I welcome Joe Biden’s narrow victory over Donald Trump much in the same spirit as Marx backed the Union during the American Civil War. Keenly aware of the limitations and hypocrisy of Lincoln’s position, Marx still backed the North against the South, which ‘inaugurated the war by loudly proclaiming “the peculiar institution” as the only and main end of the rebellion’ (New York Daily Tribune, 11 October 1861) In short, the Confederacy ‘had recognized for the first time Slavery as a thing good in itself, a bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution. If the North professed to fight for the Union, the South gloried in rebellion for the supremacy of Slavery.’ Marx opposed the southern slavocracy because ‘the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labour’ (Collected Works, vol, 20, p. 20). I have little sympathy for armchair intellectuals who recognise no difference between Trump and Biden or claim that four more years of Trump may have created the conditions for real radical change. This sort of Stalinist idiocy paved the way for Hitler and anyone sanguine about riding a wave of working-class suffering doesn’t deserve the name socialist. Nevertheless, despite the liberal adulation, we should hold no illusions about Biden’s position within the Democratic establishment. His record on mass incarceration, support for the Iraq War and bipartisan record indicates that domestic power relations and grotesque inequality will continue to favour his obscenely wealthy donors, while the US empire will maintain its violent persecution of the global South. Yet, Biden is still preferable to the supremacist and authoritarian instincts of Trump.
As Howard Zinn rightly noted: ‘There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States. And the problem of “the color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, is still with us.’ (A People’s History of the United States, p. 23). Biden is, however, non-racist not anti-racist. His politics fail to navigate the intersection between race and class that has characterised US history. Again, Zinn pointed to the unnatural character of the tangled racist web ‘the result of certain conditions’ and spent much of his intellectual energy seeking ‘to eliminate those conditions’ (Ibid, p. 31). Yet, neither did he lose sight of the fact that while ‘historical, not “natural.” This does not mean that they are easily disentangled, dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized’ (Ibid, p. 38). The liberal notion that Trump represented an historical freak, a glitch in two hundred and fifty years of seamless democratic progress based on manifest destiny is a sick joke. Trump’s snarling, misogynistic and supremacist egotism is the history of white America. A settler colony based on the genocide of ten million native inhabitants and financed on a slave population in its southern states that reached four million before the Civil War, a global hegemon after 1945 that instigated more authoritarian coups and killed more innocent civilians than any other power by a large margin.
Like an obese cuckoo, Trump, an over-inflated ego with a Twitter account, managed to hollow out the Republican Party and win nearly half of the popular vote. The Donald may have manifested elements of fascism: the racist populism, the public theatre, the disavowal of reason and truth, the glorification of masculine strength and leadership, but he did not ride into power on the back of a nervous elite faced with a choice between hundreds of thousands of Brownshirts/Blackshirts on the one hand and a potentially revolutionary Left on the other. Any future manifestation of Trumpism may not be so readily consigned to the dustbin of history. The Alt Right lionised Trump because their marginal, violent supremacism gained traction in an atmosphere of mass disenchantment with establishment politics after the 2008 financial crisis and the withering deflation of Obama’s unfulfilled Hope. While Trump’s message tapped lingering reservoirs of antipathy within an inherently racist society, his emergence rested primarily on material conditions. US living standards have stagnated or declined since the Regan revolution. The 2008 crash removed the credit and loans that had camouflaged this gapping gap, exposing the pockmarks in America’s dream. Obama and Biden promised to save main street, but resuscitated Wall Street in the interests of an economic and political elite who have spent a week patting themselves on the back and sighing with relief that everything can return to normality. They ignore the fact that it took the largest popular vote on record to defeat Trump who secured an additional three million votes and that the votes that secured the key cities of Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta were largely mobilised by the Left. If this assessment represents anything like a true representation of events, then, rather than averting disaster, Biden’s victory may lay the foundation for a future cataclysm.
The United States originated in its colonial elite’s ability to make concessions to the middle class, without damaging their own wealth or power, usually ‘at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites.’ A ‘bought loyalty’ dressed in the rhetoric ‘of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.’ (Zinn, pp. 57-58). This has continued throughout a long history of ‘the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. This was not purely deception; it involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances, which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the centuries (Ibid, p. 61). Despite mainstream liberal commentary – this historical contract appears ruptured. There are rumours that Biden fancies himself as a twenty-first century FDR – oh that it was true. While a scion of privilege, FDR antagonised the bankers, cajoled half the business elite to accept his New Deal and advised trade unionists who visited the Oval Office to take to the streets and make him implement their petitions. There is little or no suggestion that a Biden administration will implement the necessary reforms and policies to address the genuine material grievances that led to Trumpism and that right-wing authoritarianism has a definite future in the USA.
Within a decade of Lincoln ‘freeing the slaves’ the racist and by then segregationist Democratic party won the popular vote in the presidential election and the House majority. Their populist platform rested on highlighting the hypocrisy and selfishness of the Republican financial and industrial aristocracy of the Northeast. The Yankee elite of the 1870s have a lot in common with the current Democratic establishment ‘always eager to take money from people’s pockets to feather their own nests,’ at the expense of the squeezed middle class in middle America. (Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology p. 243). Thomas Piketty identifies a ‘social nativism/racialism,’ which promoted a measure of social equality but only within a segment of the population. ‘In this instance, the “social” dimension of social nativism was just as real as the “nativism”: Democrats succeeded in convincing white voters from the lower and middle classes that they were more apt to defend their interests and advance their prospects than the Republicans’ (Ibid, pp. 245-246). In a fine manifestation of what Hegel might call the cunning of reason, the forces at work appear similar, while the party labels have changed. The nineteenth-century Democrats instituted a near century-long system of Jim Crow, only broken by the courage of the Black Civil Rights’ movement and the exigencies of an empire made to look ridiculous by the savage contrast in its global propaganda calling for freedom and democracy while strange fruit still hung from southern trees. A recurrent pattern emerges between mass democratic activism and progressive policy in Washington – let us hope it forms the outline of popular politics across the West in the coming decade.
The nativist, populist and authoritarian Right will not decline until the material conditions for its success have been addressed. The Democratic Party establishment, a reincarnation of New Labour under Keir Starmer or Macron’s technocratic centrism cannot defeat populism, because their three-decade hegemony sowed the seeds of its very rise. The world has entered a period of sustained crisis, business as usual will not address the fractures within Western society or impending environmental disaster. A pragmatist, FDR seized the historical moment to arrest the Great Slump and then used war production to bring about a degree of equality and social mobility unmatched in human history until China’s recent economic resurgence. Biden should look to opinion polls, even among Republicans, that favour universal healthcare, large scale investment in education, infrastructure and the green economy and a scaling down in military spending and increased market regulation. These poll figures have remained reasonably consistent for nearly four decades [with the exception of the environment]. Rather than tack to the centre and gravitate towards the Lincoln Project and so-called moderate Republicans, the Democrats should recognise that, despite an anodyne programme, Trump successfully painted Biden as a rabid socialist anyway – winning Florida in the process. The failure to seize the historical moment and institute real progressive change that moves beyond lean-in symbolism and locates policy at the intersection between race and class will alienate the BAME workers and activists that carried the day and prime Trumpism for a resurgence and the United States for a reckoning.
BLOSC 
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