The US presidential election is nearing. On 3 November, US voters will head to the polls in what has been dubbed “the most important election in US history”. As The Canary has extensively documented, incumbent president Donald Trump is incompetent, reactionary and, worst of all, has shown signs of overt authoritarianism. And so a victory for Democratic Party challenger Joe Biden is being presented in much of the corporate-owned media and amongst the liberal establishment as some kind of deliverance from evil.
But the reality is that it was Washington insiders like Biden, who pose as ‘liberals’ but are actually center-right, that led to the rise of Trump in the first place. We need to push back against the dangerous idea that removing Trump will return the US to some kind of golden era. Because Trump is, in reality, only a marginally worse incarnation of a neoliberal and imperialist status quo that has existed for decades and has been administered by presidents from both of the US’s major parties.
You make a fair point, Peter, but I think you are over-egging it a bit. Trump is not ‘marginally worse’ than previous presidents but exponentially worse. No previous president has broken democratic standards and norms so catastrophically as he has. The Republican Party is now totally toxic for Americans for supporting Trump and for many other reasons, but unfortunately a huge proportion of the electorate misunderstand the situation and will vote Trump. Unbelievable, but true. A massive responsibility will rest on the Democrats if they win power to correct all the democratic deficits shown up by the Trump presidency and to rebalance the social and economic landscape for citizens, which will require them to face down the illiberal forces of inequality that exist that you refer to
. This will take some doing, and will take more than four years, but I hope for all Americans, and also for us in the UK, that they are successful. Paul