 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Michael Levyen, assistant professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. And we shall be talking about the Trump presidency in the United States and the growing resistance against it. Hello Michael. Hi thanks for having me. For many people the election of Donald Trump as the US president came as a big shock. The Democratic Party leadership thought that Hillary Clinton will win anyway because she is not Donald Trump. And that turned out to be a losing strategy. How did this happen? I would say that I was not as surprised as some people. Things have changed in the US economically and we're starting to see the political expression of that. In the sense that we've seen three decades of neoliberal economic policies that have led to large-scale job loss, deindustrialization, that's an older story, global financial crisis, which led to the evisceration of a huge amount of wealth, particularly in working class communities. And we're seeing levels of income inequality that are unprecedented, that we haven't seen since the 1920s. And if you go into a lot of rural areas of the US, you would have a sense of this, that there's actually a lot of anger, agriculture is decimated, there's not that many jobs. Even the service sector jobs, the low-paying non-unionized jobs that replaced the unionized blue-collar industrial jobs that are now gone, even those are starting to disappear with Amazon and online retail replacing many of those jobs. All is not well economically in much of the US right now. And I think that's what much of the Democratic Party does not understand. So I actually thought the key moment of this election, the critical juncture was the primary between Bernie Sanders and Clinton. I thought actually that this was going to determine the election. I thought if Sanders won the primary, he would win the national. I was extremely scared about Hillary Clinton winning the primary because I thought she'd be extremely vulnerable to Donald Trump. You can look at it this way. Given this kind of economic situation, there's actually a pretty broad and unprecedented section of the population that's saying actually pretty radical economic things in some ways. They're saying we want to get out of free trade agreements. It's saying that the income is distributed at the top, that the corporations, control, government. So you hear this actually across the spectrum. And in some ways that that's a sentiment that can be channeled in different kinds of ways. Just like in the 1920s where you saw the Great Depression get channeled into fascism in some places, to social democracy in some places, to communism and others, I think we're in a kind of similar moment, like globally right now. And what was really remarkable in the positive story we should keep in mind was the unprecedented success of Bernie Sanders' campaign. And I never thought I would actually see in my lifetime ever a candidate who is an avowedly socialist. He's probably a social democrat, really. But the fact that he says he's actually a socialist makes me give all the more credit to him. And that was phenomenal to see him get that much support and to come that close to winning the democratic nomination was an incredibly inspiring kind of thing. And that was the road not taking. We could be celebrating the first socialist president of the United States. And now we have this kind of quasi-authoritarian fascist, whatever you want to call it, white supremacist kind of government that's in power. So I think that was the critical juncture. And I think what really we have to understand is the failure of the democratic party here. Unlike India with a rich parliamentary system and so many parties, even if you have two major ones, the U.S. is much more constrained. We have two parties. It's almost impossible for third parties to get through that. Ralph Nader has talked about the duopoly between the Democrats and the Republicans, both pro-business, both neoliberal, and so on. Now Sanders showed that you could actually break out of that with someone the Democratic National Committee doesn't want, who's not taking huge campaign contributions from corporations or PACs. And that was small individual donations in a grassroots campaign that you could actually come out of nowhere and have this huge success win many primaries and come very close to winning the nomination. We know the Democratic National Committee did everything it could to sabotage this campaign. And one thing to keep in mind is that the Democratic party has also changed in terms of socioeconomically. I mean it's abandoned, it's working class base for at least 30 years and the composition of Democratic voters has shifted and has become more professional and middle class and urban and elite. The United States has never been known for a strong social security system if you compare it to many European countries for instance. But whatever welfare mechanisms existed, even they seem to be under attack once Trump came to power. Do you have to say something about that? I mean of course the big issue now is the health care bill and of course many of us are critical of Obamacare in the first place because we thought he should have pushed for a single payer system and maybe we would have at least wound up with a hybrid you know system where there's a public option. We didn't even get that and I faulted Obama for that. I don't think he pushed hard enough in his first two years where he had political capital and could have done a lot more to advance economically progressive kind of legislation, which he didn't do. So we wound up with this faulty health care bill that is certainly better in the sense that look there's 40 million people that didn't have insurance before this but it had big problems and that's probably because we didn't go for a single payer system or these kind of public options. So yeah so of course Trump campaign on this economically progressive message but I think those who actually believe that message you know I think must be getting disappointed if they're actually looking at what he's doing in a sense that he is cutting this legislation trying to. I mean what's interesting they're having a hard time actually taking this benefit away now. His budget proposals are incredibly regressive and involve huge cuts to all kinds of social programs and they haven't gone through yet in the way he's proposing. If they did they'd be absolutely catastrophic really and so we've also seen him stack his cabinet with the heads of industry. The policies of the Trump administration has triggered a wave of protests and growing resistance movements in the United States. What do you think about those and what is the relationship between these resistance movements and the democratic party? Good question and yeah it started right away with the women's march which happened the day after the inauguration and that was quite an incredible protest actually although it was strongly a kind of democratic maybe older school second wave feminist approach that was very strong. You