Trumpism on the Record

In 2015, I pointed out that the most obvious meaning of "Make America Great Again" was a nostalgist return to an era where America was a more straightforward, more self-interested, and (in many ways) more successful Imperial power. This was to me confirmed by Trump's statements that the time when America was great that he would like to emulate were the period from the early 20th century to the late 1940s: in other words, the effective peak of American Imperial power, when America was an industrial and financial and military powerhouse with colonies and logistical networks stretching around the world and a dominant exporter of both goods and capital to the rest of the world.

It seemed to me, therefore, that the main meaning of Trumpism was a renegotiation of America's status as global hegemon in order to ensure that the American mainland, and not merely elites, profited more from its Imperial status: which meant first and foremost finding similar ways to extract resources from the rest of the world and transfer them to the American mainland.

At the time, many people both left and right reacted with shock to this idea, insisting that Trump was in fact an isolationist whose main goal was to remove America from any involvement with the rest of the world: a vision not only absolutely contradictory to the past eras that Trump idolized, but also impossible to carry out without revolutionary changes to the basic structure of American domestic life and commerce.

Whatever truth there may have been in this, the simple reality is that Trumpism as a domestic policy has been a complete failure. One year into his second term, Trump has effectively abandoned all his ambitious domestic-policy goals, which from the beginning required institutional skill and personnel and concerted action that his coalition lacks. On a macro scale, besides random acts of cruelty and equally random affirmations of the growing American political consensus, Trump has achieved nothing on the domestic policy front except accelerating the existing institutional and social disruption and collapse from the pandemic. And I think he has realized it: which is why he has not tried to do anything on domestic policy for months now. From here on, I think it highly likely that foreign policy will be his first and only priority, as it has already largely been for most of the past year.

Anyway, I now feel that I can state with a very high degree of confidence that this was, has been, and will have been the primary significance of Donald Trump and of Trumpism writ large in history: (1) The return of America to the global stage as an Imperial power (as the recent National Security Strategy document directly stated) openly and overtly dedicated to interfering in every region and every country of the world to promote its own financial interests and maintain its own hegemonic status, (2) The renegotiation of the terms of American power away from dedication to a perceived universal rule of law or rights regime and back towards the governmental-corporate extraction of resources and possession of captive markets for the mutual profit of local and regional and national and trans-national elites the world over, and finally (3) The increasing reliance on America's status as a global hegemon to benefit at least the enfranchised members of mainland American society, and to fund and staff and cause to function nearly all the institutions of mainland American life, through various forms of resource-extraction carried out through concerted governmental-military and corporate-financial action. Again, the recent National Security Strategy document not only directly asserted a "Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine," but also ordered American diplomatic staff to see it as their highest priority to work with American corporations to promote American financial and business interests in the countries under their purview.

This is in truth not nearly as much of a shift from the previous era of American life as its overtness may imply. This vision was already largely in place for American elites under Bush and Obama, although opposed by other, more idealistic strands: and in some form, as Trump correctly perceived, it was more or less the state of affairs during the past eras of greatest American prosperity, and hence helped to shape many of the most basic structural features of contemporary American life, to such an extent that it would be very difficult to envision them functioning with it.

The question of how successful this vision will be is another one entirely. Carried out with some degree of skill, and in a way that actually led to financial profit for American citizens, it would naturally lead to great popularity for Trump and Trumpism; carried out badly, without seeing to that profit, it will become as unpopular as Bush's "forever wars." On the global level, carried out with due attention to the profit of elites in other countries and some kind of basic political and military stability, it is highly likely to be successful; carried out badly on either front, it risks undermining America's global status entirely, and imperiling further the already fragile nature of American domestic economy and institutions. On a more basic level, it is far from clear that Americans have the necessary skills and savvy to carry out this kind of Imperial policy, period.

Perhaps most fundamentally, such an overt reliance on global Empire and hegemony is not without its basic paradoxes for such a large and prosperous country as America: and comes naturally with many, many dangers, not just to the rest of the world, but to America.

Anyway, none of this should be misconstrued as praise for Trump or Trumpism, or indeed, as primarily directed toward blame either. It is simply helpful to know what is happening, and why, particularly when it affects so many so immediately.