From February 20 to March 16, I published a series of nineteen posts on the Trump administration.  The posts describe the project of Trump and his team as characterized by: continuation of the post-2001 “war on terrorism,” with its ahistorical and ethnocentric assumptions; enforcement of immigration laws, overruling the interests of some corporations in the superexploitation of illegal immigrant labor; reduction in legal immigration, with reforms orientated toward admission of applicants with higher skills; an economic nationalism that protects U.S. industries and that induces U.S. corporations to invest in production in the United States; a taking of the corporate side in the six-decade conflict between corporations and the ecology movement; an increase in military capacity; greater support for law enforcement agencies; and populist rhetoric.  

     I maintain that the Trump project has components in common with twentieth century European fascism, which was characterized by military expansionism, suppression of structures of representative democracy, scapegoating, repression of religious and ethnic minorities and political dissidents, populist and nationalist rhetoric, economic nationalism, and alliance with the corporate elite.  The Trump project, however, is different from twentieth century fascism, in that its scapegoating is more subtle, its political propaganda and manipulation is more sophisticated, and it allows minorities and women to assume leadership roles.  It thus should be understood as fascism in a new form, or neo-fascism.

     The posts also maintain that the rise of Trump is in part a consequence of the failure of the Left to formulate a narrative that is an alternative to the mainstream American narratives, be they liberal, neoliberal or neo-fascist.  With the coming to power of Trump, the Left more than ever has a duty to formulate an alternative narrative that would reframe the issues.  The posts seek to indicate the necessary lines for a politically effective and analytically sound alternative narrative of the Left.

     The posts are as follows:
“Trump and the war on terrorism, Part One” 2/20/2017; 
“Trump and the war on terrorism, Part Two” 2/21/2017; 
“Trump on immigration” 2/22/2017; 
“Let’s build houses in Mexico” 2/23/2017; 
“Trump’s economic nationalism” 2/24/2017; 
“Trump, corporations, and the environment” 2/27/2017; 
“Trump’s populism” 2/28/2017; 
“Trump and US militarist foreign policy” 3/1/2017; 
“Trump’s neo-fascist project” 3/2/2017; 
“A grand narrative from the Left” 3/3/2017; 
“An alternative epistemology of the Left” 3/6/2017; 
“The Third World grand narrative” 3/7/2017; 
“A Left narrative on the Third World” 3/8/2017; 
“A Left narrative on immigration” 3/9/2017; 
“A narrative on morality in international affairs” 3/10/2017; 
“An integral and comprehensive narrative” 3/13/2017; 
“The function of government” 3/14/2017; 
“Trump’s masterful speech” 3/15/2017; 
“Power to the people!” 3/16/2017.

     Please scroll down to find the posts.

Posted February 20, 2017
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     I begin today, thirty days after the taking of the presidential oath of office by Donald Trump, a series of nineteen posts on the Trump administration.

      The Executive Order emitted by Donald Trump on January 27, temporarily prohibiting people from seven Islamic-majority countries from entering the United States, has provoked a conflict between a number of organizations (including the American Civil Liberties Union, Islamic organizations, technology corporations, and scientific associations) and the executive branch of the federal government.  For the moment, the judicial branch has stayed the order.  The people are divided, with slightly more support for the Executive Order than opposition, according to opinion polls.  In this debate, the issues that are at stake, their root causes, and their solutions are not addressed, and they will not be addressed.  As C.J. Hopkins notes in an excellent and somewhat satirical article, the conflict in essence is between the neoliberal establishment and a neo-nationalist insurrection, and thus the terms of the debate are limited (Hopkins 2017).  

      The Executive Order touches upon two complex and emotional issues, terrorism and immigration, that are scarcely understood by the politicians or by the people in the United States, and the Left has failed to provide an historically and globally informed explanation and proposal.  Both issues are signs of the profound structural crisis of the world-system.  I will discuss terrorism in this and the following post, and immigration in the subsequent.

      Since 1967, there has emerged a “distinctive genre of violence” as a social phenomenon (Ansary 2009:332) that we know today as terrorism.  It is different from the classical strategy of terrorism that was debated internally in popular and nationalist movements, which was far more limited.  Classical terrorism involved the assassination of officials of the state, especially those known for their brutality; or the assassination of collaborators with the regime.  Moreover, although classical terrorism was debated within revolutionary movements and apparently was adopted in some cases, it was used on a very limited scale, even in cases in which the struggle took the form of a guerrilla war.  The Communist International took an explicit position against terrorism, and prohibited its member parties from practicing it.  The Cuban Revolution rejected the practice as immoral and unethical and as a dysfunctional political strategy.  

     The terrorism that has emerged since 1967 as a new social pattern involves a much higher level of violence.  It kills civilians intentionally, not an as an accidental byproduct; and it kills indiscriminately, without selecting the people that are its victims on the basis of their specific role in the political and social system.  

      The deliberate indiscriminate killing of civilians by clandestine groups also is different from the numerous examples of the mass murder of civilians in the modern era, which were carried out by armies and other agents of nation-states.  Examples include: wars of conquest by European nations directed against the nations and peoples of America, Asia and Africa from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, which murdered civilians on such a massive scale that it in some cases constituted genocide; the massive bombing raids against densely populated areas of cities carried out by the United States, Great Britain and Germany during World War II; and the bombing of Vietnam by the United States from the period 1965 to 1972.  Such mass murder of civilian populations by nation-states took a far greater number of victims than the new form of terrorism.  But they belong to a different category, because they were carried out by nation-states seeking to increase or preserve power and wealth in the world-system; whereas terrorism, in both its classical and new forms, has been carried out by clandestine groups tied to popular movements.  Because of this fundamental political difference, mass murder by nation-states and terrorism by clandestine groups are perceived differently by the people; and we historians, social scientists and philosophers also should maintain an analytical distinction between these two forms of violence against innocent people.

     The deliberate indiscriminate killing of civilians by clandestine groups occasionally occurred prior to 1967.  For example, an underground Jewish militant group bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing ninety-one civilians, which remained the most destructive single act of terrorism until 1988, when Libyan terrorists brought down a commercial flight in Scotland, killing 270 people.  But after the Six Day War of 1967, the new form of terrorism emerged in the Arab world as a social phenomenon, occurring with a degree of regularity.  Although the clandestine groups adopting the new terrorist strategy take the Islamic concept of jihad and present themselves as Muslims, their understanding is very different from the great majority of Muslims, so they should be referred to as “jihadists,” rather than “Islamists” or Islamic radicals.  Following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, jihadists from the Arab world and Pakistan flocked to support the Afghan guerrilla resistance, supplied with money and arms by the oil-rich Arab states and the United States. As jihadism grew during the 1980s, it spread to the non-Arab Islamic world, and it increasingly turned to the killing of civilians, with citizens of Western nations included among its victims.  Jihadism promoted and created an apparent clash between Western and Islamic civilizations, casting aside the effort since the 1950s by Third World nations, including those of the Islamic world, to forge universal human values through various international organizations, including the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement (Ansary 2009:321-22, 332, 344; Huntington 1997:19-39; Prashad 2007:272-73).
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      Why did the social phenomenon of the deliberate indiscriminate killing of civilians by clandestine groups emerge?  If one’s viewpoint is limited by the assumptions and beliefs of the American grand narrative, understanding the answer to this question is impossible, because the American grand narrative ignores fundamental historical and social facts.  It overlooks the role of European colonial domination of the world during the course of five centuries in creating the present world-system, which has evolved to a neocolonial world-system.  It does not grasp the connection between colonial/neocolonial domination and the spectacular ascent of the United States.  It does not see the historic struggles of the nations and movements of the Third World, seeking to transform the colonial structural foundations of the world-economy, reaching its height in the Third World proposal for a New International Economic Order.  It does not know that the Third World proposal for a New International Economic Order, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, was ignored by the global powers.  It is only superficially aware that the most revolutionary of the Third World governments, those most strongly committed to true sovereignty and to economic and cultural autonomy, were attacked through any and all means by the global powers, with the intention of undermining their political and economic viability.  And it does not take into account the fact that, beginning with the imposition of the neoliberal project in 1980, the sovereignty of even accommodationist Third World governments was undermined, resulting in even higher levels of poverty and social dislocation for the peoples of the world.  

