This Is How It Begins: The Deep State Wants to Terminate the Constitution

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / November 20th, 2024

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary.

—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

This is how it begins.

This is how it always begins, justified in the name of national security.

Mass roundups. Raids. Indefinite detentions in concentration camps. Martial law. The erosion of habeas corpus protections. The suspension of the Constitution, at least for select segments of the population. A hierarchy of rights, contingent on whether you belong to a favored political class.

This is what you can expect in the not-so-distant future.

Once you allow the government to overreach the restraints imposed  by the Constitution, no matter what that threat might be, it will be that much harder to restrain it again, no matter which party is at the helm.

We’ve seen this played out time and again.

Some years ago, for instance, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and deploy the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”[1]

In other words, they wanted the government to use the military to round up and lock up the unvaccinated in concentration camps.

That didn’t happen, but it so easily could have.

Now the script has been flipped, and it’s the soon-to-be Trump Administration promising to use the military to round up and lock up undesirables in concentration camps.

At this moment in time, those so-called “undesirables” are illegal immigrants, but given what we know about the government and its expansive definition of what constitutes a threat to its power, any one of us could be next up in the police state’s crosshairs.

Once you give the government a taste of that kind of power—to disregard the Constitution, even for a day; to use the military for domestic policing; to rely on mass deportations and concentration camps in order to sidestep due process procedures—it won’t be so easy to rein it in when it runs amok.

And it will run amok.

You don’t have to be an illegal immigrant or a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to be worried about what lies ahead. You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is why significant numbers of people are worried: because this is the slippery slope that starts with supposedly well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate.

We’ve already allowed the government to significantly undermine our constitutional republic.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be seduced by the false siren song of politicians promising safety in exchange for relinquished freedom. We placed our trust in political saviors and failed to ask questions to hold our representatives accountable to abiding by the Constitution. We looked the other way and made excuses while the government amassed an amazing amount of power over us, and backed up that power-grab with a terrifying amount of military might and weaponry, and got the courts to sanction their actions every step of the way. We chose to let partisan politics divide us and turn us into easy targets for the government’s oppression.

Consider for yourself.

We are in the grip of martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.

We are in the government’s crosshairs. The U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Consequently, we are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by the government’s standing army of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later.

We are no longer safe in our homes. This present menace comes from the government’s army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized SWAT teams who are waging war on the last stronghold left to us as a free people: the sanctity of our homes.

We have no real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American who criticizes the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

We have no real privacy. We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

We are losing our right to bodily privacy and integrity. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.

We no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.

 We have no due process. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

We are no longer presumed innocent. The burden of proof has been reversed. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so. The government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database. Having already used surveillance technology to render the entire American populace potential suspects, DNA technology in the hands of government coupled with artificial intelligence will complete our transition to a suspect society in which we are all merely waiting to be matched up with a crime.

We have lost the right to be anonymous and move about freely.  At every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Likewise, digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

We no longer have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

We have no guardians of justice. The courts were established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the courts have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests.

We have been saddled with a dictator for life. Secret, unchecked presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—now enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

We are one crisis or state of emergency away from having the Constitution terminated.

Mind you, the powers-that-be want the Constitution terminated.

They want us to be censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down.

They want our speech and activities monitored for any sign of “extremist” activity.

They want us to be estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. They want taxation without representation. They want a government without the consent of the governed.

Connect the dots.

This was never about politics, populist movements, or making America great again.

This is what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

It’s what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the slippery slope begins in just this way, with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

The danger signs are everywhere.

ENDNOTE:

[1] Jenni Fink, “Utah Newspaper Pushes for National Guard to Block Unvaccinated From Socializing,” Newsweek (Jan. 17, 2022).
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John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

The stunning success of vaccines in America, in one chart

America, before and after vaccines.


by Dylan Scott
VOX

Nov 19, 2024

A teenage boy is vaccinated against smallpox in New York in March 1938.
Harry Chamberlain/FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Measles, mumps, and polio are supposed to be diseases of the past. In the early to mid-20th century, scientists developed vaccines that effectively eliminated the risk of anyone getting sick or dying from illnesses that had killed millions over millennia of human history.


Vaccines, alongside sanitized water and antibiotics, have marked the epoch of modern medicine. The US was at the cutting edge of eliminating these diseases, which helped propel life expectancy and economic growth in the postwar era. Montana native Maurice Hilleman, the so-called father of modern vaccines, developed flu shots, hepatitis shots, and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the 1950s and ’60s, which became virtually universally adopted among Americans.

Smallpox, the most common form of which has a 30 percent fatality rate, has been eradicated. Mitch McConnell, Republican titan of the Senate, may be the last major public figure still afflicted by a childhood case of polio, less than a century after it paralyzed a sitting American president. Measles likely infected millions of people annually in the US in the 1800s, although precise estimates from the era are hard to come by. In the early 1900s, thousands of people died from the disease every year. It was still infecting more than half a million and killing hundreds per year on average in the 1950s and ’60s, before the vaccine debuted. Diphtheria, a deadly respiratory infection, killed more than 1,800 people annually between 1936 and 1945 as the vaccine against it was still being rolled out. It has not killed anybody in the United States in decades.

The vaccines that made this possible are among the most important achievements in human history. And yet many Americans appear to be losing faith in them, a worrying trend that could accelerate if President-elect Donald Trump succeeds in handing control of the top US health agency into the hands of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s foremost vaccine denier.

Kennedy has spent much of his public career pushing the thoroughly debunked theory of a link between autism and childhood vaccines. He has supported an anti-vaccine group in Samoa, where measles vaccination rates have since fallen off; a 2019 outbreak killed 83 people just a few months after Kennedy visited the island and met with anti-vaccine advocates. He has likewise cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines, a position that helped nudge the lifelong Democrat toward Trump. After Kennedy dropped his own presidential campaign this year, he became Trump’s most influential health adviser and last week was nominated by the president-elect to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The day after Trump’s election, Kennedy insisted he would not “take away anybody’s vaccines.” Instead, he said, he planned to compile vaccine safety information so that people could make their own decisions. But vaccine safety has been extensively studied — and the negative effects Kennedy claims remain undetected. (Others in Trump’s orbit have stated that Kennedy will nevertheless use whatever information he finds to try to pull vaccines from the market.)

Experts fear that his appointment will validate his anti-vaccine attitudes — and exacerbate the public’s growing ambivalence toward these vital public health measures.

As long-accepted, lifesaving public health measures increasingly become politically polarized, routine vaccination rates are rapidly declining in much of the US. In the 2019–2020 school year, three states had less than 90 percent of K–12 students vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. By the 2023–2024 school year, 14 states had fallen below that threshold. The number of states with more than 95 percent of schoolchildren vaccinated — the preferred level of coverage to prevent outbreaks — dropped from 20 to 11 during that same period.

It is no surprise then that the number of US measles cases more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2024. Nobody has died of measles in the US since 2015, but if vaccination rates continue to decline, this highly contagious disease (one person can infect more than a dozen other people) will spread with increasing ease, which raises the risk that American kids could die.

We know how to prevent that. We’ve had remarkably safe, effective shots for decades. We just need to keep using them.

Dylan Scott is a senior correspondent and editor for Vox’s Future Perfect, covering global health. He has reported on health policy for more than 10 years, writing for Governing magazine, Talking Points Memo, and STAT before joining Vox in 2017.

 

Global antibiotic consumption has increased by more than 21 percent since 2016

An analysis of antibiotic sales data from 67 countries from 2016-2023 shows a decrease in consumption in high-income countries countered by an increase in middle-income countries

One Health Trust

Washington, DC / Bangalore, India — A new study highlights recent, but fluctuating, growth in global human antibiotic consumption, one of the main drivers of growing antimicrobial resistance (AMR). AMR results in infections that no longer respond to antibiotics (and other antimicrobial medicines) and often leads to longer hospital stays, higher treatment costs, and higher mortality rates. AMR is estimated to be associated with nearly five million global deaths annually.

