Thursday 12th of December 2024

Illegal border crossings reached record levels under the Biden administration....

Donald Trump swept to victory on Tuesday by chipping away at groups of voters which Democrats once believed would help them win the White House for a generation.

After Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, many triumphantly claimed that the liberal voting coalition which had elected the first black president was growing more powerful, as the makeup of America changed.

 

BY Anthony Zurcher

 

Older, white conservatives were dying off, and non-white Americans were projected to be in the majority by 2044. College-educated professionals, younger people, blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, and blue-collar workers were part of a “coalition of the ascendant”.

These voters were left-leaning on cultural issues and supportive of an active federal government and a strong social safety net. And they constituted a majority in enough states to ensure a Democratic lock on the Electoral College – and the presidency.

“Demography,” these left-wing optimists liked to say, “is destiny.” Sixteen years later, however, that destiny appears to have turned to dust.

Cracks began forming when non-college educated voters slipped away from the Democrats in midterm elections in 2010 and 2014. They then broke en masse to Trump in 2016. While Joe Biden, with his working-class-friendly reputation built over half a century, won enough back to take the White House in 2020, his success proved to be only a temporary reprieve.

This year, Trump supplemented his gains with the blue-collar workers by also cutting into the Democratic margins among young, Latino and black voters. He has carved up the coalition of the ascendant.

According to exit polls, Trump won:

13% of the black vote in 2024 compared to Republican John McCain’s 4% against Obama

46% of the Latino vote this time, while McCain got 31% in 2008

43% of voters under 30 against the 32% for McCain

56% of those without a college degree - back in 2008, it was Obama who won a majority

Speaking on Thursday after his comeback victory, Trump celebrated his own diverse coalition of voters.

“I started to see realignment could happen because the Democrats are not in line with the thinking of the country," the president-elect told NBC News.

Immigration and identity politics

Trump did it with a hard-line message on immigration that included border enforcement and mass deportations – policies that Biden and the Democrats recoiled from when they took power back from Trump in 2021, lest they anger immigrant rights activists in their liberal base.

Illegal border crossings reached record levels under the Biden administration, with more than eight million encounters with migrants at the border with Mexico.

“If you watch a video from Hillary Clinton back in 2008 in the primaries, she talks about making sure there's wall-building, making sure that that immigrants who violate the law get deported, making sure everybody learns English,” said Kevin Marino Cabrera, a Republican commissioner in Miami-Dade County. “It's funny how far to the left [the Democrats] have gone.”

This week, Trump became the first Republican since 1988 to win that heavily Latino county in Florida. He also won Starr County in south Texas, with its 97% Latino population, with 57% of the vote. In 2008, only 15% of the county voted for McCain, the Republican.

Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who specialises in Latino voting trends, told the BBC that the problem with “demography is destiny” was that it risked treating all non-white Americans as an “aggrieved racial minority”. “But that is not and nor has it ever been the way Latinos have viewed themselves,” he added.

“I hate that if you’re black, you've got to be a Democrat or you hate black people and you hate your community,” Kenard Holmes, a 20-year-old student in South Carolina, told the BBC during the presidential primaries earlier this year. He said he agreed with Republicans on some things and felt Democratic politicians took black voters for granted.

With some states still tabulating their results, Trump currently has improved on his electoral margins in at least 2,367 US counties, while slipping in just 240.

It wasn’t just the number of counties that Trump won that made a difference, either. Kamala Harris needed to post significant margins in the cities to offset Republican strength in rural areas. She consistently fell short.

In Detroit’s Wayne County, for example, which the latest US Census reports is 38% black, Harris won 63% of the vote – significantly lower than Joe Biden’s 68% in 2020 and Obama’s 74% in 2008.

Polls consistently suggested that the economy, along with immigration, were the two issues of highest importance to voters - and where polls indicated Trump had an advantage over Harris.

His economic message cut across racial divides.

“We're just sick of hearing about identity politics," said Nicole Williams, a white bartender with a black husband and biracial children in Las Vegas, Nevada – one of the key battleground states that Trump flipped this year.

“We're just American, and we just want what's best for Americans," she said.

The Democratic blame game begins

Democrats are already engaged in considerable soul-searching, as they come to grips with an election defeat that has delivered the White House, the Senate and, perhaps, the House of Representatives to Republican control.

Various elements within the party are offering their own, often conflicting, advice on the best path from the wilderness back to power.

Left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders, who twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, also criticised identity politics and accused the party of abandoning working-class voters.

Some centrist Democrats, meanwhile, have argued that the struggle to connect with voters goes beyond the economy and immigration. They point to how the Trump campaign was also able to use a cultural message as a wedge to fracture the Democratic coalition.