       In the Arab world, the Third World project of national and social liberation was most fully represented in the 1950s and 1960s by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.  In 1952, Nasser led a group of young military officers in overthrowing a corrupt monarchy that was subservient to European interests.  The officers represented various strains of Egyptian political thought, including nationalism, Islamic modernism, the Muslim Brotherhood, communism, and Pan-Arabism.  Once in power, Nasser forged the ideology of Arab socialism or Islamic socialism, by which he meant a classless society built on a foundation of the principles of Islam.  The Egyptian revolutionary government of Nasser: nationalized the Suez Canal; nationalized foreign companies and banks; refused to participate in military alliances against the Soviet Union; purchased arms for the modernization of its army from Czechoslovakia, avoiding the political conditions that were tied to the U.S. offer of arms; and recognized the Popular Republic of China.  Egypt became a center for solidarity organizations from Africa and Asia as well as for nationalist organizations from the Arab world, and Cairo hosted the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Conference in 1957.  Nasser was one of the leading voices (along with Sukarno of Indonesia, Nehru of India, and Tito of Yugoslavia) in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. During the period 1956 to 1967, Nasserism was the hope of the Arab world (Ansary 2009:324-26; Prashad 2007:31-34, 51-52, 96-99, 148; Schulze 2000:148-52).

       Nasserism represented a form of Islamic modernism, taking a middle position between accommodation to the West and Islamic traditionalism.  It envisioned independent, modern and republican nation-states, synthesizing the basic concepts of Third World nationalism, Western bourgeois democratic revolutions, Western socialism and Islam (Ansary 2009:261-68; Schulze 2000:148-49, 174-75).  It was a fully reasonable proposal, consistent with the principle of the sovereign equality of nations advocated by the Third World project and affirmed by the UN Charter.  

      These basic historical facts with respect to the Arab world and the Islamic world are overlooked by the American grand narrative.  At the same time, the Left has failed to formulate an alternative to the American grand narrative.  It has failed to explain the reasons for the emergence of a new form indiscriminate violence against civilians, and it has failed to propose an alternate strategy.  As I will develop further in subsequent posts in the series of posts on Trump, the Left ought to formulate a narrative that explains the new terrorism as a symptom of the sustained structural crisis of the world system and that proposes a strategy of cooperation with the governments and movements of the world in order to participate in the development of a more just and sustainable world-system, in accordance with the common interests of humanity.  

     The limited, partial understanding of the American grand narrative leaves the people confused before the new phenomenon of the indiscriminate killing of civilians by clandestine groups.  The failure of the Left to formulate an alternative grand narrative contributes to the confusion, and it has left the people vulnerable to the scapegoating and ultranationalist discourse of Trump.  In Part Two of this post, which I will publish tomorrow, I will try to point to an understanding of the reasons for the emergence of the new form of terrorism, drawing upon a horizon beyond the American grand narrative and the superficial discourse of the Left.

References
 
Ansary, Tamim.  2009.  Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.  New York: Public Affairs.
 
Hopkins, C.J. 2017.  “The Resistance and Its Double,” www.counterpunch.org, January 30.
 
Huntington, Samuel P.  1997.  The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.  New York:  Simon Schuster, Touchstone Edition.
 
Prashad, Vijay.  2007.  The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.  New York: The New Press.

​Schulze, Reinhard.  2000.  A Modern History of the Islamic World.  New York: New York University Press.

Posted February 21, 2017

      As the European colonial empires fell, the strategy of the West was to block the creation of the more just world-system advocated by the revolutionary Third World project of national and social liberation, whose leaders possessed moral and political authority among their peoples, as a result of their leadership of anti-colonial popular movements that had attained the political independence of their nations.  As a dimension of this strategy, the West supported the Third World sector that was tied to Western interests and advocated an accommodationist nationalism, subordinate to the interests of the West.  In the Arab world, this took the form of support for a limited project of development directed by the Arab elite, as an alternative to the liberation project of Nasser.

      The limited project of “development” directed by the Arab elite promoted a form of religious fundamentalism known as Wahhabism, named for the eighteenth century Arabian cleric Abdul Wahhab. In the aftermath of the European domination of the Islamic world, Wahhab called upon Muslims to eliminate Western influences and to return to the pure, original form of Islam.  As it developed, Wahhabism preached that Muslims ought to follow literally and exactly the Islamic laws on prayer, fasting and alms-giving.  It taught that jihad, the struggle to defeat the enemies of Islam, is a religious obligation; and it defined enemies to include Muslims who loosely followed Islamic laws, who were hypocritical in their Islamic professions, or who introduced innovations into Islamic theology and practice.  Wahhabism attained enormous influence throughout the Islamic world by the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly among the rural poor (Ansary 2009:249-57, 306-7).  During the course of the twentieth century, it increasingly would be promoted by the elite of the Islamic world, offering it to the poor as an alternative to the emerging project of Third World national and social liberation.

     Among those schooled in Wahhabism was Crown Prince Faysal of Saudi Arabia, who created the World Muslim League in 1962.  The League was organized to “disrupt the growth of Third World nationalism and its secular sense of community, and to recall in its place the sublime bonds of religion.”  It established an international Islamic news agency and Islamic cultural centers, and it held regular conferences for the purpose of consolidating the struggle against Third World nationalism and communism.  In creating the World Muslim League, Faysal acted in accord with the wishes of leaders in the Islamic world who “rejected Third World nationalism, its secularism and its socialism as well as its type of modernity,” because “Third World nationalism was ideologically predisposed to the dismissal of hierarchy, and the domination of certain classes and clans.”  Whereas “Nasserism and Communism promised equality, the Saudis proffered a celestial equality” that “accepted the hierarchy of the world” (Prashad 2007:260-62; Schulze 2000:173). 

      Throughout the Islamic world, the established upper social classes promoted literal interpretations of Islam such a Wahhabism, seeking to derail the progressive and socialist readings of the Islamic tradition that were integral to the Nasserist Third World agenda.  This ideological strategy was supported by the United States, which also gave full political, economic and military support to monarchies and dictatorships in the region, as alternatives to Nasserism (Ansary 2009:340; Prashad 2007:267-68; Schulze 2000:128-29, 138, 151-52).

       In the 1960s and early 1970s, the World Muslim League was still limited in influence.  Its role was to provide comfort and support for “scholars and activists who felt beleaguered in their societies for their anachronistic ideas about modernity and statecraft” (Prashad 2007:268).  However, it soon would grow rapidly.  

     Following the defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six Day War of 1967, Saudi Arabia emerged as the regional leader, taking the place of Egypt.   With oil wealth and U.S. political and military backing, Saudi Arabia funded Wahhabis Islamic organizations throughout the world.  One organization that benefitted from the resurgent Islamic literalism was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by an Egyptian schoolteacher in 1928.  Envisioning a transnational Islamic unity, it opposed the division of the Islamic World into separate nation-states.   It stood against nationalist leaders in the Islamic world, whether they be accommodationist nationalists dependent on Western elites, or autonomous nationalists allied with the Third World project of national and social liberation.  With a strong following among the urban working class poor, the Muslim Brotherhood expanded as urbanization and industrialization caused the growth of this demographic sector.  The Brotherhood evolved into “a pandemic low-level insurgency—seething against secularism and Western influence, seething against its own modernist elite, against its own government, against all nationalist governments in Muslim countries, even against the apparatus of democracy to the extent that this reflected Western values” (Ansary 2009:310).  Since the 1930s, the Brotherhood had been a thorn in the side of autonomous nationalist leaders, who found themselves simultaneously battling imperialism from above and Islamic insurgency from below.  As the Muslim Brotherhood spread throughout the Arab World after 1967, it began to sprout increasingly radical offshoots that gave emphasis to the concept of jihad as a duty for true Muslims (Ansary 2009:308-10, 326-27, 331-32).   

