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.

 

Fifty-first state?

My email inbox this morning was full of offers for Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving shopping holiday in the United States, the news for the last year or so has been dominated by the US Presidential election, and the chances of London gaining an NFL franchise in the next decade now seem pretty high. With Britain about to leave the European Union, and it looks increasingly likely the Single Market too, might it not be better for us to apply to join the USA?

I can see a number of advantages. We would become part of a federal republic in which policies like taxation and healthcare are decided at state level, but Congress has far more control over Government than the Houses of Parliament does here. Britain, with over sixty million people, would become the most populous US state, and with something like seventy-five Electoral College votes a decisive force in Presidential elections. Americans could also vote for a left-wing, trade union-based party rather than one funded by Wall Street.

Becoming a US state could deal with the national tensions within the UK: Scotland and Wales could join as separate states if they wanted, as could a re-united Ireland. In sport, we'd walk the Olympic medals table.

Economically, Britain would have access to a single market not much smaller than the EU's, and of course we'd also gain the right to live and work there. Joining the US would mean swapping the pound for the dollar, probably not a bad idea as the former plummets, and even the five hour time difference between here and the East Coast isn't that much more than the three hours between there and the West Coast.