Kamala, candidate of the establishment
Kamala, candidate of the establishment
Trump, Vance, and RFK Jr. form an anti-establishment coalition
The attempted assassination of Trump, the selection of Vance by Trump, the withdrawal of Biden, the crowning of Kamala by the elite, and RFK Jr.’s coalition with Trump are significant developments that suggest the possibility of an ideological realignment that would be capable of forging a national consensus on an anti-establishment foundation.
The rise of Kamala
In the Democratic presidential primaries of 2020, the Left and the political establishment were in competition. Before the threat of the attainment of the Party nomination by the self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders, the political establishment mobilized forces in support of the candidacy of Joe Biden, a process that included the withdrawal of various candidates.
Biden selected Kamala Harris as his running mate, taking into account her compliance with the goals of the political establishment and her lack of a clearly defined ideological agenda, combined with her attractiveness to the tendencies of the Left within the party, as a woman of color. As Vice President of the United States, Harris has not been able to establish herself as an emerging leader with a capacity to inspire the people in support of clearly formulated political goals.
When Biden withdrew from the presidential race, the best road for the Democratic Party would have been an open convention, covered of course on national television, in which the delegates debate among themselves possible candidates and policies. In the best-case scenario, the Party would be seen by the people as consisting of leaders capable of defending with intelligence and dignity various candidates and policies, ultimately arriving to consensus with respect to two candidates that would be the standard-bearers of the Party. However, the delegates to the convention may not have been able to find in themselves the resources to exhibit democracy before the people, and they instead may have put on a display of caustic division, demonstrating their incapacity to arrive to consensus.
For the political establishment, the anointment of Harris appeared to be the best option. She had already demonstrated her compliant approach, and opening the selection of the candidates to the convention delegates would have been taken as a slight to women and women of color by a significant part of supporters of the Democratic Party.
The anointment of Harris began immediately. The media praised her virtues, reinterpreting her undistinguished service as Vice-President. Prominent members of the Democratic Party quickly stepped forward to call for unity behind Harris.
If Kamala Harris possessed commitment to the good of the nation as her highest priority, she would have called for an open Democratic Convention, in which the delegates would give dignified, informed, and non-confrontational speeches, in an open-mike format, in defense of particular ideas and candidates. To be sure, the election and selection of Democratic Party delegates to the Convention is an imperfect process, but it is the democratic process in place at the moment, expressing itself in each of the fifty states and other territories. When Harris, after Biden’s announcement of withdrawal and endorsement, immediately began calling important persons in the Party to shore up support, she gave the impression of being a political opportunist, of which she has been accused by some. When various important persons in the Party quickly announced their support of Harris, they gave the impression that the Party establishment feared that an open convention might lead to the emergence of an anti-establishment candidate among the uncontrollable delegates, now possessing an unanticipated political authority. This impression of top-down control was reinforced by mainstream media, which immediately adopted presentations that gave implied support to Harris.
Thus, Harris presents herself to the American people as the opportunistic candidate of an establishment political party that has endorsed toxic wokeism on cultural issues, neoliberal economic policies that have undermined American manufacturing and productivity, unimaginative policies with respect to the socioeconomic needs of the people, NATO expansionism to the Russian frontier and proxy war in Ukraine, tolerance of genocidal policies in Gaza, and imperialist foreign policies defended with fabricated threats.
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The rise of Trump
The rise of Donald Trump in the primary and general elections of 2016 was a consequence of Trump’s capacity to name the ways that the power elite and the political establishment had defended their own interests, ignoring the needs of the nation and the people. The slogan, Make America Great Again, taps into a widespread sentiment among the people that the nation is not what it once was, and that those in power have permitted this to happen, more concerned with protecting their own wealth in the face of changing and challenging world dynamics. It is a patriotic slogan, in that it affirms that the USA was once a great nation, and it expresses the hope that the nation will be great again.
In “Trump’s Real Crime Is Opposing Empire” (Compact, April 7, 2024), Christian Parenti maintains that the reason for the hostility of the political establishment toward Trump is his foreign policy heresies and his disregard for the financial interests of the establishment. In his presidential term of 2016-2020, Parenti notes, Trump did not start any new wars, and he negotiated a peace settlement in Afghanistan. He reduced U.S. military presence in Iraq, Germany, and South Korea. Trump is not an anti-imperialist in the left-wing sense, but “an instinctual America-First isolationist who seems to harbor genuine disdain for global elites and policy insiders.”
