By Professor Inderjeet Parmar
This Op-ed was originally published on The Wire

By Professor Inderjeet Parmar
This Op-ed was originally published on Oxford University Press.

One year into President Donald Trump’s administration, serious questions are being asked about the nature and extent of the ‘crisis’ of the US-led liberal order, and its hegemonic state. The most fervent proponents of that order – liberal internationalists – are in varying states of despair. According to their Whiggish narratives, the order was supposed to be open, universal, prosperous for most, and integrative. After the Cold War’s end, the triumph of liberalism seemed all but certain. Though success bred its own international challenges, liberals were ready for them. China, India, and the rest of the BRICS, not to mention South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, and Turkey (until recently), among others, continue to be seen as success stories of the order. Despite dark Realist mutterings of inevitable military conflict between extant and rising hegemons, liberal optimism remained. Until November 2016.

What is most shocking to liberals is that the significant threat appears to be at ‘home’, i.e., in the western heartlands: First, Britain voted to ‘Brexit’ the European Union; then Trump defeated liberal-order champion Hillary Clinton. For the first time since 1945, a US President won office by attacking the principal relationships that are the very sinews of established order – NATO, American Middle eastern policy, East Asian security treaties.

President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy and a governing style favouring illiberal and racialised authoritarian-populism, rather than tolerance and diversity, is narrowing American identity around the macho (angry) white male, being restored after decades of ‘humiliation’ at the hands of “usurpers.” Women’s rights, civil rights, immigrants, and liberal elite social engineering that ‘emasculated’ the American white man, tampered with the constitution and under the banner of diversity changed the very face of America.

The ‘other’ is a Muslim, refugee, terrorist, Mexican immigrant, the unwanted African and Haitian – when the immigrants Trump wants look like Norwegians, a position applauded by white supremacists. A recent Gallup poll shows the effects – collapse in America’s global approval from 48% in 2016 to 30% today, just above Russia, slightly behind China and significantly trailing Germany (43%).

The levels of social and economic inequality at home – alongside the crisis of ‘immigration’ and forced migration – much of it driven by war, poverty and military violence – makes a lethal political cocktail that has bred and encouraged leaders promoting right-wing xenophobic populism, challenging liberal norms.

Yet, those crises may have been predictable given fault-lines fundamental to the liberal order. Some are inherent in an expansionist liberalism – spreading its democracy and market economics across the world, creating its own competitors and challengers in the process, leaving nowhere for American and other western states to export their crises.

Other crises occurred because the promise of the liberal order was unequally shared. The liberal world order turned out to be the West plus Japan and pro-US South Korea. Large parts of the ‘periphery’ (across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, for example) did not share in the liberals’ bounty. That post-1945 era sublimated its colonial-era racialised-imperial impulse – embedded in the distribution of power within international institutions and the terms of trade, as well as the extraordinary violence during the North American-Western European ‘long peace.’

Yet the western ‘fix’ in the 1970s to the challenge of post-colonial nations’ demands for a New International Economic Order – leading to the export of capital to the global south through loans and investment in ‘middle class’ third world states, not only created competitors but also aided the industrial job-destruction process kick-started by automation: rust belt areas lost jobs and suffered socially. White working and middle classes drifted politically towards the Republicans, whose subliminal racialised appeals – against ‘reverse discrimination’, for example, nurtured a grievance at loss of position, viewed as others gaining unfair advantages over ‘real’ Americans. The seeds of the Trump triumph of 2016 were sown in the decline of the postwar social contract that initially fuelled Reaganism – and small government and low taxes conservatism. The wages of whiteness however delivered little in material terms to Reagan Democrats. And combined with globalisation and automation, their living standards fell, along with other large swathes of American society, as corporate wealth and political power increased.

President Trump’s ‘principled realism’ – sketched out in his inaugural address through the speech to the UN General Assembly in September, to his first National Security Strategy of December 2017, and General Mattis’s National Defense Strategy of January 2017 – is unilateral, selectively internationalist, and heavily militarised. It is also extractive, transactional, and based on American hard power. Trumpism is a kind of social Darwinism: unregulated corporate power with militarised policing at home; armed and dangerous states abroad eschewing diplomacy, loosening the bonds of international norms, underpinned by a survival-of-the-fittest mentality.

As his support erodes in practically all parts of the electorate, the legitimacy of American political and financial elite declines, and America’s global standing slips below China’s, Trump is pursuing a more militarist strategy against China and Russia – which he has labelled ‘revisionist’ powers, and closing down diplomatic pathways in dealing with major global crises. The growing threat of war, the downgrading of diplomacy and extolling the virtues of a global ‘national awakening’, augurs ill for the future of world politics, with strong undertones of worship of ‘strength’, ‘nation’ and ‘God’.

There is little room for soft power in Trump’s foreign policy; diplomacy has been side-lined in favour of military solutions. And America’s attitude to international organisations is ambivalent. Thus far, however, the effects have not fundamentally altered the international order – but President Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, UNESCO, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and selective engagement with other international institutions suggests a loosening of the international order created by Anglo-American power after World War II.

The title of a major report for discussion at the January 2018 meetings at Davos, based on a survey of global elite opinion, is ominous for the future of the international system: “Fractures, Fears and Failures.” The report’s subheadings include: “Grim Reaping,” “The Death of Trade,” “Democracy Buckles,” “Precision Extinction”, “Into the Abyss”, “Fears of Ecological Armageddon” and “War without Rules.”

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, and a columnist for The Wire. His twitter handle is @USEmpire.

By Dr Mark Ledwidge
This op-ed was originally published in International History & Politics 3(1): 14-16, Newsletter Summer 2017, An Organised Section of the American Political Science Association

This essay will not provide a historical legitimisation of the race first philosophy advocated by Marcus Garvey, nor will it attempt to legitimise the Pan- Africanist and Black Nationalist philosophies advocated by Garvey.1 The essay situates Garvey as the forerunner of the Black Nationalist leaders that came to prominence in Africa and the African diaspora during the mid-20th Century. That is, Garvey unleashed an African world view which challenged global white supremacy. In short, Garvey’s ideological thrust laid the basis for the trans-national liberation movement for Africans at home and abroad;2 Garvey influenced leaders such as Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Malcolm X and a cadre of Nationalists, reformists and revolutionaries.3 A key facet of Garvey’s leadership was countering the negative racial propaganda that Europeans and Euro- Americans had fastened onto the image of black people.4

As often occurs regarding counter hegemonic movements, mainstream historians have generally focused on Garvey’s failure to liberate Africa and people of African descent. Nonetheless it is not wrong to suggest that the Universal Improvement Association (UNIA) and the African Communities League (Founded July 15th 1914) did not fulfil Garvey’s aims. 5 Examined from a materialist perspective, the failings of the Black Star Line and the UNIA’s other business ventures, and the collapse of the UNIA could negate the assertion that Garvey possessed leadership credentials, accepting of course the external factors that caused the UNIA’s downfall.6 On reflection, Garvey’s leadership was best exemplified in his efforts to decolonize the minds of African people as he reached down into the fractured consciousness of a people whose self-image had been ravaged by centuries of racist and pseudo-scientific propaganda, and told them that they were heirs to a hidden history and stolen legacy.7 Indeed, Garvey concurred with the racial philosophy of Arthur A. Shomburg who exalted black pride in his seminal essay ‘The Negro Digs up his Past’ in the book The New Negro.

