US-amerikansk vänster om Trumps valseger

Den US-amerikanska vänstertidningen Socialist Worker har i en ledarartikel kommenterat Donalds Trumps valseger. De menar att orsakerna till att han kunde vinna är flera. Dels att Clinton var en uttalad företrädare för överklassen i USA, visserligen en liberal antirasistiska kvinna, men helt klart ingen person som var intresserad av arbetarklassen:

HAVING ABANDONED even rhetorical appeals to give confidence to the Democratic Party’s more liberal base so she could chase the votes of moderates and even dyed-in-the-wool, conservatives, Clinton left the field open to Trump to claim that his reactionary program would benefit the majority of people who have seen their living standards stagnate and decline, even in the period of ”recovery” from the Great Recession.

The liberal base of the Democratic Party came through for Clinton. According to exit poll data, she won 88 percent of the Black vote and 65 percent from Latinos. It was the swing voters who Clinton courted that stuck with Trump.

Vidare påpekar de att valsystemet med elektorer gynnar konservativa kandidater då delstater som är traditionellt konservativa gynnas genom förhållandevis fler elektorer:

Trump may well end up losing the popular vote–his victory was assured by the undemocratic Electoral College, enshrined in the Constitution by slave owners, that gives outsized influence to traditionally conservative rural states.

Det mesta tyder också på att Clinton faktiskt fått flera röster än Trump,men Trump står som segrare ändå. Till slut menar Socialist Worker också att Sanders-kampanjen svek sina supportrar:

Bernie Sanders’ left-wing campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination nearly upset Clinton by making an appeal to workers to challenge what he called the ”billionaire class.” Clinton, who has spent her political career ingratiating herself to that class, managed to bury Sanders’ message–and rather than continue his ”political revolution,” Sanders abandoned his opposition to whip up support for Clinton.

Clinton and Sanders and much of the rest of the political establishment, some Republicans included, criticized Trump’s ugly outrages. But because they never acknowledged the real economic grievances that he built his campaign around, they left the way clear for Trump to channel legitimate bitterness into scapegoating and scaremongering.

Even when Clinton did counter Trump’s racism, woman-hating, immigrant-bashing and Islamophobia, it rang hollow. As a personification of the insider Washington political establishment, Clinton bears responsibility–often directly–for policies that led to the mass incarceration of African American men, the sweeping deportation of immigrants and endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have fueled anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry.

Socialist Worker påpekar att rasism spelade en stor roll för Trumps kampanj. Hans ”lätta lösningar” appellerade till delar av arbetarklassen. En arbetarklass som förlorat arbeten under Obama-administrationen. Demokraterna hade inget att sätta emot, inget alternativ att erbjuda. När Trump sa att han skulle göra USA stort och bra igen så sa Clinton att USA redan var stort och bra. Många arbetare höll inte md om det utan röstade mot Clinton. de hävdar att det inte finns några enkla förklaringar:

THE CONVENTIONAL media wisdom was stunned by this outcome, and so there will be a scramble for simple answers to explain away Election 2016: a fundamentally conservative population; the irretrievable racism of all white workers; even the impact of the Green Party’s Jill Stein, whose ”crime” was to rightly insist that the greater evil can’t be stopped by championing the lesser evil.

We should refuse to accept those simple answers. One of the first challenges for the left will be to explain what happened in all its complexity. But there are many more challenges to come.

As the radical left warned, in defiance of calls for moderation from liberals, the right wing has been emboldened by Trumpism and needs to be confronted. But we can’t let the people most responsible for this mess point the finger at the most reactionary bigots. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party need to answer for why they had nothing to offer as an alternative to Trump’s scapegoating.

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