Trump’s isolationist instincts have led him to opposition to endless wars and toward a disposition to negotiate and trade with emerging regional powers in Asia, realistically accepting the influence of world powers in other regions. He favors a strong U.S. military with a capacity to defend the national territory and to launch occasional surgical strikes in other regions in defense of national interests, but without overextending the nation in fruitless ventures that do not directly impact U.S. interests. Parenti notes that Trump’s “anti-militarist policy moves played well with his base, the flyover country working- and middle-class people who feel that they and their regions bear the brunt of the taxes, military recruitment, and deindustrialization that serve to support the American empire.”
However, Trump instinctively sees the Americas as the USA’s own region, and he therefore has adopted aggressive imperialist policies and rhetoric with respect to Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. But since the strategy with respect to Latin American nations seeking to defend their sovereignty has been unconventional war, avoiding costly and dysfunctional military presence and interventions, the policy of preserving American hegemony in the region causes no problem with Trump’s populist base, which shares with Trump a myopic incapacity to see the many advantages of cooperation with progressive and socialist-oriented governments in the region.
For Glenn Elmers, Trump’s challenge of the political establishment pertains not only to policies, but also to fundamental issues of truth, power, and patriotism. In “How Trump Turns Postmodernist ‘Truth’ Against Itself” (Chronicles, July 2024), Ellmers maintains that Trump persistently challenges the establishment narrative, for Trump believes in the essential goodness of America, and he believes that true sovereignty resides in the people.
Trump’s instinctive opposition to the political establishment is best represented by the issue of immigration. The mass international migration from the Global South to the regions of advanced economies has been unfolding in a historic moment in which the advanced economies are less prepared than in previous epochs to receive migrants, a time in which social welfare programs to citizens had been reduced. In the case of the United States, the migratory process has been unfolding in the context of a public discourse in which issues related to the productivity of the national economy and the wellbeing of the peoples of the nation and the world have been addressed only in a superficial and ethnocentric form.
Let us note fundamental facts. During the course of the twentieth century, the world-system reached and overextended the geographical and ecological limits of the earth. As a result, the economic expansion of the system could no longer be driven by new conquests and territorial expansion, such that worldwide economic expansion was replaced by economic stagnation. Signs of stagnation were becoming increasingly visible to the de facto rulers of the world-system during the period 1946 to 1979.
The American power elite responded to this situation with a stunning turn to unenlightened policies, in two stages. First, the imposition of neoliberal economic policies on the weak states and poor nations of the world, beginning in the 1980s, constituting economic war on the world’s poor. Second, a new stage of aggressive wars against certain targeted nations, beginning in the 1990s and accelerating after 9/11, replacing the previous policy of implementing the U.S. agenda through the cooperation of accommodationist states, rather than through direct military intervention. These dynamics of sustained economic and military attacks on the nations and peoples of the world have adversely affected socioeconomic conditions worldwide, stimulating migration from the Global South to the regions of advanced economies.
Thus, the American power elite, in the midst of a profound crisis that they did not fully understand, protected their short-term profits, not seeing that the consequences of their attacks on others would eventually come around to them. The people, on the other hand, see that under elite management a problem of uncontrolled and unvetted immigration has emerged, and the elites have no plan, except for protecting themselves. And in this situation, the political establishment has not put forth a well-conceived model of cultural diversity in the USA, based on principles of cultural pluralism and local community control, rooted in the founding constitutional principles of the nation. Rather, the elite has put forth a model of diversity, inclusion, and equity that is a simplified implicit accusation of intolerance directed toward all who are ill-at-ease with what their instincts tell them is a serious problem poorly managed. These instincts are tapped by the rhetoric of Donald Trump.
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The Republican Party of Donald Trump
The impact of Trump’s anti-establishment instincts on the Republican Party is seen in the 2024 Republican Party Platform. Although party platforms are generally a dead letter without impacting policies, in this case the Platform shows that the MAGA Movement is more than the persona of Donald Trump, that it includes influential members of the Republican Party with the capacity to formulate anti-establishment instincts in a comprehensive program of action.
The Republican Party Platform begins with an attack on the political establishment:
We are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE. . .. For decades, our politicians sold our jobs and livelihoods to the highest bidders overseas with unfair trade deals and a blind faith in the siren song of globalism. They insulated themselves from criticism and the consequences of their own bad actions, allowing our borders to be overrun, our cities to be overtaken by crime, our system of justice to be weaponized, and our young people to develop a sense of hopelessness and despair. [Emphasis in original].
