Right from his near-miraculous reelection to the White House as the 47th President of the United States of America, a possibility that appeared remote given the perceived threat he constituted to that country’s democracy demonstrated especially by the insurrection he instigated against his defeat in the 2020 presidential election as well as his unsalutary record as a convicted felon, Donald Trump has given indications of his intention to effect disruptive changes both within America and globally. From day one with his inauguration on January 20, he has hit the ground running with a plethora of executive orders and verbal pronouncements to set in motion the implementation of the key planks of his campaign platform.
These include stricter immigration control, mass deportation of illegal immigrants, withdrawal of US support for the World Health Organization (WHO), rolling back regulatory policies designed to safeguard the environment, introducing retaliatory and punitive tariffs in defense of US trade, granting pardon to those convicted for their attacks on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ensuring a speedy end to the Russia-Ukraine war among others.
In many ways, Trump and the far-right ideology he has come to symbolize and benefit immensely from politically, are products of the ever-deepening crisis of capitalism and widespread uncertainty and insecurity as regards the continued economic prosperity of the advanced capitalist countries of the West. This is particularly so with the stiff competition that emergent aggressive economies like China and India continue to pose to America’s position as the world’s foremost economic power even if she still retains considerable dominance in terms of global military prowess as well as the technological innovation that sustains it. In the long run, however, economic decline can undermine military efficacy as the history of the rise and fall of great powers across time and space has all too frequently demonstrated.
Trump was obviously right when he declared in his well-written and delivered inauguration address that “As our victory showed, the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda with dramatic increases in support from virtually every element of our society, young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, urban and suburban, rural and very importantly, we had a powerful win in all seven swing states, and the popular vote we won by millions of people”. With the emphasis of their campaign on reproductive rights, protection of gay, lesbian, queer and transgender sexual rights as well as the threat, Trump was seen as constituting to the constitution and democratic governance, Kamala Harris and the Democrats utterly missed the point that substantial numbers of the electorate were concerned about current economic hardships and were willing to believe that Trump had the keys to attaining greater prosperity no matter the moral baggage he was associated with.
Indeed, the deepening crisis of capitalism is the key reason why far-right groups with their often extremist racist, nationalist and anti-immigration rhetoric have gained increasing political ascendancy not only in the US but also in many other advanced capitalist countries. Over three decades ago, a number of analysts had predicted the steady march of a character like Trump from the fringes of the American political system to general political acceptability and dominance. This was with the relatively impressive showing of non-mainstream candidates such as Ros Perot and Patrick Buchanan as independent or third-party contestants in the 1992 and 1996 presidential primaries and/or elections.
Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain had emerged as President and Prime Minister, respectively, in both countries and ushered in the neo-liberal capitalist revolution that sought to respond to the crisis that Keynesian capitalism and its extensive welfarist, interventionist state had run into as from the late 1970s after the latter’s ideological dominance since the end of the second world war in 1945. Under the intellectual suzerainty of the Conservative economist, Milton Friedman, and his disciples of the Chicago School of Economics, neo-liberalism and its orientation towards financialism, privatization, removal of subsidies for critical social services, de-funding of welfare support to vulnerable citizens, the rolling back of the state, deregulation of the economy and the subordination of large segments of society to the vagaries of market forces, maintained policy hegemony in advanced capitalist economies till the weakening occasioned by the global capitalist recession of 2008.
The capitalist triumphalism that heralded the collapse of communism in 1989, with the fall from power of most Marxist-Leninist states in the Eastern Bloc, best exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s prediction of ‘the end of history’ and what he saw as the unimpeded march of capitalism and liberal democracy into the unforeseen future, was short-lived. For, the defeat of a potentially viable political and economic alternative to capitalism and its liberal democratic accompaniment did not eliminate the fundamental, self-defeating contradictions of capitalism despite Karl Marx’s vivid description in his ‘Communist Manifesto’ of the historically unmatched creativity and capacity for prodigious production of the capitalist mode of production.
Thus, it is the inherent contradictions of capitalism and its tendency to breed incessant cycles of economic booms and bursts and recurrent recessions with the attendant hardships that have created the conditions for the emergence of Trump and the serious danger that his ideas, temperament, disposition and bigotry constitutes to the survival of liberal democracy in a country, that despite its failings, has been a beacon for representative and responsive governance over the last two and a half centuries.
Utilizing the Marxist geographer, David Harvey’s conceptualization of the contemporary crisis of capitalism in his book, ‘The Enigma of Capital’, Benjamin Kunkel writes that the origins of the crisis can be located “in the troubles of the 1970s, when the so-called Golden Age of capitalism following World War 11 – blessed with high rates of profitability, productivity, wage growth and expansion of output – gave way to what Brenner called “the long down-turn” after 1973…this long down-turn, with deeper recessions and weaker expansions across every business cycle, reflects chronic overcapacity – another variety of overaccumulation – in international manufacturing, a condition brought about by the maturation of Japanese and German industry by the end of the 1960s, and later compounded by the industrialization of East Asia”.
