Trump as President: Today, the world really has changedToday, 11/9 will prove a day of greater historic import than its better-known palindrome, 9/11: today, the United States, architect of the liberal world order built after the great war of 1939-1945, has voted for a man who stands for its dismemberment. This is not hyperbole: together with the Soviet Union, the United States underwrote the post-World War II system of nation-states, guaranteeing trade and energy flows, and ensuring a balance of power that kept the great powers from coming to war. The system was underpinned by what might, broadly, be called liberal values: the idea that robust states, guaranteeing the welfare of their citizens, would guard against the rebirth of Fascism, and its catastrophic consequences.
For Trump, though, the world is an imposition: “the United States”, he declared, “has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems”. He means to charge nation-states for the system of bases the United States maintains around the world—bases it created to maintain the world order. He is no fan of NATO: “The cost of stationing NATO troops in Europe is enormous”, Trump wrote. “And these are clearly funds that can be put to better use”. Saudi Arabia, he said, “make
a billion dollars a day. We protect them. So we need help”.
Trump’s disruptive triumph isn’t a one-off: from India’s own Prime Minister Narendra Modi to China’s Xi Jinping and Japan’s Shinzo Abe; from Britain’s Brexit vote to the looming victories of Marine Le Pen and other European far-Right parties, the post-War order is crumbling. The Right might well celebrate the tearing-apart of the puzzle-board—but no-one knows if the pieces can be put back together, in any other shape.
His triumph is about white racism, and resurgent sexism, and xenophobia, and fear. It is about all these things—but it is about something more, which it is critical to understand.
HOW did we get here? The story, for the most part, well-known. The rolling-back of the welfare state under President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher deprived millions of working people of the prospect of security—the key promise of the post-1945 consensus. Liberal parties across the West chose not to resist the new economic orthodoxy—despite evidence, from Scandinavia, that high-tax welfare states had the best outcomes for their citizens. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the anarchy that it unleashed across swathes of eastern Europe, saw tyranny legitimised.
The economic crisis of 2008 saw the livelihoods of a great mass of peoples savaged; worse, it gave rise to the first youth generation in the West since 1945 which cannot expect that its life will be better than that of its parents’ generation. As in other times of crisis, the disenfranchised found scapegoats: immigrants, racial and religious minorities, the rights won by women.
http://indianexpress.com/article/op...t-today-the-world-really-has-changed-4366243/
