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ABSTRACT
According to leading cosmopolitan liberals, the post–WWII order has been a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The main threat to this Golden Age, they maintain, is right-wing populist nationalism in general and Donald Trump in particular. I argue that their position is a Eurocentric ideological inversion of reality. In truth, Trump is not a threat to the liberal-capitalist order, but a pure expression of its life-destructive competitive dynamics. His “America First” foreign policy is a response to the contradictions of global political economic forces. The paper begins with an examination of the real drivers of the liberal-capitalist system, confronts the ideological illusions of liberal cosmopolitanism with these darker realities, argues that an empirical examination of Trump’s record reveals that he is more consistent with than an opponent of post-war political economic dynamics, and concludes with a review of the manifold life-destructive effects that order has had on the peoples of the Global South and workers everywhere.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on Contributor
Jeff Noonan is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor. He is the author of Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference (2003), Democratic Society and Human Needs (2006), Materialist Ethics and Life-Value (2012), Embodiment and the Meaning of Life (2018) and The Troubles with Democracy (2019), as well more than 50 articles in journals such as Res Publica, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Philosophy Today, Rethinking Marxism and Dialogue.
Notes
1 Roberto’s superb historical study of the rise of American fascism in the aftermath of the Great Depression and New Deal works beneath impressionistic definitions of fascism to a class explanation. Roberto cautions against defining fascism by insignia and uniformed mass thuggery. Fascism can appear under different guises, but what it always is, according to Roberto, is a ruling class solution to an intractable economic crisis. The crisis is solved by eliminating democratic politics (Roberto Citation2018, 294–295, 390). In a fascist state, business absorbs politics. “Absorbing” and “smashing” democratic institutions are different ways of solving the same problem: the emergence of democratic and socialist solutions to capitalist crisis. His point is that if these democratic institutions are fully captured by business interests, (as he argues they have been by the Trump regime), there is no need to smash them (Roberto Citation2018, 407–408). Trump has indeed consorted with armed and uniformed racist thugs, and his nationalist rhetoric is redolent with classical fascist tropes, but if he is a fascist, it is not because of those alliances and arguments, but because of the class project that he spearheads. Others on the left have distinguished between fascism and neo-fascism, and still others have argued that Trump is not essentially different from mainstream Democratic leaders (See West Citation2019; Solomon Citation2020). I disagree with the belief that there is no difference between Trump and the Democratic mainstream, but leave open the question about whether or not his movement is fascist.
2 While Trump’s domestic record is outside of the purview of this paper, it is worth noting that what applies on the international stage is also true domestically. The “authoritarian” tendencies that his critics decry, the “executive overreach” that they obsess over, and his personal boorishness are the norm, not the exception in the history of the American Presidency. Trump has not invented new executive powers (and has hardly violated American Civil liberties on the order of the Bush administration after 9/11); he is using the powers that the Constitution gives the President. For an eye-opening history of the “imperial presidency” that shows that the standards that liberal critics apply to Trump have rarely been observed by past Presidents, see Zeitz (Citation2020).
3 For a general discussion of the historically significant role of the state in directing economic development, as a prefigurative practice of a democratically planned economy, see Devine (Citation1988, 45–51).