It is the early hours of Friday, July
22, 2016 and as I have been doing in the last three days, I have been
sitting up late into the early hours of the new day watching television
broadcast of the Republican Party’s National Convention on the CNN
channel. Because I am in Berlin, Germany that is six hours ahead of the
Eastern Standard Time (EST) of the United States, tonight as in each of
the last three nights, I have to persevere till the wee hours of the
morning. This is unusual for me as the only thing that I normally watch
on television this late is tennis and then only when it is one of the
four so-called “Opens” – Australian, French, Wimbledon and American. So
what is there in the Republican National Convention that has kept me so
bewitchingly glued to the television for hours on end? The answer to
this is simple and unambiguous: the coming American presidential
election in November 2016 is so portentous, both for the United States
and the rest of the world, that I want to see and hear everything that
leads to it. More on this point concerning the portents of this year’s
American presidential election for the rest of the world later.
For now, it is difficult for me to hide my gladness that many things have gone wrong with and in the Republican Convention, from the deliberate and en massabsence
of most of the “heavyweight” leaders of the Party; to the widely
discussed plagiarism ofMichele Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic
Convention by Melania, the wife of Donald Trump,in her speech at the
Convention on opening night; and the refusal of Ted Cruz, who was one of
Trump’s rivals during the primaries, to endorse Trump in his speech
last night at this Republican Convention.One of the much touted claims
of Trump in his electoral campaign is that nearly everything in America
is broken and only he, Donald Trump, can fix things. Well, how come then
that so many things in his Convention are so broken that it is
not only embarrassing for his Party but calls into question his claim
of heroic, superhuman and technocratic deal-making efficiency? Can a man
who cannot run a Party Convention smoothly and efficiently run an
entire country, that country being the richest and most powerful nation
in the world?
Above everything else in this Republican
Convention and far beyond the sheer noise and spectacle that we get in
all Conventions, I have been struck by the extreme level of mob and herd
instincts driving the thousands gathered at the Convention. It is
nothing less than what you would get at a mass, open-airprayer meeting
of one of our evangelical denominations, especially the sort of
Dionysian frenzy that you see and hear at a gathering of the Mountain of
Fire and Miracles – halleluiah!Last night, one of the featured
speakers, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, drove the crowd at the
Convention into an apoplectic frenzy of violent rage against Trump’s
Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, with shouts of “Jail Her! Jail
Her! Jail Her!” that sounded very much like “Kill Her! Kill Her! Kill
Her!” I solemnly swear that the last time that I saw an electioneering
gathering get driven into such a paroxysm of hate, anger and violent
words and expressions was in my childhood in the early 1950s in colonial
Nigeria when electoral politics was no more and no less than the
continuation of warfare in the domain of politics. This observation
leads directly to the theme of this piece, this being the portentousness
of this year’s American presidential election for the rest of the
world, particularly the West.
Many things are by now so well known all
over the world about the demagoguery, xenophobia, misogyny and racism
of Donald Trump that there is no need to restate them here. What is of
relevance here is one particular issue that though it has not been
ignored, it has garnered far less attention than it deserves. Permit me
to state it very clearly if only because of its novelty: in Donald Trump
we see the kind of extreme and uncompromising rejection of free-trade
neoliberal globalization that for the most part, we have seen only in
the Third World and hardly ever in the Western countries. Let me be very
specific and unambiguous about this point. Xenophobic and
anti-immigrant anti-globalization is quite common in the rich countries
of the West and it has been so for about a decade now. As a matter of
fact, this is the ideological and political fuel that powers the
nationalism of many of the extreme, far-right parties of Europe. What is
perhaps unique of Trump and the mass movement that he has fostered is a
very plain, very explicit rejection of free-trade globalization and its
many transnational practices, protocols and treaties, so much so that
he has openly and vociferously stated that if elected, he will rescind
all the free-trade treaties that Obama and the Republican presidents
before him have signed with partners in Europe, North America and Asia.
Trump has in particular singled out China in his tirades against
currency manipulations that underwrite indebtedness and huge trade
deficits of America to that country. And he has stated that as
President, he will reinstate open protectionist policies to reinvigorate
industrial factory production to create hundreds of thousands of jobs
for American workers. Sounds like demands you usually get from the
anti-neoliberal Left in Africa and many other parts of the developing
world? Unquestionably so, except that this is a candidate of one of the
two major ruling class parties of America, the heartland of neoliberal
globalization, making these demands.
There is an even more uncanny similarity
of Trump’s anti-neoliberal globalization to the ideological views of
progressive activists in the developing world and this is to be found in
Trump’s claim that while neoliberal globalization has generated
unprecedented quantities of money wealth, the lion’s share of that
wealth has gone to a few rich thereby immensely widening the gap between
the haves and the have-nots.The careful regular reader of this column
might have noticed that this was indeed a point that I made again and
again in my recent two-week series on global political economy before
and after neoliberalism. On this particular point, let me say again that
while our peoples in Africa and the developing world have been
continuously SAPPED (SAP – Structural Adjustment Programs of the IMF)
for close to three decades now, the middle class, the working people and
the poor of the rich countries of the global North have been
experiencing SAP only in slightly less than one decade. All the same,
SAP is SAP and Trump is the first major aspirant to very high office in a
Western country with a chance to win that has articulated a fierce
opposition to neoliberal globalization in terms that seem uncannily
similar to what we have been saying in the global South for a long time
now. Is this a hopeful portent? I don’t think so, especially if one
considers the fate of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic Party
primaries to that of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.
At the risk of oversimplification, I
would argue that Bernie Sanders, whose anti-neoliberalism was at least
as passionate as Trump’s if not more so, could and would not connect his
anti-neoliberalism and economic nationalism to racism and xenophobia as
Trump did and this is why Sanders was defeated by Clinton. In this
respect, the fate of Sanders is very much like the fate of progressive
European opponents of neoliberal globalization who have consistently
stopped short of attaining lasting or even sustained electoral victories
precisely because demographically, those marginalized or altogether
excluded by globalization in Europe are nowhere as numerous as in the
Third World. In other words, in one part or region of the world, the
wealth generated by and from free-trade neoliberal
globalization has in many places left as large as 70% of the population
desperately poor and marginalized, while in another part or region of
the same world, the percentage of the truly disadvantaged and poor is
(only) 25% overall. Of course, for many countries of the global North
25% of desperately poor people in the total population is a historical
high, but so far this has not been sufficiently weighty enough to tilt
the balance in the direction of an all-out assault on neoliberal
globalization as we have it in Donald Trump. Which is why we have to
zero in on the dimensions of xenophobia, racism, fascism, Islamophobia
and misogyny as the factors that finally secured the electoral victories
for Trump that eluded Bernie Sanders.
As I listened to Trump’s acceptance
speech faraway from America in Berlin in the early of this morning, his
fascism and xenophobia seemed to me the most insistent, the most clamant
dimensions of the economic nationalism that is the core of the appeal
that he potentially holds for white, blue-collar workers in the
so-called “rust belt” region of the country. Fascism also once rose like
a titanic force here in Berlin less than a century ago; and also, its
hordes of frenzied supporters such as those at the Republican
Convention, were drawn mainly from tens of millions of deeply
disaffected blue-collar workers and déclassé middle class white-collar
professionals. Is this a portent, a frightening portent of what lies
ahead of us? No, I don’t think so. This will be our starting point in
next week’s continuation of the series.
0 comments:
Post a Comment