Notes From the Editors — Fall 2024/Winter 2025
Why Trump? It Was About Saying “Fuck You” To the Establishment
I have no blindingly insightful analysis to offer about Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the establishment portion of the Republican Party, but here’s my tentative take: The presidential election wasn’t a vote for fascism or even a vote for Trump. I sense that a sizable number of voters were saying, “I don’t like Trump, and I know my life won’t be better under him — but I’m voting for him or not voting at all.”
White folks in rural Iowa, Black voters in Detroit, and Puerto Ricans in nearby Allentown found an opportunity, in the words of Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, to “give the finger, to thumb your nose at the status quo…” Even NYTimes columnist David Brooks surprised me with his op-ed “Voters to Elite: Do You See Me Now?” In a PBS interview, Brooks acknowledged that race and gender had receded in salience as class was on the rise.
It’s hard to say what part foreign policy played in the election, but a pollster cited by Gabriel Winant in Dissent, found that younger voters believe that America is “a dying empire led by bad people.” We do know that if Harris had been elected, we’d simply have a female face fronting the US role in genocide. This would not be unlike the female Golda “Palestinians Are Cockroaches” Meir leading the colonial settler state of Israel. And Harris would have continued the conflict in Ukraine, the U.S. proxy war provoked against Russia that could have been avoided. As of mid-September 2024, it’s estimated that one million people have been killed or wounded in this war. This affirms what Mike Parenti once argued that what matters is not what’s between the loins but between the ears.
To be sure, the vote was not transactional, but it was evidence that the poor and working class have simply stopped believing the mainstream media lies and have only contempt for politicians who hector and patronize them, calling them “deplorables” and “garbage.” This disdain extends to the institutions of government that have lost their legitimacy. For Blacks, it includes the Black misleadership class like the condescending Obamas and the sell-outs in Congress like Clyburn and Jeffries who “go along to get along.” In Philadelphia, where over 50 percent of Black people are living in poverty, the Black mayor confidently predicted that 680,000 votes would be cast for Kamala Harris. She received 547,000.
Nationwide, some half of those of eligible voting age abstained from the process. Here I think that the astute political analyst Garland Nixon is on to something when he suggests that pollsters not only include “likely” voters but also “unlikely” ones. I’d wager that we’d find tens of millions of people who’ve given up on politics because they know it has nothing to offer them. I mention this because these data would not only honestly flesh out the national narrative but highlight the grievances of a segment of the population that could potentially alter the country’s future.
Those pulling the puppet strings of our duopoly fear rule by the people and because their first allegiance is to maintaining the capitalist system — the ultimate cause of our crisis — they have no answers, only more misdirection. After the tone-deaf, reality-denying Democrats finish their ritualistic circular firing squad, the DNC will begin looking to 2028. Perhaps this time they’ll settle on a Gavin Newsom or a Josh Shapiro. We can hope so because that will prefigure the final death knell of the Democratic Party.
We are entering an immensely dangerous period with the moral monsters of late-stage capitalism thrashing about in our midst. But this is also a time of great opportunity to begin creating a mass working-class party. We can’t squander the chance.
(1) Genociders must be punished.
If you vote for them, you are telling them that they can get away with anything including the greatest of all crimes against humanity and in the case of Gaza a genocide against one of the most vulnerable people on the planet. If we can’t even electorally or symbolically send them a message that Thou Shall Not Commit Genocide and expect our votes, then we guarantee their invincibility and nothing else matters. The genociders will be laughing at us to the bank.
(2) A political system that consistently produces no choice other than genocide (both candidates) is neither democratic nor worth fighting for or keeping.
It’s about time to oppose it root and branch before it devours us all and makes the planet unlivable too in service to capitalism and militarism.
(3) A people who do not rise to end their government’s enabling of a live-streaming, by now more-than-450-day-long genocide, does not deserve to keep their privileges at home nor ask others who oppose genocide to please vote for the Party committing genocide to keep their privileges at home.
The keep-privileges-at-home-tolerate-genocide-abroad posture is a morally depraved and indefensible position. It’s the utter self-centeredness of a people, who jump into action to save their privileges, all the while tolerating their complicity in terror and genocide abroad.
The (neo)liberals’ anguish and deep depression in reaction to Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump’s victory points to a deep-seated problem with contemporary liberalism, namely its truncated sense of human empathy, one that is limited at worse to the pain and suffering of one’s immediate circle of family and friends and at best to that of certain segments of one’s society. An expansive sense of empathy, on the other hand, would break through any artificial boundaries that aim to enclose that precious human ability to empathize with the suffering of others. If modern liberalism had nurtured such a universal sense, the liberals would have exhibited a deep depression and anguish over their favorite candidate’s genocide in Gaza. But, if liberalism had indeed nurtured a universal sense of empathy, our capitalist overlords would have long ago jettisoned it for another ideology with an appropriately hyper-individualistic core.
The Democratic Party could have made an unforgettable history of its own, trumping Trump’s, and restore some sense of human decency by cutting off the US military aid to Israel and ending the Gaza genocide. But alas!
A news flash from a sane(r) world: The European Union sanctions US and Israeli officials, military figures, and US corporations for supplying deadly weapons to apartheid Israel following its genocide in Palestine.
Those who support the US/Israeli Killing Machine in Gaza are reactionaries. Those who think this Killing Machine can defeat all resistance to its brutality don’t know much about history. Those who have chosen to be silent or refuse to stand in solidarity with Palestinians have lost their humanity.
Israel is intensifying its ethnic cleansing in the West Bank while the world’s attention is focused on Gaza and Lebanon. There are no surprises here if you know what Zionism is. The dominant form of Zionism is a racist settler colonial movement. The elimination of the natives is central to settler colonialism in general. It can resort to either ethnic cleansing, genocide, or both to accomplish its objective. An apartheid system follows logically when settlers are unable to fully eradicate the natives. Israel has found this post-October 7, 2023, genocidal moment to be as good as any in its history to further advance its settler colonial project. As in the past with the British empire, Israel depends on the full backing of Euro-American imperialism and its subordinated and reactionary Arab allies in West Asia. But, this time, Israel may be digging its own grave, given its live-streaming brutality. Critical questions to ponder are, ‘How much longer will North Americans tolerate a corrupted US political system with two genocidal political parties?’, ‘How much longer will they let the mainstream media and politicians manipulate them to submit to the rule of the few at home and the slaughter of the many abroad masked by the deceptive rhetoric of a “rules-based international order”?’ It remains to be seen.
“Israel now holds the world records for the murder of journalists, of aid workers, of UN officials, and of healthcare workers” (Craig Mokhiber, ex-director of the NY Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) with full Western political/economic/military/media support.