The second earthquake is on the left. For decades, far longer than the period in which it underestimated Trump, the same political establishment marginalised egalitarian, democratic opposition to its policies and privileges, along with calls for climate action. The nature of its rule was to support finance and corporate capital, ameliorate the inequities and pollution where it felt it could – but always from above, to ensure its continued capacity to manipulate opinion and control outcomes.
Confronted by the audacity of Trump’s far-right presidency, it crumbled. None of its usual mechanisms of control was able to contain him and his followers, now that social media meant he could cultivate, organise and inflame opinion in the wide-open frontiers of cyberspace, while Rupert Murdoch provided a bully pulpit on Fox News. Only a popular mobilisation on the left, unwilling to demonstrate allegiance to the core power structures and determined to link up issues of the environment, race, gender, human rights and economic fairness, provided the necessary countervailing effort to frustrate Trumpism – for the moment.
Joe Biden has said that he began to consider his run for the presidency in August 2017, when white power fascists buoyed by Trump’s success held a torchlight rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In a striking opinion piece published in The Atlantic, Biden denounced the racists and emphatically excoriated the president for lending them his endorsement. The week after Charlottesville, the far-right organised a “free speech” rally in Boston. Tens of thousands of protesters, activists, feminists and anti-racists marched to oppose it. “In Boston,” Biden wrote, “we saw the truth of America: those with the courage to oppose hate far outnumber those who promote it.” For the first time in living memory, a successful presidential bid started out with a thank you to the progressive left.
It would not be the first time that such a campaign had borrowed left-wing energy, only to abandon it outside the portico of the White House. Had Trump proved to be just a maverick who eventually embraced business as usual, then Biden too would probably have followed the usual course. But now everyone can see that any return to elite business as usual opens the door for Trumpism to bounce back in. Without a popular counter-force, the far right will have its way. To succeed, the Biden administration needs to work with the progressive left – and more importantly, is aware of this fact. “Progressives,” Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain recently said, are now a “big part of our party”. When Biden addressed the nation from the Rose Garden to present his signature $1.9trn American Rescue Plan, he acknowledged that “Bernie [Sanders] stepping up and making the case why this was so transformational made a big difference in how a lot of people voted.”
The implications of this will be far-reaching. For now, everything depends on developments within the US – and to understand their significance we must start with how it has come about.
The origins of Trumpism
The link between 6 January and 9/11 personified by Babbitt was more than a random echo. The US responded to the levelling of the Twin Towers by occupying Afghanistan and then launching an insane, nationalist war on Iraq to demonstrate that its wounded hegemony was intact. To legitimise the aggression, the US – along with its close ally the UK – proclaimed, falsely, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, orchestrating a massive PR campaign to convince the public.
Deceit and deception are normal in great power politics, but this was an obliteration of fundamental domestic norms. It opened up a path that would lead to Trump’s mendacity. It leant validity to his assertion that the media disseminated fake news and the political system was rigged. As he pointed out on the campaign trail in 2016, he was part of it and he knew.
More importantly, however, the rigged system failed. The scale and intensity of support for Trump is rooted in the cumulative frustration of the American middle and lower middle classes, and their decades-long experience of income paralysis and increasing insecurity, accompanied by military stalemate. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were unmatched logistical and martial achievements, deploying a colossal use of firepower, which nonetheless turned into drawn-out strategic defeats. The combination of dishonesty and failure opened the way in 2008 for Barack Obama, whose initial opposition to the invasion of Iraq gave him the standing to seize the Democratic Party nomination from Hillary Clinton, who had supported it.
As president, Obama decided that his role was not to cut America’s losses immediately, but to manage a withdrawal that preserved as much of Washington’s international influence as possible. The result was eight years of global mortification and only partial domestic change, despite the symbolic milestone of America electing its first Black president.
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Anthony Barnett | Radio Free (2021-03-20T07:00:05+00:00) The end of closed democracy?. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/20/the-end-of-closed-democracy/
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