No wind can help those who don't know where they are going. Though barely consolidated, the defeat of Donald Trump in the United States presents two apparently opposing views. For some, like Ricardo Kotscho, the defeat drained the swamp that created the political miasmas that clouded the 21st century; there will certainly be a virtuous restoration of the recent past. Others, like Glenn Greenwald, on the other hand, believe that nothing will effectively change because the interests behind the Democratic Party and Joe Biden are, in essence, as oligarchic as those that kept Trump afloat. These views fail to take into account the context from which the contemporary far-right arose – and how this scenario has transformed since the pandemic took hold. For this reason, the opportunity missed by the left twelve years ago and the emergence of a new gap in the last few months eludes them – as does the effort required to take advantage of it.
This article supports four fundamental hypotheses:
a) Trump is not the cause, but the effect of a crisis of capitalism that started in 2008 and has not yet been resolved. However, the importance of the now-fallen president cannot be underestimated. He illustrated, even if symbolically, the pincer movement carried out by the financial oligarchy to escape the crisis. Such a move implied betting on two political blocs at the same time: classical neoliberalism and neo-fascism; and to build, through this combination, magical illusions that hid the ultra concentration of wealth and the dismantling of democracy;
