Can anyone think of anything good about 2016?
Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini (leader of Italy's racist Lega Nord)
I'm having a hard time thinking of anything positive about this year, a year that has seen nationalists defeat cosmopolitans, bigots outwit the enlightened, and the vulgar triumph over the refined.
Some random, melancholy thoughts in the wake of Brexit, Trump, and now the Italian referendum:
Everything bad about this year is summed up in Matteo Salvini's (leader of Italy's racist Lega Nord) exuberant tweet last weekend after the Italian referendum:
--"Viva Trump, Viva Putin, Viva la Le Pen, Viva La Lega."
I still struggle to accept that our President, the ostensible leader of the Western World, is a fanboy of a Russian thug, an KGB agent no less, owes his wealth to his racist slumlord father, married an illegal immigrant, and proudly boasts about assaulting women--a man who has never read a book, incites violence, makes racist insinuations against our President, has a serious personality disorder, and now---to cap it all--promises to make a fortune out of the Presidency. Compared to him, even that draft-dodging dimwit George W. Bush was a man of decency, a leader of Periclean abilities.
As I said earlier, Trump, for all his apparent deficiencies, still remains hard to assess, because it is not clear what, if anything he stands for and what he intends to do. I said there were Five Possible Trumps (not mutually exclusive):
(i) Trump the Protectionist;
(ii) Trump the "America-First" Nationalist;
(iii) Trump the White Nativist Xenophobe;
(iv) Trump the Infrastructure-Builder;
(v) Trump the Cypher (the mere frontman for others);
and now a new possibility given the prominent positions of Bannon and Flynn:
(vi) Trump the Neo-Con, the new scourge of ISIS and militant Jihadi Islam.
[Since writing that post, I've come to think that his campaign involved a form of bait and switch.
Trump campaigned as a singular figure, someone beyond GOP dogma--he made noises that sounded democratic--protect workers, have a better health care plan etc. But now it seems that he has sold his soul to the most reactionary, most white conservative, elements of the GOP. This is an Administration further to the right than Reagan, GWBush and even Ted Cruz. The views of the Cabinet (Price, Sessions etc) do not reflect the average GOP voter still less the country at large.
Whether abortion should be legal in most or all cases
Price
U.S.
32%
Illegal
64%
Legal
Republicans
60%
35%
Democrats
13%
84%
Effect of illegal immigrants on American jobs
Sessions
U.S.
25%
Take jobs away
65%
Take jobs Americans don’t want
Republicans
46%
48%
Democrats
12%
79%
Source: CBS News poll, October, 2016
And yet as soon as I travel down these lines, as soon as I get annoyed at Trump's bait and switch, I realize I'm viewing the world from the perspective of a comfortable liberal.
Would I think the same way if I were a mid-western auto-worker, a white-van driver from the North of England, or some unemployed Italian graduates who can see no hope for employment no matter how distantly he peers into the future?
Perhaps we liberal elites screwed it up. We were too willing to deregulate the economy, ship jobs abroad, open borders to immigrants, even--God help us--launch hubristic foreign wars. We pushed our values and advanced our interests, while dismissing those who resisted as no more than fools and bigots.
If only we had cared more about material equality. For years, people had been pointing out that western societies were becoming plutocracies.
There's something comforting in believing that greater material equality will fix things. More troubling is the thought that the turn against liberal elites is animated less by material than ideal interests, less a lack of opportunity than a lack of tolerance.
What we are seeing in a lot of Trump and Brexit etc. supporters is a turn towards authoritarian populism. These are people, as someone in the Guardian (where else?) put it: "who could broadly be described as out of step with the cultural assumptions – such as a respect for human rights, immigration, feminism and diversity – that are the bread-and-butter of liberal democracy."
Leaving aside the contentious claim about "the bread and butter of liberal democracy." lets concede that it was the genius of Farage and Trump and Steve Bannon to articulate the worldview of this hitherto belittled rump. (For more on Bannon's worldview, see here.) Liberals had nothing to say to them. Liberals tend to assume that everyone is reasonable and shares the same basic moral outlook.
That's one of the great shocks of 2016: we occupy modern societies that are deeply-divided on fundamental values. Liberals are now going around saying: "I don't recognize my country."
They should get out more.
I can't forget my encounter with a New York city fireman--off-duty at the time--back in early 2009. We were sitting next to each other at the bar of an Italian restaurant and got talking. He was incensed by Obama's election. He thought Tim Geithner was a tax criminal who belonged in jail. He was especially bothered by suggestions that poor people caught-up in the sub-prime mortgage crisis might get bailed-out. (Bankers didn't seem to bother him.) He thought that Muslims ("rag-heads," as he predictably called them) were taking over the country. And it would only get worse now Obama was in charge.
When he figured out I was a liberal, he became especially animated. He hated liberals--like everyone else in his Fire House--partly because they preferred an argument to a fistfight. He sneered when he learnt that I didn't follow UFC cage-fighting. He thought everyone should look in a mirror before they voted and "choose one of their own."
I'm almost certain this guy voted for Trump; and I suspect a lot of Trump and Farage and Salvini and Le Pen voters think exactly like him. Moreover, this is a guy who is not poor. Firemen earn a ton of money in New York and retire early on fabulous pensions. This guy told me he also owned a plumbing business.
Perhaps we liberals should now give this new order--this form of popular authoritarianism--its chance. Maybe the popular authoritarians like Trump will do a better job with the economy-- especially if they can escape the cold skeletal hands of austerity--, perhaps they can bring people together in joint hatred of some other "other."
If there is any optimism to be found, surely here is the place to look. Trumps great infrastructure plans will grow the economy--Larry Summer's charge that these plans are a scam will be proven wrong--and the economically disgruntled will all become merely gruntled. The Europeans--the Germans in other words, since they are the only Europeans with agency--will follow suit. Southern Europe will be lifted on a great tide of fiscal policy. Targeted EU investment will rejuvenate their economies.
And yet...even if this economic renaissance were to appear, I worry that we have more to fear from Trump's success than his failure. For then we will have entered a very different world. Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy will be pulling in conflicting directions. The likely loser here will be liberalism. The views of that racist New York fireman will gain respectability.
I'm certainly not willing to let that lot take over.
So what's to be done?
No comments:
Post a Comment