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liberal democracy
Trump, Biden, and the Crisis of the Neoliberal International Order
A hegemonic stalemate or a hegemonic vacuum opens up the path to a world where power could be more decentralized.
Jul 18, 2024
Whether we call it “polycrisis,” like Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze, or “the age of catastrophe,” like the distinguished Marxist Alex Callinicos, there is no doubt that we are living in a period where the very foundations of the contemporary world order are cracking. There is that enigmatic line Gramsci used to describe his era that is also appropriate for ours: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
This short essay will focus on a key dimension of the polycrisis: the unravelling of the global hegemony of the United States.
The downspin of the U.S. empire has had a number of causes, but key among them are military overextension, neoliberal globalization, and the crisis of the liberal political and ideological order. Let us discuss each in turn.
Overextension and Osama
Overextension refers to the gap between the ambitions of a hegemon and its capacity to achieve those ambitions. It is almost synonymous with the concept of overreach as used by the historian Paul Kennedy, the slight difference being that overextension as I use it is principally a military phenomenon. The struggling empire the United States is today is a far cry from the unipolar power it was a quarter of a century ago, in 2000. If we ask ourselves what led to this situation, it inevitably comes down to one individual: Osama bin Laden.
The aim of bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 was precisely to provoke the overextension of the empire by forcing it to fight on several fronts in the Muslim world that would be inspired to revolt by his dramatic action. But instead of igniting revolt, Osama’s act ignited revulsion and disapproval among most Muslims. September 11 would have been a big failure had not George W. Bush seen it as an opportunity to use American power to reshape the world to reflect the Washington’s unipolar status. He took Osama’s bait and launched the United States into two unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The results have been devastating for America’s power and prestige.
During the June 7, 2024, debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Trump referred to the defeat in Afghanistan as the worst humiliation ever inflicted on the United States. Now Trump, as we all know, is prone to exaggeration, but there was strong element of truth in his statement.
September 11 would have been a big failure had not George W. Bush seen it as an opportunity to use American power to reshape the world to reflect the Washington’s unipolar status.
According to CIA analyst Nelly Lahoud, “Though the 9/11 attacks turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for al Qaeda, bin Laden still changed the world and continued to influence global politics of nearly a decade after.” If the United States is the confused and groping global power it is today—one that has been, moreover, reduced to a dog being wagged by the Zionist tail—that is to a not-insignificant degree due to bin Laden.
To acknowledge the significance of 9/11 is not, of course, to endorse it. Indeed, for most of us, the attack on civilians was morally repelling. But one must give the devil his due, as they say, that is, point out the objective, world-historic impact of the deed of an individual, be this person a saint or a villain.
Trading Places
Let us turn to the second major cause of the unravelling of the hegemonic U.S. status: neoliberal globalization. Thirty years ago, U.S. corporate capital, along with the Clinton administration, envisioned globalization, achieved through trade, investment, and financial liberalization, as the spearhead of its greater domination of the global economy. Wall Street and Washington were wrong. It was China that was the biggest beneficiary of globalization and the United States one of its main victims.
Investment liberalization meant billions of dollars worth of U.S. corporate capital flowed to China to take advantage of labor that could be paid at fraction of the wages paid labor in the United States in exchange for technology transfer, voluntary or forced, that helped China comprehensively develop its economy. Trade liberalization made China the manufacturer of the world supplying mainly the U.S. market with cheap products. Both investment and trade liberalization contributed to the deindustrialization of the U.S. and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, which declined from 17.3 million jobs in 2000 to around 13 million today. Compounding the deleterious effects of deindustrialization have been the financialization of the U.S. economy, that is, making the super-profitable financial sector the leading edge of the economy, and regressive taxation, which led to an extremely inequitable distribution of income and wealth.
China’s crises are crises of growth, compared to the U.S. crises, which are crises of decline.
China has traded places with the United States in the global economy. China is now the center of global capital accumulation or, in the popular image, the “locomotive of the world economy.” According to IMF calculations, China accounted for 28% of all growth worldwide from 2013 to 2018, which is more than twice the share of the United States. What must be underlined is that while the United States followed neoliberal policies of giving full play to market forces, China selectively liberalized, with the powerful Chinese state guiding the process, protecting strategic sectors from foreign control, and aggressively demanding advanced technology from Western corporations in exchange for cheap labor.
Although in dollar terms, the United States is still the biggest economy, by some other measures, like the World Bank’s Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), China is now the world’s largest. In the United States, 11.5% of people now live in poverty, whereas, according to the World Bank, only 2% of China’s population is poor.
Of course, China has faced challenges in its rise to the world’s economic summit, but development, as the economist Albert Hirschman point out, is a necessarily unbalanced process. China’s crises are crises of growth, compared to the U.S. crises, which are crises of decline.
From De Facto to Armed Civil War?
