Vol. 80/No. 46 December 12, 2016
US election shows crisis of two-party capitalist rule
The Republican Party, fractured by Donald Trump’s primary victory over many of the party bosses’ “brightest and best,” is being rebuilt around the president-elect.
The Democratic Party is in disarray and its leadership faces a challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is leading a “revolution” to take over.
“The bourgeois two-party system has, for so long, delivered nothing but crushed expectations,” notes Socialist Workers Party leader Steve Clark in the introduction to The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. Published just before the election, the book shows how the political turmoil in the bosses’ parties is rooted in the world crisis of capitalist production and trade — in decades of the employers trying to reverse their falling profit rates on the backs of working people.
“For the first time in decades, the US rulers and their government have begun to fear the working class,” Clark notes. “More working people are beginning to see that the bosses and political parties have no ‘solutions’ that don’t further load the costs — monetary and human — of the crisis of their system on us.” The rulers “sense that mounting struggle — class struggle — lies ahead.”
Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul, said he spoke for the working class who had no voice in Washington. He said there was a jobs crisis, that as a political “outsider” he would use his business acumen to change things. And he mixed in rightist demagoguery.
Trump’s campaign was opposed by many in the Republican machine and the conservative press. His victory shut them up and won some over.
The president-elect has begun to rebuild the party in his image, seeking to forge a conservative capitalist party with a base in the working class. His popularity grew when he said he would take a salary of $1 a year.
Many of his cabinet nominations reflect this new party. One of the sharpest debates has been over the selection of secretary of state. One candidate is Mitt Romney, the losing Republican presidential nominee in 2012 and a sharp critic of Trump during the campaign. Others are outside the former party establishment.
Trump gave the OK to Kellyanne Conway, one of his top advisers, to publicly oppose Romney’s nomination. She told CNN Nov. 27, “I’m all for party unity, but I’m not sure we have to pay for that with the secretary of state position.”
“The working class of this country is being decimated — that’s why Donald Trump won,” Sanders told the crowd at a Nov. 20 Boston event promoting his new book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.
Hillary Clinton had campaigned saying the economy was great and that workers attracted to Trump because they were upset about losing jobs were “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”
Sanders urges new candidates, many from the Occupy Wall Street movement of a few years ago, to seek office.
And he says the Democrats have to get rid of “identity politics,” looking for a future party built solely on Blacks, Hispanics and women. The focus has to be on appealing to workers who feel exploited, he said.
When Michigan officials certified Trump the winner there Nov. 28, it brought the Electoral College vote to 306 for Trump and 232 for Clinton. Meanwhile, Clinton’s lead in the popular vote has reached about 2 million, encouraging some who oppose Trump to claim his election was illegitimate.
Trump says he ran to win the Electoral College. “If the election were based on total popular vote,” he said, “I would have campaigned in New York, Florida and California and won even bigger,” which likely is true. Without campaigning there, Trump won in more than a dozen upstate New York counties where workers voted for “change” with Obama in 2012.
As he appeals to the working class, Trump’s cabinet picks, such as Wilbur Ross for Secretary of Commerce, demonstrate his intention to rule in the bosses’ interests. Ross’ International Coal Group owned the Sago Mine in West Virginia, where 12 miners died in a 2006 explosion from lack of safety measures. He serves on the board of steel giant ArcelorMittal, spearheading attacks on steelworkers.
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home