Everywhere you look there are far-right movements springing up from the ashes of neo-liberal austerity and the manner in which it ravaged communities across the globe. People think this is something new, when actually right-wing ideas have never really gone away, they just lacked the impetus to advance on the national and global stages when times were a bit more prosperous. Trump is now the President-elect and Le Penn is likely to be the President of France soon, with fascist groups in Germany, Holland and Italy, all on the march. This, I suggest, is the by-product of the metropolitan Liberal elite’s obsession with ‘’identity politics’’ at the expense of addressing burning poverty – that is, believing people will only vote according to their gender, ethnicity, sexuality or religion; completely glossing over the most seminal distinction of all in life – social class. Nothing could be more evident of this trend than the large numbers of statistics revealing how minorities and the lesser-off groups in America stunned the pollsters by voting far more than expected for Donald J. Trump.
Your relationship with wealth and power, your class, is of much more fundamental importance for who and what you associate with in life and at the ballot box, than any of the other characteristics which may form part of your psyche. You can change the stamp on your passport but the values and thinking behind your class-conditioning remain almost congenital. We are often told there is no working-class anymore, that we are all ‘’middle-class’’; when actually, with the increasingly insecure labour market, we are mostly all working-class – we must work in order to live, selling our labour/intellect for the price of necessities and luxuries. The middle class has largely been destroyed by years of dwindling employment rights and declining wages. Home ownership is a dream to many.
One of the good things to come out of Hillary Clinton’s defeat will be the mandatory need for the Left, the actual Left and not just the cream of the Democratic Party, around the world to congregate and debate traditional ideas and their pertinent relevance to contemporary circumstances, to examine the economic and social order in which we live. Socialism and actual social democracy hasn’t gone away, it just has yet to evolve to a more sexy and attractive political option for this emerging century. In the West, we have by and large won the right to political democracy, although few exercise their most crucial and hard-won right – the vote. So, to change those who govern us, we must pressure those who presently govern us to legislate for all to vote. Then the target must be to use that vote in electing people who will implement industrial democracy – that is, for workers to decide the bulk of issues relating to their employment, working conditions, gaining a share in the dividends and accessing adequate rights/protections enshrined in constitutional legislation.
One thing this election has proven is that elitest metropolitan ‘’Liberalism’’ cannot possibly stave off the challenge of right-wing populism and fascist elements within the overall political discourse. McCarthyism has been revived by the Clintons and their gang of centre-right bandits, who blame the ‘’deplorables’’ as those who vote according to racial, gender and ethnic motivations, when the simple reality is that they do not view the chief beneficiaries of the system to be the legitimate means of reforming the status quo. Russia and China, and a Black president, are all being cited, farcically, as the underlying reasons for Clinton’s Shakespearean defeat at the hands of a vulgar oaf. When the answer is much more basic and only five letters: CLASS. She represented only herself and people like her, culminating in an anger which Trump tapped into.
But remember this, history teaches us that there are no final battles between Right and Left, each generation must undergo the same fights over and over to defend their rights whilst seeking to enhance them. Who would have thought in the midst of Christ hanging bleeding on the crucifix that two thousand years from that marked moment there would be a Church in his honour gracing almost every city in the world? Ideas change everything, they don’t just flavour the political weather, they are the ingredients of it. The titanic political duel between ‘’truth and love against the force of evil’’, will exist so long as man has oxygen in his lungs, fire in the eyes and wit in the mind – we have been fighting, killing, helping and persuading each other for millennia due to ideas. What we are witnessing is the death of one idea (neo-liberalism), a withering old order coming to pass. The ascent of Trump, with all his Thatcherite rhetoric and primitive economic ideas will push the system to breaking point; he will harden people up to actually using their vote to ensure someone like him, or Hillary Clinton, never happens again, in a process of creative destruction. Let the Americans make and learn from their own mistakes. But for the Left, this chapter must be not the beginning of the end, merely the end of the beginning.
I am what is laughingly known as a “Gay activist”, I also happen to be a very active Labourite agitator and (amateur, as in ‘unpaid’) journalist.
I’m increasingly p—-d-off with being told the working class to a man (& his missus) are opposed to the extension of my civil rights.
Said extension[s] would not have happened if the big ‘blue collar’ Unions had not backed them.