The Majority of the US Bourgeois Want Trump Gone. But How.

Trump. El Sisi and Saudi King Salman get it on

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

The former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, wrote before Trump’s election triumph, “Since I am more in accord with Mr. Trump’s stands than not, I am particularly sorry that as an individual human being he’s a nut ,” Noonan is a serious bourgeois theoretician, writer and Republican Party loyalist. Her class and her party overcame Trump’s malicious racism and misogyny. She was not convinced at that time that he would win as were millions like her, myself included. “Does he know he’s playing with fire? “ she asks, closing her October 2016 column, She answers her own question, “No. Because he’s a nut.”

Since that fateful day it’s been a schizophrenic year for poor Peggy-------the “nut” won. After November 2016, US politics entered new territory.  Trump’s famous threat during the campaign that he might reject the outcome of an election were he to lose was bad enough, not because it would be unfair or, as the British bourgeois might say, “not cricket” but because such an action would be a major threat to bourgeois democracy. The capitalist class prefers to govern society in this way, where workers get to vote for one of their candidates in one of their two political parties every four years. To not accept the results of an election is a threat to the legitimacy of the system. If Trump could reject the legitimacy of a so-called democratic election, so could the rest of us and the unfortunate alternative of military dictatorship might have to be dragged out of the closet.

It’s been a bumpy ride. The hope has been that Trump could be controlled, that he might learn. Noonan herself urged those around him to help him in the early stages.  In her desperation she was relieved after Trump’s March 2017 speech to Congress that she described as “….clear, plain and even warm at times”. Her excitement, fueled by hope and class loyalty led her to say of the speech that, “It marks, if not a new chapter, a turning of the page. It suggests Mr. Trump may have a capacity to grow into the office, which is so surprising to me as a thought that I hardly want to commit it to paper.”

That was March. By July Noonan was still floundering around in the quagmire and crisis of US politics. Trump, “…undermines himself almost daily by ignoring traditional norms and forms of American masculinity. ”, she wrote in her WSJ column titled Trump Is Woody Allen Without the Humor. Ouch!  She’s baiting him here, knowing that a degenerate like Trump would be enraged at an attack on his masculinity like that.

She was at her wits end as things continued to deteriorate, “…he’s whiny, weepy and self-pitying. He throws himself, sobbing, on the body politic. He’s a drama queen.”, she wrote. The situation has not improved.

I see now that George HW Bush has referred to Trump as a “blowhard” in his recent book, The Last Republicans. Being a blowhard would be harmless enough, being a racist, misogynist and a human being detached from the world of ordinary working class people is a problem. The title of that book foretells the mood among the Republican old guard that a split is not out of the question..

Trump’s critics from within his own class or in their media rarely, if ever refer to him as a racist or misogynist let alone a serial sexual predator. He’s “controversial” “provocative” “a moron” ”whiny” as Ms. Noonan writes.  The ”integrity” of the office has to be maintained.

In  last weekend’s Wall Street Journal column Ms Noonan devotes half of it to the explosion of accusations of sexual harassment and rape in the workplace, particularly in the film and entertainment industry.  It is a positive development she feels because as these women come forward, men now know that, “for the first time that they will pay a terrible price if their misbehavior is revealed.”  This will help women Noonan claims because from “here on in” it’s more likely women that come forward will be believed.

To prove her point about the changed climate, she details the rich and famous who have fallen from grace due to their abuse of women as they live lives as pervasive sexual predators using their power and influence to extract sexual favors from their victims. Bill Cosby is one, Roger Ailes another and the cretin who poses as a news reporter Bill O’Reilly another. Other famous men knew about this so they are complicit also.

The “Black October for sexual harassers” as Noonan puts it, arrives with the reports from the New York Times and the New Yorker about the sexual habits of famed liberal movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. She praises the media for making a commitment to discover the truth around this issue and take seriously accusations women make about harassment and sexual abuse at work.  She does warn of the danger of going too far. That as a response to the revelations “Human-resources departments terrified of costly lawsuits will impose more and stranger rules that won’t necessarily thwart bad guys but will harass good men.”

