00:00 George Binette: [Thank you] for the invitation to speak this evening. I'm not a supporter of Socialist Resistance, but I would agree with a very, very substantial portion of what Fred has had to say. I may conclude with some heretical remarks about how socialists relate in the United States to the Democratic Party in the wake of the past year. Because there was something hopeful about 2016 in American politics, and that was the level of support that a Brooklyn-born Jew from the state of Vermont, with all of its three electoral college votes, managed, running as a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, to garner: millions and millions of votes, and come within striking distance really of the Democratic Party establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, for that party's presidential nomination. I'll come back to the Sanders campaign towards the end of my introductory remarks.
01:02 I want to focus first on the state of Michigan. Michigan, as I'm sure most of you know, once renowned for its trade union militancy, the cradle of the United Auto Workers union. Many of you probably have seen one of the early Michael Moore documentaries, *Roger & Me*, which was actually about the fate of his home town, Flint, Michigan, which was again in global headlines in 2016 because of the contaminated water supply — contaminated in part because of privatisation and grotesque mismanagement by the state government in Michigan.
01:33 Michigan, as you probably know, went for Trump. And on the very final rally of the campaign, which was in Grand Rapids, Michigan — Trump was speaking actually after midnight on Tuesday the 8th of November — there was a crowd of thousands in the arena, and he concluded his speech with these words: "This is our independence day" — an echo of Nigel Farage, actually, on the morning of the 24th of June 2016, just outside the Palace of Westminster — "this is the day the American working class strikes back, finally."
02:07 Now, to me, hearing this at about ten o'clock London time on the BBC news bulletin, the last one before the actual presidential election results, I nearly fell off my seat. This was astonishing to hear from a billionaire hotelier who had inherited a substantial fortune [from his father, a] property tycoon [?]. A property tycoon who also, as it turns out, had become a very able tax evader over the course of the 1990s. Leaving aside, of course, the overtly racist rhetoric which characterised his campaign from the very start, and the obscene sexism and overt misogyny with which he treated his female opponents and sections of the media who did challenge him, however gently.
03:15 Anyway, little over 24 hours later Trump was president-elect. He surpassed the 270 electoral [?] figure in the notorious and archaic Electoral College. There's a great deal I could say about the Electoral College and the particularly anti-democratic system for the presidential election in the United States; perhaps that's something for discussion, either here at the end or across the road afterwards. In any event, he did, as Fred mentioned, lose the popular vote by several hundred thousand, probably by a margin comparable to Al Gore's victory in 2000 over George W. Bush in terms of the popular vote.
03:46 But the official declaration from Michigan was delayed. That state went to Trump and the Republicans, therefore, for the first time since 1988. And as I'm sure many of you know, Michigan forms part of the Rust Belt, which extends roughly from Buffalo in western New York State, down through western Pennsylvania, across through the states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and parts of Illinois and Indiana. Now, this is a region that had been dominated by manufacturing industry. Further to the south, in West Virginia and Kentucky, coal had been king for generations. These are areas that have been pockmarked by decades of disinvestment that really predate globalisation as it's been branded, but have been victims since of the rise of neoliberalism from the late 1970s onwards. And there's quite a good column, I think, in today's *Guardian* by Aditya Chakrabortty, which I recommend.
05:19 Anyway, Trump's rise has doubtless been aided and abetted by the mass media, although he was constantly decrying the corporate media during large stretches of the presidential campaign. This is a man who became a national figure in no small measure because of his years on the American version of *The Apprentice*, on the NBC network, arguably the most liberal of the historic mainstream television networks. He obviously was a darling of most of the announcers on Fox News, and he had a platform regularly on CNN. He also was supported by the right-wing shock jocks on radio, like Rush Limbaugh, who has a syndicated radio show that's broadcast in cities and towns around the United States.
06:23 And of course remember that Fox News is controlled by one Rupert Murdoch. Ultimately his chief executive, Roger Ailes, had to resign in disgrace after very serious allegations of sexual harassment of Fox News staff. But it's also worth remembering that Roger Ailes goes back to the 1960s and Richard Nixon's first successful presidential election campaign.
06:54 So I think we have to remember that Trump, although he posed as an anti-establishment candidate — and it is undoubtedly the case that the Republican grandees, if you will, were extraordinarily unhappy with his performance in the primaries and his ultimate capture of the party's presidential nomination — the Trump phenomenon has been a monster gestating in the Republican Party for a long time. Arguably since the 1964 Goldwater campaign; certainly since the late 1960s and the Nixon campaign that embraced the so-called Southern strategy, which was a pretty naked attempt to cash in on racist backlash, especially in the historic Confederate states, the southern US generally, in response to the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights reforms associated with the Kennedy and particularly the Johnson administrations in the mid-1960s.