     Islamic literalism spread at a rapid pace for various reasons: the limited gains of the revolutionary Third World project of national and social liberation, blocked by the West; the limited capacity of the Nasserist project to deliver on its promise of autonomous national economic and social development, inasmuch as it was hampered by Western opposition and sanctions; the decline in prestige of the Nasserist project that resulted from the Six Day War; the growing class inequalities generated by accommodationist governments; the subordination of accommodationist nationalism to the West; and the increasing obviousness of the hypocrisy of accommodationist politicians with respect to nationalist aspirations and Islam.  Islamic literalism was a turn to the past, driven by a loss of faith in the future that Nasser had envisioned; and by a rejection of accommodationism, for its lack of dignity.  In the 1970s, developmentalism and modernism remained the dominant motif as national liberation states attempted to reform from below the neocolonial world-system, but Islamic literalism has become influential among the excluded (Ansary 2009:342).

     In the 1980s in Afghanistan, the United States turned to direct support of the Islamic insurgency, not only indirectly through support of Saudi Arabia.  The Islamist guerrilla resistance was backed with money and arms by the Saudi-financed World Muslim League, which generally supported Islamic literalists; and by the CIA, which hoped to involve the Soviet Union in an unwinnable war.  The eight-year anti-Soviet guerrilla war “totally empowered the country’s Islamist ideologues” and “attracted Islamist zealots from around the Muslim world, including jihadists from the Arab world” and Pakistan (Ansary 2009:344), who repackaged themselves as freedom fighters.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Afghan communists, the United States disengaged from Afghanistan, making no effort the rebuild the war-torn country.  The jihadists made Afghanistan, now reduced to a rubble, as their base of operations for a war against the West.  They helped to develop the Taliban (Ansary 2009:344-7; Prashad 2007:271-72; Schulze 2000:229-33).      

     Long-term global trends also favored the decline of the Third World project of national and social liberation and the rise of Islamic insurgency.  As the global powers turned to the neoliberal project and as the International Monetary Fund pushed states toward the abandonment of social services in health, education and relief, the Islamic organizations affiliated with the World Muslim League filled the void, thus expanding exponentially.  With the imposition of neoliberal globalization on the world, the sovereignty of states was undermined, and the idea of nationalism and patriotism was severed from a context defined by the “secular-socialist nationalism of the Third World agenda” and placed in a worldview formed by a cultural nationalism imbued with traditional religious concepts (Prashad 2007:274).  By the 1980s, it had become clear that Islamic leaders of the Left could not make their dreams real, and Islamic literalism thrived among the excluded people of the lower classes (Ansary 2009:343-44; Prashad 2007:271, 273-74; Schulze 2000:248-49).

     Taking into account the recent history of the Arab and Islamic worlds, let us ask:  What has caused the emergence of this new form of terrorism characterized by the indiscriminate and deliberate killing of civilians?  The answer is logical, even if scarcely acknowledged in the discourses of the North: the blocking by the global powers of all reasonable political efforts by the peoples and movements of the Third World to protect their national sovereignty and to establish economic and cultural autonomy; and the adoption of strategies by the United States that gave space to those ideological sectors in the Islamic world most inclined to adopt extremist measures.  In using any and all means to block reform from below of the neocolonial world-system, the global powers gave credibility and legitimacy to extremist violence.

      However, when the United States confronted the new form of terrorism, it did not react with a reassessment of its persistent effort to preserve the structures of the neocolonial world-system.  It did not turn to a recognition of the political, economic and ecological unsustainability of the world-system and of the need for humanity to develop a more just, democratic and sustainable world-system.  It made no effort to understand the phenomenon in global and historical context, and it proclaimed a “war on terrorism.”  

     The war on terrorism is a permanent war.  It has included: military invasions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya; military attacks in Yemen and Pakistan; military support for “opposition groups” in Syria; prisons that violate due process rights, including the use of torture; and increased vigilance on U.S. citizens.  

    The Trump Executive Order places itself in the “war on terrorism” that the United States has waged since 2001.  It declares its intention “to protect the United States and its citizens from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks in the United States” by placing a temporary halt on immigration from seven countries that the Obama administration previously had defined as characterized by high levels of terrorism.  With the goal of developing a permanent policy, the Order directs the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence to determine what information is needed from any country to judge if a person seeking admission to the United States is a security or public-safety threat.  It gives them 30 days to report, including a list of countries that do not provide the necessary information.

      In the U.S. political discourse, the “war against terrorism” is understood in the context of the American grand narrative that sees the nation as a model of democracy.  The proclaimed war casts terrorism as a threat to democracy, and it has justified military action as necessary to fight terrorism and to defend democracy.  The “war against terrorism” has created a climate of fear with respect to terrorist acts, thus generating greater popular support for military expenditures and interventions.  And it has fostered an association of Islam with terrorism, thus converting Muslims into convenient scapegoating targets.  Such an ideological war that defines external and internal enemies has been convenient for the global powers, in that, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of communists, the global powers were in need of a threatening menace that was everywhere present, but invisible.

      When the new form of terrorism emerged as a social phenomenon in the 1990s, the “war on terrorism” was one possible response for the societies of the North.  But another response was possible, one based on recognition of the fact that the inequalities and injustices of the neocolonial world-system have consequences even for the societies of the North, and thus these injustices have to be addressed.  Here is where the Left in the North should have been prepared, explaining the political, economic, financial and ecological unsustainability of the neocolonial world-system, and proposing North-South cooperation for the construction of a just, democratic and sustainable world-system. The Left should have been proposing cooperation with the Third World project of national and social liberation as the best way to eliminate terrorism.  

     The new form of terrorism will be overcome though international cooperation and solidarity and support for the Third World project of national and social liberation.  It will be overcome through the creation a world-system that respects the sovereignty and equality of all nations, allows economic and cultural autonomy, supports international programs for the protection of the social and economic rights of all citizens of all nations, and promotes laws and programs that are designed to protect nature.  It won’t help much to block the entrance to the United States of people from certain nations, to build a wall along the southern frontier, or to deport illegal immigrants.  And when such efforts are undertaken with an attitude that ignores rights of due process, they are not only wrong-headed but also egregious.

     I will reflect further on a possible alternative narrative of the Left in subsequent posts in this series of post on Trump.

References
 
Ansary, Tamim.  2009.  Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.  New York: Public Affairs.
 
Prashad, Vijay.  2007.  The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.  New York: The New Press.

Schulze, Reinhard.  2000.  A Modern History of the Islamic World.  New York: New York University Press.

Posted February 22, 2017
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      The problem of immigration is, more precisely, a problem of uncontrolled international migration.  Some political leaders have reacted to the problem with proposals of exclusion, while others focus on inclusion and respecting the rights of the immigrants.  Neither band analyzes or proposes solutions to the global problem of uncontrolled international migration.  

     In his first month in office, President Donald Trump has taken decisive steps toward controlling and reducing immigration to the United States and deporting undocumented immigrants, consistent with his campaign rhetoric.  The measures taken by the Trump administration, although they have generated a high level of conflict and controversy, respond to concerns and fears of the people, inasmuch as there is widespread belief that the government has not been taking sufficient steps to control illegal immigration, and that the United States does not have sufficient employment or social services to receive immigrants, legal and illegal, from the impoverished and conflicted areas of the world.  

