From Whence Trump?
In my last article I made the case that Trump and MAGA along with the wider populist right that currently poses a threat to liberal democracy is not fascist, but illiberal populist conservatism. The important question that fallows is how exactly this version of far-right politics came to challenge liberal democracy around the world. The first bit of background to go over is that the struggle over ideology and government takes place in the geoculture of the capitalist world-system. A world-system is a larger social system that transcends cultural, political, regional, and economic boundaries.
A world-system, in particular, is a social system that is also a self-contained social world. Its capitalist in that it is based on an endless cycle of producing commodities for profit known as capital accumulation. The geoculture of the world-system is the dominant set of norms and ideas within the world-system. The modern world-system is the only world-system to ever come to span the entire world and is around five hundred years old.
The capitalist world-system produces a class struggle in which to make a profit capitalists who employ workers must increase the duration and intensity of work while decreasing pay and benefits and in response workers organize for the opposite. In the geoculture this struggle plays out in the development of social movements and political ideologies that put pressure on capitalists and the political structures that represent them to make political concessions to the working class such as social spending and union power. The struggle around class and geoculture is divided along the lines of identity where some identity groups are given various advantages over others to facilitate the squeezing of the working class. In response social movements and struggles develop on the part of the oppressed identity ("minority") groups against these structures of privilege.
The world-system was able to manage these conflicts because of the rise to geocultural prominence of centrist liberalism. Centrist liberalism is a political ideology which calls for technocratically and slowly administered progressive change. Centrist liberalism thus transformed societies such as America and Western Europe into "liberal democracies" characterized by elections, separation of powers, and civil rights. However, this social compromise required social programs and limits on the exploitation of labor by capital as well as limits on the privileges of dominant identity groups that ate into capitalist profits.
Eventually the social compromise became too expensive particularly around a decline in the actual production of goods and services from the early 70s to now. Part of what allowed centrist liberalism to predominate was that social movements that arose in opposition to capitalism embarked on a political strategy that brought them into the centrist liberal orbit. States are entities that claim exclusive control over territory in which they regulate the use of weapons and violence and displace local authorities to accumulate central power over time. The political structure of the capitalist world-system is divided into competing states whose function is to facilitate capital accumulation with subsidies, social spending, corruption, and legal rights for productive enterprises.
In the 19th and 20th centuries socialists and communists thought they could affect a short cut to the overthrow of capital by labor if they took power over the state structures. So, either through elections, or armed uprisings they managed to take control of states around the world. However, maintaining this power required fallowing the normal procedures of using the state to facilitate capital accumulation which meant that they had to continually make empty promises to the people they ruled that if they just waited and accepted less radical changes such as rights for national minorities, social spending, and economic development, then the actual overthrow of capital by labor would eventually fallow. Socialist and communist parties were thus sucked into the political program of centrist liberalism that relied on slow technocratically applied social change.
Because the liberal strategy was effective at preventing populations from revolting the mainstream right was also sucked into the liberal political orbit with ideological fusions such as "liberal conservatism" coming to prominence and more far-right movements such as fascism being crushed. In 1968 there were student led rebellions from France to China in which populations called the bluff of socialists and communists for not delivering on the progressive change they promised. This call out made populations lose faith in the slow process of change and the use of the state machine to deliver it. Centrist liberalism thus lost geocultural dominance and the left and right were freed up to pursue more radical agendas.
The decline in real production forced states to replace the political-economy of developmentalism that allowed for slow progressive change with neoliberalism where successive liberal and conservative governments used the state to limit the power and mobility of labor, cut social spending, and amplify the power and mobility of capital. The result was the collapse and ruination of western welfare states and eastern 'socialist' states. The neoliberal consensus was ended by the 2008 financial crisis where states were forced to bailout banks with massive fiscal spending. Since then political-economy has been dominated by protectionism, debt funded spending, and austerity. Trump's trade wars are a ramping up of this approach.
The troubled political-economy is a symptom of a larger structural crisis in which limits on capital accumulation are undermining the ability of the world-system to function as normal. Costs of production such as labor, middle management, resource and waste management, and infrastructure are contracting the possibilities for the world-economy's expansion which is ultimately fatal for the world-system. The structural crisis produces wild fluctuations such as cost of living crises, environmental disasters, and global conflict. Part of the way people deal with the crisis will be to seek communities based on identity with minority groups uniting around shared struggles (BLM, Free Palestine, women's and LGBT movements) and dominant groups lining up behind chauvinist politics (illiberal populist conservativism).
The structural crisis of the world-system enters humanity into a situation which will force elites and the political right to find a new system that preserves hierarchy, exploitation, and privilege with which to replace capitalism while the left and oppressed people will have to renew the project of replacing it with a system that replaces hierarchy, exploitation, and privilege with self-determination and equality. Who wins can't be predicted ahead of time and depends on the actions of every human being. A main obstacle for the right is that even though elites may be aware of the need for a new system, the populist illiberal movement is currently reliant on capitalism's democratic state structures. A main obstacle for the left is that most leftists still cling to the idea of using state power to change the world despite its 20th century failure. Anarcho-Syndicalism provides an alternative approach for the left and oppressed people.
Sources
World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Wallerstein
Does Capitalism Have a Future? Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian, Calhoun