Unlike Du Bois, and the elite faction of the African American talented tenth, Garvey spoke to lay persons and the black masses across the globe by articulating his message of liberation in the Negro World and later the Black Man magazine.8 Garvey’s conflict with some members of the African American elite included issues related to colour, class9 and the double consciousness that Du Bois had identified in The Souls of Black Folk. Garvey theorised that centuries of racial oppression and colonialism had encouraged disunity among black people and deep suspicions regarding the legitimacy of black leadership. Ultimately Garvey’s activism forced black people to confront the externally induced self- loathing that hindered their efforts to meet their collective interests.10 Significantly Garvey argued that black liberation was dependent on self- knowledge bolstered by an appreciation of African peoples’ historical achievements. 11 Henceforth Garvey played a pivotal role in intellectualizing and internationalising Pan-Africanism, along with Du Bois and George Padmore12 but prior to Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and others. In short, Garvey understood that the principal battlefield exists within the mind of both the oppressed and the oppressor, and that liberation or behaviour modification requires the restructuring of a group's political and intellectual consciousness.

The under-acknowledgement of Garvey’s leadership credentials pertaining to international relations and black liberation are derived from three factors:

1. The successful covert counter-intelligence operations of British and American government intelligence apparatus.13

2. Garvey’s quest for African liberation was antithetical to the racial politics and interests of state actors in America and in the colonies.14

3. Despite exceptions, the academy’s tendency to construct, maintain, or perpetuate the Euro-centric and racial mores of Western society has created tensions in evaluating black freedom fighters like Garvey, whose activities threatened to destabilise the dominant social order.15

The fact that the UNIA was destabilised by British, American and colonial governments is indicative of the threat Garvey’s movement posed to Western interests. In America J. Edgar Hoover’s General Intelligence Division (the forerunner of the FBI) and other organs of the American State, willingly bypassed their own racism and utilised black informants and agent provocateurs to disrupt Garvey’s business and political ventures.16 Hoover, the US State Department, and the US Justice Department pursued Garvey with a vengeance. Hoover ordered his subordinates to find or manufacture illegal activities in order to destroy Garvey.17

“...Garvey understood that the principal battlefield exists within the mind of both the oppressed and the oppressor, and that liberation or behaviour modification requires the restructuring of a group's political and intellectual consciousness.”

In brief, persecution from the State coupled with the collaboration of African American leaders like Du Bois and members of the NAACP led to Garvey’s imprisonment and deportation from America.18 Suffice to say Garvey’s plans stimulated the significant opposition he faced.

The fact that Garvey travelled widely in the Caribbean, parts of South and North America and London provided him with insight into the international dimensions of white hegemony. 19 Ironically European Americans rejected Garvey’s revolutionary spirit despite their reverence of the American Revolution and Patrick Henry’s cry of “give me liberty or give me death”. Here racism, self- interest, and cognitive dissonance prevented the white collective from supporting the UNIA’s global agenda. It is conceivable that whites rejected the UNIA and its so-called militant tendencies. However historiographers must recognise that the brutality of racial oppression and colonialism undoubtedly fuelled the rise of Marcus Garvey.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St Ann’s Bay on August 17th 1887, on the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean.20 The history of the Caribbean was rudely interrupted by the rise of Europe, particularly Spain as a result of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492.21 The emergence of Spain and Portugal and the V oyages of Christopher Columbus stimulated European expansionism and had a cataclysmic impact on Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the world.22

European expansionism and the profiteering of commissioned and semi-commissioned adventurers like Sir Francis Drake and his cousin Sir John Hawkins,23 who was financed by the Virgin Queen to enslave, commoditise and sell Africans,24 helped fund the (so called) triangular trade, which Eric Williams maintains in the book, Capitalism and Slavery, assisted in financing Britain’s imperialist thrust into the Caribbean islands and America. 25 The profiteering of European Nation States led to the legalised enslavement of millions of Africans and the genocide of millions of the indigenous people of the Caribbean. Note the Catholic cleric Bartholomeo de las Casas estimated that 12 to 15 million Caribs were wiped out as a result of European imperialism.26 In addition, Europe’s conquests caused the construction of a hegemonic racial power paradigm.27

Garvey recognised that for centuries racism had impoverished the lives of Africans across the globe from a material, psychological, spiritual, cultural, and historical perspective.28 Clearly the descendants of enslaved Africans and Africans in general had inherited notions of inferiority that had damaged the African psyche.

Garvey realised before Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Joy Leary that white supremacy had left a legacy of psycho-cultural trauma which had distorted the political consciousness of Africans. In retrospect an unlettered man born in Jamaica pierced the veil of centuries of mis-education by identifying the so- called Negro’s African heritage. It is noteworthy that when Garvey was born there were no major texts that identified the existence of ancient African civilisations or an abundance of literary texts that exalted the virtues of an African identity, as Africans in Africa were viewed as savages and the descendants of enslaved Africans in the diaspora had been taught to reject Africa and their blackness. Consider also that in Garvey’s lifetime only Haiti, Ethiopia and Liberia had any semblance of political sovereignty.29

Conclusion

To conclude, Garvey made errors but became a leader of international stature because he spoke in a bold manner that began to address the damage that centuries of racial propaganda had wrought on the minds of Africans at home and abroad. Garvey recognised that his constituency had been taught to despise their features and made to believe that they had no legitimate history or corresponding culture.30 Marcus Garvey was an international leader, the intellectual black Moses, who reconstructed race relations internationally by spawning a greater awareness of Africa, African identity, and Africa’s role in politics, economics, and history. Finally, Garvey inspired generations of black and African people even beyond the grave. Clearly Garvey was one of the Fathers of Black Nationalism and Pan- Africanism in addition to despite the odds becoming a leader in both international and intellectual power politics.


Dr Mark Ledwidge is the Subject Lead and Senior Lecturer in American Studies in the School of Humanities. He has emerged as one of the UK’s leading scholars on the presidency of Barack Obama. His publications include: Obama and the World, 2nd edition (co-editor), Barack Obama and the Myth of Post-Racial America (co-editor) and Race and US Foreign Policy, all available from the University Bookshop.

To find out more about the American Studies courses at Christ Church, visit:
www.canterbury.ac.uk/american-studies