Neo-liberal attempts to address the protracted crises of capitalism, Harvey argued, resulted in policies that curbed high wages to increase corporate profitability but also implied deficient demand with negative economic consequences. In his words, “Persistent wage repression therefore poses the problem of lack of demand for the expanding output of capitalist corporations. One barrier to capitalist accumulation – the labour question – is overcome at the expense of creating another – lack of market”. And how was the problem of lack of market addressed? Harvey cryptically observes that “The gap between what labour was earning and what it could spend was covered by the rise of the credit card industry and increasing indebtedness”.
One of Trump’s greatest appeals to his teeming supporters is his stance on immigration as substantial numbers of Americans believe that their economic woes are compounded by the large influx of illegal immigrants who take jobs that citizens should have and endanger society through criminal activity. But capitalism as scholars like Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein noted long ago has become a global economic system that generates development in one part of the globe in the same process that breeds underdevelopment and deepening poverty in another.
The prosperity of the West cannot be understood or explained without reference to its profiting from more than five centuries of slavery and colonialism largely responsible for the backwardness of those underdeveloped countries that Trump derisively referred to as ‘shit hole’ countries in his first term. After the attainment of ‘flag independence’ as from the 1960s, John Perkins, an investment banker, in his book, ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’, reveals how Western banks, some of which he worked for, coaxed and lured African countries into taking huge foreign loans and when the lending countries ran into economic crisis, they imposed huge interest rates on the debtor countries resulting in a protracted debt trap that compounded their indebtedness and grounded their economies.
As the economic crisis in Africa worsened in the mid-1980s, the International Financial Institutions imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) demanding the devaluation of national currencies, privatization of state-owned enterprises, liberalization of trade, deregulation of the economy, retrenchment of public sector workers, removal of subsidies on fuel and essential services among other policy prescriptions that worsened poverty and deepened inequality. The resultant deindustrialization of these countries, astronomical inflationary spirals, increased unemployment and descent into political instability and internal strife created conditions in which large numbers of their citizens sought to escape their woeful existential realities and seek succour in more prosperous advanced countries such as the US.
Teresa Hayter notes the grand irony that the Western imperialists who, as European imperialism expanded, obtained labour by force transporting between 10 and 15 million African slaves to work for plantation owners and emergent industrial capitalists thus creating the conditions for the pathetic state of these dysfunctional countries today. According to him, “So-called globalization, or latter-day imperialism, has created or helped to create new pressures to migrate. But the situation has changed. The governments of the rich countries, rather than forcing people to migrate against their will, are now intent on stopping them migrating when they wish to”.
And as the late radical economist, Professor Bade Onimode, wrote “…the major sponsors of liberalization, globalization, in the North are strongly opposed to migration of labour. From France, Germany, the USA and other OECD countries, we read incredibly depressing tales of the harrowing experiences of immigrant workers…Why, this being the case, should the governments of developing countries not be allowed to exercise any controls on the entry of manufactured goods, capital, investment and technology into their countries, while the countries of the North stoutly shut out migrant workers from the developing countries…Why should free trade, liberalization and globalization be good for manufactured products, capital and technology (intellectual property rights) and be bad for labour?”.
Trump has promised to end the ‘Green New Deal’, revoke the electric vehicle mandate, promote unfettered drilling of American oil all in a bid to promote manufacturing and prosperity in America. He has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization which means stoppage of American funding for vital health programmes of the WHO many of which are of immense benefit to developing countries. Yet, the lesson of the Coronavirus pandemic is that not even the most powerful countries in the world will be immune when pandemics spread from one part of the globe to others.
If his policies worsen the menace of climate change with the poor countries being the most adversely affected, this will only deepen the problem of poverty in these countries and heighten the desperation to migrate to more prosperous climes. Enthusiastic that America’s golden age has begun, Trump averred that “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens. For this purpose, we are establishing the External Revenue Service to collect all tariffs, duties and revenues. There will be massive amounts of money pouring into our treasury coming from foreign sources”.
This may well be a legitimate national aspiration. But Trump apparently does not realize that, no matter how powerful she may be, America’s prosperity cannot assure her security in a world in which she is surrounded by increased impoverishment and heightened inequality. The contradictions of capitalism are global and must be addressed by international cooperation with America best placed to play a leading role in the quest for a fairer, more just, equitable, safer and kinder world for all humanity. To make America great again, she does not have to strive to be mean again.
