America's moment - Trump, Sanders and Brexit Point the Way Forward

America’s Moment, or How to Turn a Crisis into an Opportunity

President Obama’s recent visit to the United Kingdom to intervene in support of the Remain (in the European Union) campaign was an attempt to prevent the further unravelling of the US-led world system which is in severe crisis at home and facing significant problems abroad. A united Europe – as a bulwark against the Soviet ‘threat’ and as a market for US goods and investment – was an American project. It threatens to disintegrate under the pressure of the Eurozone crisis, the refugee problem engulfing the continent as result of past US interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and the rise of European nationalisms on the Left and extreme Right. The solution: forge a new grand bargain at home and abroad that allows for diffused leadership serving a broader range of national and class interests in the global polity. More democracy and equality, and less liberty and more state regulation or outright control of the forces of the market that have devastated working class and poor communities through unrestrained globalisation.

Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate links his position therein to the crisis of Europe, where the Right is on the march, and received the hardly-coded race card response from Boris Johnson and others from the Vote Leave (the EU) campaign (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-suggests-part-kenyan-obama-may-have-an-ancestral-dislike-of-britain-a6995826.html); in the Middle East, where the US and Britain actively disordered the region after 9-11 that led directly to the rise of Islamic State; and at home, as demonstrated by the anti-establishment turmoil of the US primaries. Obama’s intervention points to the crisis of an international order established in the 1940s that froze power relations and has changed little over the past 70 years, and a domestic party system inaugurated by Reaganomics and social conservatism in 1980 that has yielded power to the market and Wall St corporations. 

Yet, the world has changed and power relations need to change with it. America’s imperial paternalism, that brooks no one else’s nationalism, and even brands some variants of its own as ‘isolationism’, needs to diminish to permit others to exercise the responsibilities of statehood, to develop a stronger stake in the global order, and better manage the world of the twenty-first century. And that grand bargain must be reflected and anchored at home in a political realignment – currently being fashioned by the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders insurgencies - that takes into account the interests of young people, the working poor and the squeezed middle, and engineer and discipline a more socially responsible and politically-accountable financial elite, the 0.1% that since the 1990s has led the corporate takeover of American politics and the current inequalities of income, wealth and power.

Many frame the issue from conservative positions – producing blueprints for a slightly reformed US-led order. One has only to look at the reports coming out of Brookings, the Council on Foreign Relations and the legion of scholars at America’s many elite academies – such as Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School (for example, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2016/02/17-five-countries-international-liberal-order-piccone). But their flawed US-centric framing leads to a status quo set of conclusions, while actually there is an historic opportunity presented by crisis for a renegotiation of global order or perhaps a series of negotiations – thematic and regional and other - to reshape and fashion a new settlement for the new century.

Dominant framings of the issue leads to an omission of any serious consideration of the opportunities presented by Donald Trump’s critique of the US role in world – the questioning of its principal post-1945 institutions and relationships. For raising those questions alone, the GOP’s primaries front-runner is branded an isolationist. But Trump’s challenge is more than “isolationism”; isolationism is an epithet used by foreign policy establishment people to undermine practically any opposition to their interpretation of America’s global role. Trump is an “America First-er”, not an isolationist, and questions the various alliances and institutions that the US-led order built and rests upon. Trump’s challenge – whether or not he wins the nomination or the general election – will not go away, because it’s one raised on the Left by Bernie Sanders too. Between Trump and Sanders, and the ratchet effect of Sanders on Clinton, there is a structural problem highlighted by their current popularity that is deep-seated and enduring and has now come to a head in a popular revolt against the American elite.

The conservatism of entirely US-centric solutions and critiques of Trump (and Sanders) also elides serious critiques of either the inequalities of the US-led international order or of its effects at home on the majority of Americans whose income shares and wealth have diminished steadily since the 1970s and who are fully aware of the inequities of power and wealth distributions and reject the elites of both parties in such great numbers.

The domestic crisis of US liberal order and its global problems are related but are not insoluble. They require a realignment at home and abroad. Otherwise, narrow nationalist impulses will come to the fore while at the moment there is an opportunity to redefine and reshape globalisation to benefit and not damage so many people, to hollow out the state in its social functions, cutting adrift large swathes of people.

This may be an historic moment of opportunity presented by crisis; the dominant concepts are no longer working adequately, fixed in old global power relations from 1945, slightly tweaked and absorbed in the 1970s, broadly incorporating as apprentices global south ‘middle class’ powers like India, China, Brazil etc.. – what are today called the BRICS. When the West was confronted with the triumph of the oil producing states of the Arab world and the challenge of the G-77 third world states demanding a New International Economic Order, elites did what they’d done with the domestic rise of working class reform movements – buy them off (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1975-10-01/united-states-and-third-world-basis-accommodation). Those days, and that kind of thinking, may be long gone.  

Defending the status quo is to defend the iniquitous past. A defence of the status quo that focuses too much on Trump and Sanders (and Brexit) as threats, rather than as pointing the way to a new order, is a road to nowhere but the rise of the radical Right and the forces of backward-looking nationalism and chauvinism. There is sufficient force in the rise of Trump and Sanders which suggests there are significant bases for future positive change.

