Statement on the 2024 US Presidential Election
The US Presidential Election of 2024 has brought with it extreme consternation from large swaths of the American public. While there is little value in expanding on the class character of individual interest groups from either side, it is necessary to make a clear and unequivocal statement regarding the more general concerns of working class people which may have given rise to the outcome we’ve seen.
There is nothing new about the way the two major American ruling class parties are framed. While both try to absorb the workers movement to greater or lesser extents depending on the year and particular context, it is, perhaps ironically, in their charges against one another where the most truth lies. According to the Democratic party, the Republican party is the party of big business. Conversely, the Republican party can hardly let a day go by without aiming the charge of “big government,” at the Democrats. Were we to measure the size of either of these, business or government, in the natural unit of capitalist society, namely money, we would recognize that neither of these parties is particularly concerned with the relative obesity of either. Nevertheless, each party has to a very great degree, successfully painted the other as their “opposing” camp.
The 2024 election, much like previous US elections, represents little more than shifts in institutional trust. Unlike historic US elections, however, the degree of institutional failure, combined with the natural collusion of ruling class institutions among one another, has given rise to a more generic change in institutional trust. Where previous elections may signal the rising distrust in this or that (or even a set of) particular institutions, the recent election signals an increased distrust in all institutions.
There is nothing “novel” about this analysis. For at least a decade there have been various representatives from the self-proclaimed “left” and the self-proclaimed “right” claiming, somewhat hypocritically, that the current shift in US politics is no longer a divide between left/right, but a divide between “establishment” and a sort of “popularism.” But popularism is little more than the mob-rule of individuals and the individual is nothing more than the false promise of emancipation by the current ruling class. While it is certainly antithetical to any well-maintained establishments or institutions, it is also wholly incapable of providing any solution to real material problems.
Consequently, 2024 is the culmination of two distinct “referendum” elections. Despite the obvious echos of 2016, what makes 2024 qualitatively different is the simple fact that it follows 2016. If 2016 was a referendum on the post-2008 globalization and financialization scheme of the Obama/Biden administration, then the 2020 election was a referendum to re-assert and reform the institutions in response to Trump’s obvious failure to “drain the swamp.” Trump’s complete ineptitude in delivering on his popularist rhetoric has given rise to a much different context the second time around. While this might afford us some level of cautious optimism, the working class is not much better organized or suited to oppose the ruling class than it was in 2016 and that is the critical point of concern.
The question confronting most working class individuals in the US (as in many other countries) at this junction is not whether or not the ruling class intitutions deserve our support. This notion has been firmly repudiated for anyone paying close enough attention. Instead, it is whether or not new institutions can arise to take their place, or, perhaps at the very least, whether or not historically working class institutions can be revived. Barring any success on this front, the tens of millions of people who came out to give yet another middle finger to the status quo remain little more than protagonists in a theater of overwhelmingly superficial culture war.
The answer, as always, is class war.