Americans are either celebrating the return of Donald Trump to the US Presidency or soul-searching over yet another rejection of a Democratic woman candidate in favour of a twice-impeached, convicted miscreant with little regard for gender and racial sensibilities. Very few Americans, however, give little thought to the continued wars and mass murder in different parts of the world waged by American proxy states with US-supplied arms or, by American forces themselves.
‘Plausible genocide’ horrifically continues for its 13th gory month in Gaza in full view of entire Humanity, and large scale bombing devastates impoverished Yemen and once-thriving Lebanon. Given the systematic financing and equipping of the Israeli military offensives by the United States and, the sustained, simultaneous, air and sea offensives by the US and UK, what the world is forced to watch is nothingless than a combined geo-strategic regional intervention by the West-Israeli coalition.
Traumatised
Traumatised by the un-ending, blatant, aggression in West Asia and the corollary global instability, the political drama of Presidential elections in the world’s most powerful nation is reduced to a side show. Impresario though he is, President-elect Trump likely doesn’t care about this diminished attention by the outside world, given his typically American insularity.
Despite their country being the most consequential for entire humanity and, environmentally speaking, the planet itself, Americans remain focused on purely individual domestic priorities like food costs, housing costs, and weak incomes. Meanwhile, the Palestinian nation in Gaza, the West Bank, in the larger territory now named ‘Israel’ and, the over two million stuck in refugee camps and urban ghettoes in neighbouring Arab countries for the third generation since their forcible displacement from their homeland, all wait anxiously.
As news media and social media indicate, both Palestinians and Lebanese wonder how many more of their people will die, be maimed, lose their kin, or be further displaced by the Western imperial project that sustains Israel’s racism and aggression in energy-critical West Asia. Worse, the lives and economic futures of a few million guest migrant workers in West Asia are also at stake, along with their home nations dependent on migrant labour remittances, like Sri Lanka. The United Arab Emirates alone has a couple of million foreign workers to its just 200,000 plus citizens.
The Trump victory once more well exceeded expectations based on the assessments and predictions of the US opinion poll industry, probably the world’s most efficient such industry. That significant mismatch of poll numbers and the actual vote counts yet emerging last week is the third such mismatch in successive recent national elections.This data anomaly and evident failure in analysis is already under scrutiny by psephologists and political scientists worldwide.
Significantly, the scrutiny of the ‘analytics’ is more than simply a rigorous post mortem on scientific methodology. Ominously, there is also an assessment of the degree to which polling numbers and processing has been subjected to covert, deliberate, distortions by external human interventions via digital hacking. Such digital political interference by both domestic and foreign forces (state, non-state) is now part of political processes worldwide to varying degrees depending on the penetration of the Internet in any society and region.
As cyber scientists well know, a slight tweaking of a data byte at one point in data gathering and processing could then influence data collation and analysis down the line. Thus, voter preference graphs are thereby skewed artificially and artfully. In turn, the polls data then misleads political strategists of all parties, skewing whole campaign strategies.
The 2024 United States General Elections held on November 5 included the election of a new Executive President for the next four years but also elections to various national, state-level and even local Government bodies. All 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives and 34 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate were contested to determine the membership of the incoming 119th United States Congress.
Tuesday’s election
Tuesday’s election was the 60th quadrennial U.S. Presidential election. This was the first Presidential election following the 2020 national census which determines citizens of voting age. Based on the actual vote at state level, the 538-member Electoral College then votes to elect the President and Vice President.
The emerging outcome of last Tuesday’s general election shows a historic political success for the rightwing, conservative forces in America as represented by the Republican Party and numerous other individual contestants to posts and bodies at local level. News agencies report that the Republican Party is on track to win the popular vote in a Presidential election for the first time in 20 years, with Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris with 72.5million votes against nearly 68million on Wednesday night. Trump’s Electoral College vote count is already over the 270 minimum and is likely to surpass 300.
Harris conceded her loss on Wednesday afternoon, urging Americans devastated by the result to “not despair” but to stay engaged and remain “vigilant” in the fight to protect American democracy.
How did the Democratic Party experience this debacle when it seems to have done all the right things in the very short time afforded to the last-minute substitute candidacy of Kamala Harris?
