What Hath Trump Wrought?

Which is more decadent, Donald Trump or the Annual Gala of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York? Okay, trick question, because there is no wrong answer. But putting the Donald in perspective does take some work.

Yet the sources of the Donald aren’t hard to find: the stumblings and stutterings of global capitalism, plus the stumblings and stutterings of the U.S. post-Cold War foreign policy have created a perfect storm of political paranoia. If the sleep of reason brings forth monsters, the failures of reason have brought forth Donald Trump.

And let’s not forget Bernie Sanders, whose success is almost as impressive as Donald’s. And while Bernie is as proudly tolerant as Trump is proudly racist, the two are equally benighted in their loathing of global capitalism—equal in their rejection of what is, quite simply, the modern world. And let’s also not forget that virtually every major state in Europe has its own Donalds and Bernies.

The Republican Party is a virtual ruin today. For decades the “Establishment” has encouraged the most scurrilous and unprincipled assaults on Presidents Clinton and Obama—encouraged them when they were not in fact the source—and now they find that, having fed the beast for so long, they have become its food. Jeb Bush’s candidacy so resembled a lamb being led to slaughter that we forget how, in the pre-primary, he seemed a colossus, the first $100 million man. In fact, being George Bush’s brother was all anyone needed to know to reject him out of hand, so unpopular was his brother’s presidency.¹ Yet the Establishment still clings to every plank in the Bush platform.²

The Democratic Party isn’t much better. President Obama very foolishly set out to be Wall Street’s Man in Washington, only to have them reject him out of hand when he failed to protect their bonuses. At the same time, he made the classic liberal mistake of giving the American people what they ought to want—subsidized health care for all—instead of what they really want—subsidized health care for the middle class only. And he was unwilling to break decisively, or even semi-decisively, with the long-standing Democratic tradition of handing over the conduct of foreign policy and national security to “moderate” Republicans,³ effectively assuming responsibility for Republican failures abroad and indeed continuing them. The result was the virtual elimination of the Democratic classes of ’06, ’08, ’10, ’12, and ’14, with the result that the party has no alternative to Hillary Clinton, the oldest face in American politics.

But while we blame the parties, we should also blame the people, particularly the Republicans, whose hatred of “Mexicans” and Muslims has become more than toxic. On the left, the paleo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, voiceless and powerless for decades, finds itself suddenly reborn and free to indulge in its hatred of “Big Anything” but most particularly “Big Money”.

The unfortunate fact is that global capitalism isn’t the automatic win/win that everyone wanted to believe at the turn of the century. Free markets, while necessary for prosperity, have proved less than sufficient, and there is no agreement as to solutions. Meanwhile, Third World economies like Brazil and China, that were looking so First World back in the year 2000, are looking distressingly Third World once more—weighed down with corruption, self-dealing, and general lack of transparency. At the same time, Third World economies have progressed enough to take away the high-end manufacturing jobs that were once the province of the West alone.

As for foreign affairs, the Obama Administration, despite its successes in Iran and Cuba, has for the most part duplicated both the aggressiveness of the Bush Administration and its consequent failures, and Hillary Clinton seems ready to repeat the process once more. Trump has, on occasion, when not threatening to torture innocent women and children, uttered actual criticisms of the American foreign policy establishment,⁴ something that Clinton seems physically incapable of doing. Sanders could do more, but doesn’t, because he isn’t interested in foreign policy, and neither are his supporters. The so-called “logic of events” has yet to make an impression on the American mind.

The Way Forward
Is there one? Well, it’s Hillary or nothing. One can hope that the economy will continue to recover, that a continuing oil glut will reduce Putin’s appetite for confrontation, that the Middle East will have calmed down, and, well, a lot of things. Hang on to those four-leaf clovers, though, because it could be a bumpy flight.

Afterwords
I fault Trumpism here and Bernieismo here.