Footnotes
1 Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2002); Tony Martin., Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Massachusetts: Majority Press, 1986).
2 Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement (London: Methuen & Co., 1974), p. 274; Liz Mackie, The Great Marcus Garvey (London: Hansib Publications, 2001), p. 63; Adolph Edwards, Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 2000), p. 136.
4 Amy Jacques Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (Massachusetts: Majority Press, 1986); John Henrik Clarke, Notes for an African World Revolution: Africans at the Crossroads (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1992).
5 David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000).
6 Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Theodore Kornweibel Jr., “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
7 Martin, Race First, p. 13; Robert A. Hill, Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p.15.
8 Rupert Lewis and Patrick Bryan, eds., Garvey: His Work and Impact (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1991); Mark Ledwidge, Race and US Foreign Policy: The African-American Foreign Affairs Network (New York: Routledge, 2012).
9 Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, p. 67.
10 Rupert Lewis, Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion (London: Karia Press, 1987); Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney (London: Hansib Publications, 1985).
11 Hill, Marcus Garvey.
12 Toyin Falola and Kwame Essien, Pan-Africanism, and the Politics of African Citizenship and Identity (London: Routledge, 2015); Ledwidge, The African-American Foreign Affairs Network.
13 Mackie, The Great Marcus Garvey; Clarke, Notes for an African World Revolution, p. 223; Ledwidge, The African- American Foreign Affairs Network, p. 42.
14 Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787 (London: Routledge, 2003).
15 Ledwidge, The African-American Foreign Affairs Network.
16 Churchill Ward and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002), p. 94; Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” p. 131.
17 Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” p. 130; Powers, Secrecy and Power, p. 369.
18 Ledwidge, The African-American Foreign Affairs Network, p. 42.
19 Lewis, Marcus Garvey.
20 Hill, Marcus Garvey, p. lxiii.
21 John Henrik Clarke, Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism (New York: A&B Publishers Group, 1998); Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492-1969 (Suffolk: St Edmundsbury Press, 1993).
22 Clarke, Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust.
23 The Captain of the Jesus of Lubeck, the slaving ship given him to Queen Elizabeth the first.
24 Clarke, Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust, p. 31; Harry Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader (London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 18.
25 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
26 Bartolomé De Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (London: Penguin Group, 1992).
27 Frank Furedi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 1; Thoams McCarthy, Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 1.
28 John Henrik Clarke, ed., Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).
29 Ledwidge, The African-American Foreign Affairs Network. 30 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1993).

As Obama hands over the reins of power, Dr Mark Ledwidge, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, reflects on his administration and looks ahead to America’s new political landscape under the leadership of Donald Trump.

The Wider World

Obama was referred to as the new face of US foreign policy. He was viewed as someone who might be able to help America’s flagging image. The Bush years had increased polarisation and the ‘war on terror’ was perceived by some as an ethnocentric religious attack on Islam and Muslims generally. That was partly because of the Bush administration’s lack of diplomacy and extremely poor use of language regarding the ‘war on terror’.

When Obama came to office, he was identified as the first global president. As his ethnicity differentiated him from previous US presidents, it was thought he would take a new approach and this was seen as a potential breakthrough moment. The Obama administration wanted to tone down the rhetoric that depicted America as being omnipotent and inherently benign. What it did well was to position America with other nations, to discuss how to work together to solve global problems, and also to be more open to developments in Asia. I think history will judge Obama’s cultural sophistication and his understanding of global politics in a positive light – he did a much better job than his predecessor.

But the core question is, did Obama really differentiate his policies sufficiently from those of the Bush administration? He did not manage to close down Guantanamo Bay because he was blocked by the Republicans in Congress. He oversaw the ‘surge’ in numbers of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he also followed Bush’s policies by increasing the number of drone strikes. So one can argue that there were significant continuities, but this was inevitable, especially as many of Obama’s staff had also served under the Bush and Clinton administrations. However, it’s important to remember that the Obama administration was able to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, and remove him, something that the Bush administration failed to do.

New Global Dangers

Generally, people overestimate the power of the president in the first place. It is often said that the American president is the most powerful person in the world, but the truth is that the presidency exists within an institutional framework where the separation of powers limits the scope of presidential power. The world is moving toward a more dangerous position – irrespective of who the president is. The problems lie with the fact that America can no longer play the role of the global policeman it once did because it is overstretched, both in terms of manpower and the amount it spends on defence. The Bush administration arguably made the world a more dangerous place because it was too unpredictable. In addition, the Bush idea of striking first was clearly very problematic. These are characteristics the Obama administration were able to successfully curtail.

“The world is moving towards a more dangerous place – irrespective of who the president is.”

In terms of Syria and the US’s reluctance to engage in direct military action, we could either argue the world was made safer or it wasn’t. Some people maintain that ISIS exists because of the vacuum that was created when Saddam Hussein was removed in Iraq and with the removal of Gaddafi in Libya. Therefore, it has been argued that America failed to develop and craft comprehensive plans in relation to the crisis in both Libya and Syria, which has increased the problems within the region. However, this can’t be blamed on the Obama administration; instead, it can be traced back to lack of planning from the Bush administration that led to a deteriorating situation in the Middle East. In reality though, people will complain about America’s intervention and non-intervention creating global problems.

The UK-US ‘Special Relationship’

Obama made a decision that he would not necessarily put Britain at the forefront of American foreign policy. He paid attention to Europe per se, but he was also able to draw on the established relationship between America and the UK. With Trump now in the foreground, the relationship is going to be more tense than people imagine. Brexit is also of significance because it means Britain’s relative power and its influence in Europe could be seen as decreasing. Britain and America are in a bit of an unknown place right now and Britain has to begin to re-establish its political and economic identity. For instance, the fact that India has surpassed the British economy points to Britain’s fluctuating and declining status, which is something the British Government will have to address and adjust to.

The Race Relations Issue

Race relations is going to be a very problematic legacy for Obama. Racial inequalities have existed in America since its formation with the genocide of the Native Americans and the shameful history of slavery. Given that African Americans have only been legally and practically free in the full sense of the word since 1964-5, Obama was never going to fully resolve the race problem. But the question is, did he miss a golden opportunity to place the racial agenda at the forefront of American politics? The reason I ask this question is because race and ethnicity represent a major fault line in American politics, which affect millions of people’s lives within the social, economic and criminal justice context.

Obama was caught in a difficult position on controversial race issues as he tried to maintain a position of ‘objectivity’ but, when he did comment, he was often heavily criticised by sections of the media and political opponents for ‘taking sides’ (a criticism, it should be noted, that isn’t made of white presidents in similar circumstances). His position on some race relations issues was, therefore, rather muted. One of the most difficult historical problems in US society is the profound lack of trust between African Americans and the police. This is hardly surprising when so many black people have been killed by an increasingly militarised police force in the past few years and Obama’s intervention on this has been limited and ineffective.

The combination of having an African-American president and the oft-quoted demographic statistic that white people will not be a majority in the US by 2050 have also stoked up an increasingly racialised and sometimes overtly racist political backlash from Obama’s political opponents. Elements within the Republican Party, and conservative groups, such as the Tea Party, circulated the ludicrous conspiracies which allege that Obama was not an American by birth (while simultaneously implying in coded discourse that African Americans or Obama cannot be ‘real’ Americans). Trump himself was an early proponent of this baseless idea and his campaign was rightly criticised for its use of racist stereotyping as well as the overt support he received from a variety of white supremacist groups.

So the issue of race will not go away; it will increase and Trump may well shift his position and move back from some of his statements because of the difference between campaigning for election and becoming President. Nevertheless, the powder keg is there and the fuse may already have been lit.

Trump was underestimated by just about everybody. He showed an ability to read American society in a way others hadn’t. First of all, he’s media savvy and played that to his advantage. Trump didn’t do what Obama did, he spoke in an everyman language. Some may mock this approach, but this simple messaging resonated and was effective with sufficiently large sections of the electorate.

However, Trump has made it very difficult for himself. His brash approach to the election worked to get him in but we’ve already seen him backtracking. Trump’s tax cuts will only favour the rich 1%, not his working class support. His foreign policy is also difficult to read. Trump has spoken in very strong and powerful terms – he’s a so-called ‘man’s man’ who projects a macho image. The question is, can Trump follow through with his bold rhetoric and, if he does, at what cost to America and the world? Is he going to allow the extremes of his characterisations during the election to form the basis of his foreign policy?

