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By Jason Michael
On the eve of the US presidential election it is looking ever more certain that Trump will win. This is a disaster, but it may have a silver lining. Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric, if acted upon, will kill centrist triangulation and challenge globalisation.
No sleep is going to be had tonight, and I wonder why because we can be pretty sure the election is in the bag for “the Donald.” It would be nice to say, and without indicating any support for Trump, that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. She has chance, a slim chance, and it will be a tight race. All the same the sensible money is on the Republican tickets tonight. That means that in the morning we’re facing a different kind of nightmare, but we can also expect an extinction level event for globalisation and political triangulation.
Brexit was, of course, the warning shot in this revolution. People have grown desperately tired of the project of globalisation, the system of international trade that has lifted global commerce from transactions between states to business done over the heads of states. This has taken sovereignty from individual governments and put it into the hands of an unelected corporatist élite, a move that has greatly exacerbated social and economic inequality to breaking point. It has also fundamentally challenged the reasoning of centrist political triangulation; the tactic of the professional political class of working to keep enough of the electorate on the right and on the left happy so as to stay in power. With the media driven lurch to the right the political ecosystems of the West have conceded more and more to the right, ultimately crashing the entire system.
Neither Nigel Farage nor Donald Trump will provide the answer to this situation and so restore balance. They are the right. Yet their particular genius, as is the case with populist right politics the world over, is that they have tapped into this desperation for change. After decades of the political mainstream and the popular tabloid media pandering to the right’s agenda the majority of voters have been left ill-equipped to see through the neo-fascist rhetoric. Trump has been free to present himself as the messiah of the neglected and disenchanted white working class.
One good outcome of this, few as they will be, is that this most certainly spells the end of the illusion that political triangulation works. In already grossly unequal societies it has had little choice but to be weighted to and pulled to the right – so much so that now its fuelling of the right has taken it clean out of the hands of the centrists. Globalisation is the less certain extinction. While its structures have transcended those of national governments it continues to have global, legal clout and no shortage of momentum. Capitalism has always been in “crisis,” but what we have come to know of neoliberal capitalism is that it is a survivor.
Trump: Globalization has wiped out middle class
Author: Jason Michael (@Jeggit)
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