The most recent opinion poll, taken September 22-27, reveals a lot about the thinking in the United States. In fact, some of the results reveal even more than that. According to this poll, 43% of registered voters in the United States somewhat or strongly approve of Trump‘s performance while 54% somewhat or strongly disapprove. These results have not changed very much over recent months, meaning that the chaos and the increasingly difficult economy have not very much swung voter opinion. The claim was that tens of millions of voters voted for Trump because of economic dissatisfaction in the last year of the Biden administration. If that were the case, then how come that a mere 26% think the economy is excellent or good, compared to 39% to think the opposite? In other words, that must mean that nearly 20% of those who approve of Trump’s job performance still think that the economy is not doing well. So, poor economic performance has not turned many Trump voters against him.

The poll also once more reveals the crisis in the US working class. The best measure in the U.S. of who is in the working class, especially the blue-collar working class, is not income, but education level. (That is imprecise, of course, since many workers such as teachers and nurses have a college education, but it’s still a good measure.) Fully 48% of voters who have no college approved of Trump, while an equal percentage of this cohort disapprove of Trump. The breakdown is especially strong along racial lines: 54% of whites overall, and 62% of whites with no college approve of Trump while 24% of people of color with no college approve of him.

In other words, racism – which has long and deep roots in US history and culture – plays a huge role in the support for Trump.

But it is not just racism and white nationalism. Simplistic one track thinking, which is endemic to US history, also plays a huge role. For example take the issue of tariffs. According to a Gallup poll, fully 59% of US adults think the tariffs will help create manufacturing jobs in the United States. To them it seems logical that if you freeze foreign manufacturers out of the U.S. market by increasing the cost of imported goods, then of course it will increase the demand for domestic manufactured goods and therefore manufacturing jobs at home will increase. The fact that manufacturing is now an international process with US manufacturers using imported material and goods doesn’t enter the thinking. Nor is it considered that any new investment in manufacturing will involve massive use of robots, meaning fewer jobs; nor that other countries will retaliate, which will cause an overall decline in the world economy. Adding an additional note of complexity is the fact that “free trade” means additional competition between workers of the world for who will work for less. So in order to even start to deal with the issue of international trade, international working class organizing and solidarity is necessary. See this Oaklandsocialist article on inflation for a further explanation. No, it’s all far too complex and requires a real leap in consciousness and action. Far better and easier to just think about what seems most direct and logical – that’s the pragmatic approach that is common in US culture. 

There’s a history to this sort of thinking – that complex problems  have a single cause and therefore can be solved by single and simple steps. One expression of this simplistic thinking was the popularity of Henry George in the late 19th century. His proposal to solve all problems of workers was a single tax based on land ownership. He was followed

William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” – it lent itself to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

by William Jennings Bryan, who campaigned for president in 1896 around the call for “free silver”, which is to say simple monetary reform. He ended up coming in second in the general election with close to 6 million votes. His whole program attacked some shadowy force that was supposedly manipulating US currency. That program and his entire propaganda gained the support of the antisemitic conspiracy theory forces who claimed that there was, and is, an international Jewish banking and monetary conspiracy, and they are the cause of all our problems. (The most popular mystery writer of all time, Agatha Christie, wrote an entire novel called Death on the Nile which revolves around that view.)

This simplistic, single cause and single solution approach has a fraternal twin: the conspiracy theory point of view. After all, if there is a single cause to our problems, then it would make sense that some small, shadowy force that manipulates everything lies at the root of that single cause, and once their conspiracy is exposed, then, presto, our problem is solved. So what is required is to devote ourselves night and day to exposing this conspiracy. (From time to time millions do take up some conspiracy theory or another, inevitably with violent consequences.)

The Maidan “conspiracy”

Ukraine’s Maidan protest. Up to 1 million people participated, but according to some it was all created by a U.S.conspiracy.

That is why as the world situation becomes evermore complex there’s a tendency to look for single causes and from there to turn towards conspiracy theories. That is exactly what happened following the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example with what happened in Ukraine starting in 2014. What was the response of the majority of the socialist left in the United States to the Maidan Revolt of that year? “Oh it is all just a right wing coup created by Viktoria Nuland of the US state department” was their view. In other words, a conspiracy of a relatively tiny group of people was responsible for up to 1 million people protesting and camping out in the streets of Kyiv in the middle of the freezing winter time there! You could not get a better example of a conspiracy theory. And this left has gone downhill from there.

The 2020 election “conspiracy”
From 2019 to 2023 the covid pandemic gripped the U.S. This new phenomenon caused massive confusion and a mass conspiracy theory hysteria around it gripped the country. How natural for this conspiracy theory hysteria to then be turned to “explain” Trump’s election defeat. If Covid was just a great conspiracy then the defeat of Trump must have been a conspiracy also. That is what Trump played on with great success in trying to overturn that election. He created a mass hysteria around the claim that the election had been “fixed”. The fact that they could never produce a shred of evidence for this claim did not stop thousands of MAGA fanatics from descending on the US Capitol to try to institute a violent coup on January 6 of 2021.