The constraints against Trump’s belligerent world view might be the separation of powers and the sober fact that the presidency exists within the institutional framework of the US political system, including the Executive Office of the President, the White House and Congress. Indeed, in office, he will still be reliant on the advice of the Washington elites who one assumes have a deeper understanding of national security issues and foreign policy. So I suspect we are going to hear different noises from President – as opposed to candidate – Trump. Currently, he is making, or has made, overtures to certain people, which will seem to many to be very ‘non-Washington’. Some people say he’s moving towards people who have white supremacist or ultra-right leanings. That could be highly problematic for the US.

His relationship with Putin will also be of considerable interest. How will that be read by the rest of the world? Will his relationship with Putin reflect this alleged ‘love affair’ that some people say exists? Do countries, such as Russia and China, perceive that having someone less politically savvy in global terms like Trump would be better for them than someone who knows far more about how government and international relations really work?

US Politics in Crisis

In short, Obama’s core constituency claim he did not promote change or do enough either domestically or internationally. However, many people view Trump’s role as being somewhat extreme.

I would suggest that there is a crisis in American politics. It’s not a crisis with the Democrats or Republicans, but a crisis in US politics in general because it has lost its way. Scholars and laypersons alike have to ask whether a system that was developed centuries ago can rectify, resolve or contend with the key issues both at home and abroad. Either way, identity politics lies at the heart of this – not just in terms of race and ethnicity, but regarding America’s status and role in the world. In the final analysis, is America still a hegemonic power or an empire in decline, and does the election of Donald Trump reflect the symptoms of an unhealthy and troubled nation?

Dr Mark Ledwidge is the Subject Lead and Senior Lecturer in American Studies in the School of Humanities. He has emerged as one of the UK’s leading scholars on the presidency of Barack Obama. His publications include: Obama and the World, 2nd edition (co-editor), Barack Obama and the Myth of Post-Racial America (co-editor) and Race and US Foreign Policy, all available from the University Bookshop.

To find out more about the American Studies courses at Christ Church, visit:
www.canterbury.ac.uk/american-studies

By Dr Mark Ledwidge
This op-ed was originally published on Canterbury Christ Church University's Expert Comment blog: https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/expertcomment/obamas-legacy-to-the-world/

Dr Mark Ledwidge, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, reflects on the legacy of Obama’s foreign policy and looks ahead to what we might expect from the leadership of Donald Trump.

Elected on a tidal wave of hope, Barack Obama made history in 2008 when he became the first African American to win the US presidency. But eight years on, having served two terms in office, what legacy does he leave behind for international relations, security and peace?

Obama was referred to as the new face of US foreign policy. He was viewed as someone who might be able to help America’s flagging image. The Bush years had increased polarisation and the ‘war on terror’ was perceived by some as an ethnocentric religious attack on Islam and Muslims generally. That was partly because of the Bush administration’s lack of diplomacy and extremely poor use of language regarding the ‘war on terror’.

When Obama came to office, he was identified as the first global president. As his ethnicity differentiated him from other US presidents, it was thought he would take a new approach and this was seen as a potential breakthrough moment. The Obama administration wanted to tone down the rhetoric that depicted America as being omnipotent and inherently benign. What it did well was to position America with other nations, to discuss how to work together to solve global problems, and also to be more open to developments in Asia. I think history will judge Obama’s cultural sophistication and his understanding of global politics in a positive light – he did a much better job than his predecessor.

But the core question is, did Obama really differentiate his policies sufficiently from those of the Bush administration? He did not manage to close down Guantanamo Bay because he was blocked by the Republicans in Congress. He oversaw the ‘surge’ in numbers of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he also followed Bush’s policies by increasing the number of drone strikes. So one can argue that there were significant continuities, but this was inevitable, especially as many of Obama’s staff had also served under Bush and the Clinton administrations. However, it is important to remember that the Obama administration was able to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, and remove him, something that the Bush administration failed to do.

It is often said that the American president is the most powerful person in the world, but the truth is that the presidency exists within an institutional framework where the separation of powers limits the scope of presidential power. The world is moving towards a more dangerous position – irrespective of who the president is. The problems lie with the fact that America can no longer play the role of the global policeman it once did because it is overstretched, both in terms of manpower and the amount it spends on defence.

The Bush administration arguably made the world a more dangerous place because it was too unpredictable. In addition, the Bush idea of striking first was clearly very problematic. These are characteristics the Obama administration were able to successfully curtail.

In terms of Syria and the US’s reluctance to engage in direct military action, we could either argue the world was made safer or it was not. Some people maintain that ISIS exists because of the vacuum that was created when Saddam Hussein was removed in Iraq and with the removal of Gaddafi in Libya. Therefore, it has been argued that America failed to develop and craft comprehensive plans in relation to the crisis in both Libya and Syria, which has increased the problems within the region. However, this cannot be blamed on the Obama administration; instead it can be traced back to lack of planning from the Bush administration that led to a deteriorating situation in the Middle East. In reality though, people will complain about America’s intervention and non-intervention creating global problems.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy is difficult to read. He has spoken in very strong and powerful terms – he’s a so called ‘man’s man’ who projects a macho image. The question is, can Trump follow through with his bold rhetoric and, if he does, at what cost to America and the world? Is he going to allow the extremes of his characterisations during the election to form the basis of his foreign policy?

His relationship with Putin will also be of considerable interest. How will that be read by the rest of the world? Will his relationship with Putin reflect this alleged ‘love affair’ that some people say exists? Do countries, such as Russia and China, perceive that having someone less politically savvy in global terms like Trump would be better for them than someone who knows far more about how government and international relations really work?

There is a crisis in American politics. It’s not a crisis with the Democrats or Republicans, but a crisis in US politics in general because it has lost its way. Scholars and laypersons alike have to ask whether a system that was developed centuries ago can rectify, resolve or contend with the key issues both at home and abroad. Either way, identity politics lies at the heart of America’s status and role in the world. Is America still a hegemonic power or an empire in decline? And does the election of Donald Trump reflect the symptoms of an unhealthy and troubled nation.

Dr Mark Ledwidge is the Subject Lead and Senior Lecturer in American Studies in the Department of History and American Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. He has emerged as one of the UK’s leading scholars on the presidency of Barack Obama. His publications include: Obama and the World, 2nd edition (co-editor; Routledge 2014), Barack Obama and the Myth of Post-Racial America (co-editor; Routledge 2013) and Race and US Foreign Policy (Routledge 2013). Follow on Twitter.

By Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: https://thewire.in/100377/trump-america-first-presidency/

In his hands, Donald Trump claims, the US will be like him – a winner. And if anything doesn’t go according to plan, it’s someone else’s fault.

Although US president-elect Donald Trump has a well-earned reputation for unpredictability and an unconventional political style, some aspects of what makes him tick are becoming clearer as his inauguration on January 20 approaches.

This is not a definitive list – and it’ll surely change as his presidency ‘progresses’ – but there are five inter-related discernible characteristics that may help us get a handle on Trump as president.


Master concept: ‘America First’


Trump has said it all along as a badge of pride that, in contrast to all other political leaders, he stands for the US before all else and above all others. American interests are supreme to him but have been compromised by his predecessors, especially Barack Obama, who have permitted the likes of China and Mexico to take advantage of American naïvete, good intentions and openness. China manipulates its currency to cheapen its exports and destroy American jobs, militarises the South China Sea and does little to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons programmes. In response, the US does nothing, Trump claims.


