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Trump's victory - what it says to us

By Saral Sarkar - posted Monday, 19 December 2016


Trump has won, despite everything. I think Americans must now stop demonstrating and shouting childish slogans like "Not our President". We must understand the phenomenon, now, if we are to do something about it in future.
I shall here focus on some basic points and causes of some basic trends that had been clearly noticeable for quite a few years now, almost everywhere in the world.

Things are changing fast - minority in their own country

Recently, Robert P Jones published an article in New York Times, in which he cited theastounding fact that "between 2008 and 2016, America has transformed from being a majority white Christian nation (54 percent) to a minority white Christian nation (43 percent)." On election day,"this anxious minority swarmed to the polls to elect as president the candidate who promised to 'make America great again' and warned that he was its 'last chance' to turn back the tide of cultural and economic change."

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Let me here also quote a promise that Trump had made to his followers: "The forgotten men and women of America will not be forgotten anymore." This quote (partly also the previous one) refers to those once proud skilled working class whites, who in the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession of 2008 had lost their houses and savings, many of whom were literally rendered homeless paupers.

It also refers to those who had lost their jobs in the wake of the large-scale closure of manufacturing enterprises or their relocation in Mexico etc. The majority of such working-class white Christians, the blacks and the Latinos were formerly voters of the Democratic Party. This time, these millions of losers of neo-liberal globalization voted in large numbers for Trump, because they have been feeling betrayed, left out, without any hope of regaining any time soon their lost status and self-esteem.

Bernie Sanders said later: while Trump recognized that "there are millions of people today – working-class people, middle-class people, low-income people – who are living in despair and turning to alcohol, drugs and suicide, the Democrats did not." Hilary had even called them a "basket of deplorables", so that a leftist author called Trump's victory the "Revenge of the Deplorables." Remember also that during this same process, the rich, AKA "the one percent", became enormously richer.
This hugely negative economic change would have sufficed to understand the rage of the Trump voters. But simultaneously also taking place has been what Jones calls a tide of cultural change. Actually, it is more a radicalchange intheethnic compositionof the American population.Culturally, the Blacks and the Latinos are not much different from working-class white Christians. All Latinos and the vast majority of the Blacks are also Christians. They, except the newcomers, speakAmerican English. And new-comer Latinos and Blacks eagerlytry to learn English and integrate themselves into the American labor force.

But still, because they look different, come from non-European and, what is more important, poorer regions of the world, and are late-comers, they are not regarded as belonging to the ethnic groupcomprising the progenies of the early and not so early white settlers and recent white European immigrants. The latter ethnic group has been thinking for about 240 years now that the USA is their country. Moreover, for many of them, especially white and devout Christians, it has also been culturally shocking that Blacks and LGBTs were claiming and even occupying normal to prominent places in society.

In the USA, large sections of the White Christian working class feel they have already lost "their country" and also their economic basis. Jones thinks the overwhelming support that Trump received from the White Christian working class voters is the expression of rage of this group of Americans against their plight.

Make no mistake, a similar process is going on in Europe. Think of Brexit, France National, Geert Wilders' party in Holland, AFD in Germany. They are all feeling they are losing their country, and they want to get back their country. One German AFD leader said: "If an Afghan immigrant is deported, he can go back to his country. But if we lose our country, we have nowhere to go."

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Contradictions of globalization

The two changes– economic and ethnic/cultural – are both resultsof the process of economic globalization, which resulted in the forced or voluntary immigration of hundreds of millions of non-white and also non-Christian people in the USA as well as the large-scale relocation of American industries and other businesses in other, cheap-wage countries. While it's true that, across history, participating nations in international trade did generally prosper, not everyone and not all nations benefited.

That is why for many years now, all over the world, there has been a lot of dissatisfaction with, and opposition to, further development of free international trade, that is since long also coupled with further development of free flow of investment capital. This opposition has not been unjustified. To explain it in one sentence, the assertion of the protagonists of free international trade and investment that "when the flood tide comes, it lifts all boats" has proved to be wrong, because not all citizens of a nation "sit in a boat", and not all nations possess an "ocean-going boat".

That is to say, a part of the population of a nation and many nations of the world can be and have indeed been left behind and forgotten in the process of global economic development. Especially this section of the US-American population – the proletariat of the "rust belt" of America for example – voted Trump, particularly because he promised to roll back the (in their eyes) evil tide of globalization.