Researchers affiliated with the One Health Trust (OHT), the Population Council, GlaxoSmithKline, the University of Zurich, the University of Brussels, Johns Hopkins University, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed pharmaceutical sales data from 67 countries from 2016-2023 for the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic growth on human antibiotic consumption. The study provides a breakdown of global antibiotic sales in reported countries by national income level, antibiotic class, and antibiotic grouping according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) AWaRe classification system for antibiotic stewardship and projects consumption through 2030. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study found:

• Overall antibiotic sales increased in reporting countries from 2016-2023. Antibiotic sales in 67 reporting countries increased by 16.3 percent from 2016 to 2023, from 29.5 billion defined daily doses (DDDs) to 34.3 billion DDDs. This result reflected a 10.2 percent increase in the overall consumption rate in these countries from 13.7 to 15.2 DDDs per 1,000 inhabitants per day.
• Before the COVID-19 pandemic, antibiotic consumption rates in high-income countries were decreasing, and consumption rates in middle-income countries were increasing. From 2016-2019, antibiotic consumption rates (DDDs per 1,000 inhabitants per day) increased in middle-income countries (9.8 percent) while decreasing in high-income countries (-5.8 percent).
• The COVID-19 pandemic was significantly correlated with an overall reduction in antibiotic sales, most pronounced in high-income countries. An interrupted time series analysis showed that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 resulted in significantly decreased antibiotic consumption rates across income groups. The decrease was most pronounced in high-income countries, with the consumption rate falling 17.8 percent from 2019 to 2020. In 2021, lower-middle-income countries led high-income countries in antibiotic consumption rates as high-income countries experienced more sustained reductions.
• Middle-income countries experienced increased Watch antibiotic sales relative to Access antibiotic sales throughout the study period. High-income countries consumed consistently higher and overall increasing levels of Access antibiotics compared to Watch antibiotics as defined by the WHO’s AWaRe system. Middle-income countries consumed consistently higher and overall increasing Watch antibiotics relative to Access antibiotics.
• Middle-income countries experienced the largest increases in antibiotic consumption rates from 2016-2023. All five of the regions with the largest increases in their antibiotic consumption rate over the study period were made up of middle-income countries.
• By 2030, global consumption is expected to increase by 52.3 percent to 75.1 billion DDDs. Global projections based on the data from 67 countries show that by 2030, antibiotic consumption is expected to increase from 49.3 billion DDDs by 52.3 percent (uncertainty range [UR]: 22.1 to 82.6 percent) to a total of 75.1 (UR: 60.2 to 90.1) billion DDDs.

This study sheds light on recent trends in consumption across country income levels that can be used to help promote the careful use of antibiotics and other public health interventions that may reduce antibiotic consumption, such as improved infection prevention and control measures and increased childhood vaccination coverage. The study also has implications for future pandemic preparedness.

According to Dr. Eili Klein, lead author of the study and Senior Fellow at OHT, “The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily disrupted antibiotic use, but global consumption has rebounded quickly and continues to rise at an alarming rate. To address this escalating crisis, we must prioritize reducing inappropriate antibiotic use in high-income nations while making substantial investments in infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries to curb disease transmission effectively.”

“Global trends in antibiotic consumption during 2016–2023 and future projections through 2030” is available in PNAS (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2411919121).

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About the One Health Trust

The One Health Trust (OHT), which was founded as the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) in 2010, uses research and stakeholder engagement to improve the health and well-being of our planet and its inhabitants. For more than a decade, OHT researchers have conducted vitally important work on major global health challenges, including Covid-19, antimicrobial resistance, hospital infections, tuberculosis, malaria, pandemic preparedness and response, vaccines, medical oxygen shortages, and noncommunicable diseases. OHT’s mandate includes issues related to climate change, biodiversity protection, and the effect of changing human diets on the planet.  

At OHT, we believe that answers to the world’s most critical questions lie between disciplines. Accordingly, our researchers employ a range of expertise—from economics, epidemiology, disease modeling, and risk analysis to clinical and veterinary medicine, geographic information systems, and statistics—to conduct actionable, policy-oriented research. 

OHT has offices in Washington, D.C. and Bangalore, India, with researchers based in North America, Africa, and Asia. Our projects lead to policy recommendations and scientific studies published in leading journals. We are experienced in addressing country-specific and regional issues as well as global challenges. Our research is renowned for innovative approaches to design and analysis, and we communicate our work to diverse stakeholders. 

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2411919121 

Article Title

Global trends in antibiotic consumption during 2016–2023 and future projections through 2030

Article Publication Date

18-Nov-2024

Study to explore antibiotics role in childhood asthma

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

 

image: 

Christian Rosas-Salazar, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Pediatrics, Allergy, Immunology, Pulmonary Medicine at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt.

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Credit: Vanderbilt University Medical Center

The use of antibiotics in the first year of life has been found to be a risk factor for the development of childhood asthma.

What is not known is how to protect children from the long-term effects of infant antibiotic use. Researchers at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt are seeking to determine the age when infants are most susceptible to the risk of developing childhood asthma once exposed to antibiotics and the pathways through which infant antibiotic use can increase the risk childhood asthma onset.

“There are currently no strategies to prevent asthma, the most common chronic lung disease in children,” said Christian Rosas-Salazar, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Pediatrics, Allergy, Immunology, Pulmonary Medicine at Monroe Carell. “Understanding the mechanisms that lead to asthma in children who receive antibiotics in early life can help us develop interventions to prevent this condition.

“By examining how antibiotics can disrupt an infant’s microbiome and identifying a critical window of opportunity to intervene, the ultimate goal of this project is to inform the design of microbiome-based therapeutics, such as probiotics and/or bacterial products that can help deliver antibiotics safely during early life and reduce the burden of childhood asthma.”

Rosas-Salazar received $4.1 million from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to conduct a five-year study, “Effect of infant antibiotics on the development of early-life airway and gut microbiome and risk of childhood asthma,” where his team will use available data and biospecimens collected from several birth cohorts from across the country that are part of the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program of the National Institutes of Health.

Results from previous studies indicate that the association of antibiotic exposure early in childhood and the risk of developing asthma is likely due to changes in the human microbiome, but the techniques utilized couldn’t accurately identify relevant bacterial species or functions. Rosas-Salazar said that is critical in designing interventions to prevent long-term detrimental effects of infant antibiotic use.

“Our objective is to address a critical and unmet need,” said Rosas-Salazar. “The findings could be used to develop microbiome-based interventions to prevent childhood asthma in children needing antibiotics in early life,” he said.

Absorption pits necessary but hazardous for Gaza’s displaced


Amjad Ayman Yaghi The Electronic Intifada 12 November 2024
A girl picks her way through raw sewage water in a camp for the displaced in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip in August. 

Omar Ashtawy APA images

It’s not a pleasant job.

But it is a vital one.

In February of this year, Abdul Salam al-Aswad dug an absorption trench or pit near his tent in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip and placed a homemade toilet with a wooden board raised on bricks to act as a seat over it.

With Israel’s war on Gaza lurching into its 14th month, Gaza’s 1.9 million displaced people – who have found shelter mostly in tents and temporary structures erected to shield them from the elements – have had to prepare for the long term as they come to terms with the fact that Israel’s sponsors have so far shown no interest in reigning in their genocidal ally.

One crucial need is the safe disposal of sewage and waste in a territory where Israel’s destruction of infrastructure has been near total.

Going to the toilet has become “psychologically concerning,” al-Aswad told The Electronic Intifada in late October.

“We relieve ourselves in a pit that smells and certainly causes us disease, but we have no choice but to use it.”

Every overcrowded shelter in Gaza increasingly relies on such absorption pits to mitigate what is a growing health hazard, and digging tools, pipes, barrels and materials to build toilets are being sold in markets and by street side vendors.

They are needed.

Spread of disease

Muhammad Mansour, 39, said many absorption pits in his shelter west of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip have started to collapse due to oversaturation of the ground with wastewater.

His 5-year-old son fell into a pit in August while walking with other children. The child was immediately taken to Shuhada al-Aqsa hospital for tests because of the imminent danger of infectious disease, his father said.

But it’s impossible to take precautions. Sewage water is present everywhere in Deir al-Balah, Mansour said, flowing freely in between tents in shelters and in streets everywhere.

“It’s very ugly, and we have to use these pits knowing they are harmful to us,” he said.

He himself developed scabies and skin rashes from the sanitation issues, he said.

“We know the causes of the diseases that afflict us. But we can’t avoid them,” he told The Electronic Intifada.

Ahmed Shaheen, an environmental engineer with the Palestinian Water Authority, warns of a possible major health disaster.

“Absorption pits can lead to the seepage of sewage into groundwater. Increased humidity and foul odors from these pits can promote the spread of infectious diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever,” Shaheen said.

International organizations have long warned of the effect of Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza’s infrastructure and have reported a “rapid spread” of infectious diseases.

In October, the British Medical Journal, BMJ, noted that Gaza now has 40,000 cases of Hepatitis A, compared to just 18 before war started.

The territory has seen the re-emergence of polio and is enduring, according to the World Health Organization, one million reported cases of acute respiratory tract infections, half a million cases of acute diarrhea and over 100 000 cases of jaundice.

“Without an immediate and permanent ceasefire and unrestricted access to humanitarian aid for all of Gaza – including a vaccination campaign focused on young children, and the protection and rebuilding of the health system – people will continue to die from preventable diseases and treatable injuries,” the BMJ authors concluded.
No privacy

Shaheen was even more downbeat. What is happening in Gaza will have ramifications, “on humans and the environment, that may be felt for decades because of the amount of explosives and destruction.”

He pointed out that Gaza’s infrastructure had been inadequate for years as a result of Israel’s 16-year blockade on Gaza before last October that prevented entry for the necessary materials to fix the territory’s aging infrastructure.

As far back as 2018, well water samples indicated that pollution levels had risen to the point that 97 percent of Gaza coastal aquifer was contaminated with sewage water, according to UNICEF.

And it is not just a health hazard.

Jamileh Omar, who was displaced from Gaza City to Deir al-Balah, said many women are uncomfortable relieving themselves in absorption pits, so they often go early in the morning when fewer people are out and about.

“There are very few bathrooms provided in tents by international organizations to use,” she said. “It’s very crowded, and there is frequent movement of displaced people, so people have dug pits.”

