Trump’s America is intact and mobilized: the conflict between progressive globalist technocracy and national democracy
While recounting and legal initiatives run their course, and we will return to deal with them (a second ordinance in favor of Trump, although not decisive, arrived last night), it is time for analysis that, regardless of the final outcome, remain valid in our opinion (as the Trump presidency budget signed by Marco Faraci).
One of the themes of these days is "sovereignty": with Trump's exit from the White House, "will it deflate", as Enrico Letta has argued, among others? Or will "Trumpism" survive Trump, as some commentators have observed, considering the outgoing president's extraordinary vote performance?
In our opinion, the effect continues to be mistaken for the cause. Trump is the effect of a dramatic political polarization already underway during Obama's two mandates, he gave a voice to the America of the forgotten and disadvantaged by globalization, and to those who can no longer bear to be told how to behave, express themselves and even think , by the priests of the politically correct. Sure, he may have lost control of the most influential position of political power, the White House, but what is scornfully referred to as "sovereignty" or "Trumpism" comes out intact from the 2020 presidential elections, his reasons persist. Biden and the Democrats haven't even managed to scratch it, despite all the political and media firepower of the left. Indeed, in some ways, Trump's electoral base has even expanded compared to 2016, going beyond the white working class .
But does it make sense to call something that existed before Trump "Trumpism" ? Yes and no. It is true that Trump has turned him into a political movement, into an electoral coalition, and brought him to the White House, but calling it "Trumpism" leads to the mistake of thinking that he was born with him, and with him he is destined to disappear.
Nothing in the results of the 2020 presidential elections authorizes us to think that the reasons for the great fracture that emerged forcefully in 2016 – with the election of Trump in the United States and Brexit in the United Kingdom – have been reabsorbed. It is the deep social and cultural fracture described by David Goodhart, present in all Western societies due to the distortions of globalization. The one between Anywheres and Somewheres . Two social groups linked to opposing values, which see the world from two different perspectives: globalist, the former cosmopolitan; the second is more local, community, national. More educated and inclined to mobility, the former are the "competent", they exercise intellectual professions, they are employed in Big Tech , they live in big cities, their relational networks go beyond national borders, their career and their social status are independent of territory in which they live, from the well-being and safety of the community that they are around but to which in fact they do not feel they belong. On the contrary, the Somewheres owe everything to it: they are less educated and their lives, activities and productive sectors are rooted in a particular territory. They are farmers, workers, small businessmen, policemen. For them, family, local and national ties, traditional values and safety remain fundamental.
It is therefore not surprising that the former have more at heart ideals more distant from their daily reality, such as saving the planet from global warming, fighting racism, gender discrimination and sexual orientation, and that they do not raise the problem of uncontrolled immigration. , for them borders do not exist or must not exist; while the latter are more concerned about jobs and public order, but are less listened to and represented by the political and media establishment, from which they feel judged and despised and therefore harbor strong resentment.
Feelings reinforced by expressions such as "April 25 of America and the world", or "democracy won", which in addition to being rather banal and intellectually dishonest, reveal something subtly undemocratic in those who pronounce them. First, it is implicitly claiming that half of the country that supported Trump is fascist and racist. Second, that if Trump had won, he would not have "won democracy" and therefore would not have been legitimate. And in fact, that's exactly what has happened from 2016 to today, when Democrats and left-wing media have tried in every way to de-legitimize him by feeding the Russiagate hoax and accusing him of racism and complicity with the white supremacists . With what credibility, after four years of demonization and fascism of Trump and his constituents, can Biden today launch appeals for unity?
Carlo Pelanda, in La Verità , described it as a sort of new class struggle: an alliance between globalist elites and the left, who control the media, against the productive class linked to the territory and traditional productions. A conflict not only between city and countryside – “representation aimed at demonizing the productive class due to low schooling” – but between “two ways of accessing wealth”. The financial elites and Big Tech "aim for monopolistic or cartel positions for which they need political complicity". Complicity that they find on the left, where "a passive concept of access to wealth by right prevails" (subsidies and minimum wages). What Pelanda describes is a pincer maneuver against "the productive class inclined to find access to wealth in active ways, accepting risks and hardships", which is challenged on the one hand by globalization, the green and new economy , by relocation; on the other, "by a growing mass of passives , both non-poor and impoverished, politically organized by the left instrumentally supported by economic oligarchies", both for their own benefit and "to avoid exposing themselves to dissent". The oligarch "helps" the welfareist left to win, "so that the less well-off does not bother them", and "recites do-gooders and environmentalists".
