The 2016 race to the White House is one of the most polarised in years. The rise of maverick candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump has prompted widespread interest.

“Every four years, the media and the Democratic and Republican Parties proclaim ‘the most important election of our lifetimes’. But hype and cynicism aside, election time in the United States is a really unique and interesting one for politics”, US socialist and Black Lives Matter activist Khury Petersen-Smith told Red Flag.

The aftermath of the global financial crisis provides crucial backdrop to the current situation. The US working class not only suffered the brunt of the crisis but has also been left behind in the so-called recovery. Industries have been gutted, millions lost their homes, tent cities of the homeless sprang up on the outskirts of major cities and austerity has reigned.

Petersen-Smith argues that it is impossible to understand the elections without grasping the nature of the devastation being wrought on the US working class. “Wages are low. The shreds of a social safety net that existed in the US have been slashed. Public education has been seriously changed as charter schools are phased in to displace public schools. And austerity has destroyed public infrastructure that was already devastated under Bush and the presidents before him. Nothing embodies this more clearly and painfully than the poison water crisis in Flint, Michigan.”

Black people and poor people are also more interested in socialism than the average American – which is not surprising if you know that socialism is about ending oppression.

By contrast, a 2011 Pew Research Center report found that the rich have made a killing from the crisis – average household wealth for the top 7 percent increased by 28 percent. The top end of town seems further removed than ever from the lives and desires of ordinary folk. Add to this the virulent racism of state institutions, the ceaseless warmongering of the US empire in the Middle East and increasing hostility to migrants – and you have the horrors of 21st century capitalism writ large. This has been made all the worse by the last seven years of the Obama administration.

Petersen-Smith argues that Obama has been no friend of workers and the oppressed. “Both parties shared an agenda of privatisation and other pro-corporate policies, war and austerity”, he said. While some progressives believe that the Democratic Party is a “lesser evil”, the current round of primary elections has revealed that disaffection and anger with the establishment of both political parties are growing. The rise of self-styled “political outsider” candidates is a reflection of this.

On the right, Donald Trump has tapped this disaffection. The rogue billionaire claims that he will end the inefficiencies and corruption of the political establishment. His answer to the crisis entails rebooting “traditional” US values.

Racism towards African Americans, migrants and Muslims has been central to his message. This is a tested strategy. Finding scapegoats for the deep-seated problems of US capitalism is a tried and true bipartisan method of distraction. “Trump’s success is an expression of a political system where the right wing has had unbridled freedom to pursue its agenda”, said Petersen-Smith.

Such right wing populism is not just a recent phenomenon. “There has been a steady rise of openly hateful, far right activity during the Obama years. Whereas the far right has historically been considered to be on the fringe of US politics, it entered a new phase during John McCain’s campaign as the Republican candidate in 2008”, he said. “McCain-Palin rallies had Nazis participating openly, calling for Obama to be killed and so on.”

Now the Republican right is on the up. While it often seems that Trump is off the charts on the crazy scale, Petersen- Smith said that the presidential hopeful is channelling, and amplifying, existing sentiment: “Trump calls for building a wall across the US-Mexico border, the right wing cheers, and Democrats and their supporters decry his racism. The bizarre part is that there already is a wall across the US-Mexico border. And Obama has stationed more personnel and invested in technology to guard the border”.

The same is true regarding Islamophobia. Petersen-Smith pointed out that Trump is building on more than a decade of both Democrat and Republican fear-mongering. “The US has bombed seven countries under Obama – all of which are predominantly Muslim. More recently, a majority of governors in the US publicly opposed Syrian and Iraqi refugees coming to their states.” So while Trump is dangerous and vile, he has only “brought into the mainstream rhetoric that was previously considered more marginal”, Petersen-Smith said.

On the other side of the political spectrum there is Bernie Sanders, who reflects a similar disaffection with business as usual. But, unlike Trump, he directs the anger in the right direction: against big business, corporate control, the greed of the rich and so on. Sanders’ meteoric rise has both harnessed and fuelled this sentiment, relating to the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, a 2011 anti-corporate movement that swept the US. He uses the language of Occupy, and many of his campaign activists are drawn from it.

Sanders is also trying to relate to anti-racism campaigns, most palpably expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement, of which Petersen- Smith has been a part. This movement emerged in response to police brutality towards African Americans and involved demonstrations and riots across the country, from Ferguson to Baltimore. Petersen-Smith said that the movement is still trying to figure out how activists should relate to the elections.

“We have suffered some real setbacks – such as the fact that 12-year-old Tamir Rice’s killers walked away from any consequence for his murder and that the first cop tried in torturing and murdering Freddie Gray, which inspired the Baltimore uprising last year, walked too.

“On the other hand, a new wave of struggle was opened up on college campuses in the second half of last year. So activists are working to figure out which campaigns, organisations and demands will take the movement forward. The elections are mixed up in all of that.”

Petersen-Smith is enthused about the energy Sanders’ campaign has released. The Vermont senator drew with the establishment’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, in Iowa and trounced her in New Hampshire. While the south might prove a more difficult battleground, Sanders has momentum.

His message has been clear: the US is deeply unequal and divided. Society is dominated by the billionaires who hold all the economic and political power. It is wracked by racism and economic violence. The solution is wealth redistribution, and taxes on the rich to provide for public health care, education and the rebuilding of a social safety net.

Sanders has helped popularise the term “socialism”. Petersen-Smith said that this is welcome. “The left never recovered from the McCarthy era in the ’50s; there are no socialist parties and very little in the way of visible socialist traditions. So most Americans don’t know what socialism is, but a growing number suspect that it’s better than capitalism.

“Polls show that many young people are interested in socialism. While it gets less coverage, Black people and poor people are also more interested in socialism than the average American – which is not surprising if you know that socialism is about ending oppression.”

Sanders’ campaign faces some significant difficulties, however. Petersen-Smith drew attention to the Democratic Party establishment’s hostility. “The greatest limit is the one that he has chosen: to run his campaign in the pro-corporate, enthusiastically imperialist, austerity-embracing, environment-destroying Democratic Party. The Democratic Party does not exist to carry forward the vision that Sanders puts. Rather, it is doing an excellent job at enforcing the situation that so many of his supporters oppose.”

Regardless of the eventual outcome of the primaries, the space opened up by the Sanders campaign is important for building a genuine movement against the economic and political ravages of the system. “We want to win the most radical Sanders supporters to a lifetime of political activity beyond the 2016 elections – to the long term fight for socialism from below”, he said.