Many analysts blamed President Joe Biden for insisting on standing for a second term and then pulling out long after the candidate selection primaries were done. They argued, belatedly, that if Biden had, instead, decided to gracefully retire and had allowed the selection primaries to more rigorously vet the other candidates, the Party would have been able to choose a wholly new persona to offer to a voting public that had been singularly unimpressed by Biden’s efficient but colourless performance.
However, other analysts said that it had been up to the Democrat managers to have decided the party strategy and not leave it to Biden. This critique pointed to a political laziness of a party leadership comfortable with its broad political strategy and its politico-cultural credentials in comparison with the ‘rogue’ and ‘outsider’ politico-cultural ethos of Donald Trump.
Just as in 2016, the Washington-mainstream-based Democrat establishment had presumed the Donald Trump phenomenon to be a short-term aberration being currently experienced by its rival Republican Party. Indeed, many mainstream political analysts continued to see the Trump ascendancy as a temporary and passing phenomenon. In fact many mainstream Republicans saw it this way and had seeming resigned themselves to sit through the Trump aberration until it had exhausted itself. But there were independent analysts, especially on the radical Left who had realised that Trump was no aberration but represented – perhaps unwittingly, since he was no strategist – a broad shift to the extreme Right in the Republican Party as a whole. Indeed, there were a few Republican veterans who also began warning that the Trumpian ethos was truly an ethos that had begun dominating the Grand Old Party (as the Republican Party is known) and was not an individual-based temporary phase.
Rightwing shift
There were Left analysts – as well as some sophisticated ‘Realist’ rightwing analysts like John Mearsheimer – who had long warned that Trump actually was part of a major hard rightwing shift in a broad section of the population itself. This arose partly from a sense of hopelessness among the poorer social cohorts who have become pauperised in recent decades.
This pauperisation among the already poorer classes only added to their intellectual poverty as well. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has ended up becoming the party of middle and upper class intelligentsia (of the non-decadent kind), its leadership comprising that solid layer of college-educated classes wholly insensitive to the increasingly economically stagnant industrial working and farming classes.
This intelligentsia mainstream thought that the arithmetic of incipient economic stability engineered by the Biden administration would complement the socially progressive ethos of the Democrats as opposed to the Trumpian ‘incoherence’. Whereas, lack of any concrete and immediate economic delivery to the suffering poorer classes resulted in those classes desperate option for Trump the Outsider rather than for the insensitive and better-off Democrat mainstream.
To this must be added the Democratic Party’s politico-cultural overreach with Kamala Harris. The Democratic Party seems to have repeated the failure that it suffered when, in 2016, it fielded former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the first woman to bid for the US Presidency. The Democratic Party then found itself once more at the frontiers of American political culture, this time on the Feminist frontlines, when it had just succeeded on the racial equality front by bringing their nation’s first Black President to the White House.
But that Barack Obama Presidency seems to have momentarily exhausted American society’s capacity for political innovation. Even if Obama had possibly bettered his White predecessors in his aggressive foreign military interventions against non-White nations, the vast layers of conservative Whites yet barely tolerated this very first Black President.
To them, Kamala Harris was a progressive step too far. Trump’s first term was only the first reaction to the Black Presidency.
Trump’s second campaign tropes were replete with White ethnocentrism and patriarchal sexism. Campaign funding analysts found that the sexist advertising reached hundreds of millions of dollars in costs in the final weeks with rabid anti-LGBTQ propaganda. Trump proxy propagandists openly used the ‘c’ word in lewd references to Kamala Harris.
Clearly, social suffering had reached a degree of intensity of resentment at the sheer lack of sensitivity of the ‘progressives’. It was not so much that people identified with the open racism and sexism. Rather, they identified with the disregard for the political correctness of the self-proclaimed ‘progressives’ for whom political correctness was doctrine alongside social innovation as opposed to conservatism.
Will this ethical abandonment by voters enable the actual fascist forces that have latched on to the latest Trumpian wave to penetrate the Washington establishment? How far can Project 2025 be taken seriously? Is there a fascist underclass strong enough to undermine the American imperial state?