Military overextension and the effects of neoliberal economics have contributed not simply to political disaffection but to political turmoil in the United States, with one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, becoming the spearhead of far-right or fascist politics fueled by racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, fear, and decline in economic status among white people. Politics has become severely polarized, and some warn that there is now a state of de facto civil war. In short, the political and ideological regime of liberal democracy is now in grave danger, with many liberals and progressives warning that Trump’s Plan 2025 will amount to the establishment of a fascist dictatorship. They are not wrong.
Here is what Steve Bannon, the ideological chief of the U.S. far right, says,
The historical left is in full meltdown. They always focus on noise, never on signal. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump… We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.
A second Trump presidency is now a certainty, with the strong possibility that the de facto civil war could turn into an armed civil war. Indeed, the assassination attempt on Trump on July 13 may well be a major step towards the unrestrained violence depicted in Alex Garland’s Civil War.
Crisis of the Liberal International Order
Washington has been the guardian of the international order, and with the economic and political crisis of the United States, that order has also entered into a deep crisis. What are the key aspects of what has been characterized as the liberal international order? First, of all, global leadership of the United States and the West underpinned by U.S. military power. Second, a multilateral order that serves as a political canopy for Western capital, whose mainstays are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Third, an ideology that promotes Western-style democracy as the only legitimate political regime.
This liberal order is now in trouble on two fronts: on the international front, it has lost legitimacy among the Global South, which sees the multilateral system as designed mainly to keep it down; internally, the liberal democracy that is its guiding ideology is under assault from the far right. If the far right comes to power in the United States and in key states in Europe—and it may come to power soon in France and soon after that, in Germany—the international order they would favor would probably continue to assert Western economic supremacy but adopt a much more unilateralist, protectionist approach of securing it instead of using the IMF-World Bank-WTO complex. Certainly, the far right will abandon the hypocritical appeal to liberal democracy as a model for the rest of the world.
Headed for War?
China says it is not out to displace the United States as global hegemon. To the U.S. elite, however, China is a revisionist power determined to dislodge it as the global hegemon. Especially in the Biden years, the United States has become more and more determined to use that dimension of hegemony where it enjoys absolute superiority over China, military power, to protect its status as number one.
This is why the danger of war between the United States and China is not to be underestimated, and this is the reason the Western Pacific is such a powder keg, far more than Ukraine. In Ukraine, the United States and China confront each other through proxies, Russia and NATO, while in the Pacific they confront each other directly.
The United States has scores of bases surrounding China from Japan to the Philippines, including the massive floating base that is the Seventh Fleet. The South China Sea is now filled with rival warships performing naval “exercises.” Among the latest visitors are vessels from France and Germany, U.S. allies that have been dragooned far from NATO’s traditional area of coverage to contain China. U.S. and Chinese warships have been known to play games of chicken—heading at each other and then swerving at the last minute. A miscalculation of a few feet could result in a collision, with unpredictable consequences. Fears that the South China Sea will be the next site of armed conflict are not alarmist.
In the absence of any rules of conflict resolution, the only thing preventing conflict is the balance of power. But balance-of-power regimes are prone to breakdown, often with catastrophic results—as was the case in 1914, when the collapse of the European balance of power led to World War I. With Washington aggressively marshaling Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, five carrier task forces of the U.S. Navy, NATO, and the newly created AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) alliance into a confrontational stance against China, the chances of a rupture in the East Asian balance of power are becoming more and more likely—perhaps just a collision or away.
Hegemonic Transition or Hegemonic Stalemate?
So what does the future hold? Some say a hegemonic transition, whether peaceful or not is inevitable.
But let us pose another possibility. Perhaps, we should be looking not so much at a hegemonic transition but at the emergence of a hegemonic vacuum akin to but not exactly the same as that which followed the First World War, when the weakened Western European states had ceased to have the capacity of restore their pre-war global hegemony while the United States did not follow through on Woodrow Wilson’s push for Washington to assert hegemonic political and ideological leadership.
Within such a vacuum or stalemate, the U.S.-China relationship would continue to be critical, but with neither actor able to decisively manage trends, such as extreme weather events, growing protectionism, the decay of the multilateral system that the United States put in place during its apogee, the resurgence of progressive movements in Latin America, the rise of authoritarian states, the likely emergence of an alliance among them to displace a faltering liberal international order, and increasingly uncontrolled tensions between radical Islamist regimes in the Middle East and Israel.
Yes, the crisis of U.S. hegemony may lead to an even deeper crisis, but it may also lead to opportunity for us.
Both conservative and liberal policymakers paint this scenario to underline why the world needs a hegemon, with the former advocating a unilateral Goliath who does not hesitate to use threat and force to enforce order and the latter preferring a liberal Goliath who, to slightly revise Teddy Roosevelt’s famous saying, speaks sweetly but carries a big stick.
