By
DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
Disclosing on his blog that he was “reluctantly voting” for Hillary Clinton and explaining why, Richard Falk, Prof Emeritus of International Law at Princeton and former UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories, noted with characteristic lucidity that the global Left is divided between those outside the USA who are primarily anti-Clinton, and those within the USA who are primarily anti-Trump.
Among the examples he gave for those leftists outside the US who saw Hillary as the main danger were philosopher Slavoj Zizek, WikiLeaks head Julian Assange and veteran journalist and author John Pilger. We may add Prof Jean Bricmont, theoretical physicist, philosopher of science and author of a book exposing “Humanitarian Imperialism”. In a post-election essay Prof Falk returned to the theme, noting that the overwhelming bulk of his progressive friends outside the USA (and he underscored that they were authentic progressives) were more or less relieved that Hillary lost, while those within the USA were of quite the contrary view.
Samir Amin was fond of quoting Stalin’s heretically dialectical remark (1925) that objectively “the Emir of Afghanistan is more progressive than the British Labor Party”. This is true of Trump too. The Left outside the USA remembered that the US assault on sovereign national states did not begin with the Republicans: Gulf War I, codenamed ‘Desert Storm’ (1991), did not call into question state borders and was fought ostensibly to restore them by rolling back Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. The destruction of countries began with the 1999 war on Yugoslavia under Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright. George W Bush and his neoconservative Republicans took it to the next level with Iraq. President Obama and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates were reluctantly pushed into military intervention in Libya by the liberal interventionist ‘regime change’ Furies, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power.
Long time opponents and critics of US imperialism all over the world including Europe and the UK, knew that Hillary’s slogan of a no-fly zone in Syria would lead to confrontation with Russia, and that her co-thinkers had pushed the Obama administration into a policy of confrontation with Russia and subversion of Russian interests in Eastern Europe even in the post-Soviet space, such as the regime change coup with neo-fascist participation, in Ukraine. Trump rejected the ‘regime change’ doctrine, criticized the invasions and destruction of states beginning with Iraq, recognized terrorist movements as the main enemy, and came across as more of an anti-war candidate than Hillary, the Mother of Foreign Wars. An alliance of neoconservatives and interventionist liberals endorsed Clinton, not Trump. A win for her would have meant a return to the Cold War with Russia but would be more aggressive and dangerous than the Cold War because those Russophobes advocating “regime change” even in Moscow itself were in the Clinton camp. Instead, in an Engelsian “irony of History” we now have regime change in Washington DC!
At the level of economics, the liberal Democrat Clinton camp as well as the conservative rightwing Republican elite (which opposed Trump) represented the Washington Consensus, a doctrine of neoliberal globalization that held that the more open the economy and the greater the number of free trade agreements, the better. The economic pain and marginalization of communities that this doctrine created, generated a social backlash. When the Democrats failed to nominate Bernie Sanders, it was inevitable that the backlash would benefit a populist of the Alternative Right, Donald Trump.
At a conceptual or theoretical level the American outcome validates the progressive “communitarians” such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, as opposed to the liberal individualists. At the level of economic philosophy it proves the warnings of the “responsible economic nationalists” such as Jeffrey Sachs and ex-Bill Clinton Cabinet member and progressive Prof Robert Reich, more correct than the neoliberal globalizers. At the level of the philosophy of history, it proves Samuel P. Huntington’s hypothesis of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ more correct than Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’ and the triumph of liberal values. Liberal ideology and values have been successfully challenged in their home and most powerful redoubt itself: the Anglo-American space, the USA and the UK (counting Brexit). What underlies the riddle of the Trump-Putin entente is a commonality of Christian civilization (Evangelicals and Russian Orthodox) against that of Islamism, as Huntington predicted.
The Trump triumph is quite clearly part of a global trend: Putin, Modi, Syriza (2015), Erdogan, Brexit (Farage), the Colombian referendum (Uribe), Duterte, Ortega and Trump. It is a march of Populist Nationalism—The Economist (London) calls it “New Nationalism”– with ‘populism’ and ‘nationalism’ each comprising a ‘leg’ of the phenomenon. Populism and nationalism are notoriously protean in character and therefore the current wave has Right (Modi, Trump), Left (Ortega) and Centrist (Putin, Erdogan, Duterte) manifestations, often with a religious component in the configuration. Populist nationalism is also pronouncedly “statist” and suspicious of international law as well as extra-national institutions.
Antonio Gramsci had returned to Machiavelli and elaborately theorized a cardinal point in the 1930s. Crudely paraphrased, the point was that if the Left does not infiltrate, occupy and rework the terrain of nationalism, statism and populism, the Right will, and will win (as did Mussolini). Gramsci’s Comintern comrades Togliatti and Dmitrov made much the same point with the Popular Front formula. The assimilation and application of these ideas by the left intellectuals of the 1970s and ’80s led to a progressive global shift to the left or the center-left in the next two decades. These ideas were forgotten by the postmodernist liberal-progressive intelligentsia, and dismissed as “so very 20th century”. In place of ‘state’, ‘nation’, ‘sovereignty’ ‘classes’, ‘masses’, ‘people’ and ‘army’ came ethnic minorities, anti-nationalism, difference, gender, LGBTIQ rainbows, ecology, human rights, international law, ‘beyond borders’ and anti-statism. An exception was the progressive thinker Regis Debray who wrote “In Praise of Borders”. Now Gramsci has been revalidated.
The Trump victory will revive a progressive-left protest movement in the USA, and that is a good counterweight. Trump will either work with Russia against terrorism or be railroaded by rightwing hawks into fresh military adventures, but he cannot get away with external adventurism in the ideologically hegemonic manner that Hillary Clinton would have. A USA polarized within and preoccupied domestically will be a hamstrung hegemon. This contributes to global multi-polarity.
No small island can escape a powerful global trend, still less a change in the global ideological balance and overall environment. Absurdly, Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera is in no mood to leverage the Trump win to extricate Sri Lanka from the Geneva resolution trap, because he doesn’t see it as a trap and is indiscreetly negative about the shift in the US: “Of course, I mean, to be frank, as a person who has fought for liberal values throughout my political career, I would like to have seen a different result personally. But, as I said, now that the American people have decided, and we will certainly work with President Trump and his administration to further strengthen our bilateral relations over the coming years…” Meanwhile he has also unmoored Sri Lanka from its traditional bipartisan foreign policy doctrine of Nonalignment by outrageously declaring that “non-alignment is irrelevant today.” (http://www.dailymirror.lk/article/Will-strengthen-relations-with-U-S-under-Trump-Mangala-119126.html#sthash.LSdj8WUz.dpuf)
The Ranil-CBK-Mangala holdout project of “Liberal Cosmopolitan Minoritarianism in One Country” is unsustainable.
Like the MEP/SLFP bloc of 1956, today’s JO/SLPF bloc has the rare advantage of representing the full spectrum of populist nationalisms of right, left and center, containing within it the Trump and Bernie Sanders slogans and elements. 2016 (Trump) was the USA’s equivalent of Sri Lanka’s 1956 (MEP/Sinhala only). 2017 may witness Sri Lanka’s equivalent of Greece’s 2015 and the UK’s and Colombia’s 2016 referenda. 2020 will be Sri Lanka’s equivalent of the USA’s 2016.
(Courtesy Daily Mirror)