Peter Ramsay – Now Trump is Out of Excuses

The US election is not only a stunning defeat for the world’s authoritarian liberal elites, but also a victory for democracy, albeit a temporary and equivocal one. Above all, the result means that Trump’s brand of populism is out of political excuses, and we are about to find out if it has any substance

Peter Ramsay is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. He is also one of the founding editors of The Northern Star

This article originally appeared at The Northern Star

There are several reasons to think that the cause of democracy has gained from the election result in the USA.

First, it has demonstrated that American voters are very much in the game. Voters turned out in large numbers to support their candidates, and the result appears to indicate significant realignments as workers shifted to the Republicans and wealthier voters to the Democrats. Moreover, a majority of the electorate showed that they are not going to be condescended to. They not only rejected an insultingly incompetent Democrat incumbent, they also decisively rejected liberalism’s politics of fear, the elite’s endless blackmailing of the people with a fake threat of fascism. Left neoliberalism has been humbled and Washington DC reminded that the American people expect something better and need to be reckoned with.

Second, the vote against Harris was a vote against the authoritarianism of the liberal elite. As Republican donor Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted:

‘Exit polls show that “threats to democracy” was a top issue. MSM thought that meant votes for Kamala, but turns out it was exactly the opposite: voters are rejecting censorship, lawfare, and dishonesty.’

The vote was a decisive rejection of liberal censoriousness and the politicisation of the criminal courts.

Third, although the issue didn’t figure particularly strongly in polling, the result was nevertheless a vote for the candidate who was vocally opposed to the forever war policies of the liberal elite. Trump made it clear repeatedly that he intends to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and not start new ones.  His claimed political priority is the interests of the American people whom he has been elected to represent, and not the globalist priorities of the liberal and neocon narcissists who seek to bring democracy and human rights to the whole world through American firepower. To that end he claims that rather than fighting wars abroad, he will end mass immigration and act to improve the lives of working-class Americans at home, lives ravaged by inflation and falling living standards.

Fourth, and most important, the Republicans now have no political excuses for not delivering on Trump’s promises. They have gained control not only of the Presidency, but also the Senate, and they look likely to win a majority in the House of Representatives too. Trump’s previous appointments to the Supreme Court mean that there is a conservative majority at the pinnacle of the judicial branch. Moreover, Trump has much greater control over the Republican party than he did in 2016. There are no major constitutional or political obstacles to the implementation of his campaign promises.

Trump’s second term will therefore be the test of his capacity to meet the popular demands that he has articulated in his platform. He failed in his first term, only cutting taxes for the rich; he avoided war with Iran and North Korea but failed to impose his will on the deep state, blaming others for his failures, with a long list of poor and bad appointments and no cadre.

Now he has winds in his favour: inflation is trending downwards, unauthorised immigration appears to be declining, he has a popular mandate as well as a clear margin of victory in the electoral college. Moreover unlike 2016, he has a potential cadre in the team behind Project 2025. But, if Trump successfully presented himself as the ‘party of the Electorate’ while Harris fell naturally into the trap of representing the ‘party of the System’, he is no longer the insurgent he was in 2016. Republican-leaning members of the billionaire class have embraced him, and the implementation of planks of his platform such as tax-cutting, further stripping of the state’s capacity and trade war will reflect their interests. We have decades of experience to suggest that such policies will not improve real wages or yield the kind of investment that the American people need.

The strength of his mandate, on the one hand, combined with the incoherence of his underlying position, on the other, will encourage his vanity and populist instincts at the expense of genuine nation-building. Any setbacks will enhance the appeal of the culture war elements of his programme, and possibly even of diversionary international wars with Iran or China.

While his election represents a welcome popular rejection of the Democrats’ preference for promoting reactionary theories of racial and gender identity, and Americans are right to want to end uncontrolled mass immigration, the still dominant American cultural institutions and the state bureaucracies remain committed to these. We should have serious doubts about the capacity of the American state simply to reverse out of ‘woke’, or to deport millions of ‘illegals’ while still satisfying employers’ thirst for cheap labour. To address the deep-seated causes of the underlying problems would need a larger political vision for the state than the ragbag of small-state conservative policies on offer from Trump’s Republicans. Their reaction in government as the frailties in their underlying programme are exposed could easily turn into their own campaign of cancellation, censorship and lawfare against opponents.

Nevertheless, the humbling of liberalism and the left by the American people has happened in the context of the realignment between the two old parties and the growing independence of the electorate from both of them. This creates the political space for new thinking: for a politics that is critical of left neoliberalism, but also able to offer young people an alternative to the populist culture war that will provide the cover for the probable failure of Trump’s second administration; a politics with a truly forward-looking vision of a great American nation.

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