There are, however, those, and I am one of them, who view the current crisis of U.S. hegemony as offering not so much anarchy but opportunity. Although there are risks and great dangers involved, a hegemonic stalemate or a hegemonic vacuum opens up the path to a world where power could be more decentralized, where there could be greater freedom of political and economic maneuver for smaller, traditionally less privileged actors from the Global South playing the two superpowers against one another, where a truly multilateral order could be constructed through cooperation rather than be imposed through either unilateral or liberal hegemony.
Yes, the crisis of U.S. hegemony may lead to an even deeper crisis, but it may also lead to opportunity for us. To use Gramsci’s image that I began this essay with, we may be entering an age of monsters, but like Ulysses, we cannot avoid going through the dangerous passage between Scylla and Charybdis if we are to get to the promised safe harbor.
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It Is Comforting—But Foolish—to Believe the House GOP Inquisition Will Fail
The Republican Party is acting on behalf of a terrible and dangerous political perspective. But that does not mean they won't succeed.
Jan 17, 2023
If you are anyone but a MAGA enthusiast, and you care about the future of democracy in the United States, then you think that what the Republican Party and especially the House Republican majority has planned for the next two years is very bad.
And it is very, very bad.
And yet strangely, many of the same people who talk about how very bad it is also refuse to take it seriously.
I am a very regular watcher of MSNBC. Since the ascendancy of Trump to the presidency, I have enjoyed the network’s coverage of Trumpism, which often features really smart commentators, a few of whom are even my friends, who relentlessly critique Trumpism. I believe it is fair to say that MSNBC, now the home of both Never Trump former Republicans and some of the most prominent liberals, represents the mainstream centrist view of things: Trumpism is terrible, the Republican Party fully in its grip must be defeated, and democracy must be defended.
I share all of those beliefs. But there is one further claim that more or less defines this centrist perspective, and it is one that I do not share: that the Republican Party is a “clown car” and what it is doing might be dangerous but ultimately so crazy that it cannot possibly succeed.
And so MSNBC viewers are treated to a regular and constant barrage of variations of comments such as these (paraphrases of things I hear said regularly by Joe Scarborough and Lawrence O’Donnell, other hosts, and a great many guests):
- “All of this talk about investigations is not political, it is performative.”
- “These extremist plans for oversight are nothing but a distraction from their own lack of a governing philosophy.”
- “These far-right pronouncements and commitments are out of step with the American electorate, which rejected the extremist agenda in November.”
- “These crazy efforts cannot work, and it is hard to understand why any sane politician would commit to them, for such commitments will only weaken their chances for re-election.”
The most extreme version of this sentiment was articulated this weekend on MSNBC by Lucy Caldwell, one of the many professional Democratic campaign operatives to appear regularly on the network. Caldwell declared that the investigation of Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents just announced by the GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee, led by Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), is a good thing that ought to be welcomed by Democrats, because the accusations against Biden are bogus and the investigation will only blow up in House Republican faces.
Each of these tropes in a different way makes light of the very real right-wing threat to liberal democracy. It might be comforting to imagine that the MAGA-dominated Republican Party cannot succeed. But it is stupid, as wishful thinking always is in politics. And it seriously underestimates the gravity of the situation.
Fact 1: Every Republican in the House majority was elected by voters last November. And the pro-Trump/anti-Bidenism of these candidates was no secret, even if most of the candidates blended it with rhetoric about inflation, deficits, public education, etc. It was widely reported in both the mainstream media and the right-wing/Fox News media that if they retook the House, Republicans, with Jordan in the vanguard, would initiate “Benghazi on Steroids” investigations with the intention of ruining the Biden administration and delegitimizing now-reviled parts of the so-called “deep state.” And these people—around a hundred of whom had voted in 2021 to invalidate Biden’s electoral victory—were elected by the voters in their districts, who in each case rejected a Democrat who among other things claimed to stand for democracy. And the entire pro-Trumpist House Republican leadership was re-elected.
It is simply not true that “voters rejected Republican extremism” in November. In many places and races, some very important, voters did reject extremists. But in many other races they did not. And while the “red wave” failed, the Republicans still won control of the House. To imagine that somehow “the voters” in aggregate really prefer Nancy Pelosi and Bennie Thompson and Adam Schiff and the rule of law—this is delusional. And to imagine that voters will see through the hypocrisies and lies of Jordan and his colleagues and that the performative humiliation of Biden and his administration will somehow redound to the benefit of Democrats in 2024—this is even more delusional.
It is simply not true that “voters rejected Republican extremism” in November.
Fact 2: The Republican culture war against liberalism is not a “distraction.” It is a passionately committed politics of the far-right, and its powerful leaders and many millions of followers are attacking the things that they believe are destroying the country: “liberals,” “Marxists,” “Critical Race Theorists” and “gender radicals” seeking to take over schools and destroy “normal” family life and undermine law and order and Make America Weak.
