A Protest against the Protests

What had seemed unthinkable became reality. Donald J Trump first gained the Republican nomination, and then beat Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election in the fall of 2016. Thus, President Trump replaced President Obama in January 2017. Obama, America's first black president and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (but also, of course, the keen user of drone warfare, the banks' saviour and deporter of illegal immigrants). The eloquent, humorous and dialogue-seeking Obama was succeeded by Trump, who had never held public office, but made his name as a flamboyant property speculator, proprietor of bankrupt casinos and more recently, star of his own reality show, The Apprentice. Until he ran for president, Trump's most noticeable contribution to American political life had been his dogged insistence that Obama wasn't American. The contrast between the out-going president and his successor could not have been greater. Trump's victory over Clinton took many by surprise, since all the mainstream media, from CNN and NBC to the New York Times and the Washington Post had warned strongly of the dangers of a Trump presidency. If this wasn't enough, pretty much all the diplomatic, military, cultural and political establishment, including a large part of the Republican Party, whom Trump represented, sought to distance themselves from him. But to no avail; Trump won just enough votes to win the election and became president. Clinton won the most votes, 2.7 million more, but Trump won the most electors and therefore won the election.

The mobilization against Trump was spectacular. It's rare that neo-conservative commentators and left-wing activists have struggled side by side, as they did against Trump. All the politico-economic mainstream and its media in the USA and Western Europe, the Economist, Financial Times and the Guardian, along with Børsen and Politikken in Denmark, Le Monde and Le Figaro in France, and Frankfurter Allgemeine and Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, agitated more and more strongly against 'The Donald'. As did the rest of the Left in the USA and Western Europe, anti-racists, LBGTQ groups, campaigners for social justice and human-rights organizations. All were united against Trump. In Denmark, former Prime Minister and ex Security General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, warned of the possibility of global recession in the case of a Trump presidency, and Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, former spokesperson for the red-green alliance Enhedslisten, was shaken by Trump's campaign. Everyone was frightened at the prospect of the blonde, fake-tanned building matador sitting in the Oval Office. Few thought it possible that he would win. But as we know only too well, that's nevertheless exactly what happened.

In hindsight, there were many signs pointing in that direction. Not least the vote for Brexit in Great Britain. The status quo is only maintained with the utmost difficulty at the moment. Matteo Renzi's inability to push through constitutional reform in Italy shortly after his victory was the next example of dissolution. On the same day in December 2016, Norbert Hofer was just about prevented from becoming President of Austria after a nip and tuck race, but it seems fair to say there's a pattern here. Although Marine Le Pen 'only' progressed to the second round of the French presidential election and lost to Macron, the underlying pattern is painfully clear: the ruling order has great difficulties reproducing itself, giving ground to a rapidly accelerating turn to the right.

This is the story of Trump as part of something much larger, the current high point in a rapidly growing rejection of the political system as we have known it since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Populations defy the media and experts' expectations and vote against the 'system', and therefore vote the 'wrong' way. All across the world, people are reacting to a situation characterized by dissolution and crisis, in which the established political parties are seen as out of touch and unable to change course or offer something else.

The effect of Trump's victory is political chaos. The Republicans are at sixes and sevens and, up to now, are deeply split over Trump as their president. Not only do they now control both Senate and Congress, they also have a majority in the Supreme Court and, most importantly, they have the presidency. But, Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan and Trump disagree on a whole range of signature policies. Things look much worse for the Democrats, though; the party managed to lose an election against the least likely of all candidates and many now hope that the party will collapse so that new ones can be formed, not so attached to the political and economic interests that the Clintons represented.

An initial analysis of the election of Trump would be that he encapsulates the recent popular reaction. Trump is anything but mainstream. He is not only a rejection of the politics broadly accepted by mainstream economists and established politicians, he's also a break with the previous US political system. Right enough he stood as a Republican candidate, but he was in open conflict with more or less all the party's leading members and, during the election campaign, made more out of the similarity between the Democratic and Republican parties as corrupt members of the political establishment under the sway of the banks. Washington had been lining its own pockets and couldn't give a damn about ordinary Americans was a common soundbite. In this way, Trump emerged as a protest against the system. He came from the outside and dissolved the opposition between Democrats and Republicans that had dominated the political system since the middle of the nineteenth century. Trump held this binary structure in suspense and, even though he made use of one of the big parties, he wasn't like any of the other candidates, who were all experienced politicians. He was a mix between Robin Hood and Citizen Kane, at one and the same time a man of the people fighting a corrupt elite, and a self-made man who had founded a business empire and was now moving into politics.

