Who Should We Blame for Trump?

An analysis on Trump's victory and misplaced blame.

The blame game for Trump has begun, and it has been a bit frustrating to witness.

While it may feel like a waste of time, it is necessary to understand what happened so we can ensure that such a thing never happens again. What isn’t necessary is hating on other working-class people or our friends and neighbors. It will exhaust us and isolate us at a time when we really need each other. Regardless of your analysis, this is a time to love on our comrades and make at least temporary peace across the leftwing political spectrum. And while I blame some on the left, that does not mean I hate them, I just believe they need to re-evaluate their current strategies.

I believe there are correct people to blame, and incorrect people. The real blame lies with our political system, the democratic party, the republican party, the wealthy ruling class–especially the new tech-brominati, and the progressive wing of the nonprofit industrial complex. The blame does not lie at the feet of third party voters, non-voters, and even many of those who voted Trump. I believe that almost any other analysis will mislead us into the wrong conclusions and create poor strategy moving forward.

Our political system, created by a bunch of relatively smart men who enjoyed owning human beings, was flawed from the start. The first past the post system and the existence of undemocratic bodies like the Senate and the Supreme Court set us up for the kinds of presidential dictatorships that we’ve long propped up in Africa and South America. And it also limits us to a two-party system that prevents third parties from gaining seats and building momentum like in countries with more modern political systems that give parties guaranteed seats based on how many votes they get or allow voters to rank their choices or vote in multiple rounds so that they can risk voting for a third party and know it will count for something.

The two major parties we’re stuck with are also clearly to blame. The Republicans have been moving to the right for decades and these sycophants have now fully embraced Trump as their overlord.

The Democrats deserve just as much flack. They too have moved to the right, first with the beloved Jimmy Carter who embraced the neoliberalism that Reagan would master. And then later with Bill Clinton and Obama. They hollowed out the political imagination of the American people and filled it with charter schools, budget cuts to public services, and infinite forms and bureaucracy to access the kinds of welfare that other countries give for free. Instead of fighting for political reform to ensure that the likes of Trump would never be elected, they doubled down on spending billions for elections and moved further toward him on issues like immigration and military expansion. Instead of responding to a new generation of progressive and socialist young people they literally backed far-right candidates to make themselves look better and worked with conservatives to shut down the careers of progressives like Cori Bush and India Walton. Instead of responding favorably to the movement for Palestine, they fought it by creating a new Red Scare, destroying the lives and careers of American college students with one hand while engaging in genocide with the other. They set up the culture of fear that is now being used by Trump to justify the targeting of pro-Palestinian activists.

I believe progressivism is an ideological mistake (it is historically and practically about reforming capitalism enough to prevent socialism) and that the Democratic Party needs to be shattered. But both forces had a role to play over the last, and they failed. A smart liberal party would have found ways to co-opt the Palestine movement, and a real progressive movement would not have allowed Biden to run for president without opposing him in the primary. The cowardice of large progressive nonprofits and foundations–and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)–is to blame for Biden’s, and eventually Kamala’s failed campaign. The fear of Trump created a hush among the progressive movement, few people wanted to acknowledge Biden’s old age until it was too late, and instead of fighting for a competitive primary, progressives allowed Harris to ascend with barely a whisper.

AOC is particularly disappointing, she has a role to play as a voice of dissent within the party, but spent most of the last year bowing to Biden and corralling support behind the mainstream wing of the party. I understand that politicians must play a different game than movement leaders, but I believe she is making a miscalculation. Trump didn’t win because Americans yearn for fascism, most Americans yearn for a different political system, and everyone knows Harris wasn’t going to deliver that. And the more progressives go to bat for people like Harris, the less credibility they will have in moments of great crisis when the masses seek leaders who appear unblemished by the corruption of the status quo. I cannot speak for the American people, but I have lost confidence in AOC and any progressive who participated in the public ruse that Harris or Biden should have gone unchallenged without a primary.

I struggle to blame the wealthy ruling class because they are simply doing what they will always do, trying to expand their wealth by any means necessary. The new tech elite seems less scrupulous than past capitalists, but it has always been bad. Henry Ford supported Hitler much like Elon Musk wants to become him. Zuckerberg and Bezos are just as bad, bowing to Trump upon his election and flooding his inauguration with money. But even the Trump opposing billionaires like Bill Gates–who has used his ill-gotten gains to reshape global healthcare around his image–are to blame. Their mere existence and fixation on infinite growth ensure that we working people are treated as tools that need to be made cheaper and cheaper to maximize profits. Now they also control our brains through algorithms and platforms that seem to prefer fascist propaganda over useful content (remember when the internet was mainly cat pictures and oversharing?).

This is where the blame lies to me. I do not blame third-party voters who had almost no statistical impact on the election. I do not blame people who expected the Democratic party to at least temporarily stop supporting a genocide. I do not blame most Trump supporters. Like the wealthy, we are all trapped and given a very limited range of options for living within our class-based society. It is those with actual political power and political vehicles who can alter this system or appropriately respond to the demands of the masses. The only option we have is to replace the current system, and unfortunately the closest thing on the ballot to that was voting for Trump, though it will clearly deliver a worse society than what came before. I do think that those who believed that Trump couldn’t be significantly worse than Harris were operating from a place of desperate delirium and that needs to be acknowledged. I do not blame them for that, but it simply was never true and if we cannot see clearly in the future, we have no chance of victory.

I believe that moving forward we, those who seek a beautiful world worth living and dying in, must reject the Democratic party leadership with the whole of our hearts–even while some of us may run as candidates within it. Trump showed what it looks like to engage in a hostile takeover of a party. He did not win his initial primary by pretending the system or the Republican party was okay and needed some tweaks, he moved with a clear sense that the whole thing was rigged and the “swamp” needed to be drained. We must build movements that are in clear opposition to this system, and build power that can elect candidates, mobilize masses, and challenge the wealthy. We have spent too much time trying to do those things without building the power that can sustain them, which is labor. But that is for another article.