Organise, Mobilise, And Stay Engaged

Herewith, my contribution to The Guardian's counselling of its staff in their sorrow at the victory of Donald Trump. Like your idols in the United States, you can now go back to pretending to be opposed to war, to genocide, to the caging of child migrants, and to all the rest of it.

But will you? Those heroes of yours have let their masks slip, and you can let yours. They stop taking the knee when the people for whom they purport to do it stop voting for them, and that is as true of class as it is of race. Now they can scream what they have always thought, that black men were misogynists, that Latinos were misogynists and racists, that Hispanics and Arabs should be deported, that the working class was garbage, and that all of the above were just so ungrateful. Substitute brown people of sorts more common in Britain. On my knees I beg you to substitute "rubbish" for "garbage". And away you go. We have always known that those were your real views, anyway.

Having lost the popular vote on the day that it probably failed to take control of the House of Representatives, the rump Democratic Party can no longer claim to be the natural majority obscured by the Electoral College and by the Senate. 90 per cent of discretionary household spending is by women, and even those who were in favour of abortion turn out to want a loaf of bread or a carton of milk rather more often than such a procedure. In politics or any other field, there is nothing on which the liberal elite will stamp harder than a movement with a young male following. The Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn movements felt the heel of that boot, so the young men of the first have largely migrated to Trump, whom Sanders would have beaten in 2016, while those of the second show signs of arriving in even worse places on our own shores unless action were taken with the utmost urgency.

As Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been pointing out, where there is no Left, then there is no restriction on the Right, and the Democratic Party is simply not the Left. If it were, then Keir Starmer would not have sent 100 staff to campaign for it. On the contrary, the Labour Party would have expelled any member who had done so. The impending settlement of the war in Ukraine has already brought down the German Government, but just as France has Mélenchon, so Germany has the even better Sahra Wagenknecht. They need something like that in the United States. And we need something like that here. Watch this space.