Seven years ago, I wrote a post entitled Ignoracracy, about what the election of Donald Trump, and the fact that voters in Britain had voted for Brexit meant. I related it to the 2005 film Idiocracy, by Mike Judge, in which the process of natural selection had, somehow led, to the evolution of humans characterised by their idiocy.
In the US, the reality of Trump's regime led, eventually to his defeat in 2020, but, of course, given what had been said, the surprising thing was not that Trump claimed that he had not lost, nor that he was able to mobilise a few hundreds people to try to stage a farcical coup, but that millions of Americans still believed his crap, and had voted for him in that election, many of whom themselves continued to believed his lie that he had actually won in 2020.
In Britain, at least, it didn't take long for the large majority of voters to realise that they had been lied to by Trump and Putin's allies, such as Farage, Bojo, and not to mention the likes of the representatives of Blue Labour, such as Glasman, and his associates, at Spiked. Although, there are still the diehards that, as with the Trumpists cling to the lie that Brexit has been a success, or if its a failure, its because it has not been implemented (true but only because it never could be implemented), that it was all the fault of Theresa May, and so on, and who continue to parade the lie that some true Brexit, whether of the form proposed by Truss, or that of a Blue Labour Brexit, can be implemented to "make Brexit work". But, the vast majority of voters are not buying it.
That is not the case in the US. It looks as though the moron, convicted criminal, sexual predator, and inveterate liar, who tried to stage a coup after he lost last time, whose former Chief of Staff, John Kelly, says spoke about his admiration for Hitler, and so on, is set to win the upcoming election. Of course, in Britain, despite the fact that the vast majority of voters now realise that Brexit was a huge mistake, a terrible injury they inflicted on themselves, nearly ten years ago, the two main parties have continued to implement that disastrous policy, Putin's greatest success so far, and even the parties that have been most anti-Brexit - Liberals and Greens - have for some reason, been cowed into submission over the issue.
Faced with a choice of only two main parties that had a chance of winning at the last election, both of whom stood on the same reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalist, pro-Brexit agenda, its little wonder there was little appetite for either or any party, and so the turnout was abysmally low, and although Blue Labour won a landslide parliamentary majority, it did so with less votes than Corbyn's Labour won in 2019, and the lowest share of the vote of any governing party in British history, thanks to the corrupt nature of the British electoral system. Its also no wonder that, similar to what has happened across Europe, the failure of social-democratic parties to present any kind of progressive alternative, has meant that even when they win elections on the basis of a lesser-evil rejection of the far-right, it is quickly followed by even greater disillusion and discontent that simply fuels the support for the far-right even more, come the next elections.
In the US, that is being repeated once more. Owen Jones' latest video from the US, is a classic in illuminating that process. On he one hand, we see at the start the total failure of Democrat supporters to grasp the reality that Trump looks likely to win, precisely because of the failure of Biden/Harris over the last four years to provide any real progressive alternative. As with the appeals to vote for Blue Labour in the last election, or for Macron's party in the EU and French parliamentary elections, solely on the basis of opposition to the Far Right, voters are saying, that's not enough, and quite right. We do not exist just to give already privileged politicians a cushy job.
As I noted in relation to the EU referendum in 2016, the Leavers were likely to win, because their largely ignorant, usually bigoted supporters were more virulent in their support, having been whipped up by the likes of Bojo and Farage, whereas the likes of Cameron had nothing to offer, whilst the Blair-Right, Alan Johnson, went AWOL for the entire campaign, no doubt, more busy with Mandelson, Hodge and co, and the backers of Labour Together in the various tax havens, plotting the downfall of Corbyn. The same is true with next week's Presidential election. You only have to listen to the ignorant voices of Trump's supporters, interviewed by Owen Jones, to see that they do not have a clue about anything, even at the most basic level, and yet, as with those in Britain that ring into James O'Brien on LBC, and profess their superior knowledge in relation to Brexit, they are whipped up and motivated in a way that the supporters of Harris and the Democrats never can be.
The Democrat supporters are left, rather as with those that called for a vote for Starmer, hoping without any foundation whatsoever that somehow, once elected, and so when any chance of having real leverage over them had already passed by, that they would change course. In Britain it was the idea that Blue Labour were just being clever and would quickly do a deal to get closer to the EU, or would implement some, at least, modest social-democratic policies. In the US, as the interviews show, there is even greater cognitive dissonance, as Democrat activists lie to themselves about Harris's terrible position over the genocide in Gaza, and so on.
Socialists, of course, want to see Trump lose, but there is no reason to want Harris to win either. The polls say its too close to call, just as in 2016, they had Clinton ahead, and Brexit to fail. History suggests that means Trump is set to win. The labour movement, needs to mobilise, now, to defend the interests of workers in the US.
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