zombie Apocalypse people have been playing at for years in video games. But people aren’t what they used to be. And they know it. They just don’t understand why.
The early years of the pandemic came with mitigations that some people found economically difficult. But people were getting stimulus checks, which the Democratic Party had to all but force Trump to send, but which still bore his signature. And there were extended unemployment benefits and expanded Medicaid access, extended sick leave to cope with the pandemic and a moratorium on evictions. And many were able to work from home, massively reducing the percentage of their lives which were under the direct control of Capital and the faceless bureaucracies which serve it.
When these ended, yes, people’s lives became worse.
But there is more. By buying into the fiction that the pandemic is over and that things have returned to “normal” when they have not, we have lured into collaborating in the deaths of millions and the disablement of many, many more, all so we can continue to eat out, go on vacation, stay in business the way we are used to rather than making one of those “nimble” adaptations at which capitalism is supposedly so adept. We have been weakened physiologically and mentally and coarsened morally. That is why everything and everyone feels so unbearably harsh. And we know that fascism feeds on this harshness. It is, in fact, the distillation of this harshness.
And then there is the climate. Biden and the Democrats are certainly not responsible here. On the contrary, they have made the first really significant effort in the US to do something about carbon emissions, and have done it in a way which has been overwhelmingly good for the economy. But the climate is worse. The planet is hotter, colder, wetter, drier, and windier than it had been and it is changing much less gradually than we had hoped. And this affects people. It makes our lives worse. Some actually believe that the Democrats are intentionally causing all the disasters with secret weather machines worthy of Dooffenshmirtz, Incorporated. But most just feel it and factor it into their answer to that question …
3. The economy is doing as well as any economy could under these circumstances. And the Biden administration accomplished things no one thought was possible: a soft landing from an extended period of strong growth and a significant renaissance of manufacturing. But there are things which are well outside the control of the government in any capitalist economy –any economy actually. There is a fairly strong consensus among economists (at least those not seeking to score points with or for the Republicans) that the recent surge in inflation was not due to the modest stimulus and wage growth which accompanied the pandemic, but to price gouging by businesses who charged more because they could.
In formal terms it is difficult to distinguish “market pressures” and “price gouging” or “charging more because you can.” But then that is the limitation of economics as a science. Bourgeois economics provides a formal description of the behavior of various quantities. It doesn’t really distinguish between “lots of small decisions” and “a few big ones.” But I would like to suggest that Capital was terrified by the sudden power which the working class acquired as a result of the pandemic. They needed to beat it back. And so, they raised prices, knowing that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates in turn, further increasing the financial pressure on workers and weakening the new wave of labor militance.
It is not yet clear that this worked. Labor is still stronger than it was before the pandemic. But higher prices may have helped the Right win the election. Once prices go up there is no bringing them down without causing a massive recession. And the political economy of the pandemic also affected different classes differently. The most marginal workers saw their wages increase the most and were the focus of new efforts at unionization. And established unions won some big victories. The professional middle classes gained just a little and so felt like they were suffering the most in cash terms, even if they did reap the benefit of remote work. If there was a rightward shift among this Democratic constituency, this might be part of the reason.
4. If this election does represent a re-alignment, it is first and foremost a re-alignment within the ruling class. For a long time, the US bourgeoisie has been divided between a liberal wing centered the high technology and information sectors, along with education and nonprofits, and a reactionary wing centered in extractive, agricultural, and low technology, low skill, low wage manufacturing. Finance leaned just a bit to the left (mostly investment bankers), as did business services (especially the big consulting firms).
Recently, however, the structure of the bourgeoisie has changed. The neoliberal era witnessed the emergence of Capital as an autonomous intelligence independent of the historic bourgeoisie. This was the whole aim of neoliberalism. But more recently we have also witnessed the emergence of capitalist magnates (think Musk) who, while they benefited from neoliberalism, saw it only as a means to an end, and have no intention of ceding their power to market forces. These elements have allied with state capitalist and organized criminal elements (think Putin) to challenge globalism and the neoliberal order as well as the emerging regime of cultural pluralism. These are people who believe their wealth and power means that they are smarter and better than everyone else. And they have been joined by a cadre of renegades from the professional middle class, “dark elves” or the Dark Enlightenment, mostly white men with a background in STEM fields and an interest in but no formal training in politics, philosophy, and theology. And they have been working hard, using dual tactics, to neutralize or even win over elements of the legacy media and the academy (what they call the Cathedral), again especially whites and especially men.
If the election was in some sense stolen, this is who was ultimately behind it, along with what must be a much larger network than we would have imagined of well placed, highly skilled FSB/SVR/GRU operatives –or cyberwarfare capacities well in advance of our own.