As president, Trump will put a stop to all those compromises and reassert US power – and reconsider the US’s international relationships and agreements to see to it that the country gets value for money. ‘Make America Great Again!’


The domestic version of that is all those foreigners, immigrants and refugees coming to the US, committing crimes and living off welfare, under-cutting American workers or carrying out acts of terrorism in cahots with ISIS, need to be taught a lesson. Law and order must be restored, whatever it takes, to make Americans safe from the ‘enemy within’.


The other four characteristics worthy of note may derive from the master concept. In Trump’s hands, he claims, the US will be like him – a winner. His ‘winner’ self-concept indicates that he has what it takes and will do what it takes to achieve his goals – such as the US presidency and, now, the US’s interests at home and abroad. The US is a land of winners, not losers, and he’s the personification of success.


This means he finds it difficult to admit error or, when admitting error, to seem to be on the attack and blame someone else. And the Russian hacking of the US election claims are especially pertinent here: first, he needs to claim that he won the election on his own merits and is the people’s choice – despite losing the popular vote by almost three million; so denying any Russian involvement was his first line of attack against sore losers in the Democratic party.


But with the unanimity of US intelligence assessments of Russian interference, Trump accepted such interference had taken place, alongside others’ doing the same as well as arguing that the intervention had no impact on the final result. That helps explain his response to reporters’ questioning at his first news conference since winning in November.


The third characteristic – which ensures the US will always be first and therefore a winner, is because, as a successful businessman, Trump knows how to do a deal. And one aspect of getting the best deal is to open the bidding in dramatic fashion – showing strength from the start in the belief that others need the US more than the US needs them. The US can walk away and still remain the world’s policeman, its sole superpower.


Trump’s philosophy asserts power up-front and centre: unlike Theodore Roosevelt – who advised a strategy of “speak softly but carry a big stick”, Trump seems to favour big talk and big stick. No more soft power.


With such an attitude towards allies and competitors, the ultimate deal-doer will deliver best value, getting more from others in return for the US’s friendship, arms, market access or open hostility – sanctions or war.


Herein lies one of the greatest dangers of Trump’s presidency – taking negotiations with allies and enemies alike to the very brink, taking risks, unwillingness to admit error or defeat, reluctance to retreat from untenable initial positions. But even if he is forced to retreat, Trump will portray it as merely “advancing in a different direction”.


Global politics is in for a shock.


Sand in your eyes


The fourth major characteristic that might help explain Trump’s successful political strategy might be called “sand in your eyes” – the ability to divert attention from something he’d rather not talk about to something completely different and send the media scurrying off and analysing some off the wall outrageous public statement or tweet. “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he tweeted, suggesting that US intelligence services had leaked “fake news” to the media about him. This generated much media scrutiny, at home and abroad, deflecting attention from him onto the motives of the intelligence services.


While the media fact-check and report back, Trump and his people have already moved on.


Which brings us to the fifth principal feature of Trumpism – populism and the race card, or rather, the xenophobia card. When under attack, legitimately or otherwise, go on the offensive in the name of the people against the establishment and the outsider, the un-American. It could be the media, intelligence agencies, the Republican or Democratic establishments, Hollywood, or experts and university academics – but everyone is against Trump, who is all that stands between the people and the enemy within.


But this is just more sand in your eyes, agenda-setting for political pundits, media commentators and newsrooms – while behind the scenes a completely different agenda is followed. In the shadows, but mostly hidden in plain sight – Trump’s appointed billionaires to his cabinet, major international corporations now sit at the heart of the US administration, family members have taken over top White House positions. At the same time, right-wing think tanks like Heritage Foundation and Hoover Institution provide policy advice to deregulate Wall Street, abolish the few consumer financial protections implemented since the 2008 financial crash, empower energy corporations through denying climate change science, propose massive military spending, slashing healthcare provision, social security and welfare. Meanwhile, major construction and other corporations rub their hands in anticipation of major infrastructure-building contracts.


Big corporations and big money in politics – which is what Trump railed against to win office as a radical non-establishment outsider – is precisely what his administration stands for and is the source of his definition of American national interests.


There was an oft-used expression in the 1950s – “what’s good for General Motors is good for the United States” and vice versa. That was never quite true but the white working and middle classes that voted in their droves for Trump did see major improvements in living standards in that era. They have pinned their hopes for a return to the ‘good old days’ on a Trump presidency. He’s unlikely to deliver, because of the pro-business model at the core of his personality, policy ideas and senior appointments.


And that’s when he will be at his most dangerous at home – playing the race card, blaming minorities and enemies within, Chinese, Mexicans and Muslims. More sand in your eyes and tapping into the politics of white male identity – a self-assigned endangered species, besieged on all sides. And loyal to the new emperor.


If Obama could retain, purely on the basis of his African-American-ness, the near-total support of black voters, despite their material positions’ deterioration since 2008, Trump may well retain his white identity support base.


But the people who swung the election his way, in the rust belts of Michigan and Pennsylvania, and who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, may not be satisfied with the smoke and mirrors of Trumpism unless they see some end to their economic woes and anxieties.


Division and rancour were the dominant effects of the Trump candidacy; as his inauguration draws near, this might be the new normal.


Future governor John Winthrop noted back in 1630 that the Puritan settlers would build “a city upon a hill.”


However that works out in Trump’s US, there is no doubting the truth of the second part of that quote – “the eyes of all people are upon us”.


Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City, University of London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.

By Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: https://thewire.in/89510/us-politics-trump-clinton-sanders/

The past year has stood for the exposure of the fundamental contours of a capitalist democracy that relies on state welfare for big corporations.

For many, 2016 has seen a turn for the worse in American politics, mainly due to the victory of Republican President-elect Donald Trump.

But here’s some feel-good news on which to end the year, an alternative interpretation of the events and processes in 2016, providing hope and encouragement for better things to come. To be sure, the world has changed, turned some kind of corner and placed us in dimly-charted territory.

But some things are clearer:

Wall Street lost the presidential election. Conservative ideology lost out to massive demands for bigger government for the people and heavier taxation of the corporate class and the very rich. The American establishment, it’s billionaire class, was, and is, on the ropes – its principal candidate, Hillary Clinton, was found guilty by the American electorate of standing for the status quo among other ‘crimes and misdemeanours’. A self-declared socialist won over 13 million votes in the primaries and is building a progressive campaign to change the US by inaugurating a new post-partisan politics.

Millions voted for candidates who demanded the US step back from its global policeman role and reduce its military footprint. Its post-1945 global military and other alliances were challenged and questioned and its Middle Eastern wars denounced, especially the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. The US’s ineffectiveness and role in fighting the so-called ISIS was brought into public debate. The very grounds of the Pax Americana were interrogated for the first time by one of the main contenders for the presidency.

Protests over the election of Trump criss-crossed the nation and funds began flowing in their millions to campaigns against intolerance, hate crimes and xenophobia. The politics of progressivism has taken a huge leap forward. It looks like it’s going to continue to do so. At the local level, where ordinary Americans actually live, millions voted to raise the minimum wage in many states. US politics has been changed for the better in 2016 and 2017 is likely to be even better.

In Britain, leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn was returned to lead the Labour party by an even larger margin than in September 2015, damaging the campaign of Blairites and their ilk to return the party to the failed policies of austerity, mimicking the Tories draconian attacks on working and middle class people.

