Trump’s new era of reaction
Donald Trump and his far-right coterie have assumed the reins of the US government.
But, arguably, the returning president’s most significant victory is that his far-right sensibilities seemingly have become an accepted part of the political furniture: hyper-nationalism, mass deportations, dramatic increases in fossil fuel exploitation, a war on women’s autonomy and transfers of wealth from workers to the already wealthy through tax cuts for billionaires and their companies.
The New York tycoon wrote in his 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal that attention “creates value”. The adage has proven transferable. Politically, Trump generates outrage cycles to his advantage. Whatever the issue, at the end of the day—and often for weeks—Trump manages to get everyone talking about precisely what he wants talked about, thereby setting the tone and shaping the political narrative.
Through his attention-seeking, and unlike anyone this century, he has shifted political consciousness to the right—at least in terms of redefining what tens of millions of people consider to be “acceptable” in a leader: narcissism, punching down at almost every opportunity, reheating canards previously the property of fringe fascism, finding scapegoats for every failure while claiming credit for other people’s efforts.
Yet the tectonic plates of global politics and economics are moving under the pressure of forces far greater than those generated by one obnoxious New York billionaire carrying out what some consider to be a hostile takeover of the US government.
Well before Trump arrived on the political scene, the capitalist class in the US and around the world had concentrated obscene amounts of wealth in its hands. Traditional “centre-left” and “centre-right” ruling parties’ public support had eroded. And the 21st century’s two great powers, China and the US, were marching towards confrontation.
So Trump is perhaps better understood not simply as an individual but as the personification of four converging forces: his own vanity and self-absorption, an arrogant and exploitative US capitalist class, the resurgent and ultra-nationalist far right and a wounded yet increasingly paranoid and aggressive US imperialism.
“My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward”, Trump wrote in 1987. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
This quintessentially capitalist bullishness is one reason that Trump easily slots in at the apex of US power. But his vulgarity, brashness and scepticism of science are the perfect expressions of a world no longer capable of concealing the naked self-interest and a “might makes right” calculus of politics and geopolitics.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t bother with bromides about defending “freedom” or “democracy” abroad, which have been cornerstone talking points in US foreign policy for decades. Anti-China rhetoric had already retreated from philosophical and political “values” to legalistic appeals to “rules” and “order” in international commerce.
However, with Trump, it’s just about winning or losing; the only rationale for winning being that doing anything else makes one a loser. Here, the “new” nationalism aligns with real imperial anxieties that question whether the US has what it takes to defeat China economically and militarily.
It would be easy to scoff at an incoming president who muses about turning Canada into a US state and refuses to rule out militarily annexing Greenland. Yet, despite their seeming outlandishness, such wild threats signal to Trump’s supporters and foes that “Make America Great Again” nationalism is a project for America’s international supremacy. Like the last, the new administration is attempting an economic reordering to fortify the foundations of a war economy.
Politically, he and his team are also trying to create a populace that is more accepting of the indecencies and callousness required to prevail in a major conflict.
No-one is scoffing at Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda. Yet, while the immediate targets are millions of undocumented migrants, the spectacle of it all will matter just as much. The goal, already partly achieved according to opinion polls, is to normalise the idea that some people ought to have fewer rights than others and to win support for persecuting non-citizens.
Should people learn to live in such an atmosphere and with abuses directed against their neighbours and workmates, the right-wing hope is that they will become inoculated against impulses to oppose the abuses resulting from a struggle for supremacy against a foreign country.
The war against women’s right to abortion and the campaign against trans people no doubt are led as much by “traditional” conservatives as by the new far right. Yet, similar to the deportation agenda, there is another goal. In this case, it’s reinforcing an “unfree” orthodoxy: subordination to a purportedly natural hierarchy and order.
In fact, pick any agenda item of the new government—be it “drill, baby, drill”, the veneration of wealth accumulation, the war on “woke”, the return of machismo and so on. Whether new or aggressively recycled, each should be understood as part of an integrated agenda: increasing business profitability and prestige, reversing previous social, cultural and political advances, and bolstering US global supremacy.
The more this agenda is established, and the fewer freedoms oppressed people enjoy, the greater the disempowerment of the working class and the more likely it will drift with, or even embrace, the reactionary political winds.
The key question in the US over the next four years is whether enough people march against the storm.
