Trump and the American Nightmare

The Rust Belt a damning indictment of the US governments’ failures (Photo: Wikimedia commons)

When Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, he dismissed Donald Trump as an “aberrant moment” in United States history. Trump’s landslide victory this week showed he is anything but.

Its scale was a shattering confirmation of a society in advanced stages of decay. Out of that decay and the Democrats’ failures, Trump and the far right are growing and pulling it rightwards. 

More than 40 years of ­neoliberalism have built a traumatised, fearful and ­violent society. The US presents itself as a leader of the “free world”, but it’s a world leader in ­suicide rates, locking people up in prisons, gun violence and drug deaths.

Free market policies, pushed by Republicans and Democrats, depressed ­working class people’s wages, destroyed decent jobs and fuelled inequality.

The US is now one of the most unequal societies in the world. Some 20 percent of wealth flows to the top 1 ­percent—and the top 0.1 ­percent holds roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Human suffering and pain lie behind those economic statistics. In 2022, a record 49,500 people killed themselves and the suicide rate was as 14.3 per 100,000 people. That was the highest rate since 1941—until the following year when it rose to 14.7.

Addiction rates are on a ­similar trajectory. The US death rate from drug misuse is the highest in the world at 18.75 per 100,000 people. The world average is 2.08 per 100,000. An epidemic of opioid addiction—flowing from Big Pharma drug-pushing—claimed the lives of over 100,300 Americans in the year ending in April 2021.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is a city that knows the toll of drug deaths all too well. For decades its ­skylines were dominated by the vast plants of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, once an icon of US capitalist prowess.

They shut in 1992 and very few of the thousands of steel jobs are left today. Vape stores, fast food ­franchises and boarded-up shops dominate Main Street.

Johnstown is one of many towns and cities that symbolise US decline and form the ­heartlands of “Trump country”. Trump has successfully fed off the accumulated anger and grievances at the effects of neoliberalism.

“Career politicians like Joe Biden lied to you,” Trump told people in Johnstown. “He abused you. He crushed you, your dreams and ­outsourced your jobs to China and distant lands all over the world.”

But Trump, a billionaire backed by a substantial section of big business, offers ­nothing for working class people whether white, black or Latino. So why has the far right, not the left, benefited from the crisis of the neoliberal centre?

First, Trump simultaneously feeds off the crisis caused by the neoliberal centre and builds on its ideas. Politicians justified those neoliberal policies with a liberal ideology that market competition and dog-eat-dog individualism were the basis of human flourishing.

In Neoliberalism’s Demons, US writer Adam Kotsko argues it “confronted us with forced choices that served to redirect the blame for social problems onto the ostensible poor ­decision making of individuals”. So, the response to the deep social crisis in the US can be more right wing solutions, rather than looking to a collective class response.

Mainstream politicians ­pushing racism to deflect blame for their own failures gives the likes of Trump fertile ground. For example, Kamala Harris celebrated the Democrats ­presiding over “lower undocumented immigrants and illegal immigration than Trump when he left office”. She criticised Trump for only building “about 2 percent” of the US-Mexico border wall.

Second, Trump and the far right play on nostalgia for the “American Dream”, a period most associated in the decades that followed the Second World War. It was an era of full ­employment, rising living ­standards and economic boom—the apex of US power in the world. But it was always a nightmare for black people, women and LGBT+ people.

The 1950s was the era of the racist Jim Crow laws in the Southern states, segregation and lynchings. It was the era that ­idealised the “nuclear family” with strict gender roles for women in particular. The ideology of the American Dream presented prosperity as a “birthright” for white Americans.

Many working class people did win the higher living ­standards they had in the 50s off the back of struggles. Workers’ militancy, such as the General Motors sit-down strike in 1936-37 in Flint, Michigan, had forced the US ruling class to make concessions.

Fear of greater revolt pushed the US government and sections of big business to come to an accommodation with trade union leaders. At the same time, they smashed the left for a generation in the “anti-Communist” witch-hunts of the 1940s and 50s. The idea of prosperity as a “birthright” chimed in the popular consciousness.

Trump’s infamous Madison Square Garden’s speech in New York this month dripped with racism and sexism and revealed the far right play book. He tapped into the social crisis facing millions of people, slamming Harris for ­“shattering our middle class” in “less than four years”. He latched onto that deep pain and twisted it against migrants.

“I will protect our workers. I will protect our jobs,” he said. In the next breath he said, “I will protect our borders. I will protect our great families.

“I will protect the ^­birthright of our children to live in the ­richest and most powerful nation on the face of the earth.” The American Dream’s notions of birthright were ­interlaced with the deep racism of US society used to divide workers and the poor.

In 1965 Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King said the “Southern aristocracy gave the poor white man Jim Crow”. “When his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not ­provide, he ate Jim Crow, a ­psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man,” he said.

That too is part of Trump’s strategy. He has channelled a lot of people’s anger through whipping up racism, scapegoating migrants and deflecting it onto ­“liberal elites”. It diverts anger and ­attention away from the real elite—­billionaires, bosses and ­bankers—that Trump belongs to.

Four years ago, he promised a Johnstown rally, “We’re going to bring in tremendous numbers of factories.” That was a lie he didn’t deliver on, but he hasn’t lost support.

He promises to restore ­people’s worth and sense of status by going after criminals, drug dealers, migrants and the “woke left”.

This US crisis doesn’t have to benefit the right. Powerful social movements have rocked US society—for example, Palestine on the campuses, Black Lives Matter and the mass opposition during Trump’s first term as president.

Millions of people looked to Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and the “Squad” who call themselves democratic socialists.

They promised a Green New Deal that would invest billions into decent, well-paid jobs for working class people. That became Biden’s Build Back Better programme that curtailed those promises.

Then, Bidenomics effectively turned into an armaments programme with very few green jobs attached. But Sanders, AOC and Co. all defended Biden and the politics of working through the Democratic Party. They lined up behind an administration that deepened the crisis and did little for workers.

In the election, Trump’s message was “Make America Great Again”. The Democrats claimed that “America” was already great. People saw this lie—and the Democrats’ vote collapsed from 2020.

Instead, to combat Trump’s racist agenda, we need a left that doesn’t line up behind the Democrats and looks to struggle on the streets and workplaces.

We saw a glimpse of that with the recent Boeing and dockers’ strikes and there are big class battles ahead with Trump’s agenda. Alongside fighting the far right and racism, the left needs to pose a genuine alternative to capitalism.

In the 1930s Langston Hughes, the great black American poet, poked at those who used nostalgia for an imagined American past. “America was never America to me,” he said.

He said the real task was to “make America again”—to build a different sort of society free from the ravages of exploitation and oppression. “Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, the rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,” the people “must redeem” the country and its vast wealth.

We can only win that through struggle against the far right—and the system that produces it.