Is Electing Hillary Enough to Stop Trump?
An impressive amount of people are lining up to stop Trump, but his far-Right agenda could thrive under Clinton too. Without a doubt, the forceful protests in Chicago, Albuquerque, throughout California, and those planned at the RNC are an important part of rejecting his candidacy. But too often their substantive message gets buried by louder voices — including those of Bernie Sanders, a handful of GOP defectors, trade unions leaders, liberal pundits like Arianna Huffington, and cultural icons of the Left like Tony Kushner — who profess the solution is at the polls: with a victory for Hillary. Unfortunately, that will not be enough to eliminate Trump’s appeal or his enduring power.
The message of stopping Trump is too narrowly focused on electing Clinton to be useful in the long term. Instead, we should expand the scope of “stop Trump” to mean “social movements against the Right.” This means fighting Clinton as well.
Clinton has assured her supporters that she will do everything in her power to stop Trump from taking over the White House. Luckily, most signs point towards a relatively easy victory in what has become the world’s most epic unpopularity contest. Trump’s base of white working class men have historically occupied couches, not voting booths, on Election Day. And the numbers simply don’t add up in his favor.
However, policies that Clinton has supported for the last two decades helped create the current block of Trump voters. So while a vote for Hillary is a vote against Trump, it’s not a vote against Trumpism, which will long outlast his candidacy and grow in reaction to her neoliberal policies. Nor will any amount of voting for Clinton stop the rightward drift of both major parties, even as the electorate moves the other direction. Instead, we need to organize the massive energy that is currently dedicated to beating Trump on election day toward building movements to fight the forces that gave rise to his candidacy in the first place.
A mass movement for economic and social justice is the antidote to Trump’s conservatism and Clinton’s neoliberalism. For the first time in decades, the US has viable movements for political change based in working class communities of color. The Black Lives Matter movement and the Fight for $15 (the campaign to double the minimum wage) have supported each other in exemplary ways. This kind of solidarity, the bedrock of any movement to challenge the contemporary Right, should be vigorously supported.
Revitalizing the left flank of the labor movement would not only counter the economic agenda supported by both parties, but also the racism that Trump overtly promotes and that Hillary more subtly bolsters. Due to the relatively high representation of African Americans in trade unions, strengthening worker power will necessarily improve the material conditions of blacks in the US. A revived labor movement will also do damage to Trump’s support among working class whites, who should be a fundamental part of any insurgent Left.
So why then would the largest labor unions endorse Clinton despite her clear opposition to their stated goals? Such compromises emerge from the false belief that Trump can win if we don’t back the establishment Democrat. But what if there was actually a political party worth supporting?
Progressives should unite the existing electoral alternatives into an anti-capitalist political party. Pushing the Democrats to the Left, or “occupying the party” as some radicals recently proposed, has always been a Sisyphean task. But an alternate party would shift the entire system to the Left, aligning it with the actual orientation of the electorate. There are experiments brewing. In Chicago, SEIU and the Chicago Teachers Union built United Working Families, an independent political organization which supported Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s run against the conservative mayor Rahm Emanuel. Though Sanders would have been overwhelmed by pressure from within the Democratic Party, his VT-based Progressive Party controls over a dozen local offices. These efforts could be combined with groundwork laid by the Greens and Working Families Party. An incredible 12 million people just voted for a socialist president, who also received 8 million individual contributions, more than any campaign in US history. Calls for third parties usually sound hollow and unlikely to inspire, but this moment is instructive: being radical is being realistic.
Such a party could be a vehicle for, for example, legislation that expands free higher education in the way an establishment Democrat never will. “I love the poorly educated,” Trump proclaimed, hours after an easy victory in the Nevada primary. And he should. He owes a significant amount of his success to under-educated Americans and those without college degrees. Beyond being an unequivocal social good, allowing more people who want to attend college the ability to do so seems to have the power to dissuade them from Trumpism.
An uncompromising demand for affordable higher education will also bring more young people — one of the largest demographics not voting for Trump — into political movements. Millennials suffer higher rates of student debt, poverty, and unemployment than the two immediate generations before them. While the GOP has always had trouble attracting new voters, the Millennial cohort are the most liberal ever, with only one third of those polled identifying as GOP affiliates. They even tend to approve of socialism at higher rates, even if they’re confused what it actually means. (For the record, I know plenty of professional Marxists who don’t know what it means either.)
The fear of a Trump presidency is a powerful stick, focusing unnecessary attention on the election, rather than looking beyond November. Clinton perpetuates this focus because it allows her to pursue an agenda that makes compromises with the Right in order to win votes. Progessives do have a difficult choice this election season, but it’s not which lesser evil to vote for. It is how to build a movement powerful enough to engage electoral politics on their own terms, and not the terms of the ruling class.
Bernie Sanders is wrong when he said that future historians will look back and say this is where it all began. Rather, it began through decades of organizing and resistance that has finally allowed his message — virtually unchanged for thirty years — to finally have some salience. To make sure it doesn’t end in the voting booth, we need to do more than just stop Trump.