Nor was Clinton's stolen party nomination the only corrupt act of the DNC. It also successfully defeated primary efforts by a number of aggressive popular, progressive Senate candidates who could have helped the party retake the Senate by running well-funded corporatist party hacks like Evan Bayh in Indiana and Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania, against those progressive candidates. In each case, these hacks went on to lose their races, leaving the Senate in Republican hands.
Hopefully, this highly visible corruption at the top of the Democratic Party will lead to a real effort to chuck this sclerotic and wholly corrupted organization and replace it with a genuine party of working people, the poor and minorities on the left. That long-overdue project needs to begin immediately.
But back to other silver linings of the Trump presidential win.
Most importantly, it seems likely that we will no longer have to worry about the US going to war with Russia. While Hillary Clinton, with her stated desire to establish a "no-fly zone" in Syria that even leading generals said would mean "war with Russia," Donald Trump throughout the campaign made it clear that he did not want the US confronting Russia. He said, to the consternation of most establishment Republicans, that he thought the two countries "should be working together." That view, if he is serious, bodes well for Syrians, and for Ukrainians as well. Trump has also condemned NATO, which since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been converted into a military adjunct to aggressive US efforts around the globe to sow chaos, mayhem and regime change -- something Trump has opposed. With luck Trump, who recognizes that Americans do not want endless war, may act to neuter NATO, hopefully by withdrawing US funding for the organization and allowing it to fade away -- something that should have happened in 1990 when the Berlin Wall came down.
Ramping down US imperial over-reach, which has caused the deaths of millions of innocents over the last decade and a half alone, angered nations and people around the world against the US, and cost Americans over $4.5 trillion since 2001, would be reason enough to cheer Trump's victory. But revoking the so-called Affordable Care Act and leaving Americans to their own devices in an unregulated private insurance market would be another plus. The ACA, which is already becoming, to quote Trump, a "disaster," with rates soaring 25% this year for many low income people, and with plans offering ever higher deductibles and worse coverage, was an insurance-industry boon that threatened to make a shift to a nationalized health plan impossible to achieve. By undoing it, as he and a Republican Congress have vowed to do, we can expect demands for a Canadian-style system to soar in no time, perhaps handing a key campaign issue to any new progressive party.
On the economic front, Trump has made it clear that he will oppose the pending Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and that he wants to undo or renegotiate earlier job-killing trade agreements, most notably the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). If he is serious about this anti-globalism policy, and acts on it, it will be a huge victory for working class Americans of all races, and a huge blow to the Democratic Party, which since the Clinton presidency has embraced the idea favored by corporate America that shipping production overseas to cheap labor countries was sound economic policy. Trump also spoke during the campaign of the need to raise the minimum wage, and in years past even supported a tax on wealth. If he does either or both of those things he will be a working class hero. But then, there's no telling whether he was just campaigning, and will forget these ideas once in power.
Of course, there is no denying that Americans have elected a racist, misogynist, xenophobic narcissist, and that his successful campaign has made at least overt racism and anti-immigrant bigotry, if not overt sexism, socially acceptable. It will be critical for progressives and for the impacted groups themselves to organize a mass movement to resist these trends, as well as policies, like the overturning of women's right to control their own bodies, and the right of people of color to quality schools and to be safe from aggressive, militarized policing. These are important concerns but they also expose the rot of the political system, which was allowed these trends to develop and fester for years.
There's no denying either, that Trump is a climate-change denier, and that with a Republican Congress -- thanks to the corporatist machinations of the Democratic Party and it's selection of loser Congressional candidates -- he could gut environmental protections and even eliminate the EPA. On the other hand, though, Hillary Clinton, the uber-corporatist, was never going to do much about stopping climate change. She wouldn't even raise the issue in the debates or on her compaign. Truth is Obama did next to nothing about it over two terms. His main contribution to reducing carbon emissions was failing to boost the economy, which kept emissions low. Since Trump is likely to bring us a new economic crash, via his plans for bank deregulation, etc., he may end up inadvertently reducing carbon emissions too.
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