The Loyal Opposition

The recent US Presidential election was presented as a moment of crisis: democracy in danger, Fascism imminent. In the event, following Donald Trump's much-feared victory, Joe Biden immediately committed to an orderly handover. The fevered post-count analysis - Trump didn't win, Harris lost; it's the economy, stupid; the Manosphere swung it etc - obscures that the US establishment has once more emerged victorious. Obviously it is one particular wing of the establishment, and that bias will have real consequences for many Americans, but don't imagine that a second Trump presidency will significantly diverge from established policy, either domestically or internationally, any more than his first term did, and you can be assured that any substantive changes he does make will more than likely be maintained if not explicitly endorsed by a future Democrat president, just as the US embassy remains in Jerusalem and just as illegal immigrants were deported under Obama.

Trump is unlikely to be the harbinger of Fascism, even if some of his backers and hangers-on might desire that. It was the failure to deliver anything beyond a standard conservative administration during his first term that assured voters he could be trusted again, with the events of January the 6th four years ago now downgraded from a hyperbolic insurrection to a farcical riot. Among his backers, the Project 2025 crowd are likely to be more disappointed than the various billionaires. Trump isn't a programmatic guy. He may pick and mix some of their ideas, but his own egoism is likely to be a bigger factor in determining policy than a 900-page tome he clearly hasn't read. Apart from his personal indolence, he will be restrained by the guardrails of American politics. Ultimately, he wants to be loved more than he wants to be feared, and that means cleaving to the longstanding orthodoxy.

Fascism is reaction in the guise of revolution but Trump offers nothing revolutionary. His politics today are well within the historical norm, from tariffs as the solution to American industrial competitveness to moral panics over immigration as the unifying substrate of American nationalism. And this is why the Democrats will willingly go into internal exile and brood upon the electorate's lack of gratitude rather than the nature of the Republic. The "resistance" will once more be a rhetorical style that will quickly pall, while the DNC will start the beauty parade to find another pliable centrist who will appeal to rich donors. Just as nationalism cannot arise without the foundation of liberalism, so Fascism cannot arise except in the context of a democracy brought to crisis by that same liberalism. But the Democrats are not going to question the nature of their creed any more than they will question their commitment to the national secuiry state.

In foreign policy, there will be no divergence on Ukraine, let alone Israel. The US long ago made clear that it saw Ukraine as a disputed borderland between Russia and Europe and had no intention of accelerating NATO membership. Whether Trump leans on Zelensky to agree a Carthaginian peace, or whether he simply lets the war drag on and insists it's up to the Europeans to pay for it, the outcome won't be much different to what a Harris presidency would have delivered. Putin knows this, but it will suit his domestic political agenda to allow Trump to claim partial credit for a deal, and for him to appear magnanimous in victory. Netanyahu can expect a more overtly supportive White House, however the dynamic between the US and Israel is not one of empathy but of utility, and the strategy since Bill Clinton has been a deliberate absence of restraint on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians coupled with an explicit restraint on Israel's antagonism of Iran. That won't change. 

Allowing for population growth, Trump has received pretty much the same popular vote for three elections in a row. If his victory in 2016 was down to the structural bias of the Electoral College, this year's victory owes everything to the Democratic vote tanking. The party failed to turn abortion rights into a vote winner despite a number of states that voted for Trump as President simultaneously passing pro-abortion legislation. This suggests that voters have given up on the Democrats passing pro-choice legislation at a federal level, something they have repeatedly failed to do even when in full control of Congress. Pro-abortion activists are instead focusing on defending and extending rights at the state level. Likewise, many voters have decided that the Democrats cannot be trusted to re-engineer the Supreme Court, in a manner similar to the Republicans' ruthless pursuit of power, despite ample opportunities.

There has been no shortage of claims over the years that the GOP was heading for history's trashcan, whether due to demography (the dominance of cities and the growing multi-ethnic young) or its takeover by the crazies (from the Tea Party onwards), but there is no doubt that the Republican Party will persist as the preferred vehicle of both broader capital (domestic industry, land etc) and American nationalism (even if paradoxically both imperial and isolationist). What is less certain is that the Democratic Party will persist as its higher echelons reflect an ever narrower strata of high finance, the culture industry and the state apparatus, and as it consciously alienates its supposed natural supporters among the working class and progressive opinion. Its problem is that it has become a loyal opposition, hence the civility of its response to defeat and hence it cowardice over issues such as abortion. It assumes that the American people are innately conservative and this latest failure will simply reinforce that self-limiting belief.

This isn't a failing  peculiar to American centrists. In the UK, and contrary to much hyperventilating opinion in the British press, it is the Labour Party, rather than the Conservatives, that is most at risk of a steady and then sudden abandonment by its traditional supporters. The right may be currently split between the Tories and Reform, but it can easily unite, something that appears more likely as Nigel Farage now has reason to spend even more time in the US than he does in London, let alone Clacton. The broad left, from progressive liberals to socialists, looks far less cohesive, despite the dynamics of an electoral system that promotes coalition around two poles. In extirpating the left from the party, and in alienating ethnic minorities as it searched for the socially conservative vote, Labour's right have perhaps permanently damaged the progressive coalition. 

Arguably the most advanced Western democracy in terms of this trajectory is France. Not only has the traditional centre-left of the Parti Socialiste fragmented, but the technocratic centre has willingly marched to join forces with the right. Emmanuel Macron has legitimised the Rassemblement National as the loyal opposition and dismissed everyone to his left, the actual progressive coalition of the Nouveau Front Populaire, as the disloyal opposition. One day, French centrists will wake up to find that the far-right has become the government. Their response will be to become the loyal opposition in turn. Across the West, neoliberalism remains politically hegemonic despite its repeated rejection by electorates. Because neoliberalism can accommodate nationalism, opposition to it is forced into the channels of the right. The left remains anathema because its critique cannot be accommodated. The morbid symptom this gives rise to is a liberal establishment that decries the conservative right in increasingly hysterical terms while happily adopting its policies.