What the new order will look like is the big issue, not whether there should be one at all. This is the major question of our time.

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics, and co-director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, at City University London

Follow him on twitter - https://twitter.com/USEmpire

American Establishment Is Sabotaging Sanders and Trump Insurgencies

As the forward march of the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders primary campaigns continues to defy expert predictions, the GOP and Democratic party establishments, and their corporate-media allies are busily trying to win back the initiative by sabotage and intrigue. Their efforts have already had an effect and are likely to intensify as the summer nominating conventions draw closer. It makes for a fascinating case study of how established power works not just to maintain the status quo but to manage and channel change into directions that do not fundamentally endanger, but strengthen, the structure of power, but this is a long-term project. The immediate tools at their disposal include playing the ‘race’ card, malicious legal challenges, creative misuse of party resources, denial of media air time, voter exclusion and fraud. In the long run, they have the capacity to reimagine and promote reform that might dissipate demands for more radical change. But use any metaphor you like - holding back the tide, keeping a lid on a boiling kettle, fact is that the US elite has been up to now largely unsuccessful in halting the mighty movement for change and against inequality of power and wealth in America. The popular tide shows little sign of abating but that is not for a want of trying. Elites are throwing everything at it but the anti-establishment tide is proving too powerful at the moment.

The GOP convention is already being framed as likely to be violent by GOP ‘pollsters’ like Frank Luntz who predicts violence and maybe killings at future Trump rallies. While this is a possibility, Luntz’s GOP establishment credentials suggest that this is another dangerous game playing on people’s emotions – his particular speciality, honed over decades. That does not make violence any less or more likely but it shows how seriously the GOP and its supporters are taking Trump now. Luntz is well known for mind games. Luntz’s way of politics is part of the reason why there is such disrespect among American political opponents nowadays – he plays with words and word association to colour perceptions through language manipulation. In the 1990s, it was Luntz who taught the likes of Newt Gingrich that associating the Democrats with “corrupt”, “greedy”, “sick”, “devour”, “hypocrisy”, “liberal”, etc… was essential to changing popular perceptions of the GOPs opponents. He is also credited with, among other things, replacing the term ‘global warming’ to describe global warming with the neutral-sounding ‘climate change’, now part of the conventional political discourse. From Luntz, predictions of violence at Trump rallies express a desire for that very violence, to discredit Trump’s campaign and boost both Ted Cruz and John Kasich and, thereby, ensuring a contested convention.

Luntz’s intervention came on the heels of several other GOP initiatives to ‘derail’ Trump – Mitt Romney’s call to Republicans to shun his former friend and campaign donor – which backfired; the open letter from over a hundred ‘respectable Republicans/conservatives’ – many of whom were implicated in disastrous support and planning for the Iraq War of 2003; the suggestion from a former head of the CIA and NSA that the US military would likely disobey commandeer-in-chief Trump; and GOP Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, preparing ‘down ballot’ congressional and senatorial candidates to disassociate themselves from the Trump presidential campaign, should he manage to win the nomination in July 2016.

There is a cumulative effect on the Trump campaign: Nate Silver, the US election expert, suggests that the Republican convention is likely to be contested, a prediction made more likely by Ted Cruz’s victory in the Wisconsin primary. At this stage of a ‘normal’ contest, the front-runner would usually be expected to win the nomination with a delegate majority. But not this time. Trump’s chances of winning the nomination are now below 50% from a campaign high of over 70% just a few weeks ago. He no longer has a majority of delegates once Marco Rubio’s delegates are accounted for. And it is becoming apparent that the actual delegates from each state are not duty-bound to vote for Trump even if he’s won the state. Most delegates – members of the party machines in each state – are anti-Trump and could already be campaigning informally to overturn pro-Trump sentiment. That could lead to delegates calling for a rule-change at the GOP’s Cleveland nominating convention and deciding to permit a free vote. This would be highly controversial but remains an option to the GOP establishment. There are also rumours of greater backing for Ted Cruz as well as pushing John Kasich or, possibly, Paul Ryan, to derail the Trump machine. And Trump’s threat to renege on his pledge at the North Carolina primary, among others – where he won all 50 delegates – to support the eventual GOP nominee should he lose the vote, has further damaged his chances.

But according to Nate Silver’s 538 US election website, Donald Trump is exposing some key weaknesses in America’s political institutions, including the GOP. He’s also shown that America’s neither post-racial nor post-racist, as some claim, that racism and nationalism remain potent political forces. He’s also shown up and benefited from the corporate media’s complicity in establishment politics. 538 argues that whatever happens to Trump, “ the problems he’s exposed were years in the making, and they’ll take years to sort out.”

Trump has benefited from media coverage more than any other candidate. He has certainly played his cards well and managed to inflame public opinion with outrageous statements against minorities, Muslims and women. Yet, surveys of media coverage show that Trump managed to secure far more air time as compared with other GOP candidates. And the type of coverage also suggests greater focus on his polling data than on the content of his messages, a critical dissection of his racist, Islamophobic and murderous suggestions for how to tackle terrorism.

