by AIJAZ AHMAD
Civilian paramilitaries with Arizona Border Recon search for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers at the U.S.-Mexico border on November 14, days after the presidential election. Border security issues are a top national issue for the incoming administration. PHOTO/John Moore/AFP
This is a historic moment of great danger, not only in the United States but also, thanks to the power of the U.S. over the rest of us, across the world.
The proto-fascist movements of the Far Right that have been swirling around the world since the dismemberment of the Soviet Union have finally found in Donald Trump, the President-elect of the U.S., its unifying centre and its global figurehead. I hesitate to say “leader” for the simple reason that about Trump himself and his leadership qualities we know rather little beyond his limitless personal greed, his view of women as fodder for sexual predation, his hatred of all who are not of white European extraction, his demagoguery and cynicism—not to speak of his vast and somewhat ridiculous megalomania, rather analogous to India’s Narendra Modi’s and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s but on the grand American scale, even more evil than theirs, something of a Captain Ahab writ large.
But at least he undoubtedly has become a provisional “figurehead” of all that is vicious in global politics and power, thanks to his recent election to the one office in the world that can do the most damage—and has consistently done over the last several decades. Noam Chomsky summarised this side of the equation succinctly: “On November 8, the most powerful country in world history, which will set its stamp on what comes next, had an election. The outcome placed total control of the government—executive, Congress, the Supreme Court—in the hands of the Republican Party, which has become the most dangerous organisation in world history.” We shall return to this characterisation of the Republican Party and to Trump’s own relationship with his party.
Changing global equation
Meanwhile, the essential shock of this situation arises from the fact that even though the Far Right has been growing in the U.S. over many years—the process going back to the presidential bid in 1964 by Barry Goldwater who gained 40 per cent of the popular vote even then—and even though such forces have been gaining momentum across continents, the U.S. had seemed to be the last place where such a takeover could come so very swiftly. Some taste of it has come already in India and, considerably more ferociously, in Turkey; smaller European countries such as Austria, Hungary and Poland have been teetering on the verge. Such forces have been influential in France and have gone from strength to strength throughout these neoliberal times; they played the key role during the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, and they are ascendant in virtually all corners of Europe, from Greece to Denmark and Sweden. The fear was that they might come to power in the smaller countries of Europe and then grow further into its central formations. Their coming to power in the U.S. alters this global equation altogether. That power mainly resides, in my view, not in the person of Trump per se but (a) in the kind of people who are likely to run the government on his behalf and (b) the simultaneous Republican control over the Supreme Court as well as both Houses of the Congress.
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