The long-awaited Chilcot Report into the Iraq War provided a damning indictment of the leadership of Tony Blair and the doctoring of intelligence to support a prior commitment to wage illegal aggression on Saddam Hussein’s regime and the ordinary people of Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands in the process, displacing millions, and opening up a fertile space for the rise of ISIS. “Never again” was the principal message from that report, echoed across Britain, Europe and the US. No more neo-colonial wars was the rallying call of groups like ‘Stop The War’ and the families of soldiers killed in illegal conflict.

In Austria, the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen defeated the hard right’s Norbert Hofer decisively and helped stem the tide on the populist right movement across Europe. In Germany, millions supported taking in a million refugees fleeing oppression, hunger and war in Africa and the Middle east.  The nuclear agreement with Iran remains intact and avoided a (nother) major war in the region, and ISIS suffered major setbacks and defeats in its bid for a so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

In Italy, millions voted against the centralisation of power and a further erosion of popular sovereignty. The left remains strong in Spain and in Greece.

All over the world, ordinary people’s voices are being heard and making a difference. New forms of campaigning are taking off using digital platforms and social media designed by corporations that collaborate with powerful states to curb freedoms.

Julian Assange’s Wikileaks goes from strength to strength, exposing the corruptions of the corporate class and its political allies; Edward Snowden remains in exile, but free to critique the surveillance powers of the American state.

Senator Bernie Sanders has not stopped campaigning, nor have his millions of supporters. His various organisations are fighting to change American politics and wrest it back from the clutches of big corporations.

Brand New Congress will stand over 400 candidates for congress in the 2018 mid-terms; candidates will be drawn from outside the established political class and from any movement that rejects the established order, whether they be from the Tea party or Occupy Wall Street. They just need to be people who have serve the community well and place the collective interest above their individual interests. BNC is well on its way to selecting candidates for election and is raising large amounts from numerous small donations from ordinary people – just as Sanders crowd-sourced his own election campaign.

The Sanders Institute has begun ideological work to initiate study, analysis and discussion of the roots of inequality and what might be done about it.

Our Revolution – Sanders’ campaign at local level America – wants to bring ordinary people into local government and school boards and so on to change politics from the grass roots.

This is what 2016 stands for and should be remembered for: the exposure of the fundamental contours of a capitalist democracy that relies on state welfare for big corporations and corrodes democracy from within and without. For all their money, they still lost the election.

And that’s why elite candidates have to pretend to a politics of anti-elitism to get anywhere, why Trump could only win because he, rhetorically, socked it to the establishment. And it explains why Sanders got as many votes in the primaries as did Trump and why his new post-partisan politics threatens to challenge the corporate culture and colonisation of American government.

The American people showed they would not stand for more elite politics and narrow economic agendas of the hard right. A great foundation upon which the politics of the next decade is to be built.

One could quote some inspiring liberals at this point but a socialist who saw through the subterfuge and rhetoric of elite demagoguery is more appropriate: Eugene Debs, who despite all the odds fought against imperial war and for socialism a century ago. His analysis of the two main American political parties is as true today, and thoroughly exposed as such in the 2016 elections, as it was a century ago: “The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties — differing only in being committed to different sets of capitalist interests — they have the same principles under varying colors, are equally corrupt and are one in their subservience to capital and their hostility to labor.”

And he condemned the poverty of the many and wealth of the few: in a land of great resources, he argues, and willing workers, want was the result not of God or nature “but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity”.

2016 showed that the majority of Americans have had enough of capitalist elites who care not a jot for the interests of Americans let alone for the very planet itself.

As Bernie Sanders declared: “Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.”

Thank you, 2016!

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City, University of London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.

By Inderjeet Parmar
​This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: http://thewire.in/84531/trumps-taiwan-call-signals-the-gops-resurgence/

Trump’s recent choices show he’s abandoning the anti-establishment rhetoric that won him the election in favour of the GOP’s traditional policies.

President-elect Donald Trump is now in the full embrace of the principles of the post-Reagan era Republican party. His telephone conversation with the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was most likely a calculated message meant for China, to say that it should expect a much harder line from Trump compared to current US President Barack’s Obama’s ‘rebalance’ or ‘pivot’ to Asia. Trump’s rhetoric echoes that of Mitt Romney, a 2012 GOP presidential candidate who was recently nominated as secretary of state, and Senator John McCain, who contested elections in 2008. Placed alongside Trump’s raft of cabinet and other senior appointments, and policy-oriented declarations, all indications now point to a Trump presidency, with due regard to his own idiosyncratic style, almost entirely in line with what would be expected of a conservative nationalist Republican chief executive.

This leaves Trump’s white working and middle-class supporters high and dry with respect to expecting an anti-establishment presidency from Trump, but with the not-to-be-underestimated psychological wages of white empowerment and minority marginalisation to take comfort in.

The impact of this material betrayal may well be offset by the psychological profit yielded by white identity gains, much as African-Americans remained loyal to Obama despite his failure to curb police violence against Black men or to elevate the community’s economic or financial conditions. The chasmic character of American racial and class politics remains essential to understanding American society.

Signals to Beijing

The call to Taiwan may appear to be a relatively minor infringement of diplomatic protocols, but it signals that Beijing should not expect business as usual. Taiwan was long recognised as the official Republic of China after the Chinese revolution of 1949 while the mainland Peoples Republic of China under Mao Zedong was denied diplomatic recognition until the 1970s. After Mao’s death and the opening of China, the US officially recognised Beijing as the legitimate and sole sovereign power and Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be reunited with the mainland. The telephone call, then, provided a level of legitimacy to the ‘president’ of Taiwan that the position has not received since the mid-1970s.

Trump maintained a level of anti-Chinese rhetoric throughout his election campaign – China was accused of currency manipulation and dumping cheap steel into the American market, for example. China’s biggest offence, however, is its alleged but incomprehensible desire to be the new regional hegemonic power in the Asia-Pacific region, challenging and displacing the US, which the latter has long regarded as an Anglo-Saxon lake.

The ‘rise’ of China is constructed as a threat to US power as part of its long-term plan for global domination, the ‘China Dream’ of President Xi Jinping. China’s increasing economic power and the growing level of economic and commercial dependence of the US’s regional allies like Taiwan, Philippines, Australia, India on China is viewed as part of the country’s bid to eject the US from its position as a regional hegemon. Trump, to make America great again, is reasserting the US’s power to show China the shape of things to come. Hence, the dangers of greater confrontation, including military conflict – by error or design, are likely to increase.

The Taiwan call may also have come about due to the strong relationships between some of Trump’s key appointees and Taiwan. In particular, Trump’s White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has firm connections with Taiwan’s political leadership. Meanwhile, Edwin Feulner, a senior adviser to Trump and former founding president of the Heritage Foundation, is hawkish on growing Chinese ambitions. Heritage is also rumoured to receive generous funding from Taiwanese sources. Feulner is said to have played a key role in facilitating the Taiwanese phone call.

Trump has also adopted the think tank’s suggested military policy as his own and is set, therefore, to significantly increase military expenditures – larger army, navy, airforce and marine corps. Trump’s proclaimed ‘isolationism’ now appears to be a distant memory as he prepares for power. His nomination of retired General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis for secretary of defense suggests a traditional policy of respecting alliances and allies across NATO, the Middle East and Asia. And retaining the centrality of the global war on terror in American strategy.