Among the positions that Republicans targeted in this year’s election were calls to shift funding away from law enforcement, decriminalise undocumented border-crossings and minor crimes like shoplifting, and provide greater protections for transgender Americans.

Many arose after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the resulting rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as other efforts to advance social justice and acknowledge darker parts of American history.

Within a few years, however, some of those positions proved a liability for Democrats when trying to win over persuadable voters and keep their coalition from fraying. Harris, for example, backed away from some positions she’d taken when she first ran for president in 2019.

n the last month of the presidential campaign, the Trump team made the vice-president’s past support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for federal prisoners and detained immigrants a central focus.

One advert ended with the line: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

The Trump campaign spent more than $21m on transgender issue ads in the first half of October – about a third of their entire advertising expenditures and nearly double what they spent on spots on immigration and inflation, according to data compiled by AdImpact.

It’s the kind of investment a campaign makes if it has hard data showing an advert is moving public opinion.

After Trump’s convincing win, Congressman Seth Moulton, a moderate from Massachusetts, said his party needed to rethink its approach on cultural issues.

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton told the New York Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Progressive Democrats, meanwhile, reject that characterisation, and argue that standing up for the rights of minorities has always been a core value of the party. Congressman John Moran wrote on X in response: "You should find another job if you want to use an election loss as an opportunity to pick on our most vulnerable.”

Mike Madrid, the political strategist, has a brutal assessment of where the Democratic coalition is today.

“The Democratic Party was predicated on what really is an unholy alliance between working-class people of colour and wealthier white progressives driven and animated by cultural issues,” Madrid said. “The only glue holding that coalition together was anti-Republicanism.”

Once that glue came unstuck, he said, the party was ripe for defeat.

Future elections are sure to be held in a friendlier political environment for Democrats. And Trump, who has shown a unique ability to attract new and low-propensity voters to the polls, has run his last campaign.

But 2024’s results will provide plenty of fuel for Democratic angst in the days to come.

The Harris campaign itself believes she lost to Trump because she was facing a restive public angry over the economic and social turbulence in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.

“You stared down unprecedented headwinds and obstacles that were largely out of our control,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a letter to her staff. “The whole country moved to the right, but compared to the rest of the country, the battleground states saw the least amount of movement in his direction. It was closest in the places we competed.”

Moses Santana, a Puerto Rican living in Philadelphia, is from a demographic which seemed reliably Democratic a decade or so ago. But when he spoke to the BBC this week, he was not so convinced the Democrats had delivered when in power - or that their message today connected with Americans like him.

“You know, Joe Biden promised a lot of progressive things, like he was going to cancel student debt, he was going to help people get their citizenship,” he said. “And none of that happened. Donald Trump is bringing [people] something new.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mzl7zygpmo

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

“It’s hard to do cartoons without bias…”

         Gus Leonisky

liberalism gone rogue....

 

Goodbye to the liberal elites: Trump’s no savior, but he correctly identified America’s biggest problem

It’s hard to predict what the 47th US president’s term will be like, but the main conclusions can already be drawn

By Glenn Diesen

 

Donald Trump’s election victory should not have been a surprise. The era of liberal hegemony has already come to an end, and a correction was long overdue.

Put plainly, the liberal hegemony is no longer even liberal, and the hegemony is exhausted. 

Trump is often denounced for being transactional, yet the de-ideologization of America and return to pragmatism is exactly what the country needs.

Change or preserve the unsustainable status-quo?

The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the country has been heading in the wrong direction, which placed Kamala Harris – as part of the incumbent team – in an unfavorable position. As vice president, she could not distance herself sufficiently from President Joe Biden’s policies, which meant that she had to own the failures of the past four years. The message of “turning the page” didn't resonate, and she was left with the meaningless slogan of “joy” – which only demonstrated her detachment from the growing concerns of Americans. 

The borders have been wide open, media freedom is in decline, the government’s overreach is growing, US industries are no longer competitive, the national debt is out of control, social problems and culture wars are going from bad to worse, the political climate has become increasingly divisive, the military is overstretched, while the global majority rejects Washington’s simplistic and dangerous heuristics of dividing the world into liberal democracy versus authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the US is complicit in a genocide in Palestine and is heading towards nuclear war with Russia.

Who would vote for four more years when the status quo entails driving off a cliff? It is a good time to be in opposition and offer change. Being a populist with a bombastic demeanor, seemingly immune to consequences from breaking social norms, is a good feature when breaking free from decades-old ideological dogmas that constrain necessary pragmatism.

