Everything that happens in a dominant country within the world system is important to the world. If the event is dramatic or dramatised, that importance increases. The US midterm elections are one such event. They represent an unprecedented victory for the Democratic Party and a particularly humiliating defeat for President Donald Trump. From his usual residence in parallel realities, Trump asked Americans to imagine that he was the real candidate because, if that were the case, the Republican Party would win just as he himself “had always won.” Americans decided to take his request seriously and voted overwhelmingly against him and his policies. He was the super-candidate who was super-defeated.
What’s Dramatic About the Elections
1. The most dramatic thing of all is realising that money does not have unlimited power to determine election outcomes. The US is the country where financial investment in electoral processes reaches unimaginable proportions. The midterm elections showed that even the most expensive manipulation of public opinion—using the most sophisticated disinformation technology powered by artificial intelligence—cannot guarantee victory, at least not without significant electoral fraud.
The limits of money have allowed for the emergence of an enthusiastic social, cultural, ethno-racial, and religious diversity whose integrity has remained intact despite the propaganda battalions unleashing high-powered attacks against it in recent decades. These battalions are embedded in the media, in political campaign financing, in far-right organisations, in conservative religious congregations, and, more recently, in state institutions themselves (the presidency, government agencies such as the infamous ICE—US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and the Supreme Court itself).
2. The second dramatic factor of the midterm elections lies in the unequivocal way it revealed that democracy’s sole raison d’être and the most important source of its legitimacy is the extent to which it can contribute to the well-being and guarantee of a dignified life for the majority of the population. When people feel in their concrete day-to-day lives that those in power are draining the family budget, those in power lose their legitimacy to govern, and the vote becomes a personalised decree of expulsion.
3. The third dramatic factor is that defending democracy and the dignified life it can provide takes work. It is not enough to vote; one must do organisational work, talk to relatives and friends, go door-to-door in their communities to provide information, answer questions, offer clarifications—doing this over several years and for some time without visible results—and, finally, take to the streets to express the democratic will during the most intense moments of political struggle. This latest exercise in democracy was successfully carried out quite recently by the Brazilian people, earning them the admiration and respect of all democrats around the world.
4. The fourth dramatic factor draws attention to the fact that everything that happens dramatically is always preceded by signs that are usually given little attention, especially because those in power have at their disposal a powerful propaganda machine that does everything it can to conceal or downplay the significance of those signs.
Thus, it should be emphasised that this was not Donald Trump’s first defeat. It was perhaps his fourth. The first was the election of a Muslim socialist, Zoran Mamdani, to the office of Mayor of New York City. The second was his inability to end the war in Ukraine within two years—a war that candidate Trump claimed he could end within 24 hours of being elected. The third occurred in Brazil with the victory of President Lula da Silva. The spree of resounding victories with low political costs gradually faded, especially after Trump realised that there was no Delcy Rodriguez in Iran (forgive the metaphor, which is not intended to target the Venezuelan people) to put in the place of the beheaded ayatollahs.
What Is Dramatised About These Elections?
I lived in the US for part of the year for 35 years, and I was always struck by the mix of democratic enthusiasm during election seasons and the frustration caused in the post-election period by the political actions of both the government and the opposition. In recent times, perhaps the most striking experience of this kind was the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 and everything that followed. I saw many Democrats weeping with joy on Election Day, and I, too, was moved.
The American democratic system has deteriorated profoundly, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010) to allow virtually unlimited funding of political parties by private donors. In practice, it legalised what in other countries is called political corruption. Gradually, yet rapidly, the political system came to be run by the dominant economic interests of the moment. Since capitalism has only one guiding principle—the maximisation of profit—money was channelled toward the candidates who would enable the greatest concentration of wealth. Consequently, funding always flowed where the greatest potential for maximising wealth lay, whether those candidates were from the Democratic or Republican Party. As a precaution, some donors have spread their support for the “democratic cause” across both parties. Let us not forget that the major labour union federation (AFL-CIO) has also been a donor to the Democratic Party, which has historically been closer to the working class.
