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Vol. 80/No. 46 December 12, 2016
US election shows crisis of two-party capitalist rule
BY NAOMI CRAINE
The 2016 election exposed a historic crisis in the stability of the
two-party system through which the U.S. imperialist rulers have governed
for more than a century.
The Republican Party, fractured by Donald Trump’s primary victory over
many of the party bosses’ “brightest and best,” is being rebuilt around
the president-elect.
The Democratic Party is in disarray and its leadership faces a challenge
from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is leading a “revolution” to take
over.
“The bourgeois two-party system has, for so long, delivered nothing but
crushed expectations,” notes Socialist Workers Party leader Steve Clark
in the introduction to The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why
Washington Fears Working People by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes.
Published just before the election, the book shows how the political
turmoil in the bosses’ parties is rooted in the world crisis of
capitalist production and trade — in decades of the employers trying to
reverse their falling profit rates on the backs of working people.
“For the first time in decades, the US rulers and their government have
begun to fear the working class,” Clark notes. “More working people are
beginning to see that the bosses and political parties have no
‘solutions’ that don’t further load the costs — monetary and human — of
the crisis of their system on us.” The rulers “sense that mounting
struggle — class struggle — lies ahead.”
Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul, said he spoke for the working
class who had no voice in Washington. He said there was a jobs crisis,
that as a political “outsider” he would use his business acumen to
change things. And he mixed in rightist demagoguery.
Trump’s campaign was opposed by many in the Republican machine and the
conservative press. His victory shut them up and won some over.
The president-elect has begun to rebuild the party in his image, seeking
to forge a conservative capitalist party with a base in the working
class. His popularity grew when he said he would take a salary of $1 a
year.
Many of his cabinet nominations reflect this new party. One of the
sharpest debates has been over the selection of secretary of state. One
candidate is Mitt Romney, the losing Republican presidential nominee in
2012 and a sharp critic of Trump during the campaign. Others are outside
the former party establishment.
Trump gave the OK to Kellyanne Conway, one of his top advisers, to
publicly oppose Romney’s nomination. She told CNN Nov. 27, “I’m all for
party unity, but I’m not sure we have to pay for that with the secretary
of state position.”
“The working class of this country is being decimated — that’s why
Donald Trump won,” Sanders told the crowd at a Nov. 20 Boston event
promoting his new book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.
Hillary Clinton had campaigned saying the economy was great and that
workers attracted to Trump because they were upset about losing jobs
were “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”
Sanders urges new candidates, many from the Occupy Wall Street movement
of a few years ago, to seek office.
And he says the Democrats have to get rid of “identity politics,”
looking for a future party built solely on Blacks, Hispanics and women.
The focus has to be on appealing to workers who feel exploited, he said.
When Michigan officials certified Trump the winner there Nov. 28, it
brought the Electoral College vote to 306 for Trump and 232 for Clinton.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s lead in the popular vote has reached about 2
million, encouraging some who oppose Trump to claim his election was
illegitimate.
Trump says he ran to win the Electoral College. “If the election were
based on total popular vote,” he said, “I would have campaigned in New
York, Florida and California and won even bigger,” which likely is true.
Without campaigning there, Trump won in more than a dozen upstate New
York counties where workers voted for “change” with Obama in 2012.
As he appeals to the working class, Trump’s cabinet picks, such as
Wilbur Ross for Secretary of Commerce, demonstrate his intention to rule
in the bosses’ interests. Ross’ International Coal Group owned the Sago
Mine in West Virginia, where 12 miners died in a 2006 explosion from
lack of safety measures. He serves on the board of steel giant
ArcelorMittal, spearheading attacks on steelworkers.
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