       Popular concerns are to some extent fed by the sometimes cavalier attitude with respect to immigration laws on the part of some of the defenders of the rights of the immigrants.  David Bacon, for example, criticizes the U.S. government for its enforcement (during republican and democratic administrations) of immigration laws, and he advocates direct action resistance against them.  He maintains that the firing and deportation of undocumented workers, in accordance with immigration laws, functions to ensure low-wage labor, because it leads to greater use of guest worker programs, which typically are limited to one year of employment (Bacon 2017).  Such commentary implies that nations do not have a right to enact laws controlling migratory flows, and to enforce them.   

      To be sure, immigration policies should not be driven by an orientation to providing a cheap labor supply and maximizing corporate profits.  But governments ought to control immigration, adopting policies that are designed to serve the good of the nation and the world; and to this end, all governments must enact, and should enforce, immigration laws.  

      The current demands of the Left for non-enforcement of immigration laws and its orientation to direct action resistance give the impression to the people that the Left does not recognize the right and the duty of government to enact and enforce immigration laws.  They give an impression of immaturity, irresponsibility, and idealist disconnection from real problems.  In this and in many issues, the Left conveys an image that does not inspire confidence, thus ensuring its limited influence among the people.  

      In the raging conflict, many have viewed the Trump anti-immigrant measures as a violation of a tradition in the United States of receiving immigrants.  Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, for example, declared that “there are tears running down the cheeks of the Statue of Liberty.”  However, comments of this kind ignore the fact that the situation today is fundamentally different from the great migrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The world-economy has become stagnant since the 1970s, having overextended its geographical limits; and the U.S. economy has declined since the 1970s, relative to other core economies.  The immigrants today to the countries of the North are not being pulled by expanding economies; rather, they are being pushed by the increasing deterioration of economic and social conditions in peripheral and semiperipheral zones of the world-economy, and by the violence and chaos resulting from wars of aggression and interventions by the core powers.  

     The world situation is today out of control, with poverty and violence in many regions of the world, and uncontrolled migration from the most desperate countries.  The political elite, committed primarily to the defense of its interests and those of corporations, does not respond adequately to the situation.  Living in an exclusive manner, the members of the power elite are less adversely affected by the problems that the people face, such as that of uncontrolled international migration, so they have little interest in addressing them. This is sensed by the people of the United States, who do not have good understanding of global dynamics, but they do have the commonsense intelligence to intuit that the global situation is out of control and that the elite is responding only to its own particular interests.  This is why the anti-immigrant messages and actions of Trump are attractive to many of the people.

       In this situation, the Left does not have an adequate response.  It defends the rights of the immigrants, which of course is demanded and required by ancient prophetic calls of justice for the poor, the oppressed, and the foreigner.  But defending the rights of legal and illegal immigrants is not enough.  What is required is a credible and workable alternative to the anti-immigrant discourse and policies of the Right.  The Left, however, does not come close to offering an alternative.  It dismisses the concerns of the people as symptoms of xenophobia.  It does not take seriously the concerns of the people and propose solutions to address them.  

     The Left should recognize the right of governments to enact and enforce immigration laws, and it should propose more just immigration laws, designed from the vantage point of the well-being of the people and the nation.   The guest worker program, for example, could be reformed, such that, instead of a maximum of one year, the worker’s participation could be renewed for a period of five to seven years, following which the worker would be eligible for permanent residence and citizenship.  The reform could include guarantees for the protection of the workers’ rights, including minimum wage and the right to organize.  It also could establish that criminal behavior would give the government the right to deport the worker.  The reform of the guest worker programs could be the basis for a controlled, orderly and legal migration that responds to: the need for workers in fields where labor is in short supply; the desire of persons to migrate to the United States; and the concerns of people in the United States with respect to the existing uncontrolled nature of immigration.  Such specific proposals for immigration reform should be at the forefront of the Left’s presentation, for they would convey a much more mature and responsible image to the people than do calls for non-enforcement of laws and direct action resistance.  It is a question of having the political intelligence to propose solutions to problems and having the patience and the capacity to educate the people on the reasonableness of the proposed solutions.

     In addition, the Left should be explaining to the people that uncontrolled international migration is one of several symptoms of the sustained structural crisis of the neocolonial world-system, which demonstrate its unsustainability.  It should make clear that, in the long run, the problem of uncontrolled international migration will be overcome when the regions from which the migrants come experience economic and social development.  Accordingly, the governments of the North should be cooperating with the governments and movements of the Third World, seeking to promote the development of peripheral and semiperipheral regions, so that a just, democratic and sustainable world-system can emerge.  

     I will have further commentaries on the need of the Left to formulate an alternative discourse in subsequent posts in the series of posts on Trump.

​

​Reference
 
Bacon, David.  2017. “What Donald Trump Can and Can't Do to Immigrants,” NACLA Newsletter, February 6.

Posted February 23, 2017

      The other day I was getting caught up on my breakfast reading, taking a look at an article in the Sunday edition of the Cuban newspaper, Juventud Rebelde, written by three Cuban journalism students.  I said to my Cuban wife, “According to this article, the proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexican border will cost twenty-five billion dollars, and it will consume seven million cubic meters of concrete and a million cubic meters of cement.”  She replied, “You could build a lot of houses with that quantity of concrete and cement.”  Olga Lidia is a mineralogical engineer and a member of the Cuban Communist Party, and she persistently demonstrates a good head for technical and practical issues, combined with a commitment to social justice for the people.

      Reading on, I saw that the three Cuban journalism students were doubtful that the wall would have any effect.  They observed that the traffickers of drugs and other illegal products always find alternative methods for entering the United States when their existing methods confront new obstacles.  They asked, “Why would the illegal trafficking of human persons be any different?”  I began to imagine expanded opportunities for those in the business of fabricating documents; or for those who have boats capable of transporting persons from the Mexican Gulf coast to the shores of Texas or Louisiana, or from the Pacific coast of Mexico to California.

     Since the wall might not have much effect on the number of persons who enter the United States illegally, maybe we should go with Olga Lidia’s idea.  Rather than using all that concrete and cement to little effect, why don’t we use them to construct houses in Mexico?  If we were to do it in cooperation with the government of Mexico, we could be the co-sponsors of a significant housing program in Mexico. This would be consistent with what we should be doing with respect to the problem of uncontrolled international migration: cooperating with the governments of the Third World in promoting the economic and social development of their nations, so that their people do not feel compelled to undertake the risky journey to the North in order to make a living and to provide financial support for their extended families back home.

     On February 21, the Trump administration released documents that reveal plans for a significant increase in deportation of undocumented immigrants.  The new measures would include: an expansion of the expedited deportation process, which would affect undocumented immigrants that have been in the country for less than two years; the detention of undocumented immigrants while their deportation cases are being processed; and the training of local police officers for cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the enforcement of immigration laws.  

     For the most part, the new measures point to a more complete and more efficient enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.  As the New York Times writes, “President Trump has directed his administration to enforce the nation’s immigration laws more aggressively, unleashing the full force of the federal government to find, arrest and deport those in the country illegally. . . .  Because of the changes, millions of immigrants in the country illegally now face a far greater likelihood of being discovered, arrested and eventually deported.”  Whereas the Obama administration gave priority to the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes, the new measures are directed against undocumented immigrants in general, regardless of whether they have committed serious crimes. The new measures are intended to achieve “faithful execution of our immigration laws,” according to John F. Kelly, the secretary of homeland security.  They seek to overcome a legacy of lax enforcement, which has created an endless flow of illegal immigrants, according to some Congressional Republicans.