The principal reason for such coverage is that Trump’s thunder is right-wing, in a country which has no Left and whose politics is variations of right wing ideology – every tenet of conservative ‘Americanism’ militates against any form of leftist or even centrist ideas. The emphasis on extreme individualism, individual liberty, free enterprise and the market, rejection of the very idea of the welfare state or socialised medicine, the worship of the gospel of wealth – feeds the Right, normalises it and makes other thoughts almost unthinkable. And the media – owned by corporations and soaked in the same version of Americanism - privileges Trump’s basic political outlook, even where it smirks at his boorishness rather than conducts a thorough critique of what is appearing as an increasingly extreme right-wing racist appeal based on hate and resentment against practically everyone else. Trump’s racism, misogyny, and encouragement of violence at his rallies, have hardly been called out in media coverage let alone his calls for illegal torture methods and killing of women and children as US foreign policy. And his unpopularity ratings among key sections of voters, including women, have hardly received attention, severely affecting the possibility of his election in November 2016.

Nowhere is the structural corporate-media bias more glaringly demonstrated than in its coverage of Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialist campaign. Sanders has, in contrast with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, been virtually ignored by the corporate media.  Even establishment candidate Hillary Clinton is usually covered in a negative light despite her lead in the polls and generally high favourability ratings as compared with Trump’s. Trump’s free media coverage is equivalent to around $2 billion while Sanders received $321 million, and Clinton secured $746 million. And the bias against Sanders is not confined to the right wing media. The New York Times has adopted a mocking attitude to the socialist candidate, showing its ideological attachments and political support for Clinton. Up to December 2015, ABC World News had devoted 81 minutes to covering Trump and just a single minute covering Sanders even though both candidates attracted between 20-30% support in opinion polls.

Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s secretary of labour, summed it up well: “The major media have come to see much of America through the eyes of the establishment. That’s not surprising. After all, they depend on establishment corporations for advertising revenues, their reporters and columnists rely on the establishment for news and access, their top media personalities socialize with the rich and powerful and are themselves rich and powerful, and their publishers and senior executives are themselves part of the establishment.”

This is not a free market of ideas – it’s the politics of a corporate media in the hands of a narrow section of American society that is saturated in a right-wing, anti-socialist version of Americanism.

The most formidable opponent facing Sanders, complementing the mass media is the Democratic Party machine. The range of tactics has included attacks on Sanders' credibility by Clinton allies in the media, denial of access to the party's voter database, scheduling fewer debates (just 6 in 2016 compared with 26 in 2008) and restricting them to unpopular times, opaque ballot counting procedures, permitting corporate donations directly to the Democratic National Committee (DNC, Obama had stopped that), and limiting voter registration.

The veteran civil rights campaigner, John Lewis, in endorsing Clinton claimed that he’d never seen Sanders on a civil rights march, undermining the candidates actual record on the question. Other Clinton allies among mainstream economists challenged Sanders’s economic programmes while defying mainstream economics logics about the necessity and effects of large scale infrastructure investments in the United States. The Democratic party has not focused with great vigour on voter registration drives leaving large numbers off the rolls, especially young voters on college campuses. Party leaders – mayors, congressmen, senators, governors – have endorsed Clinton and are hardly making an effort to mobilise young voters the vast majority of whom have backed Sanders in the primaries. And the DNC has lifted all restrictions on Wall Street and other corporate funding of the DNC itself, which is jointly raising funds for the Clinton campaign. Wall Street – overtly opposed by Sanders – has moved to the very heart of the Democratic party, raising millions of dollars for Clinton. And the system of super-delegates – loyal to the party leadership – was designed by the DNC for the specific purpose of stopping the likes of Sanders, as DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz explained: "Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don't have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists."

President Obama has briefed against Sanders and for Clinton despite the fact that were, at the time, over 20 primaries and caucuses to come. Democratic senators have suggested Sanders either step down or discuss matters that unite him and Clinton against Donald Trump, as if the latter is a safe bet to win the GOP nomination. The Clinton machine, with the full support of the DNC, media allies, Washington, DC, lobbyists and labour organisations, is trying to make a Clinton win appear inevitable, despite the results of recent primaries and the increasingly strong position of Sanders in national polls (one of which actually puts him in the lead).

The real story is as American as apple pie: the battle of a relatively obscure candidate, with few links with the US establishment, to speak truth to power and rally a popular movement against the corporate takeover of American politics. Yet it’s a story that’s hardly been told because the powers that be who define what’s American control the levers of power.

It was hardly ever the case that ordinary Americans overwhelmingly rejected socialism: socialism has been smeared and misrepresented by corporate elites and their political and ideological allies and, in combination with that, through outright state and state-authorised violence through ‘red scares’. Socialism remains the biggest threat to the American establishment today, even the relatively mild social democratic variant offered by Bernie Sanders. So we should expect to see more dubious tactics from party and media elites to maintain the boundaries of thinkable thought. And longer term moves to incorporate, domesticate, and ultimately extinguish, the politics of mass dissent.