Shaheen said people in Gaza perceive the response of governmental and international non-governmental organizations as insufficient and that improving the health and environmental conditions of displaced individuals is not just a pressing need but “a fundamental right.”

Amjad Ayman Yaghi is a journalist based in Gaza.

Contexts of sexualities in France

INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale)

13-Nov-2024

The latest research conducted by Inserm-ANRS on sexualities and sexual health in 2023 reveals trends that reflect developments observed over the past several decades. However, significant changes have emerged since the early 21st century, especially among women, within a context of increased social and economic autonomy, the advancement of gender and sexual equality, and the ongoing transformation of family structures. These changes also take place against a legislative backdrop that has evolved considerably in recent years. The 2013 law on same-sex marriages and the 2021 law on assisted reproductive technologies for female couples and single women have played a crucial role in reducing institutional discrimination against individuals with same-sex partners in their pursuit of marriage and parenthood.

The initial results illuminate what could be termed the “contemporary paradox of sexuality.” This paradox is characterized by greater diversity alongside a decreased intensity of sexual activity with a partner. The diversification of sexual activity is evident through the increase in the number of opposite-sex and same-sex partners, the extension of sexual activity into older ages, and the broadening of sexual repertoires, including masturbation. This trend is not new, but has intensified in recent years, particularly among women. At the same time, individuals report having engaged in sexual intercourse in the past twelve months less frequently than in 2006, especially those who are not in a relationship, and the frequency of sexual intercourse over the past four weeks has decreased regardless of relationship status. These trends are also observed in other countries, including Germany, the United States, Finland, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

The factors driving these trends are multifaceted. Firstly, women and men under 69 in France are less likely to be in a relationship today compared to previous decades (Rault and Réigner-Loilier 2015). As a result, periods without a stable partner have become more common in 2023 than in the past. The rise of digital spaces for sexual expression also contributes to this shift, particularly among younger individuals, as sexual experiences not only involve physical settings but also occur online. Additionally, research indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during lockdowns, has adversely affected the mental health of young people in the long term (Hazo and Costemalle 2021), potentially altering their expectations regarding sexuality.

Furthermore, these changes occur within a broader context that challenges traditional perceptions of women’s sexual availability. The results indicate a decline since 2006 in the frequency of sexual encounters women accept to please their partner, even when they themselves are not interested. Today, younger generations seem to view a lack of sexual activity as less problematic than in the past. Similarly, the belief that men have "naturally" greater sexual needs than women, which prevailed in 2006, no longer holds true in 2023. Notably, these shifts do not appear to diminish the sexual satisfaction of either women or men, as both groups continue to report similar levels of satisfaction with their sex lives as they did in 2006.

The CSF-2023 survey also highlights an increasing challenge to the heterosexual norm in attitudes and practices. Social acceptance of non-heterosexual sexualities has grown significantly over time, although notable resistance still exists, and discrimination against individuals with same-sex partners, particularly against transgender people, remains frequent, negatively impacting their mental health. Among individuals who have had same-sex partners, only half (56.1% of women and 50.6% of men) report having used a condom during their first sexual encounter with a new partner. Furthermore, these individuals exhibit a higher prevalence of STIs compared to the general population, reaching 1.4% for women and 2.4% for men aged 18-59.

The CSF-2023 findings suggest that it is ultimately the contours of sexuality that are evolving, as heterosexual penetrative sexuality gradually gives way to a more diverse practices, less focused on vaginal penetration and increasingly occurring in digital spaces, and is notably less frequent but more often desired.

This shift can be viewed in relation to the ongoing increase in reports of sexual violence, a trend that began well before the #MeToo movement. The growing social mobilization against all forms of sexual violence has transformed the normative frameworks of sexual consent. The rise in reported incidents reflects both an acknowledgment by respondents of events that were previously not considered violent and a greater capacity to denounce such occurrences. However, the results of this new survey paint a concerning picture of the extent of these violences, and statistics regarding younger generations illustrate the continued prevalence of the issue.

The survey also shows that transidentity and questioning gender binary norms remain stigmatized, significantly more so than homosexuality, and individuals who have considered changing their gender report considerably poorer mental health outcomes than others. Nevertheless, social acceptance of transgender and non-binary individuals is evolving, as evidenced by more favorable attitudes from younger generations. It is also among the youngest age groups that a greater number of individuals have thought about changing their gender at some point in their lives. These results indicate a growing reflexivity among individuals regarding their own gender, which is no longer simply experienced as a biological given.

Even though gender inequalities remain pronounced from the onset of sexual activity through to older ages, and discrimination against individuals with same-sex partners and transgender individuals remains common, the developments highlighted by the 2023 survey overall reflect a growing trend toward gender and sexual equality in French society. The results also shed light on the issues related to the prevention of risks associated with sexuality. The use of condoms during first sexual encounters has declined in recent years, and the protection observed during initial sexual encounters with new partners falls significantly short of the recommendations set forth by the national sexual health strategy. Additionally, vaccination coverage for hepatitis B and the papillomavirus (HPV) remains low, particularly among men. While contraceptive coverage is generally very high, the types of methods used have evolved considerably. The results confirm a decreasing reliance on the pill, a trend observed since 2005 that intensified following the media crisis of 2012, particularly among young people, who are increasingly turning to the intrauterine device (IUD) and condoms, although the pill remains the most commonly used method in this age group. Among women aged 18-49, the IUD has become the most widely used method in 2023. Meanwhile, non-medical methods are on the rise, with one in ten women remaining without contraceptive protection. The survey also notes an increase in unintended pregnancies among young women, reflecting the rise in the incidence of voluntary terminations of pregnancy observed since 2016. These findings call for a reconsideration of prevention programs for STIs and unintended pregnancies, while integrating digital tools that can help expand access to care, provided they adhere to the same quality standards as other health care sources. The digitalization of sexual health represents a broader challenge of de-medicalizing sexual health in France, which is still in its early stages compared to policies implemented in other countries, such as England and the United States.

* * *

Numerous analyses are currently underway, which will provide a deeper understanding of the results presented here, taking into account the detailed social characteristics of individuals. The ongoing analyses also focus on emotional and sexual trajectories, the use of pornography, paid sexual exchanges, norms and representations of sexuality, feminism and sexuality, sexuality in older age, consent, the links between sexuality and diseases, prevention practices, and medical violence, among other topics. These analyses will cover both metropolitan France and the overseas territories (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Réunion). They will also allow for international comparisons with countries that have conducted similar types of surveys based on WHO protocols, such as Canada and England.

Results will be published in 2025 in a special issue of the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, and in-depth analyses will be presented in a forthcoming book to be published in 2026 by La Découverte.

 

Solidarity National Committee: First response to 2024 US presidential election

By Solidarity

Published 12 November, 2024

First published at Solidarity (US).

IT SHOULD COME as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right. — Bernie Sanders

The November U.S. election has produced a sweeping victory, not just in the United States but internationally as well, for the far right. It has sent shock waves through not only the Democratic Party establishment but progressive forces and the movements for racial, Indigenous and gender justice.

To be sure, Trump’s decisive victory preempted the fears of post-election chaos and constitutional crisis — and all those concocted rightwing accusations of “massive voter fraud” evaporated like the morning dew. We can also draw a concluding line under Joe Biden’s lasting presidential legacy: enabling the Gaza genocide, clinging to his sagging reelection campaign well past its best-by date, and returning Trump to power.

The results may be every bit as calamitous as many commentators are predicting. That’s certainly true for the Palestinian people under Israel’s state-and-U.S.-supplied genocide, quite possibly for Ukraine’s struggle to defend itself from Russia’s invasion, undoubtedly for immigrant communities in the United States facing a new reign of terror, and for pro-Palestinian activist students and faculty confronting repression on campuses, as well as looming threats to anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ and transgender rights movements. It will also accelerate — we don’t know by how much — the global climate-change apocalypse.

There’s much to say about all this, and we can only touch on some of it in this initial response. But we must begin with a dilemma that the Trump/MAGA victory presents far beyond the defeat of a stagnant Biden presidency: For those of us in the socialist movement, working class struggle and activism are the critical element to winning serious and lasting gains. Yet today’s reality is that a substantial minority of workers in the United States — largely but not only among white workers — have been won over to voting for a deeply reactionary agenda. By some accounts, half the union members in Michigan supported Trump.

Workers voting for Trump don’t necessarily identify in a hard way with the vicious social policies of the far right. It’s tempting and partly valid to attribute the election result to white supremacy — but after all, that’s a constant reality in the United States, and doesn’t adequately explain the 2024 result. If this election revolved around one central issue it was inflation, in the wake of Covid’s disruption of people’s lives.

Racist anti-immigrant appeals were clearly a mobilizing force on the right, and obviously remain so, but electoral polling indicated that these were not primary — as was also true of the very real fears about the future of democracy that motivated much of the Democratic vote.

Working class desertion from the Democratic Party is not a brand-new development. It’s been emerging in elections since the 1980s, accelerated during the disastrous “neoliberal” decades, and come to the fore now. At the same time, political alienation is widespread throughout the population. In 2024 the Trump vote didn’t change much at around 72 million (compared to 74 million in 2020), while the Democrats’ presidential vote dropped by as much as 13 million to 68 million, from 81 million in 2020.