Trump stood out, then, as a rejection of the norm. His election is an expression of protest. Many of those who voted Trump said they didn't especially like him, but they were sick and tired of politicians and the political system, and this is why they were voting Trump. Trump refused to accept the conventional code of conduct during his campaign, and at no point laid out anything near a coherent political programme. Any idea of politics as a knowledgeable dialogue, based on a well-informed argument was replaced by violent tirades against migrants, Muslims, black criminals, Wall Street and the government. And that's what worked. Trump was different, he wasn't reasonable, but tasteless. He was a latter-day Jesse James, who took the fight to the establishment and its naturalized values.

As remarked earlier, Trump is part of something bigger. Phenomenon Trump can't be explained away as an American thing. It's important, of course, to look closely at voting patterns and the distribution of votes among specific groups of the population, which parts of American society voted for whom and how this compares with previous elections, but we also have to extend analysis to articulate the relationship between Trump's election and similar events elsewhere (it's not just a question of identity politics, right or left). In other words, we have to account for the context, which is the political and economic history of 2008 or, as we will see, since the beginning of the 1970s. As English historian Perry Anderson writes in Le Monde diplomatique, Trump is part of the anti-system protest on the right that is spreading across the world at the moment. The US election should be understood in the framework of a global scenario of tumultuous change, where authoritarian right-wing radical movements challenge the so-called neoliberal elite and move into the corridors of power. Trump takes his place alongside authoritarian leaders like General al-Sisi in Egypt, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Mauricio Macri in Argentina and Michel Temer in Brazil, and, of course, his Russian friend, Vladimir Putin. Europe hasn't been passed by either. Here we have Viktor Orban in power in Hungary, the party Law and Justice in Poland, led by Jaroslaw Aleksander Kaczynski, and Milos Zeman in the Czech Republic. This is one of the paradoxes right now: the anti-system forces seem to appear under the banner of nationalism and incarnate a hard-core nationalist agenda. The challenge to the status quo comes from the right. In the North, Norway and, most of all, Denmark have been advanced countries in the current right turn, as explicitly Islamophobic parties have turned Islamophobia into government policy. There are, of course, important differences between the various politicians and parties across the globe, but they all draw on a xenophobic nationalism that breaks with 50 years dominated by the discourse of human rights, however real or imagined this may have been institutionally and geopolitically. In the wealthy North, racism is expressed more jovially (like in the cartoons depicting Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten in 2005), while in the global South, it takes on much more obviously authoritarian dimensions. But the development is the same. As they say in France, the 1930s are before us again.

Crisis

The backdrop to this development is a politicization of the economic crisis, which simply seems to continue and therefore rub off on asylum policy. Trump is an attempt to nationalize a way out of the crisis, politically and economically, politically through white supremacy and economically through protectionism and command economy.

That we find ourselves in a period of crisis is undeniable. Hence the uncertain and rudderless way of governing. The ruling classes have a hard time reproducing their hegemony, and neoliberal politics has suffered an ideological defeat that it doesn't seem able to recover from. There isn't really anything that works like it did before. Neither investment nor austerity, the economy just won't get going again, and it's hard to foresee which direction things take. Received modes of thought have shown their limits, but at the same time no new ones seem available. What's going on? Are we simply confronted with so-called secular stagnation, as economist Paul Krugman hopes, or are we confronted with a fundamental crisis of the capitalist system, as world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein argues? Whatever the case, much points to the end of the short American century. The value crisis is so encompassing that the USA is struggling to turn things around.

The financial crisis is, of course, a crucial factor, but phenomena like the geopolitical instability after 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the wave of protests in 2011, the growing movement of people and the climate crisis are also part of the mix. They are all tendencies that challenge national economics and put pressure on the established political system, not least in the USA. People react by abandoning the old parties and by looking elsewhere. Thus, Trump as protest.

And there are links between Trump's victory and the financial crisis, which revealed the rampant inequality at the heart of the US economy. As documentary director Michael Moore, but also the left communist journal Insurgent Notes explain, the election of Trump is a rebellion against a 25-year-long intense neoliberal globalization, where outsourcing and deindustrialization have slowly eaten away at the customary way of life of a large part of the American working and middle classes. A relationship which first became visible with a slight delay, however, because a growing credit economy kept the Western working class afloat for a number of years, but in 2008 the bubble burst, and suddenly working-class families had to hold down three or four jobs in order to survive, or borrow heavily to keep a roof over their heads and give their kids an education. This is the socio- economic cause of Trump's success: a fall in real wages, economic uncertainty and unemployment. Conditions that the ruling class has had a hard time taking seriously, even after the financial crisis, where politicians chose to bail out the banks and socialize the costs of the burst credit bubble.

