THE election’s over and now it’s time for the excuses to begin. The Democrats will blame Russia, China, Iran and probably even Moldova for interference. Had they lost, the Republicans would have said the election results were rigged. 

The truth is most voters are so angry with the way not only the country but the world is going to hell in a handbasket, they turned out in droves to vote against the centre-right neoliberal agenda, pushing the majority of Americans closer to poverty domestically and pushing the world to the edge of nuclear destruction in a foreign policy built on simultaneously waging three wars. Wars which Joe Biden’s treasury secretary had famously said that an in-debt, cash-strapped government that cannot issue disaster relief at home can afford.

The Democrats will now claim that democracy has taken a hit, but the truth is what is left of that shabby institution had already been pummelled by that party in the campaign. 

The Democrats’ famous claim in the 2024 election was that “Democracy is on the ballot,” that is, they were once again crying wolf and accusing the Republican candidate Donald Trump of wanting to shut down American rights. What actually happened though was that the Democrats did everything they could to keep democracy off the ballot.

A friend of mine was voting last weekend in New York and could find Dr Jill Stein nowhere on the ballot. He had to write her in. Would that this was just a clerical error. Instead, the Dems, the supposed party championing the right to vote and rule by law, employed a team of high-priced lawyers to toss Stein’s Green Party signatures out so she could not appear. 

This, after changing the law in 2020 so only four parties can appear on the New York ballot, not including the most formidable challenge to the Democrats, the Greens. Stein’s party then had to gather 45,000 signatures, triple what was required in the last election and withstand the Democratic procedural challenge to the signatures they collected. 

Stein was the only anti-war, anti-genocide candidate in the running and thus the most challenging opponent to the Dick Cheney/Kamala Harris Democrats, now become the pro-war, pro-genocide party par excellence. 

Harris’s “nomination” was the least democratic in history. She was quickly bounced from the 2020 primaries by Tulsi Gabbard’s four-minute condemnation of her as a ruthless California prosecutor who jailed poor black women for keeping their kids out of school, even when the children were ill, and promoted keeping black men in prison because the state needed the money from their slave labour. 

Though she portrayed herself as a champion of the people, her record as California attorney-general had her giving lip service to this claim but often instead siding with the banks and big tech to the point where Larry Fink, head of the largest investment firm in the world, claimed that in the eyes of the financial industry there was no difference between Trump and Harris. 

Her appointment followed Biden’s opponent-less march through the Democratic primaries with all other Democrats warned to stay out of the race. When it became apparent after the Trump debate that Biden did not have the mental facilities to govern — a fact which was obvious since his taking office but was ignored by an adoring media — not the party but the donors got together and told Biden to resign. 

They then anointed Harris, who never received a single vote in the primary, as the party candidate. Just to make sure there would be no visible opposition at the convention over this chicanery, the nomination procedure was held online before the convention. 

Harris was such a poor and inexperienced candidate that she refused to appear for interviews, only daring finally to get her feet wet in a CNN interview with a fawning anchor, Dana Bash, that had to be trimmed by half because of her inane rambling.

For weeks the media had been asking her to explain how she and her administration would be different from Biden’s, whose popularity rating in the US had fallen to 20 per cent.

After sidestepping the question with her usual gobbledegook, she at last came up with an answer, explaining that the difference would be she would have Republicans in her cabinet — in other words, her answer was that the way she was different from the genocidal warmonger Biden is that she was further to the right. 

Her first foreign policy speech at the convention, no doubt written by Biden’s George Bush-like neoconservatives, had her doubling down on the war in Ukraine, rather than seeking a peaceful solution, championing military aid to Israel to perpetuate the Gaza genocide now encompassing the bulldozing of the West Bank, the civilian bombing of Beirut in Lebanon, as well as the bombing of Iran, which could lead to a nuclear catastrophe, and Yemen, Syria and Iraq.

She has sounded more aggressive than Biden on China to the point that not only Cheney’s daughter but Cheney himself, “the f***ing prince of darkness,” now cheers her on and campaigns for her.

She represents the melding of centre-right and right-wing Democrats with centre and right-wing Republicans as the elites from both parties opposed Trump’s winning activation of an unruly and angry working class and his support by far-right politicians. 

The Democrats have used their influence over social media, not to sway voters as Barack Obama was famous for in his first campaign, but to suppress dissident voices just as their lawyers have suppressed third-party candidates from the ballot box. Facebook has been cancelling posts and Google limiting searches due to Democratic Party pressure. 

Say what you will about Trump, he did undergo a gruelling primary against two formidable candidates, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, coming out ahead. The party stalwarts dare not oppose him because he has an active and loyal working-class and small business base and the party elites have almost no constituency outside of him.

That is why many of them are fleeing to the Democrats, hoping to turn that party even further to the right. 

The situation is so topsy-turvy that Democrats had hoped to win the election by appealing to white suburban voters while one in five black voters and far more Hispanics it seems supported Trump.

The Democratic party as champion of unions and labour is gone. Instead, the Democrats are now a Machiavellian party of war using every underhanded trick available to ensure the election of a mouldable figurehead who the military-industrial complex could have fashioned to its own ends. 

Trump of course is no better and this election is one that confirms that the pitiful rigged-in-advance exercise every four years which Americans, or rather the American media, persists in calling a democracy is really a neoliberal oligarchy, run by a wealthy donor class with no interest in its own workers or in the rest of the world where it seeks total domination — at whatever price that may cost— no longer short of a nuclear holocaust. 

Dennis Broe is a journalist, broadcaster and novelist writing for media outlets in France, Britain and the US. His Substack newsletter is Cultural Politics For Those Who Care and his new LA detective novel The Dark Ages, about the coming of HUAC to Hollywood in 1951, will be published in December.