TRUMP or Harris?  An unavoidable issue for any readers in the US, but not one most of us have to confront.

For the left in Britain it is the wrong question anyway. There is no good answer and chewing on it diverts our attention from where it should be — ending the hegemonic power and domineering aspirations of the US, and Britain’s alliance with it.

Happy the day when the result of US presidential elections is of interest exclusively to US citizens. That is what we should work for.

This merits dwelling upon because it is now clear that Donald Trump may return to the White House following next week’s vote and, if he does, sections of the left will have convulsions.

For sure, there is a lot to object to. Trump is a racist and a misogynist, and mainly interested in making the very rich very much richer.

We have it on the authority of some of his closest associates that he is a fascist of sorts, and we have it on even better authority — his own — that a second Trump presidency will be largely driven by retribution against his numerous enemies, whatever the cost to democracy.

Nothing to cheer there. And yet Trump 2025 is not the same as Trump 2017. Then it was not unreasonable to suppose, based on his performative belligerence and unabashed chauvinism, that Trump would not get through four years in the Oval Office without starting a fresh war or several.

Since then, two things have happened. First, Trump’s bark proved to be rather worse than his bite. Of course, from Venezuela to China and from Cuba to Palestine he followed a reactionary foreign policy based on a bombastic America Firstism.

But he did not start any new wars, and in fact signed the agreement ending one he inherited from George W Bush and Barack Obama in Afghanistan, a deal eventually implemented by Biden.

It may be pointed out that he “almost” started several conflicts, including with North Korea and Iran. True. But life would be much easier if I was vice-president of the Stop the Almost-Wars Coalition.

It is unlikely that Trump is a pacifist. More probably he recognises that a very significant part of his electoral base is sick of the “forever wars” in which bipartisan elite America has sent its proletarian citizens to die. As indifferent as he appears to be to life on Earth in general, he does pay attention to living, breathing voters.

Then there is the second development — the reality of the Biden administration, which should be studied for decades to come for what it exposes about liberal imperialism as it enters the twilight zone.

It has sustained and prolonged the terrible war in Ukraine, at a huge cost in Ukrainian and Russian blood and US treasure, the better to prop up its own fading hegemony in the face of new rising powers.

It has maintained the Trump turn to confrontation with China — initiated by Obama to some extent — and actually raised the danger of war with Biden’s rhetoric around Taiwan and his Aukus military pact.

It has failed to reverse reactionary Trump policies like recognising Israel’s seizure of Syrian sovereign territory and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

But above all it has been a genocidal administration. It has armed, protected and advocated for Israel’s unending massacre of the Palestinian people. Despite undoubtedly having sufficient leverage to terminate the assault more or less at will, the Biden-Harris gang have instead enabled it.

They have underwritten every aggression, every act of barbarism by Benjamin Netanyahu. The latter has long since figured out that whatever hand-wringing the semi-senile imperialist in the White House engages in, the missiles and bombs will keep on a-coming.

Israel’s premier also knows that if he miscalculates, and bites off regionally more than the IDF can chew, Biden’s own military will do the fighting for him.

Kamala Harris has, since she became presidential nominee, been given multiple opportunities to distance herself from this policy.  She has not taken one of them.

She blocked a Palestinian-American from addressing the Democratic convention in August. While Trump agreed to at least meet Muslim community leaders to hear their concerns, Harris has refused.

There is therefore no reason whatsoever to anticipate any positive policy shift on Palestine from Harris, whose attitude to the question carries its own charge of racism. 

Trump is unabashed in his support for Israeli aggression, which he combines with a country club anti-semitism. However, it is impossible to imagine how he could make the situation in Palestine any worse than it is under the Biden-Harris dispensation.

Harris is also continuity conflict candidate in relation to Ukraine, bent on stringing out a war which Nato can clearly no longer win. She is the “normal” face of US imperialism.

That is the actual alternative to a Trump presidency.  The global left has no obvious interest in the victory of either.

The consequential struggle is to defeat US power. The rise of China, the development of new institutions of solidarity within the global South, challenging the dominance of the dollar, supporting all those in the Middle East resisting imperialism — there are the priorities.

For Britain, the focus should stay on ending our alliance of subordination with Washington, a partnership sealed in third-party blood and central to Keir Starmer’s governing mission.

Trump may provide perverse assistance here, with his apparent disregard for the sanctity of Nato and willingness to countenance an end to a Ukraine war which Starmer very much wants to keep fighting by proxy.

There is one further consideration which exposes a certain perversity on the part of at least sections of the left. They worry that a Trump presidency may lead to civil conflict in the US itself.

That is nothing to fear. There is no progress without conflict, and in the US most likely no socialism without an awful lot of it. A weakened US is a gain for the rest of the world.

But doesn’t fascism mean war? There is a clear if not invariant connection, and a fascist US presidency, if that actually proves to be the outcome, will surely give cause for protest here before long.

However, history tells a different tale. The most aggressive powers on record have been impeccably liberal British and US imperialisms, with not a day of fascist rule between them so far, but barely a year of peace in centuries. There is the main enemy, not the orange demagogue.

Rest easy, man

IN THE spirit that people do not live by politics alone let me acknowledge the passing of former Grateful Dead bass guitarist Phil Lesh.

Along with his contemporaries Jack Bruce of Cream and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane, he is credited with radically extending the contribution of his instrument in rock music, from a purely rhythmic role to a melodic counterpoint and more.

His individual brilliance made no sense, of course, outside the context of his band which, improbably, became one of the most popular in history. Lesh’s interplay with lead guitarist the late Jerry Garcia was central to the Dead’s 30-year journey of musical inventiveness.

And they were inventive, placing improvisation at the heart of their concerts, a feature which perhaps diminished as they became more musically competent but less adventurous over the years.

At their most pedestrian, trudging through indifferent Bob Dylan covers, the Dead still retained a lovability, drawing on the attractions of a residual but still powerful San Franciscan 1960s utopianism. At their best, they were the musical equivalent of a Bernini sculpture, where the artistic content is bursting free of its form to head skywards.

I met Lesh once, outside Alexandra Palace 50 years ago which is a story in itself albeit definitely one for another time. He advised me to “take it easy, man,” counsel I have not really followed but was certainly somewhere near the core of the Grateful Dead’s world view.

Like all who share in great collective enterprises, Phil Lesh will eventually pass into personal obscurity and also live forever. An outstanding musician who saw his art as changing the world — not politically as much as metaphysically — he lived the wisdom of the chant purportedly found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead: “In the land of night, the ship of the sun is borne by the grateful dead.”