Imperial Longing

Imperial Longing

US politics before the presidential elections

by Ingo Schmidt

[This article posted in November 2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.sozonline.de/2024/11/imperiale-sehnsucht/.]


Hardly a media report from the USA gets by without pointing out the division of American society. The nature of the divide is either not addressed, or a distinction is made between the hate preachers Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, the Republican candidates for president and vice president, and the voices of reason – the Democratic candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

In right-wing media, the topic of the culture war is varied: there, the truly American saviors of the nation are contrasted with morally depraved traitors to the fatherland.

Class divisions rarely appear in liberal and right-wing media, although they are addressed by all candidates in the election campaign. Avoiding the politically incorrect C-word, they present themselves as advocates of the little people. But they themselves are more or less established. And their political goals differ less than their different pitches suggest.

They all want to secure America's world domination and merge national and economic interests into an American Empire & Corporations First policy. There is no room for the interests of ordinary people. Even articulating such interests is hardly possible in view of the media spectacle of the culture war. A new irrationalism is taking hold, enshrining a lack of alternatives and political deadlock.

Social climbers and heirs

America is still the land of opportunity. For some. For example, for the candidates for vice president. Both come from modest backgrounds. And then from the countryside, no less. One of them, JD Vance, has successfully marketed his rise via the Marines and a Yale University scholarship in the autobiographical novel Hillbilly Elegy, thereby stylizing himself into a role model for his can-do world view. In doing so, he also likes to confirm the widespread prejudice among liberals and some on the left that the white working class, should it even exist, is full of racists.

The other candidate, Tim Walz, has remained more grounded. Before his career as a professional politician, he was a National Guardsman and teacher. Despite similar backgrounds, he has nothing to do with Vance's racist views.

Harris, or rather her parents, prove that even people of color can make something of themselves in the United States. Harris's father was a Stanford professor and Marxist economist, while her mother was a biomedical researcher at various universities and research institutions. In terms of class background, Harris was already one step ahead of Vance and Walz at birth, considered by many Americans to be a person of color, but still at best a second-class citizen.

Trump, on the other hand, inherited the fortune that his ancestors had laid the foundation for. His grandfather ran a restaurant and a brothel for the gold diggers who tried to scratch their luck out of the dirt during the Klondike gold rush. Very few were successful.

Trump's grandfather made a fortune that his father increased, not least by selling foreclosed properties and later with subsidized government loans and direct government contracts. This created a legacy that allowed Donald to occasionally fail in business and try his hand at a career as a TV showman and a self-promoting politician.

He was and is so successful at the latter that political reporting in and about the USA, itself a subdivision of show business for a long time, is more interested in Donald Trump's latest scandalous statements than in political content.

The candidates vying for a place in the White House are not representative. For the vast majority, America is a country of limited opportunities. They inherit nothing. They don't have the necessary connections for social advancement, and the number of those who can advance without connections is limited.

Military service as the first step on the career ladder may still be open to many, but when it comes to college education, things are already getting tight. Tuition fees are unaffordable for many, and scholarships are rare. Social climbers like Vance and Walz are the exception, as is Harris's rise. And only very few are born with a golden spoon in their mouths like Trump.

They are anything but representative, but their origins and position in the social system provide insights into the economic and social tensions and political blockades currently facing the US.

Empire and vested interests

The candidates live the American dream, which has become a nightmare for the many. Since the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, this dream has been based on the contradiction of promising universal freedom while at the same time regarding Americans as special, as a chosen people. This contradiction could only be resolved if the entire world became American.

Many Americans were able to live with this contradiction as long as the country was moving in precisely this direction, incorporating much of North America, declaring Latin America its backyard, and integrating the post-colonial and, eventually, the post-communist countries into the US-dominated world market.

But there were always “the others”, those excluded from the American dream: the survivors of the murder of indigenous peoples, the slaves and the impoverished masses in the south and east of the world. And even before the globalization or Americanization of the world reached its limits, many who see themselves as part of the chosen people felt cheated out of their share of the American dream.

The number of these doubters has been growing ever since. A new right-wing movement, from Reagan in the 1980s to Trump today, is profiting from this. Now, American supremacy and privileges are to be secured by abandoning the universal promise of freedom and happiness. Through military superiority, sanctions and an industrial policy geared towards national security. And by limiting immigration.

In a rare show of agreement between significant parts of the population and the political class, not only the economic giant China and the military power Russia are seen as a threat to the American Empire, but also immigrants. When it comes to Empire First, Trump and Harris differ only in nuances, only rhetorically are they worlds apart.

But the culture war only distracts from the fact that measures to maintain the American Empire, be it economic pressure, support for military coups, the organization of orange revolutions or direct military interventions, ensure a constant stream of refugees into the American heartland.

That measures to strengthen the empire cost the money that could make life a little better for the majority in the heartland. And that despite a weakening economy and the actual and even more felt loss of importance of the USA, profits have risen massively in recent years, while wages on average are stagnating or, for many, have fallen.

A speechless working class

As voters, workers have a voice; as a class, they are voiceless and speechless. The situation was somewhat different before the last election. Bernie Sanders' bid for the presidency was accompanied by mass mobilizations not seen in a long time. There is almost nothing left of that. With the aim of preventing a second Trump presidency, Sanders renounced his own candidacy early on and initially backed Biden and, after Biden renounced, Harris.

The change of policy from neoliberal globalization to militaristic great power politics represents an adjustment to economic weakness and geopolitical shifts. It is not a reaction to shifts in domestic class relations. The mobilizations associated with Sanders were an interlude, not a turnaround toward a strengthened working class.

The culture war makes it difficult to organize workers. They have not had their own media and public for a long time. That is why dissatisfaction manifests itself, among other things, in the shared longing for imperial splendor and greatness.

Liberals, and some on the left as well, shake their heads in disbelief at how people can cheer Trump's madness. They refuse to see that Trump finds approval not despite, but because of his madness. Be it out of desperation or disappointment with the Democratic governments.

Ingo Schmidt is a Marxist economist and lives in Canada and Germany.