By Şafak Erdem
In the second and last part of the interview, Harley Schlanger addresses various important issues surrounding the upcoming elections in the US. Schlanger covers the following topics:
* The different fractions within US capitalist classes
* “Left out” working people and elite establishment
* “The empire” and the meaning left and right today.
From what you were saying, can we say that the capitalists based on the finance and the financial speculation are supporting Kamala Harris relatively more and the capitalists based on more real production or gathering around the production process are supporting Donald Trump more?
Well, Trump has supporters in industry and in corporations as well. But I think the vast amount of money from hedge funds, Silicon Valley and banks is going to Harris. She raised a billion dollars so far in her campaign. A billion dollars! How can someone who has nothing to say get a billion dollars? Of course she’s making promises to these guys.
“Left out” working people
Now, Trump has much less money. Of course, he’s also got a lot of money coming in anyway. But a lot of the funds that he’s getting are from working people and from small business. The so-called “MAGA movement”, “Make America Great Again”, is mostly composed of the “little guy” who feel that they’ve been left out. That while there’s money going to illegal immigrants, to very poor people and to the very wealthy, there’s nothing for the working person. And so that’s where a lot of the support for Trump is coming from. And it’s very strong support.
Elite establishment backs Harris
In the 2016 elections I worked very closely with a couple of people who ended up supporting Trump. It was clear to me that their sense was that Trump was reaching the people that used to vote for the Democrats. In fact, a lot of the votes for Trump in 2016 came from people who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and felt let down by Obama.
So, I think the fact is that Harris is definitely seen as the candidate of the elite establishment. That same elite establishment hates Donald Trump, partly because he’s unpredictable. The fact that he doesn’t want to spend trillions of dollars on wars should be something that honest corporate people would like. But apparently, the money that goes to these wars ends up coming back to them. That’s why they’re backing Harris.
As you mentioned, it looks like Trump has a very core and strong support from some sections of the people. How did those people react when Trump was attempted to be assassinated?
Well, there was a lot of shock. 1963 was the last time a president was assassinated, John F. Kennedy. But there were attempts against Gerald Ford and an attempt against Ronald Reagan. Remember, Reagan was shot a few months after he became president. So there’s a history of violence in US politics.
Trump against the establishment
There have been demands that there be adequate security for him. Some accused that the secret service is not doing its job. If you go back to 2016, the “Russiagate” story against Trump was a complete fraud. There was no attempt by Putin to elect Trump. All the stories came from British intelligence and FBI and CIA, because they didn’t want Trump. Hillary Clinton was a trusted ally of theirs. That Trump said he is going to drain the swamp was one of the reasons a lot of people supported Trump in 2016 and 2020. That means he was going to get rid of the people who act on behalf of the establishment and against the average person. But he didn’t do it for a variety of reasons. He’s saying he will do it this time. I think there’s a lot of hope that he will. I don’t think it was a surprise that someone might try to kill him. There still is a danger. He now has those bubble screens around the podium when he speaks.
So, do you think that the “the war party” as you put it was behind that attempt?
There is a question of why the Secret Service didn’t lock down the whole area. There are things that should have been done. And the Secret Service is saying they just don’t have enough money to do it. Well, that’s not a good enough explanation. If you have a controversial presidential candidate, you must protect him. So, some people suspect that there was an operation run through the Secret Service to leave him somewhat unprotected.
“Kennedy broke from the war party”
But I think it’s bigger than that. If you go back to the Kennedy assassination, which has been covered up, the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin has been disproven repeatedly. The reason Kennedy was assassinated is that he broke from the war party after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And in fact, he made a deal with the Soviets, which is that if they take their missiles out of Cuba, he’ll take the Jupiter missiles out of Türkiye. Kennedy then started talking to Khrushchev, which went against the war party that wanted to continue the Cold War.
Today there is a big fear again. The US is spending about a trillion dollars a year on defense. It’s officially 868 billion dollars right now. When you add in the CIA and various other unfunded liabilities, it’s close to a trillion dollars. We’re spending 200 billions of dollars for arms for Ukraine. We just gave Israel 25 billion and another 8 billion to Ukraine. This is huge money. Trump wants to interfere with that. By the way, the Europeans are also afraid he’ll do. We have a shift in the US population that is heard in Washington saying that we should stop funding these wars.
