politics

With the Democratic Party’s landslide victory, a day of reckoning appears to have arrived for Trump and the far-right, white nationalist forces that have turned cruelty into a governing principle and hatred into a political language. Something has broken in the machinery of fear. The old fascist ideas, the politics of racial hatred, and the relentless assault on human dignity have encountered a moment of resistance. Too much suffering, too much misery, too much authoritarian violence. Too much blood in the streets, too many deaths, screams, and a deafening silence. Enough is enough, at least for the moment. The Trump regime has exposed some of the darkest impulses of political life, resurrecting the ghosts of a past that should have taught us where the glorification of state violence, racial cleansing, the crushing of dissent, and organized cruelty inevitably leads. Its legacy is written in the expansion of the carceral state, the staggering investment in prisons and punishment, the unleashing of masked agents of repression across the country, and the unapologetic embrace of a language of racial cleansing that strips entire populations of their humanity and destroys lives and civil liberties.

Yet the celebrations now dominating liberal and mainstream media risk turning this electoral victory into an exercise in historical amnesia. Trump’s defeat is being hailed as a crushing repudiation of the far right, as though the political conditions that made his rise possible have suddenly disappeared. Missing from this triumphalist narrative is any serious reckoning with the Democratic Party’s own complicity in creating those conditions. From Clinton to Obama, Democratic administrations embraced neoliberal policies that deepened economic inequality, strengthened corporate power, weakened working-class institutions, and helped create the social and political landscape in which authoritarianism could flourish. Nor can the party's leadership escape responsibility for its support of Israel's genocidal war in Gaza, its exporting of horrendous military weapons, and its broader allegiance to a colonizing authoritarian order, sustained through violence and dispossession. A party so deeply implicated in the machinery of neoliberal capitalism cannot be entrusted with dismantling the very structures of power it has helped legitimate and preserve.

For a fleeting moment, democracy may be able to breathe again. But breathing is not liberation, and an electoral victory is no substitute for dismantling the gangster capitalist order that breeds authoritarianism, feeds on human suffering, commodifies every aspect of life, and makes fascism an enduring possibility. The forces that produced Trump did not emerge overnight, nor will they disappear with an election. They are embedded in institutions that concentrate wealth, manufacture fear, normalize inequality, and transform human misery into a source of profit and political power. Trump may be defeated at the ballot box, but Trumpism cannot be defeated without confronting the economic, political, and cultural foundations of a system that turns greed into virtue, cruelty into policy, racism into a badge of honor, and human disposability into a governing principle.

Unless those foundations are dismantled, the nightmare will return, perhaps wearing a different mask. The serpent's egg, to invoke the haunting metaphor associated with Ingmar Bergman, has not been destroyed. It lies beneath the surface of seemingly democratic societies, nourished by the dark and volatile forces of a capitalist order that breeds inequality, authoritarianism, and organized cruelty. Brecht understood that fascism could not be confronted without exposing the capitalist relations of power that give rise to it. The serpent's egg remains embedded in the political, economic, and cultural machinery of gangster capitalism, waiting for the conditions under which it can hatch again. Fascism may suffer an electoral defeat, but the serpent survives, sustained by the very system that gave it life.

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