      Why is there a legacy of lax enforcement of immigration laws?  It is a consequence of the U.S. government catering to the interests of corporations that have an interest in a supply of low-wage labor, unprotected by any labor rights or labor laws.  Although lax enforcement benefitted certain corporations and other employers of domestic labor and informal workers, it was unjust to the undocumented immigrants themselves.  The great majority were pushed by the limited economic opportunities in their countries of origin, some with a distorted image defined by the “American Dream,” and others with a determination to provide support for their families in their native countries.  The situation of lax enforcement combined with restricted legal immigration compelled many to make exorbitant payments to traffickers, to undertake physical risks, and to exist in a condition of perpetual illegality and uncertainty.

       The legacy of lax enforcement has had consequences for the people of the United States, and we are experiencing today its political effects.   The New York Times reports that the new measures will be supported by Trump’s “core constituency — those who blame unauthorized immigrants for taking jobs away from citizens, committing heinous crimes and being a financial burden on federal, state and local governments.”  The New York Times maintains that these folks are mistaken: “research shows lower levels of crime among immigrants than among native-born Americans.”  Many advocates of immigrants’ rights point to this fact, and they also note that the immigrants hold jobs that no one else wants, and they contribute more to the economy and they take.

       But isn’t it understandable for people with little meaningful personal contact with illegal immigrants to believe the worst about them, even though untrue?  Isn’t understandable, in a world that is uncertain and insecure on many fronts, for people to have doubts about eleven million persons who entered the country in a form that nullified normal legal requirements for review, and who are compelled by their circumstances to live in a kind of permanent illegality?  If for no other reason than the potential of erosion of confidence in public institutions, lax enforcement of immigration laws should not have occurred.  The fact that it was permitted by the political-corporate elite, ignoring the inquietudes of the people, has now led to a level of popular support for the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump, who is taking decisive action to rectify the lax enforcement.  Thus far, however, the Trump administration does not show any indication of turning to enforcement of immigration laws in a manner that makes any allowance for the fact that the U.S. government has encouraged illegal immigration for years, through a combination of lax enforcement and limited legal immigration.  

      Before this situation, the Left has not had a politically effective and comprehensive proposal.  It has a limited understanding of the global sources of the problem of uncontrolled international migration.  It has not proposed reasonable strategies in response to the problem, and even less has it figured out how to explain to the people the benefits to the nation and the world of its proposed strategies.  It has embraced the cause of the rights of immigrants, as it should.  But it has done so in a manner that appears to imply advocacy of lax enforcement.  Thus the Left came to be seen as part of the problem by a significant sector of the people, enough to make possible the election of Trump as well as a level of popular support for his immigration policies.   

      The Left has come to the defense of the rights of immigrants, but without a comprehensive proposal with respect to the problem of uncontrolled international migration.  Moreover, it has not taken seriously the inquietudes of the people, dismissing them as manifestations of racism and xenophobia.  With its limited understanding and attitude of moral superiority, the Left has discredited itself in the eyes of the people, thus undermining its influence.  The Left is reduced to shouting from the sideline, scarcely present in a public debate between the corporate neoliberalism and the neo-nationalism of Trump and his team.  The protests of the Left are sometimes noticed, but this is hardly a venue for effective explanation.

      The Left must reconstruct its discourse on a foundation of an historical and global understanding that is rooted in universal philosophical-historical-social science.  It must explain to the people in a manner that respects the sentiments and the common-sense intelligence of the people, even as it recognizes that the people must be educated.  In regard to the problem of uncontrolled international migration, the Left should be proposing: cooperation with Third World governments, seeking Third World economic and social development, so that the people will have more opportunities to earn a living in their native lands; an end to the aggressive wars and proxy wars in the Middle East, so that people are not forced to flee the violence being unleashed in their native countries; a controlled process of international migration, with work permits and permanent residency being legally emitted on a scale that fully responds to the labor needs of the United States, thus creating an orderly process for persons from other nations who desire to migrate to the United States; full respect for the labor rights of foreign nationals with work visas, including the right to organize; amnesty for most illegal immigrants that have been living in the country for more than two years, in recognition of U.S. government complicity in illegal immigration, by virtue of its lax enforcement combined with its limits on legal immigration; and the full and effective enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, with the cooperative participation of various U.S. law enforcement agencies. 

       The Left in the nations of the North must recognize that international immigration is out of control.  It cannot simply seek to protect the rights of immigrants, without seeking to attend to the issue of uncontrolled international immigration, which itself is a symptom of the sustained structural crisis of the world-system.  It cannot dismiss the inquietudes of the people, rather than attending to them.  It must make clear its commitment to: overcoming the current chaos with respect to international migration; the establishment of a legal, controlled, orderly and safe process of international migration; the enactment of just laws and policies with respect to immigration and the rights of immigrants; the enforcement of the nation’s laws; and cooperation with other nations in a quest for a just and sustainable world-system. To continue on its erroneous path of defending the rights of immigrants while dismissing the inquietudes of the people as racist and xenophobic would be to perpetuate its marginality, and thus leave the political terrain open for right-wing politicians made in the image of Donald Trump.

Posted February 24, 2017
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      Free trade among nations benefits the stronger nations, whose companies are more technologically advanced and of greater size, thus giving them a competitive advantage.  Therefore, the nation with the strongest economy in the world-system is for free-trade.  But the states with weaker economies need to protect their emerging industries, through tariffs on imported goods and other measures.  For a weaker nation to defend its sovereignty, the state must act decisively in the economy, seeking to protect national industry, banking, and currency; and it must attempt to attain mutually beneficial trade agreements with stronger nations.  

      However, the United States at the present time has a relatively strong economy, but in some industries, it is disadvantaged by free trade.   This is consistent with the cycles of hegemony in the world-system, in which hegemonic core nations rise and fall.  During its rise and at its height, the hegemonic core nation has the economic capacity to pay its workers more than in any other nation.  But this becomes a disadvantage, as other core and semi-peripheral nations imitate the productive techniques of the hegemonic nation, but with lower wages, they are able to produce the goods more cheaply.

      The United States reached its hegemonic height during the period 1945 to 1968, and it has been declining relative to other core nations since 1960s.  During that time, foreign manufacturing companies, taking advantage of lower wages, have been increasingly penetrating the U.S. market as well as U.S.-dominated markets abroad.  

     As this dynamic unfolded, U.S. corporations did not use their increasing control of both major political parties to establish protectionist policies.  Rather, their strategy was to go global: internationalize the productive process, utilizing the cheaper labor of other nations to effectively compete with foreign companies, thereby reducing its dependency on U.S. labor, its organized unions, and its relatively high wages.  The strategy was supported by the U.S. government, through a tax structure that lowered taxes for U.S. companies that produced goods, or component parts, abroad and sold them in the U.S. market.  And the strategy was supported by most governments of the peripheral and semi-peripheral regions, which were compelled by the United States and international finance agencies to open their labor to direct foreign exploitation, with a minimum of restrictions.     

      The global strategy of U.S. corporations hastened the relative decline the United States.  It reduced the supply of relatively high waged jobs, and thus it constrained the growth of the U.S. domestic market.  In addition, it had negative consequences for the world economy.  The development of low-wage, export-oriented manufacturing, disconnected from the national economies and in no sense integral to autonomous national development plans, does not improve the development prospects for the peripheral and semi-peripheral nations where the global strategy is manifest.

       Thus, the global strategy was in the interests of the U.S. corporations, but it was bad for the nation and for the world.  But because the political careers of U.S. politicians depended upon corporate support, no sector of the political establishment emerged to explain the self-interested and treasonous behavior of the U.S. corporate elite to the people.  At the same time, U.S. activists and academics of the Left, although not beholden to the elite, developed in the context of a horizon limited by the American experience, and they were not capable of explaining the betrayal to the people.  Thus, the people have been unable to understand the dynamic, but they have sufficient common-sense intelligence to intuit that they have been abandoned by the U.S. corporate elite and the U.S. political establishment; with jobs, free trade and factory relocation functioning as buzz words expressing their discontent.

