Trump Towers Over America

Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States in Washington tomorrow, having previously served as the 45th in that office. American socialists came under massive pressure from the wider liberal left to vote for his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in last November's presidential election, with most understandably succumbing to it, something I still think was neither necessary nor helpful to their long-term goals for a number of reasons.

1. The Democratic party is the major obstacle to the US labour movement establishing some kind of pole, even initially a small one, around which it could organise independent political representation for itself. Within the party's ranks, the unions inevitably play second fiddle to the lobbying of the corporate interests which fund it, and are either sidelined in policy terms or become enmeshed in unprincipled deal making, much as the British labour movement was for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Liberal party.

2. Harris is not particularly radical for a Democrat. It would be a different case if someone like Bernie Sanders, standing on an overtly pro-working class programme, had won the nomination.

3. The election was only really a contest in the seven swing states, all of which Trump won relatively easily in the end. Outside of them, socialists voting for Harris were either unnecessarily adding their ballot papers to an already decisive pile for her in blue states, or wasting them in red ones.

4. Trump is undoubtedly an authoritarian right-wing nationalist whose rule will lead to numerous reactionary decisions, especially in foreign affairs, immigration and tackling climate change, but his inauguration does not signal a fascist takeover in which future elections are cancelled, political parties banned, unions suppressed, meetings and demos violently broken up by stormtroopers and basic civil liberties curtailed, not least because of the federal system which grants US states considerable rights, and if it did voting for a Democratic candidate and advocating that others do likewise would not be an adequate response to stop that threat.