After her call for caution, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, not to mix the good in with the bad, Noonan’s closing sentence, “It’s good the pendulum has swung. You want it to hit the bad guys hard, and leave the good ones untouched.”, is somewhat laughable given a major omission----she forgot Trump, one of the “baddest” of them all. Trump has been accused by many women of sexual abuse. Beyond that, he has admitted to it. He has admitted that as a person with money and power he can do what he wants to women, kiss them grab their crotches and so on.  Noonan can accuse Trump of all sorts of things you see but she has to leave him out on this occasion because she does not want to undermine the institutions of capitalism further, in this case, the position of president of the world’s dominant capitalist economy.

So we get back to the question of the legitimacy of class rule and the institutions of capitalism.

Noonan’s schizophrenia is shared by many of her class colleagues. They are at a loss what to do. Trump is out of control, he is weakening their collective governance. No matter what, whether he is a moron, a blowhard, a whiner, a sexual predator, a racist, this can all be tolerated. But not when it begins to undermine the legitimacy of their class rule. Not when it undermines their institutions. We have pointed out on this blog before how racism is important to the ruling class, it divides and weakens workers’ unity. It is best to be kept simmering, always present, but can have an opposite negative affect if it breaks out in to open racial conflict. He is not good for business and profit making with a few exceptions like his deal to sell weapons to Japan will be good for the arms industry.  It will “create jobs” Trump says but the German NAZI’s created jobs in that sector too. He is crude; he is embarrassing them internationally. He is undermining US capitalism’s authority in the world.

He is in a way an accident of history. What he reflects is the end of an era, the end of the two party system in the US and also the end of the institutions that arose after WW2 and Bretton Woods that were a product of US capitalism’s dominance on the global stage. Great social events have an affect on political parties and long standing institutions alike. The relative stability of the post war era, a bi-polar world occupied by two great superpowers is a thing of the past. Despite still being the world’s strongest and most heavily armed superpower, US capitalism’s influence on the global stage has declined. The cost of maintaining it to any extent has been borne by the US working class in the form of a savage assault on living standards.  These are some of the events that have paved Trump’s rise to political power.

Another factor in the rise of Trump in the US is the role that the heads of organized labor play in propping up a sinking ship.  Millions of US workers have abandoned electoral politics completely disgusted with the two party dictatorship and the politics of millionaires..  As a friend said to me the other day, Mickey Mouse could get elected if it ran on a program that was oriented to what working people need. There has never been a time as ripe as this. But this is exactly why the heads of organized labor with 14 million people in key industries will not step forward and offer us an alternative, an independent party based on the working class, our communities and organizations.   It is one thing to be in opposition, but once in control they would be expected to produce the goods and that is something they cannot do. They see no alternative to capitalism, they do not believe that working class people can govern, for them, organizing workers in any serious way to act in our own behalf can only lead to chaos.

Struggling to find an answer to all of this Noonan warned in February 2016 of the protected and the unprotected,  “The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created.” Sounding a bit like Marx, she cannot avoid hinting at the existence of two major classes in capitalist society and struggled to give a name to these two classes other than capitalists and workers. She talked of the “protected” being isolated from society, “Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.” Is that not Trump to a “T”, or his good friend Mohammad Bin Salman?  “It’s good to be King” says Mel Brooks.

She was already worried at Trump’s appeal to the “unprotected” and implied that the protected needed to “remoralize”. She singled out immigration as an issue but this isn’t the point, reading Noonan and other more serious bourgeois commentators reveals the extreme political and social crisis that engulfs US capitalism. The coming economic slowdown will add fuel to this fire.

Noonan was right to be worried almost two years ago. This is why she has floundered around like a fish out of water trying to hang on to Trump in one moment as she condemns him in another. Trump has woken many people up. He has given the racists, union haters, misogynists a dose of confidence, they have come out in to the open a little more. This in turn has forced some to act as a response, decide they cannot be silent, cannot continue to do nothing.

Trump is the whip of the counterrevolution being felt across the backs of workers and the poor. Capital likes equilibrium undisturbed profit making. Trump is shaking the hornet’s nest, he is shaking up the global capitalist system, throwing it in to turmoil.  “I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.”, Noonan wrote before the election victory.  She’s right to an extent. The US bourgeois is overconfident, arrogant, and prone to serious mistakes. Trump is a problem for them, a serious threat to their system. The serious representatives of capital like Noonan want Trump gone, they fear the unprotected; the potential power of the US working class. 

And so they should.