Even as we prepare to join the resistance, by all available means, to the coming onslaught on progressive movements and vulnerable populations, the socialist left needs to come to terms with the rightward political trends within much of the working class, and clearly analyze how they might be reversed.

The far right itself will do some of the work — as Trump’s tariffs, tax cuts for the rich and attacks on essential programs and services victimize millions of folks who voted for him. But that won’t automatically move working class people leftward, especially while so many react to crises in their lives as isolated individuals and families rather than as an organized class force.

Democrats’ debacle

We don’t ignore the severe stresses on people’s lives stemming from the Covid pandemic, especially the resulting corrosive inflation (falsely blamed by the right wing, of course, on “runaway government spending”). But we think that Senator Bernie Sanders points precisely to the basic reason why much of the working class has “abandoned” the Democrats.

It’s too easy to focus on secondary issues and tactical blunders. Of course, the Democratic establishment covered up Biden’s decline for way too long. Of course, their refusal at the convention to allow a single speech by a Palestinian-American delegate was a cynical, cowardly and racist snub — which might have been fatal if the election had turned out to be much closer and the Arab-American and progressive vote had been decisive.

But we have to get to why the Kamala Harris campaign — which was designed not by Harris but by the same coterie of corporate consultants who collect their inflated fees after every losing effort — was so insipid. Harris focused on the single substantive issue of abortion rights, which of course has resonance, along with not being Donald Trump, and very little else.

Her economic platform was mostly empty phrases about “opportunity,” with campaign-rally gestures toward unions — but nothing about the PRO (Protect the Right to Organize) Act that Democrats failed to pass, raising the poverty-level minimum wage, or tackling the obscene inequalities in the country. Rather than embracing Bernie Sanders’ message attacking corporate power, she (i.e. the professional consultants who shaped the campaign) chose to tour with Liz Cheney, essentially proposing a coalition government with non-Trump Republicans.

Her pledge to “build the world’s most lethal military” had nothing to do with appealing to the progressive voter base, or to any popular constituency at all. This was the Democrats’ promise to the ruling class to serve as the leading party of U.S. imperialism. If anything, Trump’s demagogic and lying claim to “quickly end the wars” in Ukraine and the Middle East may have sounded better to some voters.

To be clear, we will never know whether a genuinely progressive (or even traditional New Deal-type) campaign would have defeated Trump and the MAGA Republicans. It could hardly have done worse than the Democratic Party, which most emphatically did not run any such campaign. Nor is there the slightest reason to think it will ever do so.

Sanders hit the nail on the head when he concluded: 

Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.

Coming dystopias

The new Trump presidency will undoubtedly begin fulfilling his campaign promises to corporate, high-tech and crypto-currency interests: new tax cuts, deregulation, dismantling of environmental protections that are disastrously inadequate to begin with, etc.

The consequences of such measures — for the federal budget deficit and national debt, for the cascading climate catastrophe — will unfold over coming years. Promises like putting the anti-vaccination fanatic RFK Jr. over public health agencies, and Elon Musk in charge of a new budget-slashing commission, would also have long-lasting medical and social consequences.

What’s not clear is whether Trump will quickly move to implement measures like huge tariffs that would immediately de-stabilize the economy and international relations, and “the largest deportation program in history” that would cost tens of billions, could cause upheaval and violence, and seriously impact parts of the agricultural, service and even industrial economy.

In short, there might be competition between elements of the Trump agenda — straight corporate greed on the one hand, versus the crazier, more ideologically driven policies that could prematurely undermine the new administration’s support. (Given Trump’s own erratic impulses and some signs of decline, the White House chief of staff may play a decisive role.)

These matters are speculative, but in any case the challenges facing the left are daunting. Certainly, building resistance against anti-immigrant and mass-deportation threats must be a top-level progressive priority!

It’s a matter of regret that the hope for a modest Green Party breakthrough didn’t materialize nationally — although the potential was seen in a place like Dearborn, Michigan where the Arab-American and Muslim communities’ entirely justified rage against Genocide Joe Biden and the destruction of Gaza was manifested in 18% support for Green candidate Jill Stein.

The left’s inability to forge a credible alternative to the capitalist parties’ duopoly is part of how we’ve arrived at the present toxic political mess. At the same time, the strategy advocated by much of the left, “working within the Democratic Party to change it,” has done nothing to stop the party’s retreat to “the center,” i.e. to the right.

As has been true for over a century, the working class in the United States needs its own party, yet in this disastrous moment the prospects have rarely looked more distant. We don’t have a blueprint, but a political alternative can only emerge from the movements on the ground, including the outrage against the ethnic cleansing in Palestine, the continuing struggles for reproductive rights, and the modest rise in labor activism and strike activity — not yet an “upsurge” by historic standards, but a hopeful sign of revival. We note that reproductive rights ballot referenda passed even in some states that elected Trump, and in others voters raised the state minimum wage.

There are no shortcuts, and never have been. But immediately, the urgent task is to be part of the movements resisting the corporate and far-right attacks, the Gaza genocide, the brutal assaults on immigrant communities, and the climate-change threat to the survival of civilization.

The US election: How can we move forward while staring negativity in its face?

By Kevin B. Anderson

Published 12 November, 2024

First published at The International Marxist-Humanist.

The second election of Donald Trump to the US presidency and of the Trumpist Republican Party on November 5 represents nothing less than a new era of fascism. We may not be in 1933, but we are certainly in something similar to the 1920s after Mussolini seized power and the concomitant rise of fascist movements at a global level. At present, the neofascist National Rally in France has been receiving over 30% of the vote, the further-to-the-right Alternative for Germany well over 20%, and even in places like Brazil, where the moderate left has won recent elections (or California in the US), a turn toward the right in public opinion is evident.

Many sectors of global capitalism are joining in or at least accommodating themselves to the fascist turn, as seen not only in individual figures like Elon Musk but in global phenomena like the surge in financial markets on the day Trump’s election became apparent. Over the months preceding the US election, many key players decided to remain neutral in the face of Trumpism, from media like Facebook, the LA Times, and the storied Washington Post, to universities like Harvard declaring themselves neutral in social justice matters,

Causes and context

Since Trumpism’s rise in 2015, the US and global left have been discussing its causes, most of which have become too well known to detail too much here. But here is a basic list. 

First comes the wrenching economic crisis of 2008 and nearly 50 years of economic stagnation, which has left the working people in the broadest sense facing worsening conditions of life and labor. 

Second, comes the exhaustion of US imperialism and its allies after more than two decades of war in the Middle East with no end in sight, while on the other hand, some sectors are now under the illusion of an opening for Israel and the US against the Palestinians, Lebanon, and Iran that could spark a regional conflagration. 

Third, we have seen the rise, often manipulated by powerful forces, of anti-immigrant xenophobia, racist appeals over crime, and perceived disorder, all amid the demagoguery of Trump and his ilk. 

Fourth, we have witnessed the most virulent misogyny, both in political rhetoric and policy, from a stream of demeaning statements against women and sexual minorities to actions like abortion and transgender bans. 

Fifth, we are probably underestimating the ongoing effects of the COVID pandemic, not only in how its necessary “social distancing” tore at social solidarity, but also in how neofascists developed a whole new ideology of “freedom” around attacks on science in general, on vaccines in particular, and the closing down of schools and workplaces in the name of return to the “normal” capital accumulation regime as quickly as possible. These events have seemed to spur some leading capitalists (Musk et al.), public figures (Robert Kennedy, Jr.), and intellectuals (Giorgio Agamben, Carl Boggs) to shift way to the right on a “libertarian” basis. 

Sixth, we have experienced unprecedented attacks on environmental science and policy, as seen in expressions like “punitive ecology” even amid the floods and fires of the 2020s. 

Finally, the liberal and slightly anti-racist and anti-sexist wing of the dominant classes has over the past year forged a new type of unity with the far right in their joint and unstinting support for Israel’s genocide and, inside the US, repression of the student movement against that genocide.

Beyond mere causality: What to do?

The dialectical concept of second negativity teaches us never to stop at the analysis of the gravity of a new form of reaction and retrogression, but to go also the subjective level, to the state of the forces of liberation and opposition, and how to move them forward.

First and foremost, here is to avoid denial, to stare negativity in the face as the young Hegel once articulated, and to consider with utmost soberness the gravity of our situation. The world’s largest economic and military power, to a great extent because of its relative decline, has embarked upon the reckless path of neofascism. It appears at this writing that the Trumpists will control not only the presidency but also both chambers of the legislative branch, while they will continue to control the third branch of government via the Supreme Court. We should also be under no illusions about “constitutionally” minded military officers being willing to carry out Trump’s orders.

But it is equally important to avoid despair and especially to forget that a real alternative to capitalism exists: a society based upon the elimination of value production and freely associated labor as articulated by Marx over a century ago and put forward as a core concept for the global left by Marxist-Humanists over the past decade. Such concepts of the alternative are deeply practical. As reported recently by the sociologist Edgar Morin, who joined the French resistance to the Nazi occupation in his youth, what was lacking above all in 1940 was not so much left-wing organization or support for resistance among some sectors of the population, but any sense that an alternative to the new fascist order existed. People would not risk their lives merely to restore the corrupt, Nazi-appeasing Third French Republic.