5. All of which brings us to the question of the social basis and political valence of Trump’s “victory” –because it is that, even if the election was stolen. Don’t be confused by the fact that large numbers of workers voted for Trump (or for that matter a larger than expected number of Black and Latino men). This election belonged to the capitalist magnates, post-socialist/state capitalist autocrats and their ex-KGB operatives and Dark Enlightenment intellectuals. The capitalist magnates do not constitute a class or class fraction in the strict sense, as they lack a distinct way of extracting surplus. They are just very, very, very, very large capitalists. And their interests are not identical to Putin and the ex-KGB, or the Russian mob. The Right is, rather, defined by and united around a profound rage at anything that gets in the way of them doing whatever it is they decide they want to do. They are enraged by unions and by government regulations and by taxes which limit their ability to leverage their massive wealth as effective power. But they are also enraged at having to meet the demands of the marketplace. They are enraged by the very thought of members of historically colonized peoples exercising even limited authority over them. And above all they are enraged by the fact that they cannot have their way with any woman they choose, at any time they wish to.
History has not been kind to individuals of this sort. Human beings survive by means of collaboration and tyrants always end up destroying each other. But they can do a great deal of damage in the meanwhile. And this generation of tyrants has at its disposal the technology to do permanent, irreparable damage to humanity and to our common home.
6. But the tyrants were not able to do this alone, you say. Of course not. Like anyone else they had to build power. And they did this by the only means possible: by tapping into the hopes and fears of broad layers of the population. But it is essential that we are clear on the specific character of the hopes and fears in question.
There has been a great deal of recrimination on the Democratic side centered around the “culture wars” and “wokeness.” “Black men are the most sexist of any demographic and hate immigrants.” “Latinos will never vote for a Black candidate.” “Latinos got pissed off at “woke” activists who decided to change the final letter of their demonym without asking them and decide to vote instead for someone who promises to deport them all.” “White women who would otherwise have voted to defend abortion rights got all freaked out that Kamala was going to round up their kids and forcibly “transition” them –or at least make it impossible for their daughters to excel athletically by flooding their teams with transwomen who can outcompete them. And so they ignored the real and obvious threat to their health and freedom and voted for someone who promises to make their wombs the property of their husbands and the state.”
This is, of course, all nonsense. Yes, there is racism and misogyny within historically oppressed communities. That is (part of) what we mean when say that these are structural questions. And sometimes people vote against their (racial and gender as well as class) interests based on that racism and misogyny. The alienation produced by the commodification of labor power creates authoritarian personalities, and these authoritarian personalities express themselves through racism and misogyny. This is settled science, not a trendy new theory.
But none of these groups created the MAGA movement. Trump didn’t create the MAGA movement. Indeed, in the last weeks of the campaign Trump seemed convinced he was going to lose and said he wasn’t sure why he was doing “all this.” No, what happened on the fifth of November was the result of successful longue durée organizing on the part of a lineage of capitalist magnates and their political and cultural staff that is more than century old. And while this lineage is not much discussed and is poorly understood it is not a secret conspiracy. We know who collaborated with Mussolini and Hitler, with Franco and Salazar and Hirohito. We know who was involved in the Businessmen’s Plot. We know the membership of the Mount Pelerin Society.
The current leadership of the Right is centered around Vladimir Putin and a cluster of allied authoritarian leaders and capitalist magnates. Putin groomed Trump, almost certainly for much more modest operations, for many years and when his 2016 campaign took off, he invested heavily in it. Musk and Thiel and others, along with their Dark Enlightenment intellectual cadre saw an opportunity, and they seized it.
But the broader conditions for what happened were created long ago. Beginning in the late 1960s and especially after journalists largely foiled Richard Nixon’s attempt to subvert the Constitution, the Right began an attack on the “liberal media” and effectively sold the idea that balanced or objective coverage meant ignoring the facts whenever they were inconvenient for the Right. Venture capitalists and others then took over most of the mass media and effectively destroyed journalism as a profession. Frightened by the student movements of the 1960s the Right ensured that universities were defunded and broad based liberal education destroyed, so that fewer and fewer people had the tools necessary to make sense of what was going on. Frightened by the Catholic Church’s support for national liberation movements the Right staged a coup and effectively destroyed the church as an independent institution. Then Reagan and Thatcher all but destroyed the labor movement and increased market pressures forced everyone to work more so that they had less and less time to organize or even to build the communities and institutions on which organizing depends.
7. So what now? Much of the answer to that question –including the part most people really want to hear—is beyond my sphere of expertise. I am deep, longue durée strategist, and my knowledge of operational art is limited at best. So I will leave to others conclusions about our short and medium term response.
In the long run, however, nothing has changed. To be sure, our lives and our communities and everything we value is in vastly more jeopardy than they were before the election. But everything leading up to the election was in motion already and while winning the election was important it was never going to be enough. Greg Olear is quite correct that were never going to beat the Right just by winning elections.
With this in mind, we need not to lose sight of our longue durée strategy. We need to conserve what we can of humanity and its civilizational heritage and work to rebuild the communities and institutions which nurture us and challenge us to become better than we are. That is where the millions of people we will need in this struggle will come from. It’s what we have done since the beginning and what we will continue to do, even if in forms we cannot imagine, from age to age and world to world. And it is the future.
And so we are here, always and forever, but now more than ever: working, loving, and praying, seeking wisdom, doing justice, and ripening being. The present is but a vanishing moment. The Power of Being as Such is eternal.