07:55 Remember that these states in the South for decades had voted generally for Democratic members of Congress, Democrats in the US Senate, and the Democratic candidate for the presidency. That stopped, really, after 1968. And if you look at the maps — ironically, the Republicans are in red — you'll see a solid block in the old Confederacy now, election after election after election, despite demographic change. Florida obviously is a so-called swing state; North Carolina another so-called swing state; both obviously in the Trump column this time.
08:26 Anyway, even the Nixon-era phrase "the silent majority" came back into the Trump vocabulary, as something worth remembering. [inaudible] Of course it was the case neither of these candidates, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, secured a majority of the popular vote, in contrast to Obama in 2008 and 2012. And in fact it is probably the case that fewer than fifty-eight percent of the registered electorate actually voted, down substantially from 2012. And in fact it was the case that Hillary Clinton [inaudible] lost a very substantial part of the vote that went to Obama in 2008 and indeed in 2012, when Obama's own vote fell compared to four years previously — roughly three percentage points below what Obama achieved in 2012.
09:30 Voter turnout was down across virtually all demographic cohorts, but especially amongst African Americans, and arguably that most reliable element of the Democratic Party's electoral coalition cost Clinton the election. If she'd retained the black vote in areas of Detroit, Michigan, on the level chalked up by Obama four years earlier, she would almost certainly have won the 16 electoral college votes. But it looks like in Motown there were districts in Wayne County, where Detroit is situated, where the African American vote for the Democrats fell by nearly 15 percent — not because people were voting for Trump, but because they didn't vote at all.
10:01 So after nearly a quarter of a century at the centre of the Democratic Party's machine, Hillary Clinton appears finished as a politician. And arguably with her — and this is in a sense a hopeful note — the whole triangulation strategy associated with her husband's presidency between 1993 and January 2001: the rightward realignment, the accommodation with Reaganism, if you will, with neoliberalism as it emerged in the United States and Britain during the late 70s and 80s, that period which was so influential, I would argue, in terms of New Labour's ideology under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — I think that's at an end. I've seven minutes left? Thank you.
11:05 Now, that's in a way good news. There was obviously as well a whitelash against eight years of the first African American in the White House as something other than a domestic servant or a minor member of the cabinet visiting the president. It has to be said as well, though, that the eight years of the Obama administration, in my view anyway, contributed to a climate where Trump could emerge as the victor in the Electoral College. His own, if you will, hallmark health care reform — which in many ways was more conservative than what Hillary Clinton was attempting to push for during the first administration of Bill Clinton — that health care reform is now obviously in jeopardy, although Trump seems to be, at least for the time being, hedging his bets about the Affordable Care Act.
12:08 Now, there's no doubt that some very poor Americans now have access to health insurance, but what Obamacare never challenged was the marketisation of health care. And in fact, at the end of the day, partly because of deals [?] in the Congress, partly because of who the architects were of this programme, it placated the health insurance companies and indeed the health care industry as a whole. And we have a situation where premiums for middle, upper-middle-class people are skyrocketing, and they are seeing themselves as subsidising health care [inaudible]. And that has undermined electoral support for Obamacare, which has been, frankly, under assault, quite remarkably and irrationally, from Republican supporters from the very beginning in 2010. And whoever the Republican candidate had been, I think a pledge to repeal Obamacare probably would have figured in the platform.
13:11 Obviously, when he inherited the White House keys from George W. Bush, there'd been the financial crash of the autumn of 2008. Unemployment was officially running at 10 percent; it's now less than half that officially. But then you need to take into account that many people in the United States, because of the nature of the benefit system, simply drop out of the labour market entirely, and they're either in the grey economy or they do not figure in the statistics at all.
13:43 Now, he did obviously fail, in the sense — if it was ever his objective — to address the erosion of real wages and living standards for large swathes of the US population that we'd define as working class and lower middle class. And in fact the evidence suggests that wealth inequality in the United States actually rose, and rose significantly, during the Obama years, with roughly ninety percent of growth within GDP in the United States going to the so-called 1%. Nothing really happened in the Obama years to fundamentally address wealth inequality. And although, you know, it's fair enough to say that he faced an implacably hostile Republican Congress from 2011 onwards, he also singularly refused to mobilise the potential popular base that existed, I would argue anyway, at the time of his first election in 2008, and by 2012 had been significantly eroded.
14:46 Remember that Obama, with his pledges around an end to the US military occupation of Iraq, had actually co-opted what anti-war movement existed in the United States — and for a while it was quite a significant anti-war movement. Essentially Obama's presidency finished it off. And I think it shows you actually the power of the Democratic Party to co-opt movements; we'll come back to that towards the end.