Thus, while we need to defend the democratic republic everywhere versus neofascism, campism, and the like, and this is no small matter amid a plethora of ultra-leftist sects, we need to be utterly merciless in our critique of the centrist and slightly left-of-center forces that have brought us the Gaza genocide, larger military and police budgets, already draconian restrictions on immigration, burgeoning economic inequality, and now an ignominious defeat in the 2024 US election that has allowed a neofascist triumph.

To help us grasp what has happened and where to go from here, we need to reorganize our thinking at a theoretical and philosophical level. We need to dive once again and with new energy and creativity into the dialectic, into the concept of the alternative to capitalism, and into the dialectics of class, race, and gender in the form of an intersectional, liberationist, and humanist Marxism. Here we can of course draw on the writings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Frantz Fanon, Raya Dunayevskaya, and our own studies of their writings over the past decade, which have become widely recognized far outside our immediate circle as major contributions to revolutionary thought.

In the coming weeks, we must hit the streets to mount the largest and strongest popular resistance we can muster. To this end, we need also to form coalitions of the type of left that opposes all forms of capitalism, imperialism, and sub-imperialism, from the US to Russia to Israel, while also recognizing the racist, sexist, heteronormative, and climate-destructive nature of the present global capitalist order in ways that both unite with the working class while also opposing any form of class reductionism. Specifically, we need to defend both Palestine and Ukraine. Such a left pole can form a vital part of the anti-fascist resistance to Trumpism and its counterparts all over the world.

 USA

Trump’s Election: A Decisive Victory for Republicans, Now Resistance Begin

Tuesday 12 November 2024, by Dan La Botz

Donald J. Trump won a decisive victory for himself and for the Republican Party, taking the presidency, the Senate, and it appears the House as well, while in his first term Trump’s appointments remade the Supreme Court, which fully supports him. Trump and the Republican Party thus control all three branches of government giving him the power to implement his right-wing program and to transform the United States, and possibly dismantle its democratic system and suppress civil liberties.

Trump won not only the electoral college vote 312 to 226, but on this third election bid also for the first time won the popular vote, more than 74.6 million votes to 70.9 million. The Republicans gained three seats in the U.S. Senate—West Virginia, Ohio and Montana—giving them a majority and ending four years of Democratic Party control. Votes for the House are still being counted, but the Republicans appear likely to win there too.

Trump’s overall vote total was not crushing, but he had the continuing support from his base of older, better-off white voters, from suburban and rural voters, and also found new support among working class, Back, Latino, and women voters. He won the votes of 56% of those without a college education, won 13% of Black voters, and won 46% of Latino votes. He received 45% of the votes of those from union households.

Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris won fewer votes than President Joe Biden won in the 2020 election, including fewer votes from women and Black voters. Many people felt housing and food prices were too high, while others were motivated by Trump’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic message. Hundreds of thousand Democratic Party voters simply didn’t show up in several states, such as Ohio. Trump received greater support in 9 out of 10 counties throughout the country. While there was no general realignment, there was a rightward shift throughout the country.

As pundits noted, Trump has now created a multiracial working-class base for the Republican Party. For decades the Democrats claimed to be the party of the working class, now Republicans have taken that title from them.

Why did the Democrats lose? As Bernie Sanders wrote immediately after the election, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Having lost the election, the Democrats face a crisis of identity and ideology. Bernie Sanders asked, “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Probably not.”

The party leadership remains centrist, but many want the party to turn left, toward the working class.

Most progressives voted for Democrats, to their disappointment. Others voted for left parties, to no avail. Physician Jill Stein, presidential candidate of the Green Party won only 685,149 votes (0.5%), while the Black theologian Cornel West received even fewer. The left too will have to reevaluate its electoral strategy.

Trump Takes Command—and the Resistance Has Begun

President-elect Donald J. Trump claimed in his victory speech, “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” While this is not true—Obama had a much bigger victory with 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes in 2008—nevertheless Trump will attempt to rule as an autocrat, imposing his will on the nation. Whether his authoritarian plans will lead to fascism remains to be seen, but the broad left is beginning to resist.

We can expect him to begin by carrying out his promises both to his working-class and middle-class base and to his billionaire partners such as tech mogul Elon Musk and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos.

He has promised working people that he will close the border and carry out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants who he claimed are taking Americans’ jobs and bringing violence to their communities. There are now 22,000 Border Patrol officers. Sealing the U.S.-Mexico border—which is 1,954-miles (3,145-kilometre) long—will require more the current 22,000 BP agents. Trump says he will mobilize the National Guard to supplement the BP, but he would need the state governors’ permission and not all would give it.

Trump promised to deport the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants, but rounding them up and deporting them would be an enormous job costing millions and requiring many more than the existing 21,000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Families will be uprooted and broken up and there will be resistance. These policies would have an enormous and disastrous impact on the U.S. economy, since many immigrants work in construction, hotels and restaurants, elder care and childcare, cleaning, gardening, agriculture and other industries.

Trump plans to take greater control over the U.S. government, beginning by ending civil service protections for hundreds of thousands of federal employees who would become at-will employees, subject to firing at any time. He says he will revamp the Justice Department and use it to go after his political enemies.

On the economic front, Trump has promised new tax cuts and undoubtedly, they will be greatest for the rich, as he did in 2017. If he does this it would cost the government $4 trillion in revenues over the next decade. He has also said he would cut taxes on social security (retirement) payments of working people and taxes for tipped workers.

Trump proposes tariffs of 10% on most goods but of up to 60% on Chinese products and even 200% on Chinese cars. Such tariffs would increase prices for Americans and would also disrupt global trade and investment.

Trump will reverse President Joe Biden’s climate policies reducing subsidies to green energy and providing inducement to petroleum companies to drill for oil. And he will undo Biden’s pro-labor policies.

The resistance to Trump that first appeared with the Women’s March at his inauguration in 2016 has revived. Leftist-led demonstrations of hundreds took place after his election in Seattle, Portland, Berkeley, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Philadelphia. On November 9 more than a thousand union, environmental, feminist, and immigrant organizations marched in New York City.

A new national coalition of over 200 organizations has formed led by the Working Families Party, Seed the Vote, Movement for Black Lives, and Showing up for Racial Justice. The group held a mass call/livestream titled “Making Meaning in the Moment” attended and viewed by 140,000 people.
As one participant wrote, ‘The dominant politics were for all-out resistance to a Trump administration and re-centering progressives in the multiracial, gender-inclusive working class.”

If the protest movement becomes massive in the streets, Trump has said he is prepared to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1792, that authorizes the president to use the U.S. military within the United States to suppress rebellion or domestic violence.

Trump is an authoritarian. Will he create a fascist party and state? We will be watching developments.

Attached documents

• trump-s-election-a-decisive-victory-for-republicans-now_a8737-2.pdf (PDF - 910.9 KiB)
  Extraction PDF [->article8737]

United States (USA)

• Trump’s Second Term – Now is the time for a global fightback
• A People Divided Heads to the Polls to Decide the Nation’s Fate
• Election and Widening War
• Israel’s Next Attack on Iran
• Israel-Iran Conflict Becomes Issue in U.S. Presidential Election

• Dan La Botz

  Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He is the author of Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991). He is also a co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.

International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

Trump wins United States presidential election: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’

By Lance Selfa & Sharon Smith

Published 9 November, 2024

First published at International Socialism Project.

The story of the 2024 election turned out to be remarkably straightforward. In a political environment where most of the electorate thought the country was moving in the wrong direction, where they perceived the economy as poor, and where most of them reported that inflation has caused them serious hardship, voters decided to toss out the incumbent party that Vice President Kamala Harris represented.

Donald Trump won the popular vote for the first and only time, and he made gains not only in rural areas, but also suburbs, and even Democratic Party strongholds like New York City and Chicago. According to exit polls, Harris did better than Joe Biden in 2020 with the most affluent Americans, but Trump improved over 2020 with everyone else.

One of the truisms in U.S. politics is “It’s the economy, stupid.” If the economy is growing and people have jobs and higher wages, the incumbent party is usually re-elected. If the economy is declining and people are having trouble making ends meet, the voters usually “throw the bums out” by voting for the challenger. For most of the Biden administration, as the larger economy recovered from the shocks it received during the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden has been an extraordinarily unpopular president. Biden’s unpopularity has confounded his advisers, who can’t square it with the “macro” economic indicators showing the U.S. has had the strongest recovery from COVID of all of its peers.

Yet COVID left behind economic disruption, including the highest inflation rates Americans have experienced in 40 years — which is, of course, effectively a wage cut. The explosion of military spending to support wars in Ukraine and Gaza also fuels inflation. As a result, U.S. workers’ living standards have declined under the Biden administration, while the booming stock market has helped the wealthiest Americans to do quite well.

Nearly every incumbent government in Europe, Asia and Latin America — most facing worse disruptions and recoveries from COVID than the U.S. — that faced voters in the last year or so either lost or were severely weakened. The midsummer replacement of Biden with Harris gave Democrats hope that they could avoid that fate, as Biden was clearly on a path to lose to Trump. In the end, Harris couldn’t escape the fact that, as the sitting vice president, all of Biden’s negatives attached to her.