The empire, left and right
Some claim that the opposition to the establishment comes normally and historically from the left, left-wing parties, left-wing intellectuals and people. But now we see that in the US, like in some other parts of the world, especially in the West, right-wing parties and intellectuals stand out, at least on discourse level, as the main opposition to the “establishment”, “elites” etc. Is there an anomaly about it or what do you think?
Only if you think in terms that academic political scientists think in. And the way the media want you to think in. If you really think: what’s the underlying issue? On the one side, you have supporters of the “empire”, the unipolar order that is going to use the military to crush any nation that goes against the unilateral system. On the other side, what’s emerging now is a multipolar order. Nations are saying “No we’re sovereign, you can’t tell us what to do”. That’s the real distinction. There are very few people in the US who understand that, who know what the BRICS is about, who understand what Putin and Xi Jinping and Modi have done to develop their countries. And they’re horrified by the idea that the African nations are welcoming Russia and China and India in to help them develop.
Thus, the contradiction is between nation states that believe in sovereignty versus those who want “world government”. Now, is “world government” a leftist or a rightist policy? It’s a feudal empire and it used to be what was considered the ultimate right wing.
AfD, Le Pen, Meloni
In Germany, we’ve seen the growth of the Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD). Now,they are attacked because they’re anti-immigrant. But the smart people in the AfD are saying, the reason there are immigrants is because of these wars and bad economic policies that are destroying nations and leaving people with no alternative but to flee their country. There is a potential for a big shift in France around Le Pen. It happened in Italy, although I think Meloni is basically sided with the European Union establishment.
In Germany, the three coalition partners of the government can’t even get to 30% in the polls. The Green Party is about to get wiped out. The Free Democrats, the so-called liberals, are getting wiped out. And in the last three state elections, the AfD either won or finished second. Now, are they right-wing? Well, when I talk to them, they say, we want to end these wars. Is peace left, or right? I don’t think that’s a right-wing or left-wing thing, it is a kind of basic humanitarian impulse that we all should have. The ones who say we need these wars to protect our investments or sustain our debt policy should be labeled as war criminals.
The question of national sovereignty
There is a claim that the war in Ukraine is because the US wants to sever ties of Europe with Russia and, in general, the Eurasian continent. If Trump comes into power, will something change about it and will Europe have better relations with Russia, China and the Eurasian continent?
I think Germany and France in particular must have better relations with Russia and China. But the EU just passed tariffs against China, and they have this illusion that Europeans will pay 70,000 euros for an electric car where the Chinese are building good cars cheaper. And what happens when you blow up the Nord Stream pipeline and you no longer have cheap oil and gas in Germany? You have anger. You have deindustrialization. So I think we’re going to see some earthquakes in European politics.
Again, the question of national sovereignty. For example, what happens when Türkiye joins the BRICS? Can you be in NATO and the BRICS at the same time? Well, why not? The Russians are saying you can. The West is saying, no, you can’t. Do people have a right to decide what’s in their own interest or do they have to get it cleared from London and Washington first?
Wile E. Coyote runs over the cliff
Lastly, back to the US elections: Do you think that if the “war party” sees the possibility that they will lose power and control, it can provoke some unprecedented incidents in the US?
We’ve seen false flags before. I think the 9-11 was something they should have known was coming, just like October 7th in Israel. Israeli intelligence knew something was going to happen. They let it happen so they could go ahead with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I would say the Ukraine war and the Southwest Asia, the Gaza war, are part of a plan to undermine the potential for a new financial system. But I don’t think it’s going to work.
I think Putin and Xi are fairly clear on their alliance and what they’re doing. And it’s the West that’s in trouble. I don’t know if you’re familiar with these cartoons, the Wile E. Coyote runs over the cliff and he’s still running. He doesn’t realize he’s over the cliff until he looks down and then he goes down. That’s where we’re headed in the US. To the extent we can give people the real picture, we’ll have a chance to change history in a good way.