Neoliberalism exhausted the US

“Make America Great Again” is likely a reference to somewhere around 1973, when the US peaked – it's since been in decline. Under the neoliberal consensus, society became an appendage to the market and politicians became unable to deliver the changes demanded by the public. The political left could not redistribute wealth, and the political right could not defend traditional values and communities. Globalization gave birth to a political class loyal to international capital without national loyalties, and accountability to the public disappeared. Globalization often contradicts democracy, and there is a growing division between illiberal democracy versus undemocratic liberalism.

A key lesson from the American System in the early 19th century was that industrialization and subsequent economic sovereignty is a necessity for national sovereignty. Tariffs and temporary subsidies are important tools for infant industries to develop maturity, and fair trade is thus often preferable to free trade. Trump’s tariffs to re-industrialize and advance technological sovereignty are noble ambitions that even the Biden administration attempted to emulate. However, Trump’s flaw is that excessive tariffs and an economic war on China will severely disrupt supply chains to the extent it will undermine the US economy. The excesses of Trump’s tariffs and economic coercion derive from the effort to break China and restore US global primacy. If the US can accept a more modest role in the international system as one among many great powers, the president elect could embrace a more moderate economic nationalism that would have a greater prospect of succeeding.

Trump’s vice president-elect, JD Vance, correctly noted the self-defeating moralizing of the US: “We have built a foreign policy of hectoring and moralizing and lecturing countries that don’t want anything to do with it. The Chinese have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people.” It is a good time for pragmatism to triumph over ideology.

Critics of Trump are correct to point out the paradox of a billionaire claiming to represent the people against a detached globalized elite. Sitting in flashy buildings with his name on the side in large golden letters, Trump has nonetheless taken the role of representing American workers by calling for re-industrialization. Raised in the excesses and hedonism of America’s cultural elites, Trump calls for preserving America’s traditional values and culture. Is Trump a savior? Probably not. But policies are more important than personalities, and Trump is kicking open a door that was seemingly closed by liberal ideology.

An end to liberal crusades – including ending the Ukraine proxy war

Trump’s appeal to end the forever wars resulted in invaluable support from former Democrats such as Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Elon Musk. The liberal crusades over the past three decades have fueled unsustainable debt. Of course, they financed the deep state (the blob), but they alienated the US across the world, and incentivized the other great powers to collectively balance Washington. The forever wars were costly mistakes that never end well, yet the US could absorb these costs during the unipolar era in the absence of any real opponents. In a multipolar system, America must scale back its military adventurism and learn how to prioritize foreign policy objectives. 

It is not unreasonable to argue that preserving the empire in its current format could cost the US its republic. Trump is not in favor of dismantling the empire, but being a transactional pragmatist, he would like a better return on investment. He believes allies should pay for protection, regional arrangements such as the former NAFTA and TPP that transfer productive power to allies are rejected, and adversaries should be engaged to the extent it serves US national interests. Trump is condemned for befriending dictators, yet this is surely preferable to the so-called “liberal” diplomats who no longer believes in diplomacy as it is feared to’ “legitimize” adversaries.

Trump would like to put an end to the proxy war in Ukraine as it is very costly in terms of both blood and treasure, and the war has already been lost. The liberal crusaders never defined a victory against the world’s largest nuclear power that believes it is fighting for its survival. Washington’s elites have repeatedly stated it is a good war as Ukrainian soldiers are dying rather than Americanss, thus it is difficult to morally shame Trump when his main argument is that the killing must stop.

The liberal crusaders in Washington also frequently argue that the strategic objective of the proxy war has been to knock out Russia from the ranks of great powers so the US could focus its resources on containing China. Instead, the war has strengthened Moscow and pushed it further into the arms of Beijing. A humanitarian disaster is taking place and the world is being pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Economic coercion, including the theft of Russia’s sovereign funds, has triggered the global majority to de-dollarise and develop alternative payment systems. Trump is hardly innocent as he started the economic war against China. However, without ideological constraints, there may be room for course correction as he noted that the weaponisation of the dollar threatens the foundation of US superpower status. Yet again, pragmatism can triumph over ideology.

Will Trump be successful? He will certainly not end the war in 24 hours. Trump has the tools to influence Ukraine as the US is financing the fighting and arming Kiev. However, Trump’s maximum pressure is unlikely to work against Russia as it considers this to be a war of survival, and the political West has broken nearly all agreements. Trump withdrew from strategic arms control treaties and armed Ukraine, which contributed to triggering the war. Russia will demand an end to NATO expansion in accordance with the Istanbul agreement, plus territorial concessions as a result of almost three years of conflict. Trump has previously signalled the willingness to offer an end to NATO expansionism, which could lay the foundation for a wider European security agreement. The conflicts between the West and Russia derive from the failure to establish a mutually acceptable settlement after the Cold War. The West instead began expanding NATO and thus revived the zero-sum bloc politics of the 1945-1991 period, and there has ever since been conflicts with Russia over where to draw the new militarised dividing lines. 