The 2024 election “conspiracy”

Dominion voting machines. They were supposedly hacked, but nobody has explained how it could have been done.

The re-election of Trump in 2024 was a huge defeat for the US, and in fact, the world working class. Such defeats always lead to increased confusion. So it was the turn of portions of the left to adopt such simplistic conspiracy theories about the 2024 election. Some of the tiny remaining portions of the socialist left that understood the importance of trying to keep Trump out of office responded to that defeat with a conspiracy theory similar to the MAGA conspiracy theory four years earlier. Recently those claims have gotten a little traction. As a result, the Atlantic magazine carried an article documenting the growth of the conspiracy theory that Trump did not actually win the election, that by some apparently magical process he and/or Putin were able to hack into voting machines and flip votes from Harris to Trump. That there has never been any serious explanation for how that was done does not give pause to the proponents of this claim. And it is not only the socialist left. Just recently, the liberal YouTuber, David Pakman, who has 3.34 million subscribers, hosted some character from the “Election Truth Alliance” who put forward these completely unsubstantiated claims, which Pakman encouraged. It is fitting for Pakman, who always was a shallow minded liberal. The claims in this case are based entirely on some statistical anomalies in the election results rather than any supposed evidence of election fraud. Statistical anomalies occur in many elections and are proof of nothing. Before taking a position on the issue, we carefully looked at all the surrounding circumstantial evidence and facts. We then published this article thoroughly refuting this conspiracy claim. At that time we were working closely with some of those who made that claim They have never once tried to seriously refute this article. 

Jessica Denson. She’s trying to reinvent herself from a Trump campaign worker to a cyber world “content creator” and purveyor of the “stolen election” claim.

“content creators”
Also there are “content creators’” careers to be built based on these “shocking” claims in the era of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Consider, for instance, Jessica Denson, who had been a member of the first Trump administration. She left that administration when she found that the abuse and sexism she was helping to spread in the general public was also being used against her personally. It was fine in society in general just not if she personally had to suffer for it, so she quit. Instead, Denson is now trying to build a career as a content creator, and one of her main themes is the claim of 2024 election fraud. She should be taken just as seriously now as when she was working for Trump. Or there is the case of US senate candidate Diane Sare, in New York State. She recently filed a lawsuit in Rockland County, New York, alleging similar election fraud. She has gained some support from other election conspiracy theorists. To the dismay of some of her supporters, however, it turned out that Sayer is a member of, and ran on the party line of the Larouche party. Lyndon Larouche, for those who do not remember him, was a poster child for conspiracy theory thinking and fascism.

Conclusion
Viewing global developments as being the product of a single cause and the fraternal twin of that view, which is conspiracy thinking, has always been central to the far right, including the fascists. Right wing antisemitism, which is genuine antisemitism, is often central to that. As Oaklandsocialist has pointed out elsewhere, the anti-intellectualism and relatively weak class consciousness in the United States has also opened up left-wing, working class movements to the same sort of thinking, while also facilitating those movements being absorbed into the far right. Today, the political crisis of the working class has accelerated an even greater crisis in the left, including among socialists. That is why some on the left have adopted the view that Trump won because of some hidden conspiracy, or maybe not so hidden. The conspiracists were able to hack into the voting machines (through some unexplained process) and flip the votes from Harris to Trump. The fact that the machines are never online, and therefore impossible to be hacked, is all but ignored (or in a few cases false claims are made about this.) They have produced just as much evidence for their claims as has the right wing has with its similar claim in 2020.

Those who claim election fraud as the supposed explanation for why Trump won are unwilling to recognize the complex and long-term processes that have led to the rise of reactionary thinking not just in society as a whole, but among huge layers of the US working class. The denial of reality by tens of millions of US workers is reflected in similar denials by many on the left in general. 

Some on the left in practice supported Trump‘s election by spending 2024 focusing their attacks on the Democrats with hardly a word of warning about Trump. Most of these were the same ones who engaged in the conspiracy thinking to “explain” the 2014 Maidan revolt. Some others on the left did not travel down that road but are now unwilling to take a serious look at why Trump won. Maybe it’s too painful to do so and easier to engage in the wishful thinking that more voters voted for Harris than for Trump. It would be far simpler if it were so, but it is not. A renewed movement of at least a sector of the US working class will be necessary for a renewed, working class oriented, socialist movement.

Coming next: Along with a few others, I co-founded the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign (USSC) in 2022. I cannot speak for anybody else, but my view always was that, although we would help Ukraine as much as we could, the USSC would not be able to have a material effect on the outcome of the war. What I did hope – and I think others did too – was that we would help develop a counter-weight to the Putinized wing of the socialist movement. Overall, the USSC never was a significant force on the left, which in and of itself holds some lessons. During its short lifespan it made some important political contributions. It also held quite a few very interesting and stimulating public zoom forus. However, it never really grew, and in fact it started to lose members. As a result, it ultimately collapsed. In my opinion, part of that collapse was the fact that some of its leaders also adopted the conspiracy theories regarding the 2024 election. What happened and why may hold some lessons for today.