The legitimacy crisis of the U.S. elite and the rise of Donald Trump.

• Author: Parmar, Inderjeet
• Position: COMMENTARY - Essay

ABSTRACT The American political elite's legitimacy crisis is demonstrated by Trump's rise by challenging Wall Street, both main parties' leadership, and limited government. His challenge overlapped with Leftist Bernie Sanders' who also focused on deep inequalities in the U.S. The crisis is rooted in the neoliberal political-economic model adopted in the 1970s to shore up American elite power but which generated major crises at home and challenges abroad. Such challenges demand a new 'grand bargain' that is unlikely to emerge without prolonged domestic political strife and resistance to American global power.

"At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men or women who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic 'men of destiny!'"

Antonio Gramsci

"Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America."

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders

Introduction

The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States is symptomatic of a deep crisis of American identity and the power and hegemony of the ruling class, particularly of its market-led globalism. American globalism's corporate core-dynamic has produced gross inequalities of income and wealth that have colonized its political culture and institutions. This has produced a diversionary but deeply-rooted, carefully-nurtured domestic politics characterized by class-based 'pluto-populist' white nationalism. (1) Internationally, there are challenges from re-emerging powers from the global South, like China and India, demanding a renegotiation of power in the U.S.-led order, and with (rhetorical) nationalist-historical narratives of humiliation during Western colonial rule. (2) Conversely, those re-emerging powers, and their elites, have grown influential within the U.S.-led globalist order and therefore sit atop unequal and unstable societies, as they rapidly industrialize and urbanize. Finally, the United States and Europe face refugee/migration crises partly spawned by U.S.-led military interventions in the Middle East resulting in blowback terrorism and ISIS insurgency. (3) America's population appears to have less appetite for external interventions and global hegemony and are polarized on the fundamental question of what America stands for. (4)

The American elite's legitimacy crisis is multisided and deep, at home and abroad. The Trump presidency is unlikely to resolve it due to its divisive, nationalistic, "America First" character, despite the administration's reversal of headline attacks on the U.S.-led international order. The Democratic Party opposition, with the corporate media, intelligence/military services, and elite think tanks, by its side, appears to be continuing its 'centrist' status quo political strategy as the best way to defeat Trump in 2020. It is still tied to Wall Street donors, and a series of investigations around alleged collusion between the Trump election campaign and the Russian state to defeat Hillary Clinton in November 2016. (5) Meanwhile, Trump's cabinet of billionaires plans to abolish what remains of social safety nets for the most vulnerable in American society, reduce spending on environmental regulation, deregulating healthcare, banks, and other major corporate sectors, and weaken labor protections. Proposed tax cuts to the very richest suggest inequality is set to continue or increase, exacerbating the legitimacy crisis as Trump's economic nationalist program fails to deliver well-paid jobs to enough workers in the "rust belt" states who propelled him to the presidency. (6)

Should the above scenario materialize, the United States should expect major political and social unrest, a significant part of which will be racialized and/or 'Islamophobic' in character. This is, at its core, a racialized class-based politics mobilized by the right that divides society and prevents the formation of a unified reform strategy to shift income, wealth and power away from the billionaire class or establishment towards the "99 percent." (7)

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The biggest challenge facing the U.S.-led liberal international order is to genuinely embrace diversity at home and abroad and strategies to reduce class inequality. The problem, however, is that the maintenance of dominant class economic-financial interests and elite political power is implicated in racialized politics. Liberal politics professes a greater attachment to diversity but remains racialized at heart; its attachment to diversity is but a thin veneer shrouding the continuation of racialized class-based inequality on a large scale, even as highly talented minorities 'make it.' (8) On the right, diversity remains a distant secondary goal to 'color blind' equality of opportunity, obscuring large-scale racial discrimination and maintenance of a racialized class system. (9) Indeed, the Republican right has been reversing African-Americans' civil rights era voting rights. (10) Liberals and right wingers therefore work effectively in tandem to reproduce a hierarchical racial-class system at home--until recently a system of "racism without racists" (11)--dovetailing with America's approach to global South emerging powers. (12)

Race is the available politically-salient fault line nurtured and exploited to maintain the power and influence of an oligarchy of wealth in the United States. In the current period, racial politics works specifically by dividing predominantly white voters from the "outsider"--the minority, the refugee, Muslim, the illegal immigrant--who allegedly leech off the welfare system, taxpayers' generosity, and hate America's values. In this scenario, it is white Americans who are the most racially-disadvantaged, an anxiety and anger long exploited by the Republican Party and pandered to by the Democrats. (13) In certain terms, the same or similar is considered true of America's allies--"taking advantage" of U.S. military resources and goodwill while refusing to pay their fair shares, while rising competitor states like China manipulate their currency, "dump" cheap steel onto the American market, and take American jobs. (14)

Trump's pluto-populism (billionaire-led calls to the masses to rise up against the political establishment) is the most overtly racialized class politics since the 1960s--its political message of "America First," "taking America back," making it "great again" wrapped up in an openly racist Islamophobia speaks to a sense of white loss and yearning for a golden age. Such a divisive message is, however, a major roadblock to domestic stability as it generates mass opposition as well as judicial intervention to overturn unconstitutional executive orders. It not only fails to address, but is part of, the economic problem at the heart of the body politic --economic inequality and polarization alongside a politics dominated by big money that sets agendas that are narrow, market-oriented and favor low taxes and small government. Abroad, it means continued problems in accepting emerging powers as equals in the international system, with attendant political difficulties, and the continuation of racialized warfare across parts of the non-white world. (15)

Legitimacy Crisis

The legitimacy crisis of America's political-economic elites is deep, clear, serious, likely to last, and likely to...