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The election of Donald Trump as President of the USA is not an American phenomenon. It is part of a worldwide voter revolt against so-called Establishment politics and globalisation.
One of the characteristics of this revolt is that the mainstream experts can’t pick it. Like Brexit in June, the pollsters, the bookies and the markets all failed to predict the result. The population is not behaving as expected.
The reason the experts couldn’t predict this outcome is that Trump was addressing an economic reality that they deny exists. Well-paid media pundits read statistics on GDP growth and unemployment and see the stock market soaring way beyond its pre-2008 crash high and believe America is enjoying a recovery. Barack Obama claimed in an 8 October letter in London’s The Economist that in his eight years he achieved: “a more durable, growing economy; 15m new private-sector jobs since early 2010; rising wages, falling poverty, and the beginnings of a reversal in inequality; 20m more Americans with health insurance, while health-care costs grow at the slowest rate in 50 years; annual deficits cut by nearly three-quarters”.
The stark truth is that if even a fraction of this were really true, Donald Trump would not be president. And it wasn’t just Trump: the economic reality was also reflected in the success of the Bernie Sanders campaign.
The 7 November Daily Caller leaked a private Bill Clinton fundraising speech from a year ago, in which he acknowledged the truth about the economy that his wife wouldn’t in her campaign: “84 per cent of the American people, after inflation, had not had a raise of 1 cent since the financial crash”, Clinton noted. “Middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans’ life expectancy is going down and is now lower than Hispanics’, even though they make less money. And the gap between African Americans and whites is closing—but unfortunately not because the death rate among African Americans is dropping but because the death rate among white Americans is rising. Why? Because they don’t have anything to look forward to when they get up in the morning.”
A vote against free trade, financial gambling and war
Donald Trump is not an ideal president, but his personality is less important than why the people voted for him. There were three issues on which Donald Trump didn’t just say he was anti-Establishment, he proved it. Immigration was not one of them. Admittedly a sizeable minority supported Trump’s reactionary position on Mexican and Muslim immigration. Trump is wrong to scapegoat ethnic and religious groups in this way, but often he merely said what mainstream politicians are already doing. For instance Obama has built hundreds of miles of wall on the Mexican border, has deported a record number of immigrants, and is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Muslims through his killer drone program and regime-change wars in Libya and Syria. Australia’s two major parties have no moral stranding to criticise Trump on immigration, as their shared policy on offshore detention shamelessly plays to the same fears among Australians.
The issues that really set Trump apart were trade, banking and war. Trump smashed the free trade consensus that is based on the lie that free trade made America great. The opposite is true: for more than a century and a half, the USA was the global champion of tariff protection, which along with national banking was a cornerstone of what was called the American System of political economy; Abraham Lincoln for instance was a fierce opponent of free trade. The Wall Street takeover of American politics post-WWII drove the shift to free trade, with disastrous consequences. Trump campaigned against Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that Bill Clinton signed into law, because it has eviscerated America’s manufacturing heartland, but it hasn’t benefited Mexico either—millions of Mexicans enter the USA trying to escape the poverty made much worse under NAFTA. Consequently, the so-called “rust belt” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which haven’t voted Republican since the 1980s, all went to Trump.
On a related economic issue, Trump also called for a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, to separate banks with savings deposits from the Wall Street gambling casino. Sanders had also campaigned for Glass-Steagall, but Hillary opposed it, being too deep in with Wall Street (it was Bill Clinton who signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999). An early November poll of the same traditionally Democrat states that won Trump the presidency showed 70 per cent wanted Glass-Steagall restored. The day after the election Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, the great champion of Glass-Steagall who has sponsored a bill for a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, said she’s willing to work with Trump to see it enacted.
The final issue that distinguished Trump to the voters was war. From the very beginning of his campaign, the Trump statement that most riled the Establishment was not about Mexicans or Muslims or women, it was this: “What’s wrong with getting on with Russia?” Bizarrely, this simple statement drove both Republicans and Democrats, and the media, to paint Trump as a dangerous loose cannon who would make the world less safe. Yet it was Bush and Cheney, followed by Obama and Clinton, in collusion with successive British governments, who made the world less safe. They put America on to a collision course with Russia, by scrapping the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, backing al-Qaeda terrorists who spawned ISIS to overthrow the governments of Libya and Syria, and running a neo-Nazi coup to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine. A Trump White House that is willing to work with Russia to defeat ISIS (as should Australia if we are genuine, or else get out of Syria), cooperate with Russia and China on economic development initiatives such as the Bering Strait Tunnel and China’s One Belt, One Road project, and dialogue with both countries over differences, can only be good for global peace and security.
That is, if Trump delivers, which remains to be seen. There are numerous vested interests scrambling to influence Trump to change his course on these issues, including the Republican Party Establishment, Wall Street, and the British and Australian governments.
For many years the CEC has led the fight in Australia for the positive policies that won Trump support: protection for our productive industries, Glass-Steagall, and peace with Russia and China based on economic development. These policies will both alleviate the conditions of poverty and insecurity that make people fear immigration and refugees, and result in fewer economic migrants and refugees. We will continue this fight in Australia and in collaboration with likeminded groups around the world, to push Trump and all governments to dump the financial globalisation policies that have only profited the City of London and Wall Street, and to collaborate on establishing a new, just international economic order
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