      In this context of betrayal and discontent, as well as the failure of the Left to mobilize the people in a politically intelligent form, Donald Trump emerged, declaring himself against the political establishment, against free trade, and for the people.  Trump apparently intends to protect U.S. workers by withdrawing from or renegotiating free-trade agreements, imposing a protective tax on imported goods and services, and restructuring taxes so that companies would have an economic incentive to manufacture in the United States.  

     Coinciding with the relative decline of the United States, the world-economy has been experiencing a sustained systemic crisis, beginning in the 1970s.  The global elite responded to its situation of stagnating profits by imposing free-trade and neoliberalism on the nations of the Third World, requiring them to eliminate the modest and limited protections of their economies that they had developed during the period 1955 to 1979, when the Third World project was at its height.  During the heyday of neoliberalism, from 1980 to 2001, the banks and corporations of the North profited enormously from the increased value of their currencies relative to the no-longer-protected weak currencies, from the purchase of privatized state industries at devalued prices, from expanding markets resulting from the elimination of tariffs, and from interest payments by Third World governments to northern institutions.  Thus U.S. corporations and the corporate elite benefitted from their global strategy, while the nation declined and the people suffered from stagnating wages and less employment opportunities.

       Inasmuch as free-trade has been bad for the United States and the nations of the world, the Trump administration is doing the right thing in going against free-trade agreements.  But it is not necessarily doing so for the right reasons.  Trump wants to place U.S. interests first, without analysis of the impact of U.S. protectionist policies on other nations or the world-economy.  Martin Khor, Executive Director of the South Centre in Geneva, maintains that the protections proposed by Trump will have strongly negative consequences for many countries and for the world economy (see Khor article here).

     What is required is for nations to practice a form of economic nationalism that is a dimension of a spirit and practice of internationalism, solidarity and cooperation.  It is not merely a matter of protecting the economic interests of the nation, but of creatively and cooperatively developing mutually beneficial trade, so that world commerce expands, and both trading partners have their interests protected.  A new form of mutually beneficial trade is precisely what the nations of Latin America have proclaimed and have been seeking to develop since 2001, so if the political will were present in the United States, it would be a matter of cooperating with other governments of the Americas, which also are seeking mutually beneficial forms of trade with China and Russia.

     Similarly, with respect to the issue of factory location, the Trump Administration is on the right track, but its anti-internationalist nationalism prevents it from a comprehensive approach to the problem.  Factory relocation is bad for the nation and the world.  But to address the issue of factory relocation in an effective form, not only must strategies be developed for keeping factories in the nation, but there also must be policies designed to promote the development of Third World nations, so that the purchasing power of the world-economy, and the economies of all nations, would be strengthened.

     The Trump administration appears to believe that decisive action in defense of U.S. interests is all that is needed, without seeking to address problems in the world-economy as a whole, as though you could somehow fix one part of a system that as a whole is in disrepair. The narrow economic nationalism of Trump stands in opposition to the cooperative internationalism that is necessary for responding to the sustained structural crisis of the world-system in a manner that is based in the common interests of humanity.  

     With the election of Trump, the United States is moving from a corporate internationalism to a narrow economic nationalism, both of which have negative consequences for the world-economy and for the development of the great majority of nations.  It is a case of the declining neocolonial hegemonic power going from one form of bad to another.  That this would occur is a sign of the profound structural crisis of the world-system.

      In the context of the sustained structural crisis of the world-system, humanity needs responsible and wise leadership.  It needs leaders that guide their nations to an internationalist nationalism, which seeks to develop national economies with a long-term and global view, in cooperation with other nations and in accordance with the requirements of the world-economy as a whole.  In the nations of the North, whose economies continue to play a central role in the world-economy, the peoples must lift up wise, politically intelligent, and morally committed leaders, leaving behind forever the narrow nationalism of Trump and his team.

Posted February 27, 2017
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     The Trump administration is taking decisive action in support of corporate interests with respect to the fifty-year conflict between corporations and the ecology movement.  It is in essence a conflict over government regulations, with the ecology movement advocating strong government regulation of corporations in order to protect the environment, and with the corporate world so opposed to regulation that it has undertaken campaigns to confuse the people by creating a false image of division among scientists.

      For example, the Trump administration has taken steps to reorient the direction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Trump has appointed a long-time opponent of the EPA to be its administrator. And he ordered the EPA to remove the climate change page from its website, a page that includes links to data on greenhouse gas emissions, including data from individual industrial facilities.  Moreover, Trump administration officials have indicated that scientists employed by the EPA will be required to have their research reviewed before permission to disseminate their findings, changing the past policy of encouraging EPA scientists to publish the results of their work in scientific journals.

       The EPA in recent decades has been making available information that supports the conclusion that human forms of production have an adverse effect on the environment, including research showing that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming.  Inasmuch as such scientific findings are the basis and the rationale for government regulations that are designed to protect the environment, the dissemination of them by the government undermines the political agenda of the corporations, and to a certain extent it undermines the legitimacy of anti-environmental regulation comments by high public officials.  The Trump administration is attempting to eliminate this inconsistency and to bring the EPA in line with the pro-corporate policy of the Trump administration with respect to the environment.  

     In addition, during his first week in office, Trump issued executive orders that intend to advance the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota is opposed to the construction of the oil pipeline, concerned that a leak could pollute Missouri River drinking water and damage Native American cultural sites.  In reaction to protests that attained national and international attention, the U.S. Corps of Engineers decided in 2016 to delay construction, pending a review for possible alternative routes.  The Trump administration has asked the Corps to expedite the review or rescind its decision to conduct the review, so that an easement can be issued to Energy Transfer Partners, enabling the company to complete the final crossing under the river.

      The tension between the Trump administration and the EPA is one particular manifestation of a general phenomenon of tension between transient high public officials and the permanent bureaucratic structures of the government.  The effort to reorient the EPA can be seen as an indication of the intention of the Trump administration to transform the state bureaucracy in accordance with its ideological vision.  Indeed, chief Trump strategist Steven K. Bannon, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference, declared that the “deconstruction of the administrative state” has just begun. 

     The moves by the Trump administration to defend corporate interests with respect to the environment received ample news coverage during the administration’s first week.  But Trump’s January 27 Executive Order on immigration provoked a firestorm and a court battle, thus sidelining the environmental issue.  The intense debate that broke out over the order had a relatively narrow focus, concerning the rights of U.S. residents and visitors from seven countries. Important due process issues are at stake here, and certainly the matter is of great importance to the persons affected.  Nevertheless, the debate on these matters distracted attention from the defense of corporate interests with respect to the environment, and it also contributed to the negation of any possibility for public discussion of the false ahistorical narrative that frames the war on terrorism or of the root causes of uncontrolled international migration (see “Trump and the war on terrorism, Part One” 2/20/2017; “Trump and the war on terrorism, Part Two” 2/21/2017; “Trump on immigration” 2/22/2017).

       One wonders if the January 27 Executive Order was planned deliberately as a distraction.  If so, the liberals took the bait: they reacted with the predictable fury, and they took the lead in distracting the people from the essential.  

      Most transnational corporations for decades have been irresponsibly attempting to deceive the people by hiding or distorting knowledge with respect to the impact of human production and consumption on the environment.  But the ecology movement has not had it entirely right.  As I will discuss in a subsequent post in this series of posts on Trump, the ecology movement formulated its critique in a form that was disconnected from the struggles of the people for social justice on other fronts, especially the movements of the Third World.