The Platform calls for a sensible policy of immigration and border security. It promises to move thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to the southern U.S. border, combined with increased penalties for illegal entry and overstaying visas. It advocates the deportation of suspected gang and cartel members and drug dealers. It calls for the elimination of federal government funding to sanctuary jurisdictions. It promises to deploy the U.S. Navy to impose a Fentanyl blockade in U.S. regional waters.
The Platform stresses the restoration of domestic manufacturing, with the goal of “establishing the United States as the manufacturing superpower of the world.” It promises the revival of the U.S. auto industry through the reversal of harmful regulations. It seeks to create abundant and affordable energy through lifting restrictions, thus stimulating the expansion of oil and natural gas production. It wants to stimulate American commerce through fair and reciprocal trade with other nations. It wants to block companies from outsourcing jobs by excluding such companies from federal government contracts.
The Platform maintains that in a world that includes hostile nations, the USA needs a strong military to defend its interests, but it should use its military strength sparingly, “only in clear instances where our national interests are threatened.” It declares that “war breeds inflation while geopolitical stability brings price stability. Republicans will end the global chaos and restore peace through strength, reducing geopolitical risks and lowering commodity prices.”
The Platform notes that the educational systems in the USA have had poor results. It proposes closing the Department of Education and turning responsibility for the running of education to the states. It advocates the promotion of authentic civics education that teaches American founding principles and that celebrates American heroes. It wants to reduce the cost of higher education and restore classic liberal arts education.
The Platform advocates the promotion of “a culture that values the sanctity of marriage, the blessing of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents.” It promises to “end left-wing gender insanity,” promising to “keep men out of women's sports, ban taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop taxpayer-funded schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden's radical rewrite of Title IX Education Regulations, and restore protections for women and girls.”
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J.D. Vance
The selection of J.D. Vance as the Republican Party vice-presidential nominee gives the MAGA movement a potential intergenerational continuity. The Senator from Ohio is 39 years of age, and he formulates an anti-illegal immigration, anti-woke, patriotic, pro-family, economic nationalism that proposes decisive governmental action to expand American manufacturing and productivity and raise the wages of American workers. He promises to defend abandoned communities in middle America and to defend the interests of workers and the nation, and not the interests of big corporations. He formulates a partial reconceptualization of American ideology, by seeking to bring the Republican Party beyond Reaganism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and globalism, as he sounds like a classical liberal Democrat in speaking of state action in defense of workers.
In an interview with The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on June 13, 2024, Vance discusses his ideas for a comprehensive populist economic agenda. He criticized the increasing tendency of “the postwar American order of globalization” to rely on cheaper labor abroad as well as cheaper labor at home through uncontrolled immigration. Both types of cheaper labor create downward pressure on American wages; and immigration also results in upward pressure on the costs of housing and medical services. Vance proposes economic policies that do the reverse, policies which create upward pressure on wages and downward pressure on the cost of housing and services.
In his address to the Republican National Convention on July 17, Vance delivered a speech that was crafted to appeal to workers and to middle America. He declared that the nation needs a leader who defends workers and defends American companies. “We need a leader who fights for the people who built this country. We need a leader who is not in the pocket of big business but answers to the workingman, union and non-union alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations but will stand up for American companies and American industry.”
Vance promised that the second Trump Administration will rebuild American manufacturing.
We are done catering to Wall Street; we’ll commit to the workingman. We’re done importing foreign labor, we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages. We’re done buying energy from countries that hate us. We going to get it right here from American workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio and across the country. We’re done sacrificing supply chains to unlimited global trade. We are going to stamp more and more products with the beautiful label “Made in the USA.” We are going to build factories again, putting people to work making real products for American families made with the hands of American workers.
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RFK Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced the removal of his name from the ballot in ten battleground states, where his independent candidacy in those states could fulfil a “spoiler” function, changing the results of a contest that is clearly between the two major parties. He is keeping his name on the ballot in the great majority of states that are definitely Blue or Red states, where a vote for RFK Jr. would not affect the electoral college results. At the same time, he endorses Trump with respect to the elections in the ten contested states. He expects that he will have a place in a second Trump administration, perhaps playing a central role in commissions established to investigate the declining health of the U.S. population as well as the assassinations of JFK and RFK and the attempted assassination of Trump.
