For many, 2016 has seen a turn for the worse in
American politics mainly due to the election victory of Republican Donald
Trump.
But here’s some feel-good news on which to end the
year, an alternative interpretation of the events and processes in 2016, providing
hope and encouragement for better things to come. To be sure, the world has
changed, turned some kind of corner, and placed us in dimly-charted territory.
But some things are clearer:
Wall Street lost the presidential election;
conservative ideology lost out to massive demands for bigger government for the
people and heavier taxation of the corporate class and the very rich; the American
establishment, it’s billionaire class, was, and is, on the ropes; its principal
candidate, Hillary Clinton, found guilty by the American electorate of standing
for the status quo among other ‘crimes and misdemeanours’; and a self-declared
socialist won over 13 million votes in the primaries and is building a
progressive campaign to change America by inaugurating a new post-partisan
politics.
Millions voted for candidates who demanded America
step back from its global policeman role and reduce its military footprint. Its
post-1945 global military and other alliances were challenged and questioned
and its Middle eastern wars denounced, especially the illegal invasion and
occupation of Iraq. America’s ineffectiveness and role in fighting so-called
Islamic State was brought into public debate. The very grounds of the Pax
Americana were interrogated for the first time by one of the main contenders
for the presidency.
Protests over the election of Donald Trump criss-crossed
the nation, and funds began flowing in their millions to campaigns against
intolerance, hate crimes and xenophobia. The politics of progressivism has
taken a huge leap forward. It looks like it’s going to continue to do so. At
the local level, where ordinary Americans actually live, millions voted to
raise the minimum wage in many states. US politics has been changed for the
better in 2016 and 2017 is likely to be even better.
In Britain, leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn was returned
to lead the Labour party by an even larger margin than in September 2015,
damaging the campaign of Blairites and their ilk to return the party to the
failed policies of austerity, mimicking the Tories draconian attacks on working
and middle class people.
The long-awaited Chilcot Report into the Iraq War
provided a damning indictment of the leadership of Tony Blair and the doctoring
of intelligence to support a prior commitment to wage illegal aggression on
Saddam Hussein’s regime and the ordinary people of Iraq, killing hundreds of
thousands in the process, displacing millions, and opening up a fertile space
for the rise of Islamic State. “Never again” was the principal message from
that report, echoed across Britain, Europe and the USA. No more neo-colonial
wars was the rallying call of groups like Stop The War and the families of
soldiers killed in illegal conflict.
In Austria, the Green candidate Alexander Van der
Bellen defeated the hard right’s Norbert Hofer decisively and helped stem the
tide on the populist right movement across Europe. In Germany, millions
supported taking in a million refugees fleeing oppression, hunger and war in
Africa and the Middle east. The nuclear
agreement with Iran remains intact and avoided a (nother) major war in the
region, and ISIS suffered major setbacks and defeats in its bid for a so-called
caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
In Italy, millions voted against the centralisation of
power and a further erosion of popular sovereignty. The left remains strong in
Spain and in Greece.
All over the world, ordinary people’s voices are being
heard and making a difference. New forms of campaigning are taking off using
digital platforms and social media designed by corporations that collaborate
with powerful states to curb freedoms.
Julian Assange’s Wikileaks goes from strength to
strength, exposing the corruptions of the corporate class and its political
allies; Edward Snowden remains in exile, but free to critique the surveillance
powers of the American state.
Senator Bernie Sanders has not stopped campaigning,
nor have his millions of supporters. His various organisations are fighting to
change American politics and wrest it back from the clutches of big
corporations.
Brand New Congress will stand over 400 candidates for
congress in 2018 mid-terms; candidates will be drawn from outside the established
political class and from any movement that rejects the established order,
whether they be from the Tea party or Occupy Wall Street. They just need to be
people who have serve the community well and place the collective interest
above their individual interests. BNC is well on its way to selecting
candidates for election and is raising large amounts from numerous small
donations from ordinary people – just as Sanders crowd-sourced his own election
campaign.
The Sanders Institute has begun ideological work to
initiate study, analysis and discussion of the roots of inequality and what
might be done about it.
Our Revolution – Sanders’ campaign at local level
America – wants to bring ordinary people into local government and school
boards and so on to change politics from the grass roots.
This is what 2016 stands for and should be remembered
for: the exposure of the fundamental contours of a capitalist democracy that
relies on state-welfare for big corporations and corrodes democracy from within
and without. For all their money, the still lost the election.
And that’s why elite candidates have to pretend to a
politics of anti-elitism to get anywhere, why Trump could only win because he,
rhetorically, socked it to the establishment. And it explains why Sanders got
as many votes in the primaries as did Trump and why his new post-partisan
politics threatens to challenge the corporate culture and colonisation of
American government.
The American people showed they would not stand for
more elite politics and narrow economic agendas of the hard Right. A great foundation
upon which the politics of the next decade is to be built.
One
could quote some inspiring liberals at this point but a socialist who saw through
the subterfuge and rhetoric of elite demagoguery is more appropriate: Eugene
Debs, who despite all the odds fought against imperial war and for socialism a
century ago. His analysis of the two main American political parties is as true
today, and thoroughly exposed as such in the 2016 elections, as it was a
century ago: “The Republican and Democratic
parties are alike capitalist parties — differing only in being committed to
different sets of capitalist interests — they have the same principles under varying colors, are equally corrupt
and are one in their subservience to capital and their hostility to labor.”
And he condemned the
poverty of the many and wealth of the few: in a land of great resources, he
argues, and willing workers, want was the result not of God or nature
“but it is due entirely to the
outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in
the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity”.
2016 showed that the
majority of Americans have had enough of capitalist elites who care not a jot
for the interests of Americans let alone for the very planet itself.
As Bernie Sanders
declared: “Let us wage a moral and political war
against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere,
whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.”
Thank you, 2016!
