Donald Trump and the new man of the right
Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections has brought to light the enormous contradictions that plague American society today. His messages were a call to selfishness and discrimination, yet people who consider themselves charitable voted for him, such as 62% of evangelicals, many of whom see him as the new Messiah, and that includes 56% of Catholics, despite Pope Francis’s insistent calls for solidarity among people.
Honestly, there are also many helpless people who are hard to help and quite a few victims of discrimination voted for the discriminator. It is striking that for the first time in a long time the Democratic Party receives more proportional support among voters located in the wealthiest third than among the poor sectors. In particular, the favorable vote of 54% of Latino men stands out, whom Trump never tired of insulting. Interviewed by a media outlet, one of these men explained his decision: “The bills have to be paid, the rest doesn’t matter.” It is difficult not to feel sorry for a Latino disguised as a Trump supporter.
Donald Trump is the living image of an ostentatious exploiter, adored by the exploited. In particular, by a labor movement that since the New Deal identified with the Democrats and now blames them for the collapse of their living standards. Bernie Sanders is right, the Democratic Party is paying the price for having abandoned them to respond to the interests of the neoliberal sectors that dominate the party structures and are great accomplices of the economic transformations generated by globalization, the true cause of its misfortunes. “While the Democratic leaders defend the status quo, the American people are angry and want a change. And he is right,” said the senator from Vermont.
The right-wing outpouring of popular discontent is explained by the fact that the union movement was never truly unitary, but rather was mostly limited to defending the economic demands of the large white industrial sectors, it excluded the poorest workers and was permeated by racism, xenophobia and discrimination against women. It is also because the social advances of the 1960s did not lead to the consolidation of a left-wing movement that articulated its doctrine, established its objectives and imposed its conditions on the Democratic Party–where it lives because it has not found another niche to take shelter. Donald Trump is a liar that many want to believe, because he feeds their worst instincts. Fanatics of law and order voted for a convicted criminal willing to burn down the country in order to satisfy his egolatry, who will now be freed from all his guilt –the old and the new– since the Supreme Court, designed in his image and likeness, granted him immunity for any crime committed during the exercise of his office. Al Capone came to power with a safe passage to commit crimes and pardon his accomplices.
Al Capone came to power with a safe passage to commit crimes and pardon his accomplices.
Al Capone came to power with a safe passage to commit crimes and pardon his accomplices.Once again, a woman, a mixed-race woman to boot, was rejected by the majority of voters, including 44% of white women and 54% of men of the same race, the most relevant segment among American voters. Ignorance was also an ally of Trumpism, 54% of people without a university education voted for the tycoon and tripled the difference with the Democrats compared to 2020. Although 41% of graduates also voted in his favor, as if to confirm that good intentions do not always nest in the most cultured minds.
Support for Trump is identified as a sign of rejection of the system, but although we are certainly in the presence of a very comprehensive criticism of institutions, namely the executive, the congress, the judicial system, even the press, the individualism and the cult of money that characterizes that society are reaffirmed, as well as its most reactionary social tendencies. According to some American sociologists, this cult of money is the factor that most defines the culture of that nation, which is why Donald Trump is also a cultural phenomenon, difficult to assimilate in other countries.
As Christopher Robichaud, professor of ethics at Harvard, said: “It is cultural. America has completely abandoned a policy of decency and respect and has embraced instead a policy of resentment, revenge, false nostalgia and harassment (…) A culture that has descended to this level of degradation is not easily fixed. In fact, it may never be fixed.”
It is striking how, based on these premises, the culture of foreigners is transformed when they settle in the United States and the cursed process of turning the discriminated into discriminators takes place. Immigrants have been the most rejected, since they constitute a threat to the value of wages and, therefore, a deterioration of the living conditions of workers who have managed to establish themselves in the country. There is no contradiction between the capitalist interest in increasing the rate of profit by devaluing the workforce and the institutional persecution of immigrants: the fewer rights these people have, the cheaper they have to sell themselves. Indeed, Trump has increased the support of Hispanics thanks to his anti-immigrant policy, because the system forces them to repudiate their fellow men.
The slogan “Make America Great Again” was stolen by Donald Trump from Ronald Reagan, but it has taken on a different meaning. In Reagan’s case it was a call to strengthen the American hegemonic system, weakened by the defeat in Vietnam, the oil crisis and other international events. They were the victors of the Cold War and the promoters of a neo-conservative philosophy oriented towards the world domination by the United States through the control of financial capital and the spread of large transnational companies, on the understanding that the United States would act without equivalent competitors. With more or less “democratic” modesty, the unbridled warmongering, a source of extraordinary profits for the military-industrial complex, as well as the excessive use of financial power to impose sanctions on third parties, have been the main instruments of American foreign policy, regardless of the party in power.
As far as Trump is concerned, the slogan is a return to the most primitive nativism, conditioned by the effects of this neoliberal globalization on the American domestic economy and the consequent deterioration of the levels of well-being of American society. This is the point of demarcation of the currents that animate the country’s foreign policy and differentiate Democrats and Republicans in this sense. No one is exempt from an imperialist vision, nor does he rule out the use of force, military or economic, to impose his conditions on the rest of the countries, but it seems that Trump is not motivated by the pretension of establishing a unique system of world domination, as the Democrats propose, but rather he conceives these instruments as resources to “negotiate” with advantage, in favor of the specific and concrete interests of the United States. This explains his conditions to the alliance with Europe and his criticism of the promotion of war in Ukraine, at the expense of the American taxpayers.
The Third World countries do not come out well from the application of this logic either, since the “specific and concrete interests” include the exploitation of our resources, the mistreatment of our people and the ignorance of our rights. Donald Trump acts as the “bully of the neighborhood” and that is why he is the leader of the “new man of the right” in a sick society. The only way to stop him is to confront him.