Posted February 28, 2017​

     Donald Trump began his inaugural address of January 20, 2017 with a succinct and true description of the abandonment of the people and the nation by the political establishment and the corporate elite, and with a stirring proclamation that, from this day forward, the government will be controlled by the people.  He declared:

     In accordance with this populist rhetoric, the Trump administration is taking action with respect to issues that cause inquietudes among a significant sector of the people, namely, uncontrolled international migration and the abandonment of the nation and the people by the corporate class (see “Trump on immigration” 2/22/2017; “Trump’s economic nationalism” 2/24/2017).  And the administration it taking decisive action, attacking the state bureaucracy.

       The people resent bureaucracy, because they experience it as an authoritarian force that is imposed from above, negating individuality, liberty and creativity.  Bureaucracy, however, is necessary for the efficient attainment of organizational goals, and as a result, the modern world has become increasingly bureaucratized.  All social institutions today, with the exception of the family, are ruled by bureaucratic structures, with their functional division of labor directed from above.  The people experience bureaucracy as an inescapable fact of life, in schools and colleges and in places of work.  The people are forced to accept the established bureaucratic rules, as a condition for getting ahead or even for surviving.  Since 1980, the global elite has launched an ideological attack on the state, thus channeling popular resentment of bureaucracy toward government bureaucracy in particular.  

     Therefore, Trump endears himself to the people when he attacks the EPA (see “Trump, corporations, and the environment” 2/27/2017), or when he ignores the established bureaucratic rules.  The latter phenomenon was very much in evidence in the Trump Executive Order of January 27, temporarily prohibiting people from seven Islamic-majority countries from entering the United States.  The fury of the liberal establishment over the Order was fueled in part by the fact that the Trump administration ignored the established procedures, which involve submitting a preliminary draft to relevant ministries and divisions, so that the life-time bureaucrats can point to potential problems, thus leading to its reformulation.  It is a process that often leads to a watering down of the proposal, and for this reason, sidestepping in can be interpreted as necessary decisive action

       Defending the interests of the people is a good thing.  Indeed, it is necessary in today’s world, as humanity confronts a profound global crisis.  But populist rhetoric that appeals to the disappointments, discontents, and resentments of the people, while not seeking to educate the people and mobilize them with respect to their true interests, is a manifestation not of popular democracy but of fascism. This will be the subject of our next two posts.

Posted March 1, 2017
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     Both liberalism and fascism are forms of capitalist-class domination, and both have emerged as projects with global projections.  They differ with respect to strategies of global domination.  Whereas fascism involves the seizing of economic control through military aggression, liberalism formally respects the sovereignty of nations, attaining domination of other lands through economic and financial penetration of national economies and through political and diplomatic influence.   For the most part, liberalism guided the foreign policy of the United States from the 1890s to 1980.  Prior to the collapse of the European colonial empires, the United States, an ascending power with an expanding economy, was able to economically and financially penetrate independent but poor nations, without having direct political control.  During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States increasingly projected itself as a global power that represented a progressive alternative to the European colonial empires.  Later, as the hegemonic core nation in the post-World War II neocolonial world-system, the United States was able to economically, financially and ideologically penetrate Third World nations, whose formal political independence was recognized.  

     Whereas liberalism is a viable international policy for a hegemonic nation with decisive productive, commercial and financial advantages over other core nations, fascism is a more viable strategy for a core nation without such advantages.  In its classic twentieth century form, fascism involves the military seizing of control of the forces of production, commerce and banking, and placing of them under military government control.  Accordingly, fascism requires only military advantage, and not productive, commercial and financial advantage.  

     The United States held productive, commercial and financial advantages over other core nations from 1946 to 1965.  Today, however, the United States is a declining economic power, relative to other core nations.  Yet it remains a hegemonic military power, and this combination of a declining economy and continuing military hegemony favors a turn to fascism.  They make logical, in the short term, a policy of continuous wars of aggression, in order to attain economic benefits that the nation does not have sufficient productive and commercial capacities to attain through economic means.  

     In the long run, however, militarism further undermines the economy, by directing resources away from investment in sustainable and marketable forms of production.  Wars of aggression are a sign of economic weakness, and inasmuch as military strength ultimately depends upon economic strength, a policy of continuous wars of aggression is not sustainable in the long run.  

     In 1991, the administration of George H.W. Bush launched a war against Iraq in order to ensure control of oil reserves in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.  The invasion of Iraq could be interpreted as the first U.S. war of aggression in order to attain economic objectives since the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua in 1926, before the nation ascended to neocolonial hegemony.  In a similar way, the Clinton administration bombed Bosnia in 1995 and launched a massive bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 in order to ensure U.S. primacy in the region and thus protect U.S. economic interests.  These three military engagements represented an emerging tendency to engage in direct military action in pursuit of economic interests, even though they were not presented in these terms to the people.

      The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 represented a dramatic unleashing of the new form of terrorism that involves the indiscriminate killing of civilians by clandestine groups (see “Trump and the war on terrorism, Part One” 2/20/2017).  They provided the United States with an ideological pretext for the systematic launching of wars of aggression in pursuit of economic objectives.  President George W. Bush declared a new doctrine of “preventive war” and launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Military expenses increased significantly, and U.S. global military presence expanded.  The militarist foreign policy continued after 2009, as the Obama administration maintained military troops in Iraq, tripled military presence in Afghanistan, extended the conflict to Pakistan, and used drones to attack targets in Yemen. Although these militarist policies of the Bush II and Obama administrations were defended with the ideology of the “war on terrorism,” they functioned to ensure U.S. control of petroleum reserves and exports, and to undermine the influence of Russia in the region.  The Obama administration also launched an invasion of Libya and overthrew the government of Muammar Qaddafi, as a result of Qaddafi’s moves toward African unity and alliances with progressive governments in Latin America, which were threats to U.S. economic interests.  Under Obama, military expenditures continued to grow, even though the Obama administration demonstrated some tendency to rely more on “soft power” in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

      According to the figures of the International Institute of Research for Peace in Stockholm, U.S. military expenditures in 2016 were 596 billion dollars.  This is more than the military spending of the next seven countries combined, and it is nearly three times the military expenditures of China, which has the second highest military budget in the world.  In contrast to China’s military expenditures, which are more sustainable in relation to its economic capacities, U.S. military expenditures exemplify what Paul Kennedy called “imperial overstretch” (Kennedy 1989:xiv, 515, 533).

      I don’t think that it is likely that Donald Trump read Paul Kennedy’s book.  On February 27, 2017, Trump announced that he will propose to the Congress a historic increase of fifty-four billion dollars in military expenditures, which constitutes an increase of 9%.  According to earliest reports in The New York Times and Cuban news coverage, this significant increase in military expenditures would be made possible by cuts in social programs, foreign aid, and the State Department as well as by an increase in government debt.  Taking into account the make-up of Trump’s team and of the Congress, all indications are that the U.S. tendency toward the increasing use of military force to obtain economic objectives, formally initiated by the first Iraq war of 1989, will continue.

      As noted above, the application of military force in the pursuit of economic objectives is a dimension of fascism.  Other components of the Trump project also can be interpreted as a new form of fascism, as we will discuss in the next post.

Reference
 
Kennedy, Paul.  1989.  The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000.  New York: Vintage Books.
 

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Posted March 2, 2017
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     Twentieth century European fascism had six characteristics: populist rhetoric, economic nationalism, alliance with the corporate elite, military action in pursuit of economic goals, the scapegoating of popular sectors that are ethnically and/or religiously different from the majority, and the use of violent gangs to violently attack the targeted ethnic/religious groups and political opponents.  As we have seen in this series of posts on the Trump administration, Executive Orders and public statements by the Trump Administration indicate that the first five of these components are emerging as central to the Trump project.