RFK Jr. brings to the coalition his own brand of anti-establishment understandings and proposals. One of RFK Jr.’s principal messages is his opposition to the corrupt merging of corporate and state power, which he views as a violation of the underlying spirit of the American Revolution, and which today is threatening to impose a new corporate feudalism in the USA. He declares that the regulatory governmental agencies (NIH, EPA, CDC, FDA, DOT, USDA, and CIA) have been captured by the industries that they are supposed to observe and regulate.
RFK Jr. is opposed to the continuous wars in which the USA has become involved in recent decades. His critique is informed by a realist understanding that the USA does not have the resources to be the policeman of the world. The continuous wars have cost trillions of dollars, he declares, without attaining any declared foreign policy goals, and leaving the country in greater debt and without resources to invest in the national economy or needed social programs. The continuous wars have been caused by the capturing of the CIA and the intelligence agencies by the military-industrial complex. The continuous wars, he maintains, constitute a systemic attack on the middle class, whose needs are ignored for the demands of war.
RFK Jr. laments the toxic and dangerous polarization of the country. He maintains that divisions among the people advance corporate interests, be they differences between blacks and whites, between Democrats and Republicans, or between rural and urban areas. He believes that the people can be unified, and the divisions can be healed, by speaking the truth and stressing the common values of Americans. He distances himself from the woke, rarely invoking the mantras of today’s radical Left. He notes that he has long recognized the serious problem of institutional racism, but he believes that priority ought to be given today to the socioeconomic development of poor communities, black and white. He appears uncomfortable with phrases like “systemic racism” and “equity,” with reservations about how they are sometimes defined; he seems more comfortable with the historic Kennedy liberal call for “equality of opportunity.” He is reluctant to comment on divisive cultural issues, like abortion or transgenderism, wanting to stress the common values of the people.
RFK Jr. observes that the U.S. government is paying six billion dollars a day in interest on debts owned by the Chinese and Japanese in order to finance war, bank bailouts, and lockdowns. In addition, in the last fifteen years the USA has printed ten trillion dollars, ten times more than what was printed during the entire twentieth century. This causes inflation, and inflation is a tax on the poor. In the last two years, food costs have doubled. He declared that we are starving the American people, cutting them off from aid that we should be providing, and instead spending money on being the policeman of the world.
We now have 800 military bases around the world, RFK Jr. notes. We spend $8.8 trillion per year in military expenditures. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we were supposed to get a peace dividend. Some projected a decrease in the military budget from six trillion dollars to two trillion, but instead we have increased it to 8.8.
The Iraq war, RFK Jr. observes, did not attain any reasonable foreign policy goals. No weapons of mass destruction were found. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. We may have killed one million Iraqis; no one knows the number. Iraq today is an incoherent country, in which the government and the police are corrupt. The war created ISIS, and it created two million refugees going up into Europe, causing Brexit. This is the cost of the Iraq War. In the USA, we have nothing to show for it.
While the USA was spending trillions of dollars destroying roads, ports, and hospitals, the Chinese were spending trillions building roads, ports, and hospitals, RFK Jr. observes. China is today replacing the USA as the principal trading partner of many nations in Africa and Latin America. As a result, many countries, like Brazil and Saudi Arabia, are looking for alternatives to the U.S. dollar as the international currency. Some calculate that the fall of the dollar from its privileged position as the most widely used international currency could cost the USA 750 billion dollars per year. This is part of the cost of U.S. involvement in continuous wars.
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The limited anti-imperialist consciousness of the anti-establishment coalition
Neither Trump nor the MAGA-led Republican Party nor J.D. Vance nor RFK Jr. have arrived to anti-imperialist consciousness. When they speak against war, they do not speak against imperialism, but against imperialist overreach.
They speak of a strong military that ensures the fortress-like defense of American territory, without the need for involvement in the numerous conflicts in other regions of the world, which is a reasonable position. But they have not heard the call of the nations of the Global South and East, formulated with persistence since 1955, calling for mutually beneficial cooperation among nations and for a dialogue of civilizations, which dovetails with and deepens the meaning of the Republican Party Platform’s call for “fair and reciprocal trade deals.”
The deafness of both the political establishment and the anti-establishment opposition with respect to the historic and persistent call of humanity for worldwide cooperation has profound and long-lasting implications. It prevents the creative and common discovery of forms of mutually beneficial trade and cooperation, which could provide the foundation for the common development and the common prosperity of humanity, giving all nations and parties an interest in the preservation of peace.
America needs the patriotic economic nationalism proposed by the anti-establishment opposition. But it must be a patriotic economic nationalism with an internationalist spirit and consciousness.
