Trump used the campaign slogan “make America great again.” The problem is very simple. Neither he nor any other president – be it Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or for that matter Ronald Reagan – can do very much about the advanced decline of the erstwhile hegemonic power.
The disbelief, shock, and anguish that Donald Trump is now president-elect is giving way to waves of protests. Tens of thousands are hitting the streets in cities large and small, blocking roads, and rejecting Trump’s blatant racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia.
Let’s get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let’s set aside whatever is keeping us apart and start right now.
Source: Roar Magazine
Only a reinvigorated left and radical-democratic movements can clear away the ruins of the political establishment and defeat the proto-fascist right.
A political earthquake has just ripped through the world. There can be no doubt that Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections marks a historic breaking point for American politics and the liberal international order established in the wake of World War II. Things simply won’t be the same after this. And yet it’s crucial to remind ourselves that this moment has been a long time in the making.
Source: The Intercept
The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.
Source: Alternet
‘The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters’, Antonio Gramsci.
Donald J. Trump, the outsider billionaire, defeated Hillary R. Clinton, the insider politician, in a stunning upset for the US presidency. All polls and all pundits assumed that Clinton would win in a landslide. Confidence ran so high that Clinton’s people in the Democratic Party felt that she might even win traditionally Republican states – even Texas, the bastion of American conservatism. It was suggested that Clinton could win the battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, denying Trump any path to victory. As it turned out, Trump won each of these states, comfortable in his victory.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019