In sociological terms, American democracy has been an electoral autocracy over the past fifteen years. There is a “deep state” with a single party, existing in two versions—sometimes more convergent, sometimes more divergent. In terms of domestic policy, the Democratic Party tends to provide greater protection for the most vulnerable social classes, but this protection has come under increasingly unfavourable conditions. Wage stagnation and the deterioration of public services (already very limited compared to those in Europe) speak for themselves.
The US remains the richest country in the world, and the gap between its GDP and that of the EU has been widening, given the decline of the European economy since the start of the war in Ukraine. However, when compared to the European average (EU), the US has been deteriorating in many social dimensions: average life expectancy—78 years in the US, 82 in the EU; poverty rate—17%—18% in the US (with child poverty rising particularly sharply), 10%—15% in the EU; concentration of wealth among the top 1%: 40% of national wealth, 25% in the EU; college student debt after graduation: $40,000, virtually nonexistent in the EU; incarceration rate: 531 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, 106 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants in the EU.
In terms of international policy, this is where the reasons for frustration are most concentrated: historically, the Democratic Party has been more interventionist (that is, imperialist) than the Republican Party. The latter has a more isolationist and sovereigntist tradition. In recent times, President Donald Trump was the only president who did not initiate any new wars or large-scale military invasions during his first term (2017 to 2021).
The danger that Donald Trump will become more aggressive on the international stage after the midterm elections is real. This has happened with other presidents when, after the midterms, they have less power to intervene in domestic politics. Many voices within the Republican Party have insinuated (and now say openly) that Trump’s bellicose stance during his second term was due to Zionist pressure from Netanyahu. In recent days, Tucker Carlson, a highly influential far-right broadcaster and long-time Trump supporter, set social media ablaze with a warning that a US nuclear attack on Iran was imminent. According to him, the pressure from Netanyahu was daily and was primarily motivated by Netanyahu’s political survival. Was Trump being blackmailed over the Epstein files? Pure speculation. The attack would reportedly target Pickaxe Mountain, beneath which Iran’s nuclear facilities are located. According to Alistair Crooke, this would be a disastrous and, to a large extent, symbolic attack, since the mountain is made of granite and the facilities are located about 100 metres underground. There has also been talk of an upcoming intervention in Cuba similar to the one carried out in Venezuela, this time involving the arrest and abduction of Raúl Castro. As is well known, total control of Cuba is Marco Rubio’s great dream.
The Trump era is over. Perhaps he won’t be impeached so as not to turn him into a martyr. But justice will not fail to come knocking at his door. The most important thing is that even if Trump is finished, “Trumpism” is not over: the Trumpism of the politics of hate, of xenophobia, of a political climate bordering on civil war, of abusive language, of arrogance and haughtiness toward international norms, of contempt for the ancestral cultures of other peoples, and of the notion that negotiation is surrender without concessions. None of this has ended, nor has the political regime been touched. If there is a country that needs regime change, it is the United States.
After the dramatic and the dramatised
Domestically, the Democratic Party faces more complex problems than the Republican Party. The victory was due to the mobilisation of activists belonging to social groups, many of whom have been ignored by the gerontocracy that dominates the Democratic Party—a gerontocracy just as addicted to private funding as that of the Republican Party: young people, people of Latin American descent, people of African descent, citizens with sexual and religious identities different from the dominant ones, citizens outraged by the genocide in Gaza, and the US’s active complicity with murderous Zionism. In short, citizens are terrified by the possibility that the US might become a rogue state whose only loyal ally is an even greater rogue state, the State of Israel.
What will be the political impact of this new generation of politicians on the Democratic Party? In the past, frustration stemmed from the fact that, in somewhat similar situations, hopes for party renewal were dashed—either because dissident politicians were marginalised or because they were gently co-opted into the fold of orthodoxy.
This time, the drive for renewal is so strong that, if it does not gain the political clout it deserves, it will likely create internal turmoil within the party. If the party emerges weakened from that turmoil, the only beneficiary will be the Republican Party. And in that case, we will be back to politics as usual. Unless, that is, the possibility of a third party—a truly left-wing party with some political clout—finally materialises. It must be borne in mind, however, that the US political system is structured to make it practically impossible for third parties to gain any significant political influence. That does not preclude the possibility that history may yet surprise American Democrats and all Democrats around the world.