15:18 Now, with the inauguration of Trump looming — to quote from the front page of the New York City edition of *Time Out* — "these are scary times". And I think confirmation of that came on Sunday night with the appointment of Steve Bannon as his chief strategist. You may have read about him today in the *Guardian* or online. Bannon is currently on sabbatical from Breitbart News. Breitbart was always a right-wing online news source; it became much more populist and increasingly white nationalist, and arguably antisemitic in an overt way, after he took over in 2012. And by the way, this guy's an ex-investment banker with Goldman Sachs; he has an MBA from Harvard, and apparently was even at the London School of Economics, which I only found out this morning — not during my time [inaudible].
16:23 Now, there's also obviously the issue of the importance of the Supreme Court in the United States. Will Trump have the power to appoint at least one judge definitely, possibly two or three if he were to be in office for eight years? So, you know, a very right-wing [inaudible] placed on the US Supreme Court: a fundamental threat to the *Roe v. Wade* decision in 1972, which accorded some limited abortion rights to women across the United States. The criminalisation of abortion, I think, is an all too real possibility in the course of the next four years.
17:26 And of course we've seen media reports suggesting — just as we did in the aftermath of the Brexit vote in this country on the twenty-third of June — a spike in a range of hate crimes: racist attacks, Islamophobic attacks, homophobic attacks occurring. And certainly we live in the age of Black Lives Matter, and yet we've seen with Trump the police federations in many parts of the country actually endorse this presidential candidate. And also — organised labour in general did not support Trump and remained actually a key source of support in many states for the Clinton campaign — the main union representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers actually did endorse Trump.
17:58 Remember as well, actually, PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union, at its 1980 convention supported Ronald Reagan, and you know what happened in 1981 — most of you do, I'm sure. For those of you who don't: PATCO was smashed by the Reagan administration, and its shop stewards were literally brought in handcuffs and leg irons into federal courts for actually leading strike action.
18:29 Hopeful signs. Although comrade here has, I think understandably, characterised demonstrations of the last few days as froth in one sense, a hundred thousand people on the streets of Los Angeles isn't trivial — and that's partly, of course, LA's demography. But we've seen, from Silver Spring, Maryland, on the east coast, to Seattle, Washington, in the north-western United States, high school students — secondary school students — take the streets, walk out of classrooms, not in their dozens but in their hundreds and even a few thousands. Now that, I think, shows you the extent of shock and anger that does exist, particularly in sections of the younger generation.
19:32 And I think we also need to look at some hopeful signs for what is a pretty battered American trade union and labour movement. CWA, Communications Workers of America, had a successful three-week strike against Verizon, one of the biggest telecoms operators in North America; that was this spring. Recently, a small strike, about 700 workers — dining hall workers at Harvard University — but because it was Harvard, this was national news. An indefinite strike: they won after three weeks. They won essentially all of their demands. Service Employees International Union, representing janitors, cleaners, building custodians — this is [inaudible] in the Boston area, which is where I'm from [?] originally — but the SEIU actually secured significant gains for those workers in privately managed apartment and office buildings in the Boston area just in the last couple of months. So there are a few hopeful signs.
20:03 I think we also have to appreciate that the Rust Belt's decline has really hollowed out the historic manufacturing unions, rather like what we've seen in large swathes of Britain over the last 30-plus years. And that, I think, has helped create a vacuum where a Fox News–shaped worldview has become much more dominant among sections, particularly, of the white working class — and I have to say probably also the white petty bourgeoisie in some of these areas, because I think there's a lot of confusion. The phrase "working class" almost entirely disappeared from the US political vocabulary until a few years ago; it's come back with a vengeance in 2016.
21:06 And finally, just to come back to the beginning of my remarks: Bernie Sanders stood as a democratic socialist, and in many ways, I think, articulated a class-based anger far more effectively than Jeremy Corbyn has over the last year and a half. Now, I have many, many criticisms of Bernie Sanders, but in terms of the campaign he ran, I think it was extraordinarily impressive, and it actually defied my expectations of what could ever be achieved within the context of the Democratic Party.
21:38 And that's why I'm going to make a heretical suggestion, and that is: in the light of the Sanders campaign, should socialists in the United States simply see this as confirmation of the insurmountable structural obstacles to using the Democratic Party as a vehicle for anything progressive? Or should there actually be a rethink of the far left's categorical rejection of support for Democratic candidates, and trying to work within the Democratic Party? And I think we all probably have some appreciation that political parties in the United States are profoundly different, in how they're organised, how they're structured, from anywhere in Europe. The obstacles to third-party candidates, so-called, are even greater, in terms of the numbers of petition signatures you have to get, in state after state after state, in order to be on the ballot papers.
22:42 But it's food for thought, in any event, because clearly there are social movements that are spontaneously bubbling, but we also need to look at how we relate to a political party that competes on the electoral terrain. Very scary times, but not hopeless. And this is not, dare I say, a 1933 moment. Thank you.
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