On January 6, 2021, Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, fulfilled his duty and, contrary to the president’s coup wish, certified Biden’s victory. Soon, in the next 6/1, Kamala Harris, the defeated vice-president, will bluntly certify Trump’s victory. In this act, the 6/1 of 2017 gains new light, when Biden, then Obama’s vice-president, certified Trump’s first victory.
Until days ago, Trump was described as a passing diversion, a brief interlude in US history. Today, it is more appropriate to interpret Biden’s presidency as a short-lived hiatus in the era ushered in by Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat. Four years ago, Biden triumphed thanks to the Covid-19 epidemic. But, since 2016, the political tradition inaugurated by Franklin Roosevelt and updated in the immediate post-Cold War period has been broken.
Information technologies and globalization have caused a profound split in the world of work. In search of lower production costs in Asia or Mexico, the traditional industry embarked on the adventure of relocation. Meanwhile, digital economy clusters have flourished in the US, supported by vast venture capital funds. The American economy has bifurcated, intensifying the contrast between those with a college degree and those who only completed high school. Hence a new political scenario emerged: the stage for the rise of Trump.
The advent of the digital economy and deindustrialization dissolved the coalition of unionized, black, and Hispanic workers that sustained the Democratic Party. Democrats have become the party of the cosmopolitan middle class in big cities that sees politics through the lens of the environmental crisis, female reproductive rights and, in the case of militant sectors, also the identity bible written in universities.
Trump identified, in this mutation, the opportunity to refound His movement, MAGA (Make America Great Again), destroyed the old liberal-conservative party that represented business corporations. In his place, he built a national-populist party from the outside in that offers a political interpretation for the economic insecurities of the orphans of the traditional economy.
Maga’s social base does not live in the world of bytes, but in the world of fossil fuels. It aims to restore basic economic security. He is not interested in “body politics”, but in the price of food and mortgages. Rejects the idea of ”historic reparations” for minorities. In the absence of a consistent Democratic argument, it buys into Trump’s legend about the “immigrant invasion” that would put the jobs and incomes of ordinary people at risk.
The national-populist party is no longer limited to the lower white middle class of rural cities and cornfields. The Hispanic vote, a Democratic stronghold in the recent past, is moving towards the Republican Party – and a similar phenomenon, on a smaller scale, occurs in the Democratic stronghold of the black electorate. In a way, Maga is inclusive.
Millions of Trump voters voted, before, for Democrats can choose the convenient alibi of classifying them as a mass of “deplorables”: racists, fascists or misogynists. It is the shortest way to reap serial electoral defeats.
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