From a more ideological point of view, the rift is between progressive cosmopolitan technocracy and national democracy. On the one hand, the focus is on global governance of economic and social processes, increasingly removed from the democratic control of the territories, rewarded with a promise of redistribution of wealth and "new rights"; on the other hand, the defense of the sovereignty and prerogatives of democratic institutions which are an expression of the territories, their interests and their identity.
But the globalized “new world” also requires a “new man”, remodeled by the politically correct and the cancel culture , alienated from his own culture of origin, “white” and Western, therefore racist, and from the old bonds of national solidarity. The globalists are confident that the globalized world will embrace liberal democratic principles, but the Chinese example has disproved them and history – which one would like to erase – shows that democracy and liberalism have established themselves and evolved within the framework of the nation-state. . And in the meantime, their policies produce illiberal outcomes (economic leadership, social engineering, welfare).
Trump has been the most capable leader to date, thanks also to the US electoral system, to represent the demands of the Somewheres and the Forgotten Man , and become their standard bearer. The political and economic establishment that has guided Western countries in globalization has not yet indicated a credible way for a recomposition of this rift, assuming that this is the intention. While the traditional right and left have been absorbed rather easily, it has instead focused on the demonization and de-legitimization of Trump, increasing social pressure, making the "reputational cost" of supporting the president ever higher for the American citizen, in the belief that the 2016 it was a blaze, a last blow of the tail.
The 2020 presidential elections show that this is not the case. There has been no rejection of Trump. “His” America is there. Strong, proud, mobilized. The announced "blue wave" did not rise, on the contrary Trump was unexpectedly in the game, until the very end, and he really touched the company, the Mission Impossible 2 . His presidency was promoted, not rejected, by his electoral bloc. It has kept many promises: radical deregulation , the biggest tax cut of the globalization era, full employment, energy independence, new trade agreements, confrontation with China. Trumponomics worked and benefited the nation as a whole, it was the most prosperous time for "minorities", as shown by record levels of employment by women, African Americans and Hispanics, traditionally Democratic voters. As Marco Faraci observed , the path taken, making it clear that conservative ideas work for everyone and not just for the old "white America", is the right one to broaden the political base of the Gop.
So Trump was by no means a disaster for the GOP. This should by now be an established fact. In fact, he is in the game to save his majority in the Senate and has won several seats in the Chamber, where according to all forecasts he should have broken through the Democratic Party. One of the reasons influential pieces of the Republican establishment fought him was the belief that with him the GOP would become the party of men, white and heterosexual, shattering support among women and minorities. It didn't happen. On the contrary, the news is the considerable growth in support among African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities. Even if Biden's election were to be confirmed, Trump led the party in the direction many hoped for. The feeling is that more than demographic changes, the GOP must fear the real cultural and media siege and its own compliance.
There is a paradoxical outcome, however, of the pandemic caused by the virus that came from China: on the one hand, it has undermined confidence in the magnificent and progressive fate of globalization, showing the limits and risks of economic and commercial interdependence with unreliable and totalitarian regimes such as that of Beijing, to the point of introducing the debate on the decoupling of supply chains; on the other hand, it could have killed the world leader who more than any other had exposed those limits and challenged the rise of China, and has hit even more heavily the productive classes already battered by the effects of globalization.
Thus, the pandemic could accelerate the process of deglobalization or the correction of distortions, but having politically weakened the forces that push in that direction, we could also witness, on the contrary, an attempt to revive globalization.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/lamerica-di-trump-e-intatta-e-mobilitata-il-conflitto-tra-tecnocrazia-globalista-progressista-e-democrazia-nazionale/ on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 03:50:21 +0000.