In Michelle Obama’s eloquent speech given in New Hampshire
against the rising tide of hatred and misogyny unleashed during the American
election campaign she did not refer to Donald J. Trump by name but merely as
Hillary Clinton’s opponent. Now we will
have to get used to reading and saying his name more often but politics is
never just a matter of a single individual, even under the extreme reactionary
swerve of US politics, that has taken everyone, not only Americans, into a
dangerously uncertain and perhaps even irreversible situation. The Paris climate change treaty may be in
jeopardy. Key domestic achievements of
the Obama years could be ripped up including wider access to health care. New appointments to the US Supreme Court will
have lasting significance for American society.
The Democrats had foolishly assumed that Wisconsin was safely
in their camp but the primaries had already given signs of deep disenchantment
with the dynastic Clinton party machine.
However effectively Hillary Clinton managed to present her own agenda she
was nonetheless unable to completely emerge from the shadows of the last
Clinton administration (as may also have been the case with Al Gore in
2000). Both Gore and Clinton were
ultimately ahead in the popular vote but cursed by the final outcome of the electoral
college system (and also in Gore’s case by the infamous Florida count and its
legal aftermath). It turned out that Barack
Obama’s broad-based coalition of progressive voters simply could not be
mobilized in sufficient numbers to hold Wisconsin along with other crucial
electoral college votes spread across the so-called “rust belt” of the Mid West. Would a Sanders-Warren ticket have done
better? Maybe, but we shall never know. Furthermore, with over forty per cent of American
adults not participating in the election, let alone a further seven per cent
disqualified as former felons or for missing papers, the actual outcome of this
debacle was decided by less than a quarter of the adult population, and far fewer
if we look at the wafer thin margins in five or six bell weather states.
The rise of right-wing populism now endangers liberal
democracy at a global scale. A toxic
brew of pervasive inequalities, manipulated grievances, and historical amnesia
threatens to overwhelm attempts to articulate a progressive alternative. The social democratic tradition in particular
finds itself in deep crisis, its sources of mobilization splintered and
scattered, and its previous achievements steadily eroded.