Trump’s voter base is destined for disappointment

Trump’s other appointments seem destined to disappoint his struggling and anxious working and middle-class voter base. Steve Mnuchin, for treasury secretary, stands squarely against Trump’s anti-Wall Street rhetoric. Mnuchin, like his father before him, has been involved with Goldman Sachs, hedge funds and financial institutions, a far cry from the rust belt workers whose swing away from Clinton put Trump across the electoral college finishing line on November 8.

Another billionaire financier is nominated for commerce secretary – Wilbur Ross, formerly with Rothschilds, and apparent saviour of coal and steel firms. Ross possibly represents a ray of hope for Trump’s supporters – that he will similarly save miners’ and manufacturing jobs in the rust belt. Yet, as the World Socialist website argues, Ross “made his fortune buying and closing steel mills, putting steelworkers out of work and dumping the pensions of retired workers into the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which pays only a fraction of what these workers actually earned in a lifetime in the mills.”

With his cabinet of billionaires and millionaires, overwhelmingly white and male, promising multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, Trump’s administration and policies will become indistinguishable from previous Republican administrations, especially those from the pre-civil rights and women’s freedom movement eras. His cabinet members’ total personal wealth is said to be worth around $35 billion, demonstrating that Trump’s administration will be one represented by the rich and, most likely, work for the rich.

From a campaign for change to an administration of billionaires, Trump has apparently saved the Republican party and built a coalition of white workers, middle class voters, the very affluent, a smattering of minorities and a majority of women – a combination that could make the GOP unassailable for the presidential elections in 2020. A great deal depends, however, on the delivery of material gains, especially to rust belt workers and minorities or the mid-terms in 2018 could be brutal for the GOP’s new found self-confidence.

Those who took Trump seriously but not literally may well be upset with Trump’s performance in office since he’s embracing the conservative principles people voted against. Trump the isolationist also seems unlikely to appear during his time in office, so we should expect a drift, if not a stampede, back into the presidential fold of those ‘respectable’ conservative Republicans and think-tankers who declared Trump a racist warmonger unfit to serve as America’s commander-in-chief.

It’s morning again in a resurgent, amnesiac, Reaganesque America.

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City, University of London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.

By Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: http://thewire.in/79998/the-deepening-crisis-plaguing-the-uss-political-parties/

The moral and political decay within both the Democrat and Republican establishments is symptomatic of the crumbling US-led, post-1945 world order.

Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party’s leadership may blame everyone but themselves for their spectacular defeat in the US presidential and congressional elections, and the GOP’s oligarchs may congratulate themselves on an unexpected victory, but both would be deluding themselves.

The crisis of both political parties has just deepened and exposed their political and moral decay. The American electorate, whose disillusionment with politics-as-usual propelled Donald Trump to the White House,  is unlikely to find much in its 45th president’s actions that will satisfy its hopes and dreams. It is already evident that Trump, the anti-politics non-politician, has been preparing to betray his working-class political base for several months now. The US is in for a very rough time over the next four years.

Since Clinton’s unexpected defeat, leading Democrats and liberal commentators have identified several blocs of voters to hold responsible for her loss: millennials, African-Americans, women and even those who voted for the Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green candidate Jill Stein.

But they have yet to identify the class factor in the presidential election – why did so many white and black working class men and women either stay at home or vote for Trump?

Class: the unspeakable factor

To the Democratic party, class is a force that dare not speak its name, especially the working kind. For many, the working class does not even exist, let alone possess any political saliency. The democrats have adopted in toto the politics of identity – women/gender, black/race, LGBT – and consigned the working class to the political dustbin.

Yet, they embrace with a passion the interests and ideas of the billionaire class – centred on Wall Street banks, investment firms and hedge funds. This class of people has supplied billions to the Clintons – $3 billion over the past four decades – and to the Democratic party since the 1970s. As then-presidential candidate Barack Obama noted in his book, Audacity of Hope, released before the 2008 presidential election, Wall Street bankers, as a class, think only of their own interests and have little empathy for anyone else.

Obama also noted, with a hint of disappointment, that he spent so much time with such people that he began to think just like them.

In 2012, the New York Council on Foreign Relations, the elite think tank at the heart of the American establishment, declared that Obama was in practice a traditional Republican candidate for the presidency. Wall Street had two candidates in 2012, therefore, the other being the former head of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney.

Clinton and her husband Bill’s dance with bankers and financiers has been a longer affair than Obama’s, the first African-American president who delivered little to black Americans over the course of two terms. Indeed, young African-American men are being gunned down by police at rates that have been declared a national epidemic by Harvard’s medical researchers. The politics of identity, around which Democratic politics turns, has proven to be a dead end for minorities. Obama has been a lame duck for eight years as far as the US’s minority communities are concerned. The opportunities available to their communities diminished steadily while Wall Street banks and corporations were bailed out using trillions of US taxpayer dollars.

Clinton promised nothing more than the continuation of corrupt, money-soaked politics, with all the frills of identity politics and schmaltz about diversity and unity wrapped around it – that effectively meant politics as usual. Yet, the politics of class and inequality stared the Clintonites in the face – they either could not see it for the salient political factor it had become or they defined their strategy as one designed to protect the billionaire class by focusing on the abundant negative characteristics of the Republican presidential candidates’ campaigns, Trump’s in particular.

The Democrats played court politics while the American electorate demanded radical change. How else to explain the fact that the Democratic Party organised this Shakespearian tragedy of a campaign. According to a batch of emails released by Wikileaks that contained emails to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager and intellectual-political guru or simply her personal Machiavelli, the Clinton camp’s preferred Republican candidate was Trump, someone who probably had no serious idea that he would get anywhere in the GOP’s primaries.

Clinton’s team acted accordingly, gratuitously name-checking Trump and increasing media coverage of the controversial candidate, along with Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, people who would shift the Republican campaign even further to the right and play into Clinton’s grubby hands.

Similar sabotage tactics were deployed against Clinton’s main challenger for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders – his economic plans were declared naïve by Clinton spin doctors, he was denied full access to party voter data by the Democratic National Convention, debates were scheduled at odd times, college voter registration drives weren’t conducted with vigour as students were backing the socialist and the superdelegate system was used to build belief in the inevitability of a Clinton win.

Had Sanders’ candidacy been seen as an opportunity to galvanise the party’s base and message to all those who were screaming for change and respite from the power of Big Money, rather than a block to the insatiable political ambition of the Clinton dynasty and its acolytes, the US would likely be in a very different position today, one that would not involve the riots and protests that have attracted thousands since Trump’s victory on November 9.

Fissures in the GOP

The GOP’s crisis also continues and runs as deep as that of the Democratic Party. The Republicans have won both houses, and nominally the presidency, but have paid a very high price. Their candidate won 5 million fewer votes than Romney in 2012. Trump ran a campaign that gained ballast from anti-conservative ideological positions; he declared Muslim immigrants terror suspects and Mexicans murderers and rapists; he treated and spoke about women in the most sexually aggressive terms and boasted about numerous acts of sexual assault he had carried out. Trump’s promotion of violence at his rallies and his cult of personality, declaration of complete knowledge of every subject and solution to every problem, and refusal to accept that he could lose a fair election brought into disrepute the party’s leaders who refused to repudiate him.
The US’s soft power has been severely damaged, its image tarnished, its credibility questioned by allies. Few welcome a Trump presidency but ISIS is among his champions; how many more jihadis will Trump recruit for their cause?

