Dispatches After the Election of Trump

My last dispatch was almost a month ago, on November 6, the day after Trump won the American presidential election. The main reason for the pause in dispatches is that my hosts in Ukraine, and then Poland, Germany, Czechia, and now the U.K., have kept me too busy meeting with leftwing activists. That has been a good thing, but it has meant I have not had time to write reports. I have a lot to report and that will be coming in the next few weeks. In this dispatch, I will report on the reaction to Trump’s election in Ukraine as well as my reactions as well.

But first I should note I will now return to the states on December 9, five days later than my original plan. I am extending my trip at the urging of members of the Green Party of England and Wales in order to attend the European Greens Congress in Dublin, Ireland, December 6-8, where I will be able to have more conversations with more European Greens. You may be aware of the open letters that the European and American Green parties exchanged on the Friday before the American elections. The European Greens asked that Jill Stein stand down and endorse Kamala Harris. The European Greens were absolutely wrong to say that Harris would be a “reliable partner” on climate and peace in the Middle East. I think their criticism of Stein’s position on Ukraine was basically correct, though overstated. But my biggest reaction to this exchange was why the hell are European and American Greens sending open letters to the press ABOUT each other without having talked TO each other in years. I anticipated something like this fiasco was going to happen soon when I was asking to meet with Greens in several of the European countries to discuss these issues as I planned my trip. The damage of the open letters is done, but I hope in Dublin to make more contacts to help build constructive dialogues instead of issuing media gotchas at each other.

After the election, I had meetings with trade unionists, socialists, veterans, soldiers wives, feminists, and students that were organized by Sotsialnyi Rukh, the very active democratic socialist organization that is well-networked with progressive social movements in Ukraine. I also met with the Party of Greens of Ukraine after the Trump election.

The universal reaction of all of these groups to Trump’s election was distress and dread for what it means for Ukraine. They see Trump’s victory as a victory for the rising global far right whose international spiritual leader is Russian President Vladimir Putin. They fear Trump will join with Putin to cut support for Ukraine in order to force it to accept a peace deal on Putin’s terms.

These groups have not been happy with Biden’s Ukraine policy, either. They see Biden’s policy of “escalation management” as managing the conflict rather than helping Ukraine win the war. They point to the U.S. taking many months to finally approve weapons systems and being slow to deliver them after they are finally approved, from Patriot air defense systems (while the U.S. provides 100% air defense coverage to Israel), Abrams tanks (31 tanks out of the U.S. arsenal of 4,650), HIMARS and later ATACMS medium-range missiles (but with restrictions on the location and nature of Russian military assets that can be targeted), F-16 fighter jets (a dozen so far out of a NATO arsenal 3,275 fighter jets, while Israel has received 75 of the more advanced F-35 fighters). But some support is better than the no support they fear they will get from Trump.

The Trump victory was also seen as a vote for authoritarian rule and against democracy, which leftists in Ukraine put top value on. They want to defend the democratic rights they have to organize and speak out against the neoliberal policies of Ukraine’s government, which they do not have in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. They are also disappointed in the West’s weak and hypocritical defense of the post-World War II international law based on the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions for international humanitarian law governing armed conflicts. The double standard of the U.S. in supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression but not Palestine against Israeli aggression demonstrates to the Ukrainian left the unprincipled and unreliable nature of the West’s support for Ukraine.

Taras Bilous in Kyiv, Ukraine, November 15, 2024

Taras Bilous in Kyiv, Ukraine, November 15, 2024

Taras Bilous, a Sotsialnyi Rukh activist and member of the Ukrainian armed forces, won the 2024 Daniel Singer Prize for the most important socialist essay of the year. In “The War in Ukraine, International Security, and the Left’ (Commons, May 26, 2022), Taras calls for the left to take up reforming the United Nations to effectively protect the peace and security of small nations from the predations of imperialist powers like the U.S. and Russia. I spoke to him ten days after Trump’s election and he was very pessimistic. He told me that the Trump election had made him lose his hope that the obvious violation of the UN Charter by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would provoke an international reform movement, which he hoped the left would lead, particularly in the countries that are permanent members of the Security Council like the United States. Taras had been disappointed and critical of the U.S. and Western left’s confusion and division over whether to support Ukraine against Russian imperialism. But with Trump’s election and the far right in charge in the U.S., Taras felt his hopes for reform of the international system had been set back decades. I will publish a video interview Taras gave me about this soon. It is a sobering interview from a Ukrainian leftist who is literally in the heat of battle.

In my meeting with the leaders of the Party of Greens of Ukraine, they focused on the same concerns that Taras has, except they focused on the failure of Western European Greens as opposed the left as a whole to come up with a positive program for reform of the international system. They said it is not enough for Greens engage in negative criticism and condemnation of militarism and war. The Greens should be developing a positive program of reform of the international system to prevent wars like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I asked them if they had read Taras Bilous’ essays on reforming the international system. They had not. But the fact that these Greens were focused on the same problem and the need for a positive solution as the socialists and anarchists in Taras Bilous’ circles shows that the problem is very clear to progressives living in a small country that a big power is attempting to (re)colonize. Another article by Taras Bilous, “The war in Ukraine and the Global South” (Commons, March 14, 2023) linked Ukraine’s national liberation struggle to those of small nations in the Global South.

In that busy week after Trump’s election, I wrote a brief analysis of why Trump won and what the left needs to do now for a symposium on “Resisting Trump” for Workers Liberty (November 13, 2024) that had 16 contributors, from Bernie Sanders, AOC, DSA, UAW’s Shawn Fain, and AFT’s Randi Weingarten to lesser known leftists like me. Briefly, the Democrats lost because they ran to the right and lost enough of their progressive base to lose and the left needs to build its own mass-membership party to resist both the Republican neofascism and Democratic neoliberalism, which has fertilized the grounds for the growth of neofascism.

Two days after the election, I was on a podcast out of London called the Left Lane where two out of three guests were from Syracuse, New York, even though I was in Ukraine at the time and the other Syracusan was in England. The other Syracusan was Matt Huber, a geographer at Syacuse University and author of Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022).

I also did an interview in Warsaw, Poland on November 19, a couple of days after leaving Ukraine with the “Emancipations” podcast in Poland, hosted by Jacek Drozda, called “In conversation with Howie Hawkins – Ukraine, American Left, history and future.” We also talked about the Trump election along with the labor movement and ecosocialism.

Author

  • Howie Hawkins has been involved with the Green Party since it’s first US meeting in 1984 and was the Green Party presidential nominee in 2020. A prolific author and organizer, Howie has been active in movements for civil rights, peace, labor, and the environment since the 1960s.

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