The Chicken Littles wallowing in the Augean stables of the Murdochracy are obsessing about whether or not the sky will fall if Trump wins the presidential election in November. Trump is unquestionably a squalid creature – personally, morally, politically. However, he is by no means the whole story.
The Murdoch lackeys’ obsession with Trump is hardly surprising given that so many of them cheerfully attended the political birth of the monster. Nonetheless, as the primaries commence and the election looms, we can only wonder if they will stand by their man, or will they abandon him? More importantly, however, it’s time they looked beyond the malevolence of the Donald factor in contemporary US politics.
It is well documented that America today is a deeply divided society: its economy is failing; its politics are pathological; its self-appointed role as global policeman is under serious challenge. Like the old Soviet Union in 1989, the USA is a great power in decline, with all the problems that this entails. Its disintegration as a “united” state will not be the result of another Trump presidency – although Trump would definitely hasten that disintegration.
The roots of America’s decline as a great power are deeply entwined in the country’s turbulent history. At the core of that history is the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. The defeat of the southern Confederates exacerbated rather than healed the grievances of the Deep South which wanted to retain slavery as the basis of its economy. Meanwhile the northern states rejected the quasi-feudal arrangements sustaining the south. That bitter history continues to feed much of the racism and violence in modern American society, while fuelling the ideological politics of such diverse and divisive groups as the NRA and the white Southern Baptist churches.
Arguably America is at least four different regions. Consider the sharp cultural, political and economic differences between north-eastern states (for example, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts), the west coast (California), the Midwest (for example, Kansas, Kentucky), and the Deep South (for example, Alabama, Texas). Despite all the hype about the “United States of America”, unity has never really been enduringly institutionalised throughout the country’s history. The American Constitution remains a vulnerable fig leaf hiding the regional disunities bedevilling the country today. That vulnerability is precisely what Trump intends to exploit if he regains power. His stacking of the Supreme Court during his years in the White House was a first step towards that invidious goal.
Moreover, America’s much vaunted “liberalism” has failed to heal the deep rifts between the discrete US regions. (In fact American “liberalism” is an egoistic version of possessive individualism.) Issues such as abortion and women’s rights, the rights of minority groups, access to guns, capital punishment, access to affordable health care, prayer in schools, limiting voter registrations, the drawing of electoral boundaries – these and other issues all vary contradictorily across the regions. A tradition of illiberalism has long been entrenched across parts of the USA, especially in the Deep South. Frequently this illiberalism is reinforced by fundamentalist versions of Protestant Christianity that legitimise authoritarianism rather than nurture democratic norms and values.
Writing in the 1980s, Yale historian Paul Kennedy warned that America was facing some potentially insuperable challenges: “[…] whether, in the military/strategic realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means that it possesses to maintain those commitments; and whether […] it can preserve the technological and economic bases of power from relative erosion in the face of the ever-shifting patterns of global production” (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 514-5).
Three developments that have made the challenges identified by Kennedy so perilous for the contemporary United States are : (i) failed economic policies pursued by successive administrations over the past 40 to 50 years; (ii) the rise of populist politics; and (iii) the rise of China as an emergent great power.
(i) Failed economic policies
For the past half century successive US governments (and governments around the world) have been hell bent on shifting responsibility for regulating their economies away from governments to the private sector. Variously labelled as classical economics, neoliberalism, Reaganomics, Thatcherite economics, or post-Keynesian economics, the resulting policies saw the supervisory powers of governments over their economies significantly diminished. Public goods were sold off, often at knock-down prices, to the private sector on the grounds that services like public transport, prisons, hospitals, utilities and banking would become cheaper and more efficient. The predicted economic growth would “trickle down” bringing affluence to all, ending inequality.
The results have been disastrous. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 should have made that abundantly clear to us all. Most concerning of all has been the massive growth of inequality across all the developed economies, but especially in the United States. A tiny minority (around 8%) of capital owners own and control more capital that the 90% of the rest of us have access to. Market failures abound, especially in essential services (electricity, health, education). This is what Thomas Picketty calls hypercapitalism – an extreme form of capitalism that is cannibalising itself.
The only solution is a rigorous implementation of neo-Keynesian policies to facilitate the growth of a vibrant public sector that can robustly compete with and regulate the anarchy and social destructiveness that the private sector has imposed on the US economy. Failure to move in that direction will see America aping Putin’s kleptocracy. Trump no doubt would be salivating at the very thought of such a possibility.
(ii) The rise of populism
Closely associated with the abject failures of hypercapitalism has been the rise of populist politics in the US and elsewhere. The inordinate accumulation of capital at the top end of the US economy has seen jobs destroyed, relationships torn apart, increased poverty, and much personal and institutional devastation. Men, especially, have been thrown out of work. Welfare measures have been miserly and ineffective in addressing this very serious crisis in the lives of too many individuals, families, and communities.
Of course people have become angry, furiously and rightly so. Their often tragic plights have been arrogantly ignored by governments (“the elites”) sequestered away in their comfort zones in Washington and elsewhere. Their victims, especially in the rust belt states in the US, desperately turn to sleezy demigods among the political class who promise them the world but deliver nothing. It is out of this ugly amalgam of bad economics, egomaniacal politicians, arrogant bureaucrats, and lackey journalists that populism has grown so vigorously in recent decades.
(iii) The rise of China
When Francis Fukuyama proffered his fanciful thesis on the “end of history” following the implosion of the old Soviet Union’s economy and superpower status on the world stage, many Americans – especially the advocates of neoliberalism – were cocksure that the US would reign supreme over global politics for the foreseeable future. But they failed to see that China was remerging in the Asia Pacific as a great power. While China’s growth is faltering presently, especially because of Xi Jinping’s clumsy policies, it is still on course to be a larger economy and formidable military competitor with the USA. The world is watching, amazed and fearful, as America declines and China rises.
Here in Australia, we should not be focusing obsessively on the rise or fall of the egregious Donald Trump. He is a nightmare, that’s for sure. However, Australians should be preparing to deal shrewdly with an America under his ugly tutelage. But we should not be blind to the fact he is as much a product of the inevitable decline of the US as a superpower as the rest of his blinkered compatriots.