(Liberal Only) Trump's victory represents the fulfilment of neoliberalism, not its failure

Sunstone · Jan 12, 2017

Please Note: Liberal Only

I'm placing this in the Liberal Only section in the hopes of getting an intelligent discussion of the following article unhindered by attempts to derail the thread:

Trump's victory represents the fulfilment of neoliberalism, not its failure

Trump has no intention of limiting the abuses of capitalism, having innovatively engaged in extending and intensifying them. This leaves only one apparent way to maintain neoliberalism with all its destructive excesses: by restricting democracy. The superficially more respectable Republican politicians laid the ground for authoritarian rule by nullifying the protections of voter rights at the national, state and local levels.

Fulfilment of the neoliberal transformation to unregulated capitalism is incompatible with electoral democracy. A polity can have one or the other, but not both. The dark genius of Donald Trump lies in following this incompatibility to its logical conclusion — if his brand of capitalism and electoral democracy conflict, it is democracy that will be undermined.

Comments?

Augustus · Jan 12, 2017

I've read it twice and still have no idea what he's on about

I'd guess his thinking reflects the kind of thing that John Gray is discussing here though, and he rarely fails to hit the nail squarely on the head (as should be pretty obvious, but just to point out, he is using liberal in a different sense to how Americans use it):

Even as the US election hangs in the balance, many are clinging to the belief that a liberal status quo can be restored. But Trump’s presidential campaign has already demolished a bipartisan consensus on free trade, and if he wins, a party system to which his Republican opponents and Hillary Clinton both belonged will be history. Dreading this outcome and suspecting it may yet come to pass, liberals rail against voters who reject their enlightened leadership. Suddenly, the folly of the masses has replaced the wisdom of crowds as the dominant theme in polite discourse. Few ask what in the ruling liberalism could produce such a debacle.

The liberal pageant is fading, yet liberals find it hard to get by without believing they are on what they like to think is the right side of history. The trouble is that they can only envision the future as a continuation of the recent past. This is so whether their liberalism comes from the right or the left. Whether they are George Osborne’s City-based “liberal mainstream”, or Thatcherite think tanks, baffled and seething because Brexit hasn’t taken us closer to a free-market utopia, or egalitarian social democrats who favour redistribution or “predistribution”, an entire generation is finding its view of the world melting away under the impact of events.

Today’s liberals differ widely about how the wealth and opportunities of a market economy should be shared. What none of them question is the type of market globalisation that has developed over the past three decades. Writing in Tribune in 1943 after reviewing a batch of “progressive” books, George Orwell observed: “I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases that were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are ‘the abolition of distance’ and ‘the disappearance of frontiers’.” More than 70 years later, the same empty formulae are again being repeated. At present, the liberal mind can function only to the extent that it shuts out reality.

(Liberal Only) Trump's victory represents the fulfilment of neoliberalism, not its failure

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora

Augustus

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