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This US election marks a fork in world history [1]
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Date: 2025-01
With a week to go the polls are showing that the contest to become president of the United States is deadlocked. Donald Trump’s vitriol filled hate rally at Madison Square Gardens appears to justify Kamala Harris’s strategy of leading on how dangerous, divisive and racist he will be. But Trump himself declared it was a “Lovefest” and this is being reported as if it was indeed one. It is now normal for him to suck his millions of supporters through the looking class into his travesty. At the same time Jeff Bezos of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, leads the US oligarchy in declaring neutrality. In such circumstances it seems sensible to hold off speculating on the future of America and the world until after the November election.
But this is also a special moment of high anxiety. We face what may be a definitive turning point in modern history. Personally, I feel my entire political life is on the block. It’s a strange sensation; one that combines a feeling of vindication that I’ve been right all along even as I sense the axe blade of modern fascism above my neck about to sever any hope for a progressive future.
For the roots of the contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – go back to the 1960s. While radicalism in Britain took the form of satire, deep political passions were defined by America. There, a long civil conflict began. It still divides the US, it shapes much of today’s politics around the world and it defined my generation.
In 1968, Donald J Trump was 22, the perfect age to be blown away by its heady transgressions. Kamala Harris was only four. Today, the images conjured up by ‘The Sixties’ are of left-wing revolution: the civil rights movement, rage and riots against the Vietnam war, Black Power, sexual liberation. Indeed, the 1968 ‘revolution’ was triggered by the Tet offensive in February, when the Vietnamese stormed the US-backed regime in the South of their country. Militarily the so-called Viet Cong were crushed but politically they won by revealing that the US was fighting a people not a conspiracy.
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It took seven years. Despite half a million US troops, the napalming of the countryside, the eventual B-52 bombing of Hanoi and the deaths of up to two million Vietnamese, America lost.
The consequences roiled America.
In 1968 itself, the assassination of Martin Luther King decapitated the civil rights movement, that of Robert Kennedy obliterated the most credible Democrat politician to oppose escalation in Vietnam. The old order never ceased to mobilise and it was Richard Nixon who won the presidential election in 1968. He and his side-kick Kissinger expanded the war.
It was racism at home and racism abroad that defined the times, not the Left. As Bruce Springsteen put it in Back in the USA: “Got in a little hometown jam/So they put a rifle in my hand/Sent me off to a foreign land/To go and kill the yellow man.” Trump personifies and reproduces this dark side of the Sixties: its demagogic, anti-elitist, rule-breaking, ‘fuck-you’ contempt for conventions, apocalyptic violence and promiscuous misogyny.
In a compelling account of Harris’s personal career, Fintan O’Toole shows how, far from her being a continuation of her radical parents as Trump claims, “She is a child of the revolution only in the sense that she grew up in its wreckage”. However, she is also the product of the two progressive responses that materialised out of and against the Sixties ‘revolution’: the second wave of feminism and the politics of human rights.
Inspired in part by the rhetoric of the Left, feminism challenged its vanguardist dogmas and asserted the rights of full and equal agency to all humankind. And after 1975, in the wake of defeat in Vietnam, the US embraced ‘human rights’ and signed the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union to formally end the Second World War. It was entirely cynical in its motivation. It was cynical but nonetheless its claim of universal values led to the International Court. As feminist lawyer, Harris personifies the two progressive responses to the wreckage.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/us-election-2024-trump-harris-marks-a-fork-in-world-history/
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