by George
Ciccariello-Maher
The final
election results are not in, but one thing is crystal clear: Hillary
Clinton is a failure. And so is the neoliberal establishment.
Even if she
narrowly manages to defeat Donald Trump, she has still lost. Her
failure is not individual, however, but a failure of Clintonism, the
Democratic Party, and decades of failed economic policies. According
to some exit polls, Clinton is losing half of union households and
getting routed in a rust belt abandoned by Clintonism: in Ohio,
Michigan, and Wisconsin, a state that she took so much for granted
that she didn’t make a single campaign stop there.
All this
against a racist misogynist with no ground game, hemorrhaging the
support of his own party leadership, with far fewer resources and a
thousand character flaws and weaknesses to be exploited. All polls
show that even many Trump voters doubted his qualifications and
character, but they voted for him anyway.
Confronted
with this reality, Clintonite liberals have been willfully ignorant,
managing to both write poor whites off as racist deplorables while
simultaneously underestimating their potential to swing to the Right.
Neglecting poor whites, Clintonism holds Black and Latino Americans
hostage, offering no solution to police murder and promising more
deportations to boot.
The blame
game is already in full swing: Democratic apparatchiks are already
preparing to blame FBI director James Comey, third party candidates,
and it wouldn’t be surprising to hear Vladimir Putin’s name come
up—the Red Scare never gets old. But the ire of a wounded
Clintonism will no doubt be directed above all at the Left.
But the
liberal establishment and its neoliberal economic policies have
failed, and it’s time for liberals to own that. The pundits, the
talking heads, the press, and the pollsters are admitting that they
had no idea what they were talking about and flailing for
explanations. Maybe if liberal and conservative elites alike don’t
have answers, it’s time to build a fighting left that can offer
real solutions.
The left
needs to directly confront the racism that Trump harnessed, but it
also needs to better understand what caused the Trump phenomenon to
begin with. For all of his flaws, Bernie Sanders did the second, and
you don’t have to like Sanders to admit that there’s no way he
would have fucked this up so bad.
But Sanders’
failure to capture the Democratic Party was no accident. If Trump
wins, the same Democratic Party has been calling him a fascist and
would-be dictator will demand that we recognize his legitimacy. They
will suddenly discover that, instead of fighting back, they can reach
across the aisle and work with this eccentric leader.
But the
reality is this: if you really believe that Trump is a fascist, you’d
better be prepared to do more than just vote.
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