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He's not my president!
(from the Detroit Workers' Voice mailing list for Nov. 14, 2016)
Demonstrations have spread across the country against the election of Donald
Trump. While Democratic Party bigwigs and establishment media were calling on
people to give Trump a chance, indignant people have come out on the street
declaring that Trump was "Not My President". The establishment figures are
consoling themselves that market forces will supposedly tame Trump and the
government will run as usual. But Trump's election marks a shift in the
dominant trend in bourgeois policies, and activists aren't waiting for Trump
and Congress to trample them. For day after day, there have been
demonstrations against Trump and against racist incidents inspired by Trump's
campaign. They have occurred around the country, including California,
Michigan, Massachusetts, Oregon, Illinois, New York, Washington state,
Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Maryland, Texas, Florida, Iowa,
Kentucky, Georgia, and Louisiana. A Million Women March is being organized
for January 21, the day after Trump's inauguration.
At the same time Trump's campaign has unleashed a lot of pent-up racism. His
election has been taken by racists as an endorsement. The KKK in North
Carolina is planning a victory parade to celebrate Trump's presidency. Across
the country bigots are demonstrating in their own way: they are seeking out
minorities and women in hijabs to insult and harass. It is a sign of the
danger that confronts us.
Trump's racism and bigotry is fostered by the conservative section of the
bourgeoisie. But Trump united the conservative and racist core of the
Republicans with a section of the working masses who were susceptible to his
demagogy or willing to ignore that aspect of Trump's campaign because they
were tired of hearing the Democrats saying for year after year that
everything was getting better, when this isn't true except for the wealthy.
Something similar has taken place elsewhere around the world where the bigots
and reactionaries are on an offensive. In the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte was
elected president earlier this year, and he is notorious for sponsoring
vigilante murders and death squads in the name of a war on drugs and crime.
In France, President Francois Hollande is vastly unpopular, and there is the
danger that Marine Le Pen, leader of the fascistic National Front, will be
elected president in next spring's elections. In Europe, as in Trump's
campaign, the far right combines racism and anti-immigrant hysteria with the
claim of opposing austerity. Hollande and his party may call themselves
socialist, but many "socialist" parties combine the claim to be socialist
with neoliberal measures against the masses; the French workers need
something different to fight austerity and the right-wing.
With Trump's presidency, we are entering a period of intensified crisis in
the US; this will be a period of yet more harassment and hardship for the
working class. But it will also be a period in which many people are going to
be drawn into action in one direction or the other, right or left. The
demonstrations against Trump are important in setting an orientation of
struggle.
The lack of a mass alternative on the left to the Democrats and Republicans
is a problem. Many people can recognize the hatred and bigotry in Trump's
declarations, and they want to fight it. It's harder for people to recognize
all the neoliberal steps that make up the austerity program of the
bourgeoisie. It's easy to recognize the absurdity of climate denial, but
harder to recognize the futility of the neoliberal market measures that claim
to deal with the environment. It's easier for people to build organizations
that fight individual capitalist atrocities, but harder to build an overall
opposition to the establishment and the program of the capitalist class.
Indeed, the radical left itself is still mired in a crisis of orientation,
with some activists even supporting Russian imperialism in the guise of being
"anti-war". The Green Party was the largest "third" party on the left, and it
didn't do well in the recent elections. It makes a lot of economic promises,
but is unable to make them sound credible. And in fact, the Green Party
hasn't emancipated itself from neoliberalism: it's backing of tax and market
measures as a main tool to fight global warming is in line with World Bank
and IMF orthodoxy.
Bernie Sanders caught the mood of working people for change, and many more
people are now talking about socialism. Most, like Sanders, see socialism as
simply better policies within the cur