Concerning Israel, there is an obvious exception to Trump’s aversion to war. Trump, Vance, Musk, Gabbard, and Kennedy are all reluctant to take a hard line against the genocide in Palestine or even criticize the Jewish state. Trump will likely continue to offer unconditional support for Israel and take a hostile stance against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Pragmatism and “America First” will likely be lacking in this part of the world.

Panic across the Liberal Empire

The opponents of Trump demonstrate a remarkable difficulty in articulating the case for Trump. Even if they know why people voted for him, they feel morally compelled to refrain from articulating the reasons in fear of “legitimizing” his policies with understanding. The inability to articulate the position of an adversary is a good indication of being propagandized. Have we been exposed to propaganda? There is clearly a tendency for ideological fundamentalists to present the world as a struggle between good and evil, in which mutual understanding and pragmatism are demonized as a betrayal of sacred values. 

The panic and confusion are also caused by a dishonest media. The media has almost exclusively negative coverage of Trump, while Harris can do no wrong. Trump did not win despite the bad media coverage but because of it. A populist claims to be the real representative of the people, who will defend them against a detached and corrupt elite. The animosity towards Trump and his supporters was therefore worn as a badge of honor. The political-media elites used the judiciary system against the political opposition during the election cycle, they impeached Trump twice and tried him as a private citizen, and they attempted to remove him from 16 state ballots.

Controlling the media is not an advantage when it is not trustworthy. The Russiagate hoax from the 2016 election has been exposed as a fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story from the 2020 election was censored by the media under the false pretense of being “Russian propaganda.” During the 2024 election, the removal of Biden was largely a non-issue. The undemocratic selection of Harris was ignored, and the media instead converted her into a rockstar after ignoring her due to her failures over the past four years. The first assassination attempt against Trump went down the memory hole with remarkable haste, while most people are likely unaware that there was a second one. Stupid media stories, such as Trump threatening Liz Cheney with a firing squad, were so desperate and dishonest that they had the opposite effect. The liberal machine, represented by an obedient media and Hollywood elites, has run out of steam.

Western Europe is in panic as it lost its ally in the White House and thus fears for the future of the liberal international order. Yet, the liberal international order is already gone and an ideological EU is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Biden is complicit in genocide in Palestine, he attacked Europe’s critical energy infrastructure, lured European industries to relocate to the US under the Inflation Reduction Act, brought major war to Europe by provoking a proxy war in Ukraine and sabotaging the peace negotiations in Istanbul, he intensified censorship around the world, and has pressured the Western Europeans to reduce economic connectivity with China. After years of aspiring for strategic autonomy and de-vassalization, the EU has subordinated itself and accepted diminishing relevance in the world. The Western European political-media elites present Trump as the new Hitler, yet are in a great hurry to subordinate themselves economically, militarily and politically to the US. They are also worried that a similar leadership crisis has come to their own continent. Political elites committed to liberal hegemony have neglected national interests, and will be swept away in the years to come.

How will it all end?

The second Trump presidency will not be like the first term. The first Trump presidency was constrained as the Democrats openly contested the election results in 2016 by denouncing him as an illegitimate leader who had been placed in the White House by the Kremlin. The Russiagate hoax has since been exposed and Trump even won the popular vote by 5 million votes, giving him a powerful mandate to pursue his agenda. Furthermore, the first Trump government was infiltrated by neocons as he was dismissed as too radical. Over the past eight years, a powerful MAGA movement has emerged that also consists of former Democrats.

One should be careful when looking into the crystal ball and making predictions, and this is especially true with Trump. Professor Richard Rorty predicted in 1998 that the excesses of liberalism and globalization would eventually be met with a fierce correction:

“Members of labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots… Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen.”

Trump has identified many of the problems plaguing the US and the world, although he may not have the answers. He will make many mistakes and his maximum pressure approach from business is not always transferrable to international politics. After decades of criminalising opposition to liberal hegemony, it should not have been a surprise that a “strongman” would be elected to throw a wrench into machinery. Trump is a wild card and the world is undergoing immense transformation, so to quote Rorty: “no one can predict what will happen.”

This piece was first published on Glenn Diesen’s Substack and edited by the RT team.

https://www.rt.com/news/607372-conclusions-trump-us-president-term/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

“It’s hard to do cartoons without bias…”

         Gus Leonisky