▲ Donald Trump (in file image) won the presidency of the United States with the votes of just over a third of the total electorate; That is, a minority of the registry, so it is false that the Republican has obtained a large popular mandate.Photo Afp
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before anything else, and for counter propaganda here and around the world: it is false that the right has triumphed with a great popular mandate, which has led countless progressive analysts here and in other parts of the planet to proclaim that the United States has now shown its true colors of a racist, misogynistic and xenophobic country, among other things. It is worth highlighting, as The Day reported (https://www.jornada.com.mx/2024/11/13/mundo/024n1mun), that Trump won the presidency with just over a third of the total electorate, that is, a minority of those who have the right to vote in this country.
Now there is more data – still preliminary – from the very slow count, which puts the victory of the right in context. Trump won by one of the narrowest margins of the popular vote since the 19th century, the poll calculated. New York Timeswith a 1.6 percent lead over Kamala Harris. Furthermore, everything indicates that he will not win the majority of the popular vote cast (now it is 49.9 percent). The fact that 40 percent of the electorate did not participate in the election means that Trump won with less than half of that 60 percent of the electorate who went to the polls. Although he continues to declare that “ America gave us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he actually won the White House with a third of the electorate. Or put another way, an overwhelming majority of two-thirds of the electorate did not vote for him.
Now, given the triumph of the right brought to power by a minority of the electorate, the immediate question is where and how a resistance will be organized taking into account that the vast majority of the country did not support the reactionary and neo-fascist proposal of the winner. From traditional democrats, liberals, to progressives in the broadest sense, everyone, obviously, knows that it is necessary to respond and quickly to the nation project that is already being promoted by the president-elect and his entourage. But for now there is no consensus beyond that, between alerts and alarms about how terrible the next four years will be. The proposals are everything one imagines, or in fact, they do not show great imagination for now, although that will happen over time, since rebuild to the Democratic Party and/or bet on social organizations – unions, environmentalists, women, the gay community, defenders of civil rights, immigrants, and more – that is, some combination of those defeated by the result. It is worth emphasizing that it was not only an electoral defeat, but also one of the country’s progressive social forces.
While Trump builds his cabinet, described by some as a clown car, the implications for the majorities here and for countries that are not willing to take orders are not funny at all. For the next rulers, the enemy internal It is the entire wide range of opponents of his project, as Trump repeated every day. The former military man nominated to head the world’s largest armed forces wrote in his book American crusadein 2020, we should humiliate, intimidate and crush our leftist opponents and “defeat the internal enemies of America”.
For the resistance, this is no longer the same old political game. And therefore, the answer cannot be more of the same. Perhaps what Trump represents is so serious that it will force progressive forces to imagine something far beyond just the next election.
For now, Trump could have disrupted the traditional game of the American political duopoly with his movement that was never controlled by the traditional leadership of the Republican Party, which is now subject to the magnate. On the progressive side, Bernie Sanders partly managed to do something similar within the Democratic Party by running as the party’s presidential candidate in 2016, but in that case the traditional leadership defeated him. Perhaps the resistance that will be emerging will have to address whether it is time for something new beyond just requesting a vote for the lesser evil, again.
Johnny Cash. man in black. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDd32K-mOVw