Is Trump’s Victory A Harbinger Of Capitalism’s End-Game? Has US Opted For A Mussolini Populist?
By Kumar David –November 9, 2016
Prof. Kumar David
Donald Trump has defied forecasters and stormed to victory. It is a repudiation of the Obama legacy, a rejection of the Washington establishment and a mandate for racial prejudice. It is also the beginning of a new period in US foreign policy if he keeps the threats he flung on the campaign trail. The white working and lower middle class vote was a wall Hilary Clinton could not scale. They were angry with Obama, with Washington and with non-whites. Add America’s conservative, reactionary, gun trotting and male chauvinist population segments and you have Trump’s winning formula.
Colic in America will disturb the rest of the world as profoundly as did the decline and fall of Rome bring chaos to medieval Europe. A plunge in America will not usher in a Dark Age, a jihadist catastrophe or global financial chaos, but capitalism as a world system stands confounded. A political and economic mess in America will affect others. Inter-layering and spread of production, trade and political power across the world is more intense now than in Roman times hence the world today has resilience. Well, this is not quite true if you recall that the other great civilisations of the time, Imperial China and Gupta India, hardly noticed events in far way Rome and Constantinople; but that was a differently compartmentalised world. Global dependence is deeper today than millennia ago.
The insurmountable obstacle
The question is what will a Trump presidency look like given his idiosyncratic personality? This is the point of departure of this essay and my conclusions are negative. I wish it were otherwise; I am not a juvenile who delights in human wretchedness because it brings revolution closer. Capitalism when it goes will do so on its own, it does not need a push from me; in any case social revolution is not within the perspective of a short essay such as this.
The President Elect – What a pity!
Some things are so difficult to change that one could disagree with Napoleon that “the word impossible is found only in the dictionary of fools” – you can’t bring Queen Victoria back to life! Trumpism (the Trump phenomenon) is an outburst of anguish from a white working class which has lost or is losing its livelihood and is in distress. The underlying and impossible to reverse root cause is that US capitalism is no longer competitive, or to be more precise, US manufacturing and much of the US service sector is no longer competitive in world markets.