This is the third consecutive presidential election where the incumbent party lost and where the incumbent president spent most of their term with approval ratings below 50 percent. Perhaps that says more about underlying discontent in U.S. society than it does about any particular candidate.

The Democratic Party’s campaign playbook backfired — again

In 2016, Hillary Clinton demonstrated her contempt for Trump’s then-overwhelmingly white supporters by labeling them “the deplorables” — rather than trying to acknowledge the source of their anger: the gross inequality of the economic status quo. Eight years later, with Trump’s support bigger in virtually every demographic group, it is impossible to ignore the economic despair that drove voters away from the Democrats, while Biden continued to brag that the U.S. the economy during his tenure is “ the strongest in the world.”

But those without the financial means to make a killing on the stock market are living paycheck-to-paycheck, unable to make ends meet, often while working two jobs.

In political system in which the two major capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans, take turns in dominating the seats of power — without an actual opposition party — the only way for voters to express their dissatisfaction with the party in power is by voting for the other one, the lesser of the two evils.

Moreover, since Bill Clinton occupied the White House, the Democrats have embraced the same neoliberal policies championed by Republicans, with only slightly less obvious enthusiasm. Republicans since Ronald Reagan had railed against so-called “welfare cheats”, but Clinton was the president who actually ended “welfare as we know it” in the 1990s, sending millions of poor people into a downward spiral of poverty which has only grown today.

In recent decades, the Democrats have deliberately courted the votes of the well-educated and wealthy, and in turn, support for the Democratic Party has steadily eroded among its traditional working-class and Black constituents. This pattern has become even more exaggerated since Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign for president. Yet the Party’s powerbrokers have done nothing to change this disastrous strategy in the years since. They coronated Joe Biden as their 2024 candidate, even as his mental faculties were rapidly declining, and then, after finally dumping him, refused to hold an open Democratic Party convention in August — forfeiting even a semblance of democracy within their own party.

Now, the chickens have come home to roost. And the bigoted and mentally unstable convicted felon Donald Trump is going back to the White House, in an Electoral College landslide — while Republicans regained control of the Senate and perhaps will remain in control of the House, with vote counts still ongoing.

A closer look at the 2024 voting demographics should dispel the myth that the majority of the U.S. population is composed of incorrigible racists and misogynists who believe all of Trump’s lies — that Haitian immigrants are eating pet cats, or that the military should round up immigrants in mass deportations, for example. There is already some anecdotal evidence that many Trump voters don’t actually believe his more outlandish claims or expect him to fulfill his most draconian campaign promises.

As the New York Times reported in October, for example,

One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.

The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of non-loyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “ one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “ a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act.

As one Republican pollster told the Times, “[P]eople think he says things for effect, that he’s blustering, because that’s part of what he does, his shtick. They don’t believe that it’s actually going to happen.” Only time will tell us whether or to what degree this is a correct assumption.

Until votes are fully counted across the country, most of the current data rely on exit polls, which thus should be viewed as estimates. That said, exit polls showed that nearly one in five Trump voters were people of color — a major shift from 2016. Trump won 26 percent of the Latino vote, including a number of mostly-Latino border counties in southern Texas. Trump gained less dramatically among Black voters, but nevertheless won between 13 and 16 percent of the Black vote overall (compared to single digits in previous elections), and between 21 and 24 percent among Black men, according to Politico.

Despite the reproductive rights crisis resulting from abortion bans, Harris’s margin among women voters was just 8 percent, the smallest since 2004. In a number of states where pro-abortion rights referenda passed, Trump still carried the state. This includes Missouri, where voters undid an abortion ban but a majority voted for Trump.

Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza cost Harris at least some votes among Arab, Muslim and pro-Palestinian voters, though again national statistics are not yet available. But Trump carried the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan, where many polls had already showed voters turning against Biden and then Harris over their support for Israeli atrocities in Palestine and Lebanon. Harris won only 36 percent of the Dearborn vote, compared to Biden’s 68 percent in 2020. It now appears that while some voted for Trump, a whopping 18 percent voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein at last count, compared with less than one percent for the Greens statewide.

Harris did, however, notably win among voters earning $100,000 or more annually, in what appears to be a long-term political realignment, although Trump maintains the support of super-rich billionaires.

Bernie’s advice

As could be predicted, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders waited only a day to issue a scathing critique of the Harris campaign. “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working class people should find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders’ statement said. “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?... Probably not.”

Sanders critique is true (especially the “Probably not” part), but it’s hard to take at face value. After all, Sanders and other Democratic Party “progressive” surrogates like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) were “all in” — first for Joe Biden and then for Harris throughout her short campaign. Both of them barnstormed for Harris across the swing states. Harris gave Sanders and AOC prime speaking slots at the Democratic National Convention (while refusing to allow a single pro-Palestinian speaker), where their speeches were intended to establish Harris’s bona fides among the Democrats’ progressive base. And now Sanders is telling us that the Harris campaign was doomed from the start?

Surely Sanders is correct when he criticizes the Democrats as a party of the status quo. Although we should also remember that Sanders and AOC were among the last defenders of Biden before Democratic leaders and donors shoved him out of the race. Harris’s “opportunity economy” agenda emphasized entrepreneurship with a few vague nods to cutting health care, housing and grocery costs. Even her ostensibly “big” proposal to add coverage for home care of the elderly and disabled to Medicare was barely more than a talking point — and even then, just a drop in the ocean of what it would take to fix the profit-based healthcare system in the U.S. that makes it unaffordable to many millions of people.

Could Harris have beaten Trump had she run on Sanders’ agenda? It’s doubtful. It’s hard to run as an “insurgent” when you’re the sitting vice president in an unpopular administration. But she didn’t even try.

Harris and AOC held set-piece events with union leaders like UAW President Shawn Fain. Union leaders cited Biden’s walking the UAW picket line, his National Labor Relations Board nominees, and creation of “good, union jobs” as part of infrastructure investment as proof that Biden (and presumably Harris, as his successor) was the most “pro-union” president in a generation. But union households provide only a slim advantage to the Democrats, with only 53 percent of household members voting Democrat, compared to 58 percent in 2012. And when the union density in the workforce is only around 10 percent — and just 6 percent in the private sector — even these pro-union issues won’t resonate in the broader working class.

In a period when the public gives unions their highest support ever, perhaps union leaders should spend more time and money helping workers to organize than to blow millions on Democratic election campaigns.

Who won turnout?

It will be weeks before we get an accurate picture of all the votes cast in the 2024 election. What isn’t at issue is that for the first time ever, Trump won the majority of votes. He is the first Republican to win the presidential popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.

As of November 7, Trump had racked up about 72.7 million votes and Harris had 68.1 million. Elections expert Michael McDonald estimates that the overall turnout will be around 64.5 percent of the voting age population, compared to just under 66 percent in 2020. This represents a slight drop from the 2020 turnout, which was the highest since 1900. So, 2024’s turnout looks to be among the highest turnout in more than a century.

Exit polls suggest that Trump won 56 percent of the 8 percent of voters who were voting for the first time. About 6 percent of Biden voters in 2020 switched to Trump in 2024, compared to about 4 percent switching from Trump to Harris. For all the effort that Harris made to lure Republicans into the Democrats’ tent, it made no significant difference.

Compared to 2020, when Biden got 81 million votes, and Trump took about 74 million, both Democrats and Republicans appear that they will gain fewer votes, although Trump may catch up to his 2020 haul. But the Democratic Party’s decline will be more than 10 million.

So where did the Democrats’ 2020 votes go? A small number went to Trump, but it looks like most of them stayed home. In Detroit and Philadelphia, two of the main Democratic Party strongholds in the swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, Democrat turnout fell short. After all the hoopla about Harris’s door-knocking turnout machine, Harris won fewer votes from Detroit than the execrable Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.

A telling account of why this happened in Detroit came from a Harris canvasser: “I was shocked by how many people said they already voted, basically allowing us to turn attention to people who hadn’t. There are some voters who are cynical and dissatisfied with everything, (who say) nothing ever changes. You could write 20 different stories about what Michigan voters care about, and it would be true.”

Harris, the “Republican-lite” candidate

The corporate media predictably drew the all the wrong lessons from the 2024 voting results. The New York Times, for example, blamed progressives, arguing,

The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election… It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system — which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults.

But as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) accurately observed, “Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.”

Harris chose to court Republicans, not progressives, in the leadup to the election. The traditional electoral courting rituals were thus turned upside down, as Democrat Harris groveled to Republican voters and Republican Trump (somewhat more successfully) sought out Latino voters in particular. Harris’s support for reproductive rights and breaking through the gender glass ceiling took a backseat to finding common ground with Republicans on social issues.

Rather than focusing on what distinguished herself from Trump, Harris ran a “Republican-lite” campaign, emphasizing what she had in common with Republicans: her opposition to immigration and support for cracking down on the Southern border; reasserting her unwavering support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine; bragging about owning a Glock pistol to appeal to gun advocates.

Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney joined Harris on the campaign trail. Her father, the war criminal and neoconservative Dick Cheney, endorsed Harris with great fanfare.

But amid all this electoral jockeying, it wasn’t clear what Harris actually stood for. As a district attorney and then attorney general in California earlier in her career, she was neither consistently right nor left, but transformed into a proud liberal when running for president in the 2019 primaries. This year, running for president after Biden dropped out, she seemingly wanted to appear more conservative. So, she flip-flopped on her 2019 liberal opposition to fracking for oil and support for “Medicare for All” — but without admitting she’d actually changed her mind on these major issues. Not too surprisingly, many voters rejected this disingenuous candidate representing the incumbent Biden administration and went instead for the impudent billionaire, who has proven he is willing to at least shake things up, for better and for worse.

These are the unfortunate choices voters yearning for change were forced to make from within the two-party duopoly that traps the U.S. electorate in a chokehold.

An angry electorate, without a viable left alternative, turns right

The U.S. left has been far too weak to have an impact on elections in recent decades — a trend that has only worsened in the last few years. The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was inspired by the independent socialist Bernie Sanders’s electoral successes in 2016 and 2020. But in both cases, Sanders acquiesced to the Democratic Party’s political powerbrokers and ultimately endorsed their chosen candidates, first Hillary Clinton and then Biden. And, as noted above, Sanders campaigned enthusiastically for Biden and then Harris.

Not surprisingly, the growth of the DSA — although a still very small organization with only a marginal influence on U.S. politics — coincided with the decimation of most of the revolutionary left, which had already been in decline for decades prior. The short-sighted goal of gaining broader political influence for the left via the Democratic Party no doubt played a role in furthering this development, but did not prevent the left’s overall deterioration. Sanders and AOC’s support for Biden and Harris illustrate this vividly.

If anything, the DSA accelerated the left’s decline in influence by its outsized focus on elections rather than prioritizing building grassroots movements that can influence politics outside of the electoral arena. There is a valid reason why the Democratic Party has been traditionally regarded by the revolutionary left in the U.S. as “the graveyard of social movements.”

This point can easily be proven in the negative, using abortion rights organizations’ reliance on Democratic Party politicians as a prime example. The abortion rights and women’s liberation movements won via grassroots organizations the right to abortion when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 — when anti-abortion Richard Nixon occupied the White House. But in the decades since, pro-choice organizations have depended on the Democrats to defend the right to abortion, and major pro-choice demonstrations have not been organized for two decades. Yet the Democrats, as the Party of Compromise, allowed the right to abortion to be eroded and then finally overturned in 2022. None of these politicians has sought to rebuild a vital pro-choice movement to change the status quo since then, even though it has caused a reproductive rights crisis that is killing women.

The only solution the New York Times — and the liberal establishment — has on offer is to wait until the next election cycles to vote: “Those who supported Mr. Trump in this election should closely observe his conduct in office to see if it matches their hopes and expectations, and if it does not, they should make their disappointment known and cast votes in the 2026 midterms and in 2028 to put the country back on course.”

But this is far from a solution. Elections themselves do not usually determine the balance of political and social forces at any given time. They normally reflect the balance of forces — although they can sometimes strengthen or weaken them — and can therefore be influenced by movements outside the electoral arena.

Today in the U.S., the balance of forces is weighted decisively in favor of the right because the left is so weak. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” as the saying goes. When the Democrats echo the Republicans in veering rightward, and the left follows the Democrats in pursuit of winning elections, voters hear no left-wing alternative viewpoint. As such, the right carries the day.

This is the situation we face today. It is easy to scapegoat immigrants for society’s problems when there is no left-wing explanation for falling wages and high inflation: the divide and conquer policies of the capitalist class.

The only possibility for shifting the balance of forces is through struggle — and organization — at the grassroots level. We caught a glimpse of what such struggle might mean last year, when the United Auto Workers (UAW) struck the Big Three Automakers and won. We also saw a glimpse this past spring, when pro-Palestinian protesters formed encampments at college campuses across the U.S.

But a much more significant rise in grassroots and class struggle is a necessary precondition for shifting the balance of class forces. Until then, the wealthiest people will continue celebrating their good fortune. The status quo will prevail, no matter who we did or didn’t vote for. And Trump will be taking office in January, with consequences that no one can now predict.

Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality (Haymarket, 2017).

Sharon Smith is the author of Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States (Haymarket, 2006) and Women and Socialism: Class, Race, and Capital (revised and updated, Haymarket, 2015).

Boris Kagarlitsky on the US elections, Trump, peace talks and prospects for world war

By Boris Kagarlitsky

Published 9 November, 2024

First published in Russian at Rabkor. Translation and footnotes by Dmitry Pozhidaev for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Marxist sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky is currently in a Russian prison for speaking out against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The following interview with Kagarlitsky was conducted by a Rabkor viewer. This is the second part of the interview which deals with questions relating to the US elections, its potential impacts on the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine and prospects for a new world war. It was conducted before the US elections published on November 4. The first part can be read here.

Do you think that US policy towards the Israel-Palestine war could change with a new president?

Until recently, there was a bipartisan consensus in the US regarding support for Israel. However, things have indeed started to change lately — and not only from the Democrats. Remember that Republicans in Congress last winter delayed the vote on a bill to fund Israel. Yes, this was partly because the [Joe] Biden administration bundled aid for Israel with aid for Ukraine and other issues into a single bill, hoping that including Israel in the aid package would guarantee relatively easy approval from Republicans in Congress. Nothing of the sort happened, and the package stalled until spring.

[Donald] Trump is trying to attract US Jewish voters (most of whom still lean Democrat) by pointing to his sympathy for Israel and warning that [Kamala] Harris will stop supporting Israel’s military efforts. Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, both right-wing populists, are ideologically close. But it is uncertain whether this will work.

Israel’s main problem is not with the leadership of the US Democratic Party but with its own policies, which are causing worldwide outrage, including among Americans. Worse yet, the number of opponents and critics of Israel among US Jews is growing, as it is among Democratic voters in general. Thus, the evolution of party leaders’ positions reflect shifts in public opinion — and this actually strengthens Harris’s position.

Overall, reduced US support for Israel is inevitable, unless there is a change of power in Tel Aviv itself. That said, a complete reversal of US policy is impossible — Israel is still its main strategic partner in the Middle East. Netanyahu believes the West will tolerate his policies, no matter what he does, but he risks crossing a line where serious problems could begin.

Will a new US president influence the conflict between Russia and Ukraine?

Among the Russian elites, there was a long-standing illusion that Trump’s rise to power would solve all its problems. How he would do this was unclear — magical thinking was at play. Somehow, things would just improve. But by early autumn, two realisations set in. First, that Trump was unlikely to return to the White House. Second, that if he did return, things could get even worse. Trump is not interested in Ukraine. And if the Russians want to do something bad there, it is not his problem.

However, giving [Russian President Vladimir] Putin freedom on the Ukrainian question would require one very important condition: that Russia become a key US ally in the fight against China. For Trump, the Chinese threat is an obsession (as is opposition to Mexican migration). For the Russian economy, which has grown increasingly dependent on China, a pivot to the West would be catastrophic, economically and geopolitically. After all, the extensive land border with China lies with us, not the US.

Thus, friendship with Trump’s Republicans is far more dangerous for Moscow than hostility with the Democrats, who can ultimately be appeased with superficial political reforms and concessions in Ukraine. Especially since Ukraine’s “gains” are of no real value to Russia’s economy; this war is not about territory but about preserving the political regime in Moscow. Western elites will not demand deep democratisation; a mere facade of liberal decorum will suffice, as the more pragmatically-minded Kremlin faction understands.

Lastly, we need to understand China’s role in this setup. Not only is Beijing interested in keeping Trump out of the White House, but China’s economic interests also require the restoration of transit routes for goods to Western Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway through Russia and Ukraine. Therefore, the Chinese need peace between these two countries and no conflict with the West, along with open and transparent borders. It’s just the economy. In the early years of the conflict, the loss of transit was offset by capturing the Russian market, but now that market is taken, and could face issues with European markets. So, not only is peace needed, but it is also becoming urgent.

Thus, a new configuration arises. Harris is backed by Chinese allies and Moscow’s pragmatists, while Trump has the support of a few very influential madmen within the Russian elite.

While Trump was president, he began building the wall between the US and Mexico. This resembles a mega-project to enrich construction businesses, while diverting budget funds from the military-industrial complex to the wall. Moreover, Trump did not start any new wars; he only ended conflicts inherited from previous administrations. Does this indicate that Trump has the support of the more peace-minded segment of US capital, or at least the segment that prefers pouring money into a wall over military production?

Trump indeed lobbies for the construction industry. Incidentally, a substantial portion of orders for construction work related to the wall would have gone to Mexico. And most of the migrants rushing to the US come from even poorer countries south of the Yucatán. So, regardless of Trump’s rhetoric, there will not be a conflict with Mexico.

But calling Trump “peace-loving” is very conditional. Increased defence orders benefit industry, and we must remember that, regardless of who the US president is, there is the state apparatus, Congress and intelligence agencies. They are far from omnipotent, but they will not just readily accept any policy. They benefit from continuity, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. The same problems would face any new president, including Harris if she were elected. But Democrats are better at working with the establishment than Trump’s people (the old Republicans also cooperated well with the bureaucracy, but they have since lost influence).

