Editorial – Fireworks on November 5?
As we go to press the US presidential election is approaching its conclusion amid a febrile atmosphere of fear and mutual loathing, with each side trolling the other during a punishing schedule of rallies in the decisive swing states, and Trump-backer Elon Musk offering to pay $1m a day to petition-signers in Pennsylvania.
‘What happens on 5 November could change the world we live in,’ pants the Guardian, reflecting the breathless fascination of the world’s media for an election which may in truth have a significant bearing on tariff-versus-free-trade tensions playing out across world markets, as well as on Israel and the Middle East war, Russia’s war in Ukraine, the growing power of China, and implications for US carbon commitments. Many fear the consequences of a Trump victory. Many others fear the fireworks Trump may unleash if he rallies his fanbase to reject a defeat.
According to Pew surveys, domestic US voters are not overly concerned with geopolitical questions or foreign trade, and even less with global warming. 81 percent of those polled say their main concern is the economy, which a barrage of Republican disinformation has represented as a failed basket-case under Biden. This isn’t so, objectively speaking. The economy is in fact very healthy, at least for wealth owners, but for many workers it’s a catastrophe of low wages and high prices. Both things can be true, of course. A healthy economy of desperate workers is capitalism’s ideal operating condition.
Many US voters probably grasp, at some deep level, that they don’t matter, their views don’t count, and their needs will go unmet. The Democrats make no apology for standing primarily for the urban, college-educated, white-collar ‘middle class’, by implication writing off the rural, non-college, blue-collar majority as a rabble and a lost cause. If capitalist democracy is a rigged circus anyway, some will think, why not elect the most outrageous clown, if only to wind up the establishment and the liberal woke opposition?
From an outside perspective, this vicious race to the bottom looks frankly surreal, framed as it is partly by America’s privately owned and heavily polarised news media, with Fox touting Trump and CNN touting Harris, and partly by their peculiar libel laws, disguised as ‘free speech’, in which anyone ‘has the right’ to slander and tell lies about anyone else without the legal obligation to substantiate or retract.
Unlike the recent UK general election, there is no foregone conclusion here, with polls showing Trump and Harris neck and neck. But we can certainly predict that, whoever wins, and failing a global environmental disaster or nuclear war, American workers will not see much if any difference. Governments can’t control markets anyway, regardless of ideologies. They are like rollercoaster riders, hanging on for dear life as capitalism hurtles through its booms and slumps, powered by its own insatiable frenzy. The main effect of capitalist elections is not to bring about real change but to promote the illusion of change while the runaway acceleration of exploitation remains unaddressed and undisturbed.
So, whichever way it goes, the working class won’t win. There is no way to win, except by abolishing capitalism in favour of truly democratic global common ownership. Otherwise, all the glamour and fireworks are merely sound and fury, signifying nothing.