But the GOP will pay a high price for victory. Trump is unmanageable – by his family, his campaign team, close advisers and his vice president. He has already rowed back on abolishing Obama’s landmark Affordable Care Act, which the party has made a centrepiece of its campaign. People backing Republican candidates for Congress did not support their conservative programmes.

What will further damage the Trump presidency and the Republican party is the betrayal of Trump’s supporters. He has forgotten his promises to white workers to hike up taxes for the rich and deliver more welfare to the needy. His attacks on free trade have softened into talk about how smart his trade deals will be and the likely pick as his commerce secretary is a steel magnate who has no time for trade unions. Trump’s options for treasury secretary are hedge fund managers. The economic and financial core of his programme centres on massive tax cuts that will largely benefit the super-rich.

An impending betrayal

The betrayal of Trump’s core voters in the US’s rust belt began some time ago when he courted the Heritage Foundation – the heart of conservative ideology in America – and sought out Ed Feulner, the think tank’s former president, to head his transition team. Feulner is drawing up lists of appointees – hundreds of them – for the major departments of Trump’s administration.

The anti-politics, anti-conservative Republican president-elect seems also to have retreated from his ‘isolationist’ reputation and adopted the Heritage Foundation’s military policy – to strengthen the US’s firepower in all armed services around the world to counter threats to American power.

That is not what Trump’s supporters signed up for. They may not care for a while and give their man a chance to find his feet. But they will be watching and waiting for some concrete actions to deliver on promises made during the campaign that might not make it through a hardcore right-wing congress.

The moral and political decay of the US’s two main political parties contains many dangers for its people, and for the world, over the next several years. Their decay is symptomatic of the crumbling of the very foundations of the post-1945 world order built by the US.

This is evident in the vote to Brexit and the crisis of the EU’s legitimacy; in the popularity of the hard right in Europe, the rise of leftist movements in Greece and Spain and, more patchily in Britain; and in the demands of China, India and other emerging powers for a greater voice in the halls of global power, while they themselves sit on the powder-keg of popular discontent from the impacts of globalisation. And it is evident in the flow of refugees flooding into Europe due to American and other western interventions in the Middle East – Iraq, Libya and Syria, among others.

But Wall Street has found a new friend in a de-regulator president – banks are safer from regulation, as are oil and gas corporations once a climate-change denier is appointed to the Environmental Protection Agency.


Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City, University of London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.

By Inderjeet Parmar
This op-ed was originally published on The Wire: http://thewire.in/78491/us-election-elite-referendum/

Whoever wins the US presidential election on November 8, the result will reflect a verdict of the American people on their political and economic elites.

Make no mistake, the elite, the establishment, ruling class, oligarchy, fat cats, billionaire class, Wall Street – call it what you will – has been on trial for the past 12 months and has been found guilty on all counts. All we are waiting for is the sentence. It could be the harshest one for the US and the world – a Donald Trump victory, however narrow. Or it could be a final health warning – put your house in order or face a total shutdown of America, Inc.

It is telling that when it looked as if the Democrats could take control of the House of Representatives, the Wall Street Journal lamented the possibility of an end to congressional gridlock. Why? Because, for US corporations, political gridlock and government shutdowns are functional. Big energy corporations, major pharmaceuticals and Wall Street finance houses do not want the sort of government that responds to popular demands for reform and corporate regulation.

They want to drill where they want, sell overpriced drugs without fear of effective monitoring by the federal government, and continue playing roulette (why blame the Russians) with people’s hard-earned pension funds, to hide away money in tax havens, pay little tax, enjoy the trappings of super-wealth without democratic oversight or moral conscience.

Gridlock is only a problem if you want a government that actually responds to people’s needs and demands – for better infrastructure, a school system that doesn’t fail its children, a healthcare regime run for patients rather than profit, a university sector that gives young graduates a chance for a future unencumbered by massive indebtedness and a globalised economy that provides adequate support to domestic industrial workers and communities. Forget the plight of the US’s minorities, the levels of police violence against young African-American men that Harvard medics have suggested be declared a national epidemic in need of statutory investigation and remedial action by the Centers for Disease Control, the near-total lack of gun control that kills around 30,000 Americans annually and the fact that the US has the highest numbers of people in prison in the world.

The oft-used quote from either Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine, or Henry Thoreau – that he “who governs best, governs least” – has passed its usefulness in the US today. Its rejection is written into every line of every sentence, and the 26 million primary election votes, of the major insurgent campaigns this year – against the wishes of the Democratic and Republican party leaderships – of near-victor socialist senator Bernie Sanders and the billionaire self-styled man of the people, Trump.

Hillary Clinton stands as the last line of defence of the American political and economic oligarchy today. Millions stand behind her to be sure – not principally millions of people but Wall Street’s dollars that bankroll her campaign, rebuffed Trump and did not give a cent to Sanders. As usual, Wikileaks tells the story – of Clinton warning Wall Street banks that some popular reforms are needed to placate the dangerous classes, the 47% that Mitt Romney dismissed in 2012 as yearning for government handouts, all the while soliciting donations to the Clinton Foundation and millions in speaking fees for the family’s bank account.

And Trump has been right to call out the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for its sabotage of the Sanders campaign. Clinton may not have been involved but, as a leader of the party, her campaign had a privileged position with the DNC, hence the removal of it chair last summer.

The email saga, which should never have been an issue in this election, has remained one not because of its own uniqueness or its implications for national security. Plenty of public officials have destroyed, lost or kept hidden government papers and emails – former President George W. Bush is reputed to have ‘lost’ 22 million emails, some from the critical run-up to the illegal aggression against Iraq in 2003. But in the context of the longevity of the Clinton dynasty, its immersion in Wall Street dollars and the use of the family foundation in a complex system of charitable donations in return for political favours, lucrative government contracts and personal income, operating a personal email server smacks of prior right of ownership of the state and the privatisation of a public office – the US department of state.

It is frequently asked how the US has arrived at this point – a country with vast resources, wealth, opportunity, some of the best universities and minds in the world. The answer is quite simple – its two main parties are machines with the sole aim of winning power for its leaders, financed by corporate donations in return for laissez faire from state regulation, a beneficent tax regime and generous government subsidies won by armies of paid lobbyists in Washington, DC.

Pollsters tell us that around 13% of the electorate is either undecided or is leaning towards voting for third party candidates – that is almost three times the usual percentage in the week running up to the election. It was around 19-20% just a few weeks ago. What are they waiting for in order to decide? The answer is quite simple – they can’t decide which candidate is worse so they swing on the basis of the latest scandal or leak. They are not so different to those who’ve decided on their candidate, or rather, on who they dislike more.

Clinton and Trump are considered the two most disliked candidates for the White House in living memory. One poll indicated that over half of Trump voters do not believe he will make a good president – but they could not stomach a Clinton presidency. Most Clinton supporters are trying to prevent a Trump victory.
The American jury – actually about 70 million of a total of 220 million eligible voters – will send its verdict in a matter of hours in this most exhausting, exhilarating, fascinating and shocking of elections. Whoever wins, there is no question that American society is unravelling, the domestic political order is falling apart.
Let’s leave the last word to political thinker Antonio Gramsci who, in a Mussolini prison, could see beyond its walls and produce timeless insights:

“At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic “men of destiny.”

Win or lose on November 8, Trump will cast a shadow over the US and directly or indirectly, the world, for a long time to come.

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics, and Co-Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City, University of London. Follow him on Twitter and via his blog.