Yes that’s what the headline says, and no I am not looking for attention. This election was about the American people versus American politics, and the people won. Don’t get me wrong. This is going to be the ultimate in Pyrrhic victories. The people who are going to suffer the most will be Trumps voters when they realise that they have been sold the biggest bill of goods in American political history.

The border wall will not get built, there will be no mass deportations (although life is about to get harder for America’s undocumented workers) and the banks/Wall Street will not be brought to heel. Most of all, the trend that has seen the livelihoods of middle-class (in reality, working class) Americans reduced over the last 40 years, will not be reversed.

Forty years ago the majority of American families could get by on one income provider. Moreover, that same income provider could fulfil their role having only a single job. Forty years ago credit cards were virtually unheard of. Forty years ago the working class was not burdened by anything approaching the level of personal debt it currently holds. Forty years ago the working class was both doing well and knew that it was doing well. Forty years ago the working class was doing so well it started calling itself the middle class and forgot that it was still comprised of wage slaves.

Wage slavery is not and should not be a term of abuse. It’s a simple description of those of us who absolutely require a wage to maintain our standard of living. That’s most of us. In one sense we truly are the middle-class because there are only three layers in any capitalist economy and we are neither top nor bottom. There are those who can afford to live off their capital assets in one form or another: be they shares, property, land or other forms of investment. That’s the top layer. Immediately below are the wage slaves. The final, bottom layer is made up of those who are basically excluded from the capitalist system entirely.

Within this structure, Donald Trump did not just beat Hillary Clinton in the race to the White House. Donald Trump managed to beat the entire Republican and Democratic machines. For Hillary in the election read Jeb Bush in the primaries. Bush and Clinton were mirrors of each other, moneyed-up establishment choices from a “presidential family”. Hillary and Jeb both made the same mistake in assuming that their base had nowhere else to go. When Trump slapped Bush aside in the Primaries, the Democrats should have sat up and taken notice, even more so because Trump didn’t win by playing well, quite the opposite. From beginning to end there has never been a political operator as inept as Trump. He had no organisation, little real money, and a superhuman ability to shoot himself in the foot.

Despite all of this he won. He won for one reason only. He’s not part of the machine. All the Republicans in the primary and the Democrats in the main election made the same mistake as Clinton and Bush. They were guilty of assuming that it was their turn, or if not, it could be their turn the next time. Hillary Clinton should have realised that it was never going to be “her turn” eight years ago, when a virtually unknown African American senator trounced her within her own base. Nevertheless, Hillary it was, all the time exuding an air of expecting her inevitable coronation in November.

Writing in the Guardian Newspaper in the immediate aftermath of the election, the American political commentator Thomas Frank rightly condemned the Democratic organisation for choosing and pushing a candidate who served the needs of the party rather than one who could have actually appealed to the American people.
Bernie Sanders was the real populist in 2016, not Trump. To thwart him, the DNC rallied around their chosen daughter with a brutal efficiency. Trump on the other hand, came through a fragmented field of numerous boilerplate candidates in order to subvert the Republicans. If the RNC had been as ruthless as their democratic counterparts, we would now be looking at president Ted Cruz, and for that at least, we should all be thankful.

The great thing about the election of Donald Trump is this. There is a lesson here for working class, liberal Americans. Your party doesn’t serve your interests. Your party has not served your interests for decades. Your party assumes that you will vote for them simply because they are not the Republicans. Your party has held the White house for four of the last six cycles and has done nothing to reverse the flow of money from the working class to those at the top of the capitalist pyramid. Under Democratic presidents and Republican presidents alike, working class Americans have seen their wages drop in real terms, their job-security diminished, and their levels of personal debt rise to unfeasible levels.

Donald Trump will not fix this. Trump is, when all is said and done, a clownish demagogue with delusions of grandeur. Even if he had the will and the nous, which he does not, the machine will now simply swallow him up. The Republicans will pursue their own standard agenda via their control of both houses. The Democrats will do nothing. They will simply wait for the inevitable economic downturn that the cycle of capitalism always provides. When that happens they will point the finger at the outsider in the Oval Office and hope, as a result, to take their turn at the wheel once more. As all of this happens, the gradual transfer of wealth to the upper tier of the capitalist system will continue. It will never stop until both lessons of this election have been learned. Lesson one: A man outside of the system can be president, even a man as unfit to govern and as ludicrous as Trump. Lesson two: Until the left stops voting for the Democratic Party nomination simply because they feel they have no choice, they will never threaten the system which is slowly crushing the life out of them.