The Republican establishment is jumping out of its skin trying to present President-elect Trump as the guarantor of continuity. Of course, he represents nothing of the sort. He stood up against the political establishment and, as he himself said at the pre-election rally, his victory means "Begzit plus, plus, plus". Now, when two political earthquakes have occurred in a few months, others will inevitably follow them, and we can fully agree with the opinion of the French ambassador to the USA: the world as we know it is "collapsing before our eyes".
The last time it looked like that was during the two world wars, from 1914 to 1945. The feeling of the world "collapsing" was expressed in VB Yeats's poem "The Second Coming", from 1919: "Everything spills over; the center gives way; Mere powerlessness is flooding the world..." * When traditional institutions of government are completely discredited by war, the vacuum of legitimacy is filled by influential demagogues and populist dictatorships: "The best believe in nothing, while / The worst swell with fury." ** Oswald Spengler presented the same idea in his work "The Fall of the West", published in 1918.
Yeats's political predictions are the fruit of his religious eschatology. He believed that the world had to go through "mòra" in order to "be born in Bethlehem". For his time, he was right. The nightmare he saw continued during the Great Depression of 1929-1932, culminating in World War II. He was the prelude to the "second coming", but not of Christ, but of liberalism built on a firmer social foundation.
But are nightmares and wars a necessary prelude? Is horror really the price we have to pay to progress? Evil indeed often serves as a conduit for good (without Hitler there would be no United Nations, no Pax Americana, no European Union, no prohibition of racism, no decolonization, no Keynesian economics, and not much else). But it does not follow that evil is necessary to achieve good, much less that we want it as a means to achieve goals.
We cannot accept a policy of coup because we cannot be sure whether a new Roosevelt or a new Hitler will emerge in the end. Every decent, reasonable person hopes that progress can be achieved by soft methods.
But does the soft approach - whether it is called parliamentary or constitutional democracy - have to suffer catastrophic breaks from time to time? They usually explain it like this: the system collapses because the elite lose touch with the masses. But why does the disillusionment with democracy come precisely from democratic countries, even though we might expect the loss of those ties in a dictatorship?
One explanation, going back to Aristotle, is that plutocracy has perverted democracy. The more inequality there is in society, the more the way of life and values of the rich differ from "ordinary" people. They are locked into symbolic societies where it is considered polite, respectable and acceptable to speak in public only in a certain way. This in itself represents inequality. For Trump's supporters, his failures are not failures at all, and they don't care, even if they are.
It is the economy, not the culture, that deals the blow to legitimacy. Precisely when the fruits of economic progress belong mainly to those who are already rich, the gap between the cultural values of the minority and the majority becomes a serious destabilizing factor. I think that this is exactly what is happening in the democratic world.
The second coming of liberalism in the form of Roosevelt, Keynes and the founders of the European Union was ruined by the economics of globalization: the pursuit of a perfect balance with regard to the free movement of goods, capital and labor, which is inextricably linked to reconciliation with financial malfeasance, to the obscenely large enrichment of the minority, high level of unemployment and underemployment, as well as to reduce the role of the state in providing welfare. The resulting economic inequality removes the democratic veils from which the majority of citizens do not even see how the government actually works.
The populists' "enthusiasm" carries a simple, understandable and now universal message: the elite are selfish, corrupt and often involved in crime. Power must be returned to the people. It is no coincidence that the two strongest political earthquakes this year - Brexit and the election of Trump - took place in countries where the economy followed neoliberal canons the most.
Trump's geopolitical and economic views should be judged against the background of his disappointment, not by moral or economic standards. In other words, "Trumpism" can be the way to solve the crisis of liberalism, not the harbinger of its downfall.
From that point of view, Trump's isolationism is actually a populist way of saying that America must abandon commitments it has neither the strength nor the will to fulfill. Pledge to cooperate with Russia to end the savage conflict in Syria - is reasonable even if it marks a victory for the Assad regime. For Trump, the biggest problem will be to calmly get out of the exposed global obligations.
Trump's protectionism comes from an old American tradition. The US economy, with its high wages and large number of manufacturing jobs, has collapsed under globalization. But what should protectionism look like in a sustainable form? The question is how to gain central control, without destroying the international economy and inflaming national conflicts and racist sentiments.
Trump also promised that he would invest from 800 billion to a trillion dollars in infrastructure, financing it at the expense of bonds, and that he would greatly reduce taxes for corporations. Both aim to create 25 million new jobs and stimulate growth. All this, along with the promise to preserve social benefits for the poor, represents a modern form of Keynesian fiscal policy (although, of course, it is not called that). Its advantage is that it openly defies the neoliberal obsession with deficits and deleveraging, and also the reliance on quantitative easing as the only, now obsolete, instrument for managing demand.
When Trump moves from populism to politics, liberals should not turn their noses up in disdain and disappointment, but should use the positive potential of "Trumpism". His proposals should be analyzed and corrected, not removed from the list as nonsense of the ignorant. The task of liberals is that the third coming of liberalism takes place with the least losses to liberal values. And there will inevitably be some losses. This is the meaning of Brexit, the victory of Trump and all future victories of populists.
The author is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, a Fellow of the British Academy of History and Economics and a member of the British House of Lords.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2016.
* William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, translated by Milovan Danojlić (primary editor)
** The same
Bonus video:
