by MARCO D’ERAMO
It would be laughable if it were not so tragic. For at least four reasons.
1. The full-throated defence of globalization by a left that previously characterized it as the source of every human misfortune. Having deplored the indiscriminate opening of markets for thirty years, it is now tearing its hair out because that opening is being rescinded, as the American empire proceeds with deglobalization (a process that has been underway for the past decade). It might be recalled that for years left-wing economists regarded the trade protectionism of the Cambridge School as a guiding light.
2. The carefree jubilation with which Europe met German rearmament, heedless of the country’s last two military build-ups and their disastrous consequences for the world. Blithe cheerfulness also met news that Chancellor Friedrich Merz was deploying the 45th Armoured Division in Lithuania – Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, which tells the story of how the Teutonic Knights were (fortunately) driven back from this very region, had seemingly been forgotten.
3. Europe’s anguish as it realizes that it has somehow (no one quite knows where or how) lost its umbrella. A feigned anguish, considering that in all of Donald Trump’s outbursts, this subject has been conspicuous by its absence: not once has the US president threatened to scale back American bases in Europe, nor has he raised the possibility of removing its hundred-odd nuclear bombs, nor the approximately one hundred thousand troops it has kept stationed on the continent for more than half a century. No matter: European leaders wring their hands, regardless of the persistent silence. My God, they cry, we have no umbrella to protect us from the storms on the horizon. At the very least, we are in urgent need of a raincoat.
4. Speaking of raincoats, witness the chest-thumping virility with which France and Great Britain flex their modest nuclear muscles, striking a pose of proud independence from a United States now weary of the Old Continent, and urging other European countries to spend more on weapons. This is, of course, precisely what Trump had ordered of his vassals: raise military spending to at least 3% of GDP, and then 5%. The only way to achieve this is by slashing social expenditure – schools, healthcare and so on. In other words, in the name of bellicose continental independence, the European ‘powers’ are rushing to force their citizens to swallow the diktat of Washington.
Today, the tragicomic seems the only register in which to narrate contemporary events, such is the gulf between proclamation and action. To narrate, not understand, much less predict: unpredictability appears the sole constant of the period, the only forecast that can be made with any certainty.
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Interpretations of Trumpism – distinct, of course, from Trump himself – tend to oscillate between two pairs of opposites: minimalist/maximalist and declinist/anti-declinist. In a recent Sidecar article, Matthew Karp describes the poles of the first with great clarity:
Maximalists are inclined to view Trump as an agent or conduit of a sudden historical rupture, whether the transformation of the party system, the destruction of American democracy or the implosion of the liberal world order. Minimalists see Trump not as a fundamental break but rather as a lurid symbol of longer-running developments, or a symptom of crises that lie elsewhere?– a black hole detracting attention from real political problems.
For Karp, this dichotomy cuts across both left and right:
Despite some disagreement, liberal and conservative maximalists unite in seeing the President himself as the chief and often the only issue in national politics; both have also leapt to enlist in the “fascism wars”, often brandishing the F-word as a cudgel to discipline the left at elections, and elsewhere.
Minimalism, on the other hand, is the stance adopted by both Republican and Democratic leaderships, which are united in the strategy of ‘ha da passare la nottata’, that is, of waiting for the Trumpian storm to blow over. The former are using it to notch up a few of the right’s traditional goals – tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization of state services, a shower of public contracts. The Democrats, for their part, highlight inconsistencies, reversals and blunders, wielding them as weapons for a (hoped-for) electoral comeback in next year’s midterms. But both sides are united in supine, bipartisan acquiescence: Republicans swallowing without protest the coup Trump carried out within the Grand Old Party, Democrats enduring the institutional offensive – total disempowerment of the legislative branch – without even engaging in a little parliamentary obstruction in the form of filibustering.
New Left Review for more