I predicted a Trump win, and I’ve also predicted he won’t see out his term which would mean the world will suffer a Vance presidency.
In analysing the Democrats' defeat, it must be acknowledged that Harris had to overcome the double whammy of her sex and her ethnicity in a country which, in its bones, is sexist and racist. In addition, her parents were "immigrants" of the sort that Trumpists have been encouraged to see as the main cause of their mounting social and economic woes.
There surely is no greater demonstration of the USA's national cognitive dissonance than the spectacle of the descendants of settler colonists and subsequent immigrants railing against other, more recent, immigrants.
Harris had to keep the warmongers (I refuse to grace them with the term hawk) in her party happy, and toe the party-corporate line in continuing to fund Israel’s brutal assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, while trying to persuade Muslim-Americans and anti-Zionist Democrats that they should still vote for her.
She had to try to win back enough of the millions of angry, disillusioned, fearful working class Americans by promising to keep the trickle-down tap open a notch, while also keeping the predatory corporate class and their legions of affluent enablers and minions happy by not letting too much of what they see as “their money” flow down to the increasingly debased base.
She had to walk the political tightrope between professing an on-going, uncritical support for trans rights, (a cause the Democrats handled in a way that allowed the religious and secular right to make a bumper crop of political hay), and defence of women’s reproductive rights in the form of access to abortion and birth control – which the right want to erode.
She relied on a procession of celebrities using their tinselly star power to win votes from the various cults of celebrity that infest the USA and, due to its cultural hegemony, infest the rest of the world also.
She even appealed for support from some of the worst of USA Inc’s warmongering border-line and actual fascists.
All she had to do was to beat a bumbling, mumbling, incoherent, seventy-eight year-old, self-absorbed rich-boy with improbable hair and orange-hued skin.
A sexist who holds women in contempt. A convicted felon. A cheat. A liar. An out and proud ignoramus. A person whose popular appeal can only be explained in the context of the venality, cynicism, and opportunism of his main political opponents.
Some people, men and women alike, are drawn to the maverick, the bad boy – the man who appears to thumb his nose at convention and the forms of authority which maintain it. As is usual in the US, appearance has a tenuous link to essence.
The real US is hidden under a glossy veneer of democracy and decency which obscures its plutocratic and essentially corrupt social and political foundation. USA Inc's foundation is now so riven with contradictions and so rotten, the veneer, even where it was once thickest and glossiest, has warped and cracked.
Trump is not a maverick; he’s a narcissist who is driven not by ideology but by ego, by a drive for personal power that fills the places in his psyche where intellect, rationality, self-control and decency should reside.
Trump’s ego is vast but hollow, and it requires a constant stream of fawning and flattery to keep it inflated. Those who want to influence or wholly control him know this.
Those of his supporters who aren’t drawn to his apparent individualism and political unorthodoxy have been captured by the cult of celebrity which wields immense influence in the US, and Trump was a media celebrity before he decided to enter politics. It is a measure of the USA's cultural depth that even the spurious claim to celebrity via a schlocky “reality-TV” show is enough to draw people to him.
Some people voted for him because they are desperate for anything seemingly solid and unsinkable that they can use as a buoyancy aid to stay afloat in increasingly wild socio-economic seas.
Some perform a seemingly impossible leap of logic and common sense and turn him into an almost messianic figure.
People will continue to analyse the reasons why he has won a second term as president despite all the aspects of his life, his intellect, and his morality that should be impediments to it.
The fact is, the Republicans won largely because their opponents failed to provide a viable choice for the tens of millions of Americans who desperately want their country to change – to change in its essence, not just see another coat of gloss paint or cheap veneer laid over the rotting base.
The women who voted Republican because Trump "knows what a woman is", because he promised to roll back trans rights, protect women's sport, keep gender ideology out of schools .... were conned.
They were led to or actively chose to believe that the ideology of gender identity was the construction of the left; that somehow this "left" which is incapable of achieving much else, managed to impose an ideological framework on global corporations, on NGOs, and on corporate-compliant governments at all levels of governance and management.
Their narrow focus prevented them from seeing gender identity ideology and praxis as a Neo-liberal project, the culmination of the rightwing politics of the "self", which was a nail in the coffin of mass collectivism, a wedge to topple the last of the trees in the leftwing forest.
The idea of the gender identity orthodoxy being a leftwing movement only makes sense in relation to the infantile notion of the Democratic party being left wing, which, by any sensible measure, it is not.
It is essentially a right wing, corporate-friendly party that has recently embraced certain "liberal" issues. There is not even the pretence of making systemic changes, just some accommodations to take off the worst of the sharp edges and dull the most glaring contradictions.
In essence, the Democrats' commitment to traditional leftwing values and causes takes the form of applying more layers of plastic veneer, gloss paint, and glitter.
Left wing feminists said all along that the way the ideology of gender identity was embraced and enacted risked being weaponised by the religious and secular right – to the detriment of women's rights and wider democratic and social rights.
As we are pushed into taking a stand on critically important issues, I will enter into strategic alliances with those liberals who embraced gender identity orthodoxy. Those who did so fanatically however, I am unlikely ever to trust, or forgive because they either lacked political acumen or they acted in bad faith.