There really is a MAGA ideology. It is promulgated—with slight differences—by Trump and Pence and DeSantis and Gaetz and Boebert and Jordan and Scalise and Cruz and Hawley and Graham and Ingraham and Carlson and Trump, Jr. It is preached to millions from the pulpits of many hundreds of Evangelical churches across the country. It is broadcast and disseminated by Fox News and One America News and Newsmax and scores of podcasts and social media feeds that have many millions of followers. And it is given a veneer of respectability by journals such as American Greatness and The American Mind and American Affairs and Claremont Review of Books and by the reactionary educational initiatives of Hillsdale College (which has apparently been invited by Governor Ron DeSantis to take over and transform Florida’s premier liberal arts college, New College).
This is all very real.
Most and indeed all of the beliefs at the core of MAGA ideology might rest on paranoid conspiracy theories and misinformation and disinformation. The holders of these beliefs might not really understand American history and how the U.S. constitutional system works; they might not care about the ethics of democracy or the rule of law; they might be deluded about how their political passions serve or fail to serve their economic interests, or how their reactionary dispositions are in tension with their embrace of modern technologies. And the leaders who purvey these claims might be opportunistic or manipulative, and might understand that some of what they are saying is not factually true or is contradicted by other factual truths. That is how ideology works. And it is very real—even if it is complex or admits differences—and is often held with some confusion or ambivalence.
The MAGA activists want to destroy the Democratic Party—and liberalism more generally—as they seek to alter the political landscape and electoral law so that Democratic voters become politically marginalized.
They want to destroy a Justice Department that they believe, rightly, institutionalizes a certain basic commitment to the rule of law that stands in the way of their agenda and their Caesarist desire for A Strong Man to lead them.
They want to attack scientific institutions because such institutions promote climate change concerns and reproductive freedom and a wide range of choices that they wish to take off the political table.
They want to attack teacher unions and indeed professional education, and “restore” control of schools to “normal parents” interested in “family values” and “patriotism” and “American Greatness.”
They want to eviscerate Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights League and a wide and deep network of institutions all across the country that promote public health and modern medicine for women and for LGBTQ individuals.
And they want to whip up hatred for liberals and progressives and feminists and climate activists and BLM activists and queer activists and a Democratic Party which is at least minimally hospitable to these groups.
And they are doing these things.
And the Inquisitions promised by Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor-Greene and the entire House Republican majority that unanimously supported the “Rules Package” that centered on this agenda are serving this purpose, attacking and weakening the Democratic Party and the broad democratic left.
These attacks are not a distraction from politics. They are the goals of Republican politics.
And they are “performative” only in the sense that so much of politics is “performative,” from demonstrations and rallies and speeches and ads and Tweets and TV appearances.
The House Republicans are performing, i.e., enacting, their hatred of liberal democracy. And they are doing it in full public view. So that their supporters can see, and be emboldened, and so that their opponents can watch as their leaders and their values are debased and brought down.
Fact 3: All of this might be demagogic and racist and reactionary and contrary to modern science and modern medicine and hostile to public health and the rule of law and hostile to liberal democracy itself. Indeed, all of this might be dangerous and might even be evil. But this does not make it any less real.
Can it work?
Can evil work? Can dictatorship work? Look around . . .
It works, in different ways to be sure, in Russia and China and Turkey and Hungary and Belarus and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Sudan and in many other places. . .
A great deal of moral and political awfulness has “worked” for a great many ruling individuals and parties for a great deal of modern history.
It worked—for around three-quarters of a century—in the Soviet Union.
True, it only worked for around 20 years in fascist Italy, and it only worked for around 12 years in Nazi Germany. But even in those relatively short-lived examples, it worked quite well, for the fascists, who succeeded in destroying political oppositions, arresting thousands, murdering millions . . .
What “works?”
A great deal of moral and political awfulness has “worked” for a great many ruling individuals and parties for a great deal of modern history.
Is the U.S. far from that now? In some ways yes. In some ways maybe not so much. These are the very things that many smart people are discussing and debating right now, in the face of a very real crisis of liberal democracy that is being promoted and intensified by very real enemies of liberal democracy. To the extent that history has “verdicts,” they can only be known in hindsight. And to the extent that the last century furnishes any lessons at all, it can be said with some confidence that there is no guarantee that either political leaders or masses will be moved by a concern for human dignity; no guarantee that what is good or right is what will prevail; and no guarantee that liberal, constitutional, pluralistic democracy must survive.
And that is why it is both foolish and dangerous to believe that what the MAGA-Republican party is now doing must fail.
The party is acting on behalf of a terrible and dangerous political perspective.
The only way to be sure that the party and its supporters will fail is to defeat them.
And the only way to defeat them is to treat what they are saying and doing with the utter seriousness that it deserves.
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