It does not seem to me such a giant cognitive leap. The anti-establishment opposition understands that the political establishment and the media lie and defame with respect to domestic opposition; it should not be difficult for the anti-establishment opposition to believe that the political establishment and the media lie and defame with respect to nations that are playing a leadership role in a worldwide anti-imperialist opposition that is seeking to construct an alternative world order with more just and democratic norms. Indeed, the American political establishment can lie and defame with impunity, taking advantage of the pervasive lack of knowledge of the world in the USA. This is a phenomenon rooted in the Cold War, as we ought to be able to understand.
Our basic image of socialism and communism is shaped by the Cold War image of the political trials of Stalin, the forced agricultural collectivization of the Soviet Union, the disaster of the Great Leap Forward in China, and the extremes of China’s Cultural Revolution. These were events that actually happened in the Soviet Union and China. However, they were exceptional events in the historical evolution of socialism and communism, and these crimes and errors were subsequently rectified.
Much has happened in the nations constructing socialism since the 1980s, concerning which we should be aware, and which ought to be central to our public discourse. The nations constructing socialism today have turned to mixed forms of property developed under the guidance of states that are led, as they always have been, by delegates and deputies of the people, elected freely by the people in a system of direct and indirect elections. The nations constructing socialism have attained unprecedented gains in recent decades with respect to economic development and political stability. And the nations constructing socialism have developed mutually beneficial relations with nations in all regions, thereby playing leadership roles in the construction of a post-imperialist world order, which they invite the USA to join.
The role of the establishment media in contributing to the distortions and defamations concerning projects of alternative construction is illustrated by a July 21, 2024, article in The Economist, entitled “Cuba is out of supplies and out of ideas.” It maintains that the Obama opening was not reciprocated by Cuba, a claim that has validity only if reciprocity means adopting the U.S. form of democracy and U.S. economic policy proposals. It declares that central planning and state control is the root cause of the current economic difficulties in Cuba, obscuring the Cuban development since the late 1980s of a model of state stewardship of an economy with mixed forms of property, including small and medium private property, cooperatives, and joint ventures with foreign capital that are integrated with state enterprises. It ignores the fact that the Cuban model in essence is like the model that has been developed by China since the 1980s, the success of which is visible to all; and by Venezuela in the last couple of years, which has been successful in promoting its economic expansion, in spite of the U.S. economic war against it.
Those of us with a conservative philosophy reject the post-modern belief that narratives ought to be created in order to give credibility to beliefs that advance a particular political and power agenda. We believe that truth can be discerned on the basis of reasoning and empirical observation, and that all citizens have a moral duty to give the quest for truth the highest priority. With respect to views concerning an anti-imperialist country like Cuba, this duty implies thorough observation of its economy and its economic model. And it implies taking into account a number of historic factors that have shaped the current Cuban economic situation. Namely, the neocolonial relation between Cuba and the USA from 1902 to 1959; the U.S. rejection of Fidel’s proposal in 1959 and 1960 for a continued economic relation with the USA, but with mutually beneficial trade rather than unequal exchange; the imposition of an embargo by the USA in 1960; the flight of the Cuban national bourgeoisie in the early 1960s, rejecting Fidel’s call to participate in the construction of a truly sovereign nation; the collapse of Soviet Union and socialism in Eastern Europe, resulting in the Cuban loss of its trading partners; the expansion of the U.S. embargo into an economic blockade in the 1990s; the intensification of the blockade by the Trump Administration, continued by the Biden Administration, which includes pressuring companies and banks in third countries to cancel economic and financial relations with Cuba; its lack of a highly profitable natural resource, such as oil; and its small size with respect to territory and population.
As the American anti-establishment opposition expands, priority should be given to facilitating its evolution to anti-imperialist as well as anti-establishment opposition, capable of formulating the concepts and principles that would be the foundation for a reformulation of American foreign policy on a basis of respect for the sovereignty of all nations and the development of mutually beneficial world commerce, for the common benefit and prosperity of all; and formulated on a foundation of fidelity to the principles of reason and empirical observation.
The American people, once given the chance to assimilate a new anti-imperialist discourse, would be most willing to cooperate with other nations in the pursuit of common human goals. They only need to be led there by leaders from and of the people, whose commitment to the people and the nation is visible for all to see. If this were to occur, the peoples of the world would embrace the people of the United States, and they would celebrate the fulfillment of a long-standing hope. The peoples of the world have long admired American achievements in technology, and they have appreciated the openness and sincerity of the American people.
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People’s Democracy in Cuba: A vanguard political-economic system