To the question of why Donald Trump won, I want to offer an extremely simple answer: There was no alternative on the ballot that registered the depth of the crisis that is being lived in the United States and elsewhere. Trump won because the Democratic Party establishment has for more than eight years systematically blocked every effort to constitute a left-wing alternative to Trump. By that, I mean an alternative that would woo working-class voters, that would strengthen labour rights, people’s livelihoods and security, and deal with the varied aspects of this crisis. The questions of women's rights, of LGBTQ+ rights, of human rights, of democracy, became separated from and isolated from the questions of working-class families’ livelihoods.
Eight years ago, I coined the expression ‘progressive neoliberalism’ to describe what it meant to separate the human rights and democracy issues — which are pressing questions — from questions of working-class social reproduction. For three successive electoral cycles, in 2016, 2020 and now 2024, the Democratic Party has doubled down on its ‘progressive-neoliberal’ strategy and essentially ceded to the right thet large and growing segment of the electorate that is focused on the social reproduction of the working class. In this sense, the Republican Party turned out to be more democratic than the Democratic Party. Of course, Trump is not a true friend of the working class. But the Republican Party has transformed itself in response to this crisis. It listened to voters. The Democratic Party did not. In 2016, it used every trick in the book to shove Bernie Sanders off the ballot and install Hillary Clinton. It did the same thing even more boldly in 2020, when Sanders was far ahead in the primaries and Biden was nowhere, All the other candidates suddenly dropped out and the party’s Congress endorsed Biden. This was a well-orchestrated anti-left strategy. And now, in 2024, Biden took a very long time to decide not to run. When he did finally stand aside, he simply anointed Kamala Harris. This again avoided any possibility for an open primary fight in which the left would have a chance.
From my point of view, these have been eight wasted years, when we could have been building an alternative to Trump. Whether that alternative would have won the presidency in any of these elections, we can't know. Perhaps, at least not the first time. But there would have been a process underway to build an alternative. And that has essentially been truncated and stopped.
I said that the Republican Party, through Trump, has registered the depth of this crisis. They have done so in a distorted and selective way, disavowing the climate dimension of the crisis, for example, and blaming immigrants, ‘Mexican rapists,’ ‘childless cat ladies,’ trans people and many other scapegoats du jour. They are blaming everyone except the true culprits here, meaning financial capital: what I call ‘cannibal capitalism’ in a recent book.
This is, in brief, the ‘why’ of Trump’s election. So, what can we expect next?
My short answer is a very unstable interregnum situation, because I don't believe that Trumpism in the United States, perhaps anywhere, will be able to consolidate itself as a stable and durable policy regime. For Trumpism is filled with its own immanent contradictions. It has a populist wing, represented by incoming vice-president JD Vance, who wants very conservative, pro-working class policies that would strengthen the social safety net for the ‘right’ kind of families, while blocking immigration and deporting masses of people. Yet that wing is also, in a contradictory way, allied to what Ross Douthat called the ‘dynamist wing’ represented by Elon Musk, who wants drastic cuts in public spending and in corporate taxes and increased immigration of highly skilled workers. These two wings of the party are not on the same page. So, I don't see a stable policy regime. And whatever emerges, it's not going to raise the minimum wage. It's not going to secure labour rights. It's not going to bring back manufacturing or secure high paying jobs. Even if people voted for Trump because they want to secure their livelihoods, that security is not going to materialize. Assuming that there is some rationality among voters — and if we don't assume that, then we might as well just give up — then at a certain point they will realize that this option is not delivering what they wanted.
This is an unstable and chaotic time not only in the United States, but globally, as we are currently seeing a tremendous exacerbation of geopolitical instability. What Trumpism brings to that mix is quite complicated. The official line is: withdraw. America first. Don't meddle. Don't get involved unless US national interests are clearly at stake. From Trump's point of view, that is not the case in Ukraine. On those grounds, we can expect a quick settlement of Ukraine. But the situation in the Middle East, which is now in tremendous turmoil, is not susceptible to any kind of quick solution, even if Benjamin Netanyahu is systematically destroying various forces in Iran’s or bit. There clearly remain many questions about what's going to happen there. But this is all, in one way or another, a reflection of declining US hegemony at the geopolitical level. The question is: on what terms will this happen? By means of what process will US hegemony end? Will it end in a violent clash, or will there be some slower process by which China comes to the fore? This remains to be determined.
The final question I have been asked to answer is about counter strategies: what do we do now? We need viable left-wing alternatives to Trumpism in the US and to various Trumpist-like formations elsewhere. That means overcoming this split between the question of working-class social reproduction on one side and the things that have become separated from it, but that are absolutely integral to it, namely women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, human rights, and democracy. You cannot win elections today — in the United States, certainly, and I suspect elsewhere as well — by simply ranting on and on about how terrible Trump and Trump-like figures are and about how they violate democratic norms and human rights. All of that is true. But if you don't talk about the crisis of social reproduction in all its forms, then this rings really hollow. This focus on Trumpist threat makes sense only to those fractions of the population that actually don't have to worry about social reproduction crisis because they're sitting pretty. They belong to that professional managerial stratum, if not to the ultra-rich. For everybody else, these issues must be connected up. And we have to figure out how to show voters why women's rights and livelihood security go together, why these are not competing opposites in a zero-sum game, why you can't have one without the other.