also had many unions participating you had radical and queer feminists involved. You had people with Black Lives Matter involved so it was actually really kind of amazing and huge protests so that kind of set the tone right away that this is going to be there's going to be you know a lot of resistance emerging and of course there was the reaction to the Muslim ban and that was an encouraging set of protests that emerged in a totally unplanned and ad hoc way of people going to airports right and protesting. There's also now dozens of resistance groups of various kinds it's a very big and complex terrain now that's across the political spectrum. I think the left in the U.S. has for a long time you know I think a lot of it has been kind of anarchist because there's been this view that both parties are corrupt we just can't get any headway in this electoral system you know there was the effort of Ralph Nader in the 2000s and we saw that the Green Party really never got very far and I think that Occupy was a critical moment here so I think in some ways the Sanders campaign represented this recognition on the left that actually you know we need to relate to electoral process in some way otherwise we're just going to get you know steamrolled by someone like Trump and the problem of course is that there's such enmity on the left towards the Democratic Party that it's you know it's it's very difficult to say all right let's try to take over change the Democratic Party because it seems almost impossible and even we've seen you know they haven't learned a lesson from the Sanders campaign they rejected the the more progressive candidate that tried to run for they ran for the DNC chair in favor of an old guard Clinton cabinet member they did they were forced to make Sanders part of this kind of leadership committee but it's not clear how much power they're giving him it's not clear that Democratic Party still wants to support progressive candidates that have a Sanders type program in fact it's clear that they don't want to support them so it's still very difficult but it's you know it's it's a very difficult situation because there's no other party and it's almost impossible for a third party to break through in the US system this huge entry costs and so then the question you know people are debating do we need another party if it's going to be another party what kind of party should it be for example Democratic Socialist of America is a party that it's been around for a while but has gotten a lot more attraction since the Sanders campaign a lot of new members and you know I think they have a pretty mature approach to this where they're saying you know we need to relate to this electoral process but we can't be captured by the Democrats that we need to maintain autonomous kind of social movement power will run around candidates but if the Democrats you know will have put forward a progressive kind of Sanders type candidate we were not going to run someone against them so I think that's now I mean going forward that we know that this kind of candidate has a chance of winning and I think we'll have to think more deliberately about how to build up that kind of infrastructure and to kind of articulate a coalition right around class inequality around racial domination and around you know patriarchy and gender inequality so I think that's that's a that's a key I think that one of the things that he did not do well was to break out of a kind of old left discourse where it's the main contradiction is always class and everything else is kind of secondary so racial inequality will be solved by addressing class inequality and I think that's a really big lesson that the left should have learned by now and you know I he was perhaps unfairly targeted because his policies were far more progressive than Clinton's than track record on issues that would matter a lot to black Americans there's not a very strong left tradition in the U.S. I mean there was but it was really obliterated in the early part of the 20th century mid 20th century Palmer raids McCarthyism and the Cold War right so talking about socialism was really taboo you know and it's still remarkable the accomplishment of Sanders to reintroduce that and to in a sense you know disarticulate socialism from authoritarianism and rearticulate it to democracy right democratic socialism and I think that was a huge accomplishment Trump had tried to give the impression during the election campaign that he wouldn't want to wage too many wars and so on but he seems to have flip-flopped on this promise what do you have to say about that you're absolutely right and it was not a promise that I never took seriously I think that the really dangerous thing now is as this Russian investigation moves forward and they're getting closer and closer to him in his inner circle you know will he resort to the kind of you know well-worn strategy of authoritarian leaders of trying to actually generate conflict to distract attention from this kind of growing scandal I think that's a very scary thing I mean I think this is someone who makes decisions in an incredibly irresponsible way it could be based on his mood I mean this it's a very scary kind of prospect that this guy is ordering you know the biggest bomb in the US government's military's arsenal to be dropped while he's having you know dessert with the you know Chinese leader and Mar-a-Lago I mean that is something that's just deeply disturbing I mean this is someone you think might actually start a nuclear conflict through his tweets so there are sections in the democratic party who wants to impeach Trump do you think that is a viable strategy you know I think it's just not up to the democratic party they don't control Congress so the question is how bad does it have to get before the Republicans also decide that it's in their interest to impeach him and so far it's not in their interest so how this Russia investigation plays out will be you know crucial to this now I think that there's clearly I mean there's so much smoke there's definitely some fire we've already seen these revelations coming out one by one by one getting closer to Trump now look do I think that this is the most important issue facing the US no and I'm also worried about this kind of like anti-russia holdover discourse from the Cold War that said obviously what he did was problematic and also it's kind of useful in a way that he's getting so bogged down in this that he's not being able to accomplish the legislative agenda that he wants to best case scenario for for the left is that this drags on for another year or so right about up into the midterm elections then gets so bad that Republicans lose both houses of Congress so by the time Trump gets impeached and Mike Pence comes into office who's also a pretty dangerous and extremely conservative person he won't have two houses of Congress to advance his agenda and then it's just gonna be kind of waiting out to the next election that's all the time we have for today thanks Michael for talking to us and thank you for watching NewsClick