So the backdrop to Trump is the financial crisis, which broke out in 2007/8 in the USA and quickly developed into an economic crisis, which spread across the world, but hit the USA and Europe especially hard. Governments dealt with the crisis, just as Mussolini had in the 1930s. They took on the banks' debts and then cut deep into the remnants of the welfare state that had survived 3 decades of neoliberal restructuring. The crisis thus developed into a real political crisis. The ruling classes just carried on as if nothing had happened. The representatives of the current ruling class were unable to see the problem with their political agenda. Inequality grew explosively, globally and locally, and more and more workers were thrown off the labour market, which resulted in growing unrest. Saving the very institutions which were responsible for the finance bubble in the first place was the priority. The immediate reaction to the popped housing and credit bubbles, which spread from the USA to the rest of the world, was to give the banks, insurance companies and finance capitals an enormous amount of money in order to stop them from going bankrupt. This operation revealed the inflated economy's odd mechanics, in which paper money is printed without any connection to the production of value. Their deficits suddenly vanished and the banks went on as if nothing had happened. Nation states had taken on their debt, leaving most countries even deeper in the red than they already were. The alliance between political leaders and finance capital was all of a sudden very clear. Bill and Hillary Clinton are obvious examples of this alliance, and their close connections with Goldman Sachs and Wall Street without doubt worked against Hillary in the eyes of many voters. The banks were saved, while many Americans were driven out of house and home.

The outbreak of the financial crisis and its subsequent management revealed some of the underlying tendencies that had gone more or less unnoticed for a long time. Not least the cavernous inequality of income distribution in countries like the USA, where the richest part of the population had cut itself an increasingly large slice of the cake.

As we know from the Marxist historian Robert Brenner, the problem is that the production of surplus value hasn't increased for a good while. Since the end of the 1960s, the global economy and the economies of the advanced capitalist countries, not least the USA, experienced a significant drop in the rate of profit, while at the same time the richest part of the population has grown richer and richer. This development is the result of the neoliberal politics that have set the agenda since the beginning of the 1980s, and which have been a political attempt to compensate for the decline in value creation by transferring large sums to the rich through tax cuts, deregulation and other such initiatives.

As Brenner has shown, what we are confronted with is a longer history dating back to the end of the Second World War. The economies in the USA and Western Europe went like the clappers for a 25-year period after the war, but ran out of steam at the end of the 1960s. The advanced capitalist economies have been trapped in a slow decline of lower growth, increasing inequality and repeated crises ever since. Neoliberalism was an answer to this crisis. As there was less to distribute, Reagan, Thatcher and little by little all other politicians in the Western world, and after 1989, in Eastern Europe too, correlatively pushed through not only extensive tax cuts, which benefited the rich, but also cracked down on trade unions. The goal was to weaken the workers and prevent them from getting a greater part of the value they produce. This is the history of neoliberalism as an answer to 1968, and as an attempt to splinter the core of worker militancy in the USA and Western Europe and replace them with cheaper wage slaves elsewhere, not least in China, since the country's economy was opened at the end of the 1970s. In retrospect it is obvious that so-called neoliberalism wasn't an effective long-term solution. Or rather, it was, of course; an enormous concentration of wealth has taken place in the last 30 years, but the money economy's underlying problems haven't been solved. This is why Marxist economists talk of neoliberalism as a slow crash landing, where capitalism's been running on empty for the last 30 years, and where inconceivable amounts of credit have been the primary force driving growth. The enormous growth in international trade, in the movement of capital and on the stock markets made it look as though the economy was doing alright, it looked as though profit and the production of value were independent of each other, as though the process of accumulation had freed itself from the process of production. Only of course it hadn't. Just as manual labour hadn't disappeared, as some sociologists and philosophers believed it had for a while. No, history hadn't come to an end, and the neoliberal economy didn't create growth, but an enormous amount of paper money that gave the illusion of growth. Paper money endowed the period with the gloss of normality, though all the while there were crises. There was crisis at the beginning of the 1970s, at the beginnings of the 1980s and 1990s, the beginning of the 2000s and again from 2007 and on. If we look at the neoliberal era from the perspective of social reproduction, it almost takes on the character of a 30-year war, in which neoliberalism attacks the working class relentlessly. But it was a Pyrrhic victory; rejection of the working class wasn't enough to lift the rate of profit, even though it looked for a good while as if credit and revenues from shares were the solution.