The US elections spelt a resounding defeat for the left

Donald Trump may have been defeated but Trumpism will continue to haunt the Democrats for at least another two years.

After almost a week of counting, the famous electoral map has finally begun to paint a comprehensible picture. Indeed, despite legal challenges from the incumbent to come, it is now abundantly clear that Joe Biden will become the forty-sixth president of the United States.

Having withstood an early onslaught of sexual assault accusations by various members of his own party, including his own running mate, Kamala Harris, the former vice president’s victory is now being touted as a ‘victory for progress’ by a plethora of left-wing commentators and activists. Up and down the country, the celebrations have already begun. Bad orange man is gone, racism has once again been defeated and progressive policies are now à la mode!

Anyone who has any knowledge of American politics, however, will understand that these celebrations are pre-mature. If one takes a step back, the political landscape becomes a much bleaker picture for the left. Indeed, the Republicans currently hold a fifty-to-forty-eight advantage in the Senate after having fended off heavily funded challenges in Maine, North Carolina and, Kentucky whilst flipping the key state of Alabama.

The final shape of the Senate will be decided in January by two run-off contests in Georgia after neither of the established parties was able to obtain a fifty per cent+ majority.

Those on the left who believe that a blue flip in the presidential election will automatically translate into a blue flip in the Senate are well mistaken. In fact, a Morning Consult poll found that forty-four per cent of those who voted for Biden admitted they were in fact voting against Trump.

The president’s polarising tenure inspired millions of new voters to come out and vote for him, but equally roused millions more new voters to come out and vote against him. With the controversial figure presumably out of the political landscape by January, it will be difficult to see how the Democrats will galvanise the same levels of voter turn-out for the Georgia senate run-off contests.

The inevitable Republican stronghold of the Senate thus spells the end of any form of Biden-Bernie coalition that was promised to progressives. Any hopes of the left getting their radical policies (the green new deal, the $15 federal minimum wage and police reforms) through the senate have all but been scuppered this election.

Donald Trump may have been defeated but Trumpism will continue to haunt the Democrats for at least another two years.

The limitations of the newly elected Democrat president will thus see greater emphasis placed on foreign policy which does not bode well for the left. Indeed, during the Obama-Biden administration, US military interventions abroad increased from two to seven countries, drone killings of civilians greatly increased, and Biden himself played an active role in the 2014 Neo-Nazi coup d’état in Ukraine. 

The most damaging aspect of Biden’s victory for the left, however, is the fact that moderates can now boast that their chosen candidate was the right call — and will continue to be. They will use the 2020 result to demonstrate that moderate candidates with moderate policies are the key to winning elections.

During the 2010 UK general election, Peter Hitchens famously campaigned for social conservatives to reject the Blairite-lite Tory party. He believed that the only way to reform the Conservative Party was by first destroying it electorally. Unfortunately, Mr. Hitchens was to be vindicated as the Tories scraped a narrow victory and continued down the path of double-dose liberalism.

The same analysis may be used for the Democrats, however. A second defeat in a row to Trump would more-than-likely have left the Democratic establishment on its knees and facing huge pressure from its membership to reform. By giving Joe Biden their vote, however, the left has essentially switched on the life-support machine breathing life into the moribund corpse of neo-liberalism. Furthermore;

If Biden is to continue to pursue the same policies as he did under the Obama administration, he will find himself engulfed by a greater wave of right-wing populism than we witnessed in 2016.

As I am writing this article, the gritty cogs of the Democrat establishment machine have already begun to ruthlessly turn against the left.

Having secured the White House, Democrat leaders are now pushing for the party to abandon any modestly progressive healthcare positions before their crucial senate races in Georgia. Furthermore, the rumoured list of front-runners for Biden’s new government suggests that he is listening to this advice as top cabinet roles look set to be filled by corporate-friendly Democrats and Republicans.

Meanwhile, progressive candidates such as AOC are being lambasted by the Lincoln Project — an organisation originally founded to fight the re-election of Donald Trump. It has now become apparent that any promises of a ‘broad coalition’ are now dead for the left.

The most resounding defeat of this election, however, was handed to the woke Identitarian left. Indeed, the exit polls certainly made for some uncomfortable reading for the left as they suggested that the ‘white supremacist’ Donald Trump had increased his vote share amongst all minorities for a second election in a row. Whilst his vote share amongst African Americans and Latinos rose by four per cent respectively, the incumbent’s vote share doubled amongst the LGBT community.

The most revealing results of the night came: firstly, in Florida where seventy-one per cent of Cubans voted for Trump, and secondly in Zapata County (located on the US-Mexican border) where Trump’s Hispanic support augmented from thirty-three per cent to fifty-two per cent.

These impressive numbers showed clear rejection of identity politics at the ballot box. A rejection of a divisive and quite frankly racist ideology which dogmatically states that a person’s character should be defined solely by their race and that we should treat minorities as a monolithic bloc that thinks and votes in the same way — often in the same way as white liberals.

A report written following the 2016 presidential elections, found that for many Americans, Trump-voting was a form of ‘cultural deviance… [from] the salience of restrictive communication norms’. In other words, Trumpism has become a new form of counterculture for Americans attempting to resist the growing liberal elitism which increasingly seeks to impose political correctness and cultural supremacy whilst monopolising all political discourse through restraints on free speech and cancel culture.

Despite the usurping of Donald Trump, the racial minority voting figures have certainly caused a meltdown amongst critical race theorists.

In response to the remarkable increase in the Latino vote for Trump, New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones explained that ‘whiteness is not static, and it is expandable when necessary. A lot of folks we don’t think of as white, think of themselves as white because the lines have never been entirely clear. That’s the beauty of white supremacy — it is extremely adaptable’.

Hannah-Jones’ comments expose the failures of the left-wing intelligentsia to comprehend the fact that working-class migrants may be more incentivised by employment and economic security than liberal Utopian politics, understand that concerns of mass illegal immigration are not solely white concerns and recognise that, while many African-Americans will want to see police reforms, many living in crime-ridden communities will equally be worried by the threats of ‘defund the police’.

However, the liberal backlash has also revealed a reluctance to accept the ‘multi-racial populism’ which Trump’s legacy has left behind. A term, coined by Spiked Online journalist Brendan O’Neil, which rejects the liberal narrative of white nationalism in favour of an alliance of patriotic ethnic minorities based on ‘fiercely anti-socialist sentiment, economic patriotism, robust border security, appreciation of faith, traditional social structures and support for the police’.

The greatest consolation prize conservatives could have asked for in this election was the rejection of proposition 16 by the people of California. The controversial proposition was fabricated to overturn proposition 209 which was introduced in 1996 to forbid school admission officials and public sector authorities from considering a person’s race or gender as part of an application form.

In other words, it rendered racial preference for hiring illegal. It was thus incredibly encouraging to find that even the most woke state in the country still believed in a meritocratic colour-blind society. This result has truly exposed racial separatists and ‘Black Lives Matter’ organisation fanatics as the vocal minority.