The Homer Simpson of statesman has once again seized control of his ship of state. Dementedly swinging the wheel wildly to the right, the rest of the world is scrambling to adapt. Do we abandon our own vessels and swim to shore, or should we double down and navigate more responsibly?
Compared to the decades long effort in Russia, the weeks long rapidity of America’s Putinisation is overshadowed by the chilling similarity of both events to the rise of Nazism in Europe a century ago.
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This resemblance motivated Dennis Glover to repeat the observation misattributed to Lenin that “decades pass when nothing happens and then weeks pass when decades happen”.
One difference is that, alongside Putin, the Hitler role is also filled by Trump, according to the latter’s chief apologist, Steve Bannon.
Joy of joys, we can now experience belligerent nuclear armed autocracy in stereo.
America’s long vaunted “light on the hill” is sputtering and will soon go out. Many pundits now see the end of the post-WW2 “pax Americana” (which was itself deeply flawed) and a return to medieval struggles to the death, all led by an American insurrectionist, convicted felon, multiple bankrupt, admitted sexual assailant, and draft dodger.
The nation that his MAGA followers seek – one that persecutes opponents, adores its dodgy leader as godlike, loves lies, threatens the press, stacks the courts, politicises the public service, foments international chaos, persecutes women and minorities, allies with criminals, lionises oligarchs, repudiates its own agreements, undermines democracies, invades other nations, already exists. It is called Russia, and its president has issued an open invitation for the like minded to move there.
The nation that MAGA despises – one that values individual equality, the rule of law, immigration, plurality, democratic transfer of power, improvement of the human spirit, entrepreneurial endeavour, freedom of expression and political association, and aims to share those values with the rest of the world – also already exists; it’s called the United States of America.
Of the 22 per cent of America’s population that returned Trump to power, the smaller proportion of MAGA adherents appear to hate their country and wish to tear it down.
Maybe they should accept the Russian president’s invitation and move there and leave the less unhappy 78 per cent of Americans alone with what they achieved over the last quarter of a millennium.
Is strategic endeavour now even possible?
Well summarised by Hannah Arndt’s “banality of evil” formulation, most of humanity’s serious stumbles were not caused by evil geniuses but by mediocre men (rarely women) acting badly.
If the mediocre man is always at his best, one with a criminally shrivelled super ego will believe he is a genius.
Like it or not, mediocrity now rules. It is unfortunately widespread, emphatically transactional and untethered to any morality other than self devotion.
The more colourful aspirations that once defined enlightened human affairs – imagination, creativity, optimism, daring, brilliance, hope – have been replaced by smothering grey mediocrity – caution, timidity, love of myth, unreasoned fear, populism, selfishness, all the way through to complete bastardry.
Hobbesian haters now sneer at our collective achievements and aspirations. We are left to tolerate mere existence with a glum, inward looking, resentful, lobotomised, and peculiarly fawning acceptance of these “geniuses”.
Some blame this experiential narrowing on social media, which has banished evidence and valorised unreflective feeling as the basis for action.
So long as brazen lies are comfortable, they are perfectly acceptable foundations for serious decision making. Our imagination no longer spans globally, though our fears extend well beyond it.
International undertakings are now worthless. The same person who only 5 years ago negotiated an enduring “brilliant” trade treaty between Mexico, Canada and the US has now unilaterally trashed it. More of the same is likely to follow for NATO.
Already, international aid budgets are being slashed and redirected in favour of increased defence spending.
A Canutian face off between an implacably indifferent universe and climate deniers seems inevitable (see title image). Consider, for example, what is the likely outcome when flood and storm cover is denied the Mar-a-Lago estate, which is some 3 feet above sea level in coastal Florida, America’s most hurricane prone and second lowest state? Persuaded more by evidentiary risk calculations than the fervent beliefs of its owner, pesky out-of-touch underwriters will probably then be targets of infantile imperial rage, or worse.
(An aside: unlike the current deluded thugs, Canute was wise. His stunt was meant to convey to overly fawning underlings that his power was limited.)
The preconditions for any kind of strategic endeavour – collective agreement and sustained commitment over time – have all been trashed, replaced by idiosyncratic, incoherent, volatile, self centred and childish outbursts. It’s like a frat boy on acid.
Is it possible anymore to pursue strategic collective endeavours, like dealing with the climate crisis?
How did we get here?
There are dangerous fallacies deep within these arch-conservative perspectives.
Reasonably seeking to cut the “fat” from government they also wish to cut the flesh and bone.
Sensibly suggesting that the new hard right political lurch requires determined “realist” opposition, the conservative Michael Gove suggests that “(w)e can no longer afford luxury beliefs” like commitment to ESG principles, net zero emissions, enlightened immigration and DEI policies.
In this, he echoes a little too closely the ridiculous Trumpian accusation that recent US air disasters were the inevitable outcome of employing women and “lesbians” in air traffic control roles.
The error of these conflations is well explained by John Ikenberry. American power, he points out, has endured because, not in spite of, its deep liberal underpinnings; the same legacy that gave life to the initiatives that MAGA and fellow travellers are now determined to detonate.
Consequently, America’s severe hard right ideological lurch will likely damage its global standing much more in the long term than the decline in its economic or military clout, also inevitable from misguided MAGA policies.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly for an economist, Rana Foroohar (hint: it’s worth a read) sees these ructions originating in the failure of the half century long neoliberal project; the idea, crudely put, is that markets left to their own devices will deliver both prosperity and fairness to all.
She explains that a feature of the neoliberal consensus is its aspatial assumption; that the peculiarities of “place” – geographic, political and cultural – are irrelevant to economic performance.
Current American political disruptions, now reverberating globally, can be traced to the grim futures faced by those in the wrong place. They can emphatically attest that neoliberalism got it wrong.
As she put it, “Suddenly, there wasn’t a single American dream, but rather a coastal dream and a heartland dream, an urban dream and a rural dream”.
To many, the aspatial assumption was always patently absurd. Cities thrived on their ability to tap into capital flows, the countryside languished because they were isolated from these conditions, and populist anguish, disenchantment and resentment were expressed at the ballot box.
Though the current hard right lurch closely mirrors those in 1930s Europe and America, stimulating the growth of fascism and the outbreak of world war, Foroohar hints at a more optimistic trajectory of events, but only if we learn the lessons of history.
“The importance of place has become even more evident since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic decoupling of the United States and China, and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Globalization has crested and begun to recede. In its place, a more regionalized and even localized world is taking shape. Faced with rising political discontent at home and geopolitical tensions abroad, governments and businesses alike are increasingly focused on resilience in addition to efficiency. In the coming post neoliberal world, production and consumption will be more closely connected within countries and regions, labor (sic) will gain power relative to capital, and politics will have a greater impact on economic outcomes than it has for half a century. If all politics is local, the same could soon be true for economics.”
Adding that “(a)ll these shifts suggest that regionalization will soon replace globalization as the reigning economic order. Place has always mattered, but it will matter even more in the future”, she foresees a greater, not lesser, role for government as a grand coordinator reconciling local social cultural and political interests with much more nuanced global markets.
This role, and the benefits it could deliver, are simply not possible if the MAGA tribe continues with its scatter gun Capitol riot approach to existing government and its institutions; the disrupt and “break things” practices beloved by its “kidult” tech-bro converts.
We need to learn from America’s Trumpian stumbles and its Jonestown like self destruction and redouble our strategic endeavours, not abandon them in a funk of existential pessimism.