     Fascism is an emotionally loaded term, and some argue that we should not use it.  But the word “neo-nationalism,” currently in vogue among commentators, is problematic, because it implies that nationalism is a negative force.  However, when nationalism is combined with a spirit and practice of internationalism, it is a progressive and positive force, as the nations of Latin America today are demonstrating.  On the other hand, fascism is widely understood to be evil, and at the same time, the similarities between Trump’s project and twentieth century European fascism should not be overlooked.  So I am inclined to refer to the emerging project of Trump as an incipient neofascism.  I say neo-fascism, for it is a new form of fascism that includes leadership roles for women and people of color, in accordance with post-1965 rules of equal political and civil rights for women and minorities.  And the new form of fascism manipulates rather than intimates: it relies much less on violent gangs and much more on a sophisticated public discourse.  Although attacks on immigrants and Muslims are likely to rise during the Trump regime, scapegoating and the silencing of opponents will be far subtler and more advanced than the dynamics of Germany and Italy in the 1930s and early 1940s.

​     But we should understand the Trump neofascist project in the context of the evolving political culture of the United States.  There were five key historic moments that established the foundation for the emergence of the Trump neofascist project.

     (1)  The turn to imperialism in 1898.  During the nineteenth century, a battle for the soul of the nation raged.  It was a moral battle of ideas, with focused on the advantages of domination and others on the promise of democracy.  On the one side, there were those economic and political forces that forged the conquest of new territories, the expansion of slavery, and the systematic denial of the rights of people of color and women.  On the other side, there were the hopes embedded in the breast of the people and expressed by the eternal words of Thomas Jefferson, proclaiming that all men and women are endowed with inalienable rights.

      With respect to foreign affairs, the nation decided on its character at the end of the century: it would be an imperialist nation, seeking to control the markets and the raw materials of other lands.  The strategy was for the nation to insert itself in the expanding world-system, not as a colonial power, but as a nation able to influence the political affairs of other nations and penetrate their economies.  It began with the U.S. military occupation of Cuba in 1898, and it became more systematic with Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” foreign policy.  It depended on military force, but it required above all a strong productive, commercial and financial capacity.  Embarking on the imperialist road, the nation established a permanent contradiction between its promise and proclamation of democracy and the conduct of its foreign policy. Imperialism would be a constant in U.S. foreign policy, from McKinley to Obama.  Even the administrations of progressive presidents (Wilson, FDR, Kennedy and Carter) would be marked by the imperialist stamp.

     (2)  The establishment of the permanent war economy in 1945. Even though the United States from 1898 to 1941 became increasingly involved in Latin America, the growth of its military was constrained by an isolationist political culture.  But World War II changed political attitudes.  U.S. auto and steel industries were mobilized in the war effort, and the military-industrial complex emerged.  Franklin D. Roosevelt envisioned the post-war reconversion of the war economy to peaceful economic development.  But national economic dependency on the war industry had been established, and the reconversion envisioned by FDR would have required enlightened and effective political leadership.  But the administration of Harry Truman turned to the policy of the containment of communism through a strong military, based on the false claim that the Soviet Union had an expansionist foreign policy.  The nation embarked on a forty-year Cold War and a permanent war economy.

      (3) The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  The false premises of the Cold War ideology led to the tragedy of the Vietnam War, which fueled popular movements with anti-imperialist discourses.  But the movements were guilty of strategic errors and excesses, giving rise to reaction among significant sectors of the people.  The result was the election of Ronald Reagan, master of a simplistic conservative discourse.  Reagan reversed the tendency toward de-emphasis on military power that had influenced U.S. political culture as a result of the Vietnam War.  His escalation of the military budget, in conjunction with tax cuts, quickly converted the nation from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in the world.  Seeking to overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the government invaded the government of the small Caribbean nation of Grenada, quickly overcoming military resistance.  

      Reagan also adopted a discourse that represented a subtle form of racism, attacking “Welfare Queens.”  This was consistent with the “Southern Strategy” of the Republican Party, which was inspired by the 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace.  As governor of Georgia, Wallace had attained national fame when he dramatically defied the federal government’s concessions to the civil rights movement, proclaiming, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”  But in his presidential campaign, he did not talk about race per se.  Instead, he criticized the welfare program, and he maintained that the legal system was soft on crime.  He insisted that he wasn’t talking about race, but no one could misunderstand the message: the government is too indulgent and too soft on black folk.

        Thus, in the Reagan era, there was a renewed militarism, and there emerged a public discourse that attacked social programs and excessive government bureaucracy with a hidden agenda of containing the gains of the African-American movement.  Cast aside were the hopes of the popular movements of the 1960s for a nation that protected the social and economic rights of its citizens and that turned from imperialism to cooperation with Third World governments of national and social liberation.  The nation settled in to a culture incapable of reflecting on the meaning of democracy or of responding constructively to the sustained structural crisis that the world-system had entered.

     (4)  The 1989 invasion of Iraq, the first fascist war.  Iraqi nationalism had historic claims to Kuwait, which it viewed as an arbitrary creation of the British colonial office.  But the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait meant that its petroleum reserves and exports were no longer controlled by a reliable U.S. ally, and the Iraqi military move also was perceived as a threat on neighboring Saudi Arabia, another reliable U.S. ally with significant oil exports and reserves.  

       The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1989 had a character different from previous U.S. military interventions.  It was different from the U.S. military interventions and occupations in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Honduras and Nicaragua from 1898 to 1932, which were undertaken by an ascending power that had not yet established the necessary structures for domination of Latin America.  It also was different from the direct U.S. military engagements of the period 1950 to 1965 in Korea, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic, which were military actions against nationalist forces that were threats to the neocolonial world-system.  These military engagements were undertaken by a neocolonial power at the height of its hegemony, for the purpose of preserving global structures of domination.  In contrast, the U.S. military invasion of Iraq was undertaken by a declining hegemonic power, seeking to ensure its access to raw materials, which it no longer had the economic strength or political influence to ensure through non-military means.  It therefore constituted the first fascist war unleashed by the government of the United States.

      (5)  The permanent “war on terrorism,” 2001 to the present.  Whereas the United States has had a permanent war economy since 1945, it has been in a permanent state of war since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  Under the “preventive war” doctrine of George W. Bush, the United States claims that it is justified to attack any nation as a preventive measure.  The policy was continued by the Obama administration, in spite of some tendency to use “soft power.” The United States has been continually at war since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq and against clandestine terrorist groups.  Military expenditures have been increasing annually.

      At the same time, U.S. presidents from Reagan to Obama have developed and implemented neoliberalism, a project that undermines the sovereignty of Third World governments, attacks the impoverished peoples of the Third World, abandons the people of the United States, and ignores the good of the nation.  Rather than an enlightened response to the sustained structural crisis of the world-system, which began in the 1970s, the U.S. power elite since 1980 has aggressively defended its particular interests.  Meanwhile, the Left has not offered a politically effective alternative project, rooted in universal philosophical historical social science, with the consequence that the people have been left in confusion. The abandoned and confused people have responded to the scapegoating, narrow nationalist, and militarist discourses of Trump.

     The foundations for the neofascist project of Trump have been a long time in the making.  They include the development of imperialist policies since 1898 and of a permanent war economy since 1945.  And they include since 1980: an increasing militarism, subtle racism, a banal public discourse that obscures the economic decline of the nation, news reporting that does not know the meaning of analysis, the emergence of a permanent war on terrorism, and a Left constrained by the limitations of the political culture.

     Each of the five historic moments of 1898, 1945, 1980, 1989, and 2001 represented a decisive step away from the promise of democracy powerfully articulated by Thomas Jefferson.  Trump represents a sixth historic moment in this descent toward fascism: an escalation of the scapegoating rhetoric, the move toward a narrow economic nationalism, and the adoption of a populist rhetoric that casts Trump and his team as defenders of the people against the corporations and the media.

      The Left must reflect on its failure, made evident by the emergence of the Trump neofascist project, and reconstruct its discourse.  This will be the subject of the following posts.