Trump the globalist
Trump is often understood as a nationalist, but his agenda is just accelerating the dominion of global capital.
I have always tried to resist the melodrama and hyperbole that saturates left writing about the Trump administration but it is hard to describe what is going on right now without using words like catastrophe. The story is a simple one: Trump, radicalized by the experience of the last decade, has declared an anarchic war on the federal government. It is anarchic in its means, openly defying the rule of law, and anarchic in its aim, which is simply to eliminate most of the existing state.
It is easy to assume that some combination of Democratic opposition and institutional constraints will ultimately check Trump’s ambitions, but I see no reason to take this for granted. They are acting quickly and in ways that will be difficult to reverse. You cannot just hire back hundreds of thousands of fired federal workers overnight. You can’t just buy back national assets that have been sold or rev back up complex federal programs that were summarily terminated. Most of what what we’re seeing dismantled will not come back.
The United States is naturally a global backwater that, through a few turns of fortune — the timing of industrialization, our isolation during the great wars of the early twentieth century, a president in FDR who was somewhat amenable to social democratic reforms — enjoyed widely shared prosperity for almost a century. This prosperity, given the pressures that globalization place on wages and the welfare state alike1, was never going to last forever. As long as it was still in place, however, American workers could hope to take advantage of the democratic breathing room prosperity offers to build a more sustainable future. This, as I argued recently, meant building mechanisms that could redistribute the wealth — not just domestically, but internationally.
The American right has long decried this agenda — socialist internationalism — as globalism. And in its place, we are told, they propose a kind of nativist nationalism. If outlets like Compact and American Affairs are to be believed, the great hope of Trump is that he will close the borders, reshore our factories, turn our country into a fortress against globalization, and perhaps even expand the welfare state for those of us lucky enough to make it in the door. That’s what Making America Great Again means to them, and it’s likely that this is what it means to most of the American who voted for him.
But what Trump is proving right now is that he is not the nationalist that Sohrab Ahmari and Angela Nagle fantasize about. Donald Trump is the embodiment of globalization come to America. He is actively dismantling a welfare state that was built on our postwar prosperity. He is privatizing the government and selling it off to a faction of the international bourgeoisie that cares nothing for building up American infrastructure; for gods’ sakes, these people want to funnel their wealth off to private seastead nations where they can rule like kings! In last month’s controversy over H1B visas Trump proved that he isn’t even the nativist foil of immigrant workers that so many Americans hoped he would be. He’s a bourgeois globalist par excellence.
Barring some truly dramatic change in fortunes, Trump’s legacy will be a rump state and a greatly diminished America that looks a lot more like the developing world. I do not want to sound overly apocalyptic — I’ve lived in the developing world, in countries where the state is running on fumes, and you can get by well enough. But it’s a very different way of life than most Americans are used to. With any luck we still have a few good decades left before the sidewalks crumble and the air starts smelling like kerosene.
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Not because immigration makes society “too diverse” to tolerate redistribution, as the right likes to argue, but rather because cheap labor undercuts the tax base that welfare states rely on.