The world has been upended in just a week since Trump’s sweeping victory – or at least for “liberal progressives.”
Many of these read the runes of Trump’s recapture of the US presidency and Senate and retention of the House as giving “liberal elites” a deserved bloody nose. In explaining his triumph they excused or at least glossed over his excesses and accused Biden, Harris and themselves of treating “ordinary” (white, god-fearing, working class..) Americans with contumely.
Well, now we are beginning to see what “strongman leadership” (Gideon Rachman) means 68 days – almost ten weeks! – before 47’s inauguration. At home vicious retribution against his enemies, real and imaginary, including hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of undocumented immigrants (sans papiers) denounced as violent drug addicts, rapists and pet-eating barbarians who face the modern American equivalent of KZ Lagern and summary deportation.
Plus, no doubt, the dismantling of the federal state, including checks and balances institutions (nodded through by the Supine Court). Maybe prosecution of political opponents such as Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, who knows, even Kamala Harris and Joe Biden himself while the constitutionbal felons of January 6 will be pardoned en masse. Critical journalists should be bracing themselves for relentless attacks on their freedom to report. Women, including young women who endorsed this predatory monster, will see their own freedoms of choice savaged by the evangelical Christian Talibans in the White House.
Who will hold this destructive surge back? The recent spate of appointments of Trump loyalists/sycophants to key posts suggests damn few. The Big Tech and banking oligarchs who now call the political shots are hardly likely to move against a President offering renewed tax cuts and a conflagration of regulations – as well as enjoying Putinesque powers of patronage and punishment.
Economic (un)truths
Trump’s promise of a golden age of American prosperity “like never before” may turn to dust despite that renewal and extension of the 2017 tax cuts. Of course, Biden’s economic record didn’t save his or Harris’s bacon a week ago although inflation had come down to 2.4% (now at 2.6%), the employment rate was healthy (despite a September blip) and hourly earnings were at a high of $35.46 – it just didn’t feel that way, apparently.
A common critique, including among liberals, of Biden/Harris immediately post-election was that the (inaptly called) Inflation Reduction Act was a bridge too far for voters with the trillions of dollars invested in the Green New Industrial Deal aka twin (digital and green) transition, including clean energy. In other words, the transition should have been slower and patchier while Trump was right to stress re-shoring (bringing manufacturing jobs back home) and investment in “dirty” industrial segments like oil, gas and coal…’Drill, baby, drill.”
This is wrong-headed – just as the EU plus UK are wrong to row back on the Green Deal (pronounced dead by some). First, the climate emergency is not just continuing unabated; it’s intensifying as we recently saw in Spain. Global warming is already 1.54C above pre-industrial levels in the first quarter of this century….Second, this investment and that planned in the UK, EU, let alone China and other parts of Asia, generates jobs and wealth and raises people out of poverty. Trump’s recipe of tax cuts plus controls on immigration and, crucially, tariffs would not only be highly inflationary according to most economists but could depress the global and US economies.
The 1930 Tariff Act (‘Smoot-Hawley”) was ostensibly designed to protect US industry and farming plus jobs but ended up provoking tit-for-tat trade restrictions around the world – and deepened the Great Depression. The fear now is of precisely the same or at least a similar outcome almost a century later. (Read again Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929.
Fortress America
“I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars” promised Trump on the stump. We don’t yet know how he plans to end the war in Ukraine other than it is bound to involve mega-appeasement of Putin – and the dismemberment of a European country. Ukraine, already said to be losing territory and facing the harshest winter since the February 2022 invasion, may well be forced to give up sovereignty over swaths of its eastern oblasts.
This obviously has serious implications for other European countries, not least the Baltics and Finland, that border Russia but also elsewhere around the world: the principle of territorial integrity does not fit into Trump’s foreign policy canon. The EU is going to have to rethink its whole defence and security policy very rapidly – as should the UK (but that’s for later).
Similarly, given his previous utterances and evident closeness to Netanyahu, Trump is unlikely to rein back Israel and its far right cabinet from settling Gaza, expelling the Palestinians and, eventually, annexing the West Bank. (And, for all their current talk about a Palestinian state, the Saudis will in all likelihood “normalise” relations with Israel in due course…). After all, Biden/Blinken’s threat to withhold arms from the IDF unless aid to Gaza is stepped up has proven to be empty already.
The truly earth-shattering question is what Trump would do if Israel intensified its aggression towards Iran and set out on war against the Revolutionary Guards and their political/religious masters in Teheran. Would US support go as far as committing its own troops?
Conclusion
This may be “morbid pessimism” as Edward Luce put it today – but there’s certainly no place here for “optimism of the will” as the world is in a dark place with those strongman leaders in the ascendancy.
First published on the author’s Cosmopolitan Villager Substack
Featured image: By Ninian Reid CC BY 2.0
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