Lastly, while US capital is divided into competing factions, we should not underestimate their ability to reach compromises. They will seek a compromise under any president, though achieving one is more difficult now than it was a decade ago.

Even if Trump does not become president, his supporters will not disappear from US society. Do you think there could be another storming of the Capitol or a similar attempt by conservatives to seize power by force in the US?

Trump’s defeat, if it happens (which seems likely now), will demoralise his supporters. The storming of the Capitol was an exceptional episode. Trump’s strategy of grassroots mobilisation in 2020 unexpectedly backfired. In mobilising the grassroots, Trump’s supporters resembled the left. We too advocate grassroots mobilisation. The question is whom you are mobilising and by what means.

Trump brought millions of forgotten working-class people into politics, mostly white but not exclusively — people historically betrayed by the Democrats, who abandoned their progressive agenda. Tom Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas? addresses this, showing how these people, mostly uneducated and politically inexperienced, expressed their resentment and frustration, first by voting for Trump and then, feeling betrayed again by the system, storming the Capitol. Ultimately, they got nothing but more humiliation and repression.

But Trump’s team learned lessons from the “Leninists” who relied on mobilisation — most of them were purged (I’m not joking; [former White House Chief Strategist under Trump, Steve] Bannon, for example, directly quoted Lenin). Trump’s team learned lessons from the Leninists who relied on mobilisation from within their ranks. Trump has distanced himself from grassroots activism, seeing it as a chaotic, dangerous, and uncontrollable force. Trumpism has become more bourgeois, even more conservative, despite the populist rhetoric. It has not become more respectable, of course, but it has grown consistently reactionary.

In 2016, both Trump and Brexit supporters in England, and even the National Front in France, mixed reactionary xenophobic or anti-immigration slogans with social demands that should have been voiced by the left. Back then, I wrote that such movements, unfortunately, expressed legitimate social protest. Even Bernie Sanders acknowledged this at the beginning of his campaign. Later, when the Democratic Party apparatus sank his primary campaign by dubious methods (and Bernie gave in), many of his supporters went over to Trump. And in Britain in 2016, both right and left supported Brexit. In France, during the European constitution referendum, there was a similar situation.

Recently, I was told that during a debate between Svetova and Sakhnin on Zhivoy Gvozd,1 a viewer commented that Kagarlitsky would support Trump. In reality, I have never supported Trump, but in 2016 I outlined the ambiguity of the situation whereby some progressive demands were being voiced by right-wing populists. Since then, things have changed (as they have with Donbas, if we compare 2014 and 2022). Trump, French nationalists, and their British counterparts have consistently abandoned any social agenda. Now it is a purely reactionary movement with no progressive elements.

And regarding workers, the right now behaves exactly as the left used to — they believe that workers have nowhere else to go and will keep voting for them. This is their fatal mistake. Theoretically, this creates an opportunity for the left — the true left, grounded in class positions — to win back the support of blue-collar working-class voters. But this will not happen at once and automatically. For now, we are likely to see growing demoralisation among society’s grassroots.

Why is Trump popular among Americans with his ideas?

Trump’s popularity was due to him addressing problems that the liberal establishment (including its left wing in academic institutions) denied.2 Yes, his proposals were wild. For example, let’s build a wall to keep out Mexico (incidentally, here in prison, I heard a similar idea — that Russia should build a concrete wall along its borders and shut itself off from the world, so IK-4 in Torzhok3 has its own Trump supporters).

But the problem of uncontrolled migration really exists! A low-educated worker from the Rust Belt or a farmer from the American South, for whom the outside world is limited to Mexico and Canada, is ready to accept such answers. No alternatives are offered! And however much we mock the ignorance of Trump supporters, there is a certain logic and even a hint of common sense in their behaviour. Sadly, I do not always notice this among intellectuals.

In recent years, conflicts that have been smouldering for years have intensified. Does this resemble the situation before World War I?

I have seen comparisons to World War I, or rather the period before it, in various texts for a long time. And indeed, there are similarities. World War I was preceded by an unprecedented economic globalisation that culminated in the exhaustion of markets. As a result, competition increased, leading to what Marxists of the time called heightened inter-imperialist rivalry. Only libertarians believe that markets function independently. In reality, market competition inevitably fuels political confrontation, often in the harshest forms.

But those are the similarities. There are fundamental differences as well. To begin with, in the early 20th century, more or less stable blocs formed: Germany and its allies against the old empires (Britain, France, and Russia), joined by the United States, whose ruling class chose a non-aggressive strategy at that time. Instead of attempting to push Britain out of its position as the world hegemon, the US began supporting Britain while simultaneously replacing it in this role — at first partially.

What is significant is that the competition centred on the same territories and the same markets. Today, the situation is qualitatively different. Only the Russian elite is still playing by late 20th-century rules, and only a few domestic Marxist dogmatists continue to analyse the situation in those terms.

The fact is, China does not strive for hegemony in the world-system; it is simply forming a China-centric economic space, using the rest of the world as a resource base. Naturally, goods need to be exported — to Europe, the US and Russia. But Chinese capital does not consciously create new markets or attempt to reformat them; it simply exploits them. China’s growth is disruptive to the world-system, precisely because there is no attempt to compete for hegemony.4 After all, hegemony is not just dominance but an ordered organisation and development of the system. There is none of that here.

For the US, war with China holds no prospects, but it does not solve the main issue: as long as the neoliberal regime of global trade exists, China will exploit it. And changing the regime would require radical changes to the entire system. Trump tried to introduce protectionist measures (which hurt Chinese capital), but even he is unwilling to reform the system, let alone revolutionise it. This approach will not work.

The crisis is escalating, and it will be accompanied by local wars and then a series of revolutions. In the end, as the old Soviet joke goes: “There will be no war, but the struggle for peace will be so intense, it will be even harder to bear.”

Do you see any threat of a new world war? Could the Israel-Palestine conflict trigger a world war?

Based on what I have said earlier, it logically follows that the Middle East conflict will not lead to a world war, not least due to China’s position, as war does not serve its interests. China is not trying to take anything from the West. This is not peace-loving but rather arrogant indifference. China wants peace, especially since its internal situation is not as stable as it seems.

The paradox is that regional players, trying to drag superpowers such as the US and China — and indeed anyone they can — into their conflicts, are the ones igniting wars. Israel’s ruling clique diverts growing domestic discontent by focusing public attention on war with an external enemy — that is Netanyahu’s policy. But this is unnecessary for the US, China or even Iran. There is a paradox here: the forces considered irresponsible and radical — Hezbollah, Iran — have shown restraint, while Israel (supposedly a civilised democracy) displays complete irrationality.

I have previously written about the similarities between our situation and what’s happening in Israel. Netanyahu understands that any end [emphasis in original] to the war would mean the end of his power. In Russia, we see influential forces reasoning in a similar way. And if we return to the situation with Lebanon, the war is not being waged to defeat Hezbollah but to prevent peace, which would require accountability.

What would have to happen for a world war to break out?

As I mentioned, we are not threatened by a new world war. We face a growing and expanding number of smaller or regional conflicts that consume enormous human lives and resources. The cumulative toll could be monstrous — and it is already huge. But this is not a world war with two opposing global camps.

More importantly, I sincerely hope that the warring parties, deeply affected by internal crises themselves, will gradually slide towards peace. Endless war is impossible, especially when these wars have no geopolitical purpose or sense. No one can win, and no one even wants to. But war for the sake of war is a dead end. If maintaining power requires endless war, that power will not last long.

For many today, unfortunately, peace is far scarier than war. In the long term, peace means revolution, or at least radical reforms. We are on the threshold of great change. The old man [Immanuel] Wallerstein,5 I think, was right when he predicted the end of the current world-system (which, by the way, included world wars).

• 1

  Zhivoy Gvozd (Live Nail) is a Russian opposition media platform established by former staff members of the now-defunct radio station Ekho Moskvy. It offers a range of content, including news podcasts, expert analyses, and discussions on political, economic, and social issues. Ekho Moskvy, a prominent independent radio station in Russia, was effectively shut down in March 2022. The Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office ordered its removal from the airwaves, accusing it of disseminating information that called for extremist activities and violence, as well as spreading false information about Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. 

• 2

  In his last book, The Long Retreat, Boris Kagarlitsky critiques the left for abandoning the working class by aligning with urban bourgeoisie interests and adopting politically correct stances. This shift, he argues, created a political void that the right exploited, co-opting the working-class agenda and causing a general rightward shift in the electorate. 

• 3

  Penal colony No 4 in the town of Torzhok in Russia’s Tver Region where Kagarlitsky is serving his term. 

• 4

  For a more detailed discussion of China’s capitalism, its resource-extracting nature, lack of hegemonistic ambitions, and the destructive consequences for the world-system, see Boris Kagarlitsky’s article "China and Russia in the Modern World-System — A Dual Challenge" on LINKS.

• 5

  For example, Wallerstein explores the structural crises facing the modern world-system and contemplates its possible transformations in his 1999 book, The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century.