Trump's rejection of economic globalization is of a more fundamental kind than what I have heard from the anti-CETA and anti-TTIP movements of Europeans. Most of the better-known points of the latter's criticism of these proposed agreements are so insignificant that they could easily be invalidated by small concessions. That also happened in the case of CETA, when the German and Canadian Economy Ministers made some concessions in the face of strong opposition to it. In contrast, the main argument of the US-American victims of globalization (the unemployed and now unemployable) has been that they have lost the very source of their livelihood, without any chance of getting an equivalent alternative one. That is why they and their leader Trump are explicitly for protectionism,which leftist and environmentalist critics of globalization, however, also oppose.

I have found very little sensitivity among leftist activists to some real and more serious issues associated with economic globalization. They are as follows:

(1) It divides the working class of the world more effectively than anything that the bourgeoisie could think up before. When a manufacturing unit is shut down in Pennsylvania and relocated in Mexico, several hundred American workers lose their livelihood, but in Mexico several hundred hitherto unemployed workers get these jobs, albeit with less wages.
(2) As we have seen, it even generates animosity between ethnic groups who become competitors for jobs in one and the same proposed factories and other economic opportunities.
(3) Competition between states to attract investments leads inter alia to downward pressure on wages, social benefits, and other conditions of work, in short, to a race to the bottom. Mr. Lafontaine, a leading German politician once said (roughly): "In the matter of wages, we simply cannot win the race to the bottom against China"
(4) Globalization facilitates technological development, the secret of increase in labor productivity, and that leads, through concomitant growth in automation, to further unemployment.
(5) Since most technological developments are resource-intensive, they ipso facto cause more environmental degradation.

Contradictions of Trump's anti-globalization program

Actually, all critics and opponents of globalization should now be rejoicing. After all, Trump has announced he would withdraw the US signature from the TPP and renegotiate the NAFTA. And the TTIP is now dead. I too rejoiced at this prospect, but for reasons different from those that motivated Trump and his supporters to oppose these. Trump wants to "make America great again". Not I.

But far from making America economically great again, Trump's policies are likely to lead to a strong shrinking of the American economy and its national income as well as that of the whole world. This could be a blessing in disguise. Of course, for those leading the push for globalization it is a disaster.

They argue that (1) today, economic growth is not only good but also absolutely essential for the health of the economy and society, globally as well as for each particular nation (it generates profits and also jobs and income), and (2) the more we liberalize international trade and remove the various barriers to it, the more growth can be achieved. But if we reject the growth imperative from the calculation, their arguments lose all value.

So far, the leaders of the merely globalization-critical movements have refused to do that. Those, however, who have understood the general global environmental crisis, and the climate crisis in particular, should (1) oppose any- and everything that promotes global economic growth; they should demand that the growth imperative be replaced by a stop growth imperative; they should (2) oppose any further labor-saving technological development, and (3) for the middle term, they should advocate a policy of plannedcontraction (de-growth) of all overdeveloped economies, and, simultaneously, a planned reduction ofthe global human population.

Economic contraction is not, of course, the conscious purpose of Trump's anti-globalization program. But if we have a little good luck, it might, by a roundabout route, serve our purposes. Trump would then, after eight years, be remembered (and lauded) for having brought about a much neededworldwide economic contraction that would do good to our environment. At first he would of course be cursed by all but a few radical environmentalists, but he might later be remembered as the leader who unwittingly did much to save the planet.

Conclusion: social entropy

I would like to conclude by submitting an impossibility theorem:

It is impossible to fulfill the continuously growing demands, wishes, aspirations and ambitions of a continuously growing world population while our resource base is continuously dwindling and the ability of nature to absorb man-made pollution is continuously diminishing. It is a lunatic idea that in a finite world infinite growth is possible.

Mass discontent is therefore bound to continuously rise as we continue to press up against the limits to growth. In this situation, large masses of relatively deprived and highly frustrated citizens of the rich countries are not looking forward to a better future in a democratic-leftist or eco-technological utopia; they are looking backward to a nationalist-rightist solution to their problems. In the EU, after Brexit, the centrifugal forcehas become stronger. It now appears possible that "populist" figures like Marine Le Pen will soon get elected.

I have expounded my analysis of the final crisis of capitalism in my theoretical writings, in which I have also dealt with the question what we should and could do in the present world situation. Here only two advices: we must prepare ourselves for the worst and try to do our best. And do not get distracted by unimportant issues like identity politics and rights of minorities etc. Concentrate on saving the planet

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This is an abridged version of the original article which can be accessed at www.eco-socialist.blogspot.com.



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About the Author

Saral Sarkar is an Indian academic resident in Germany who writes about Eco-Socialism.

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