Building New Rafts: Trump’s Inheritance of the Legacy of the Left (Martin Jay, Salmagundi)
What, in addition to his seduction of a significant chunk of the working class, has Trump inherited from the playbook of the left in American political life? How has he and his right-wing populist movement refunctioned for their own purposes many of the traditional positions and attitudes that were once considered, grosso modo, “progressive?” What does this confusion of identities suggest for our conventional way of placing aggregated political formations along a linear spectrum? What does it portend for the future constellation of discrete positions that form, at least for a while, a shared platform or coherent ticket?
Painful as it is, we have to acknowledge the various ways in which the cards once dealt to a certain hand, and remained there for a long while, can later unexpectedly find their way into another. Let us begin with economic issues. At least ever since the Reagan administration, the bugaboo of the left has been neo-liberal globalization, which, broadly speaking, was accused of sacrificing domestic jobs in the pursuit of high corporate profits by investing abroad and profiting from cheap foreign labor. Neo-liberalism also meant fiscal austerity, the weakening of the welfare safety net, the undermining of unions, indiscriminate deregulation, the dissolution of barriers to free trade, and the marketization of as many social relations as possible. When the Democrats climbed, more or less, on board the neo-liberal express during the Clinton administration, it seemed as if both parties had placed their chips on a new international economic order run by plutocratic and technocratic elites beyond the control of democratic domestic politics. International organizations like the European Union, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund gained autonomy from national electorates.
For a long time, the left fulminated against the sins of neo-liberalism and the dangers of unaccountable globalization, whether under Republican or Democratic administrations.3 From Reagan through the second Bush presidency, its cries of distress were met with scorn by staunchly conservative defenders of the sanctity of markets, smaller government, deregulation, balanced federal budgets and other neo-liberal shibboleths. During the past ten years, however, a curious erosion of the line between camps occurred. Signs were already there during the Brexit debate, when progressive voices urged the UK to leave the EU because, as an article in the leftist periodical Jacobin put it, “it provides an opportunity for a radical break with neo-liberalism.”4 Even after Brexit succeeded, Perry Anderson, UCLA historian and the esteemed editor of the New Left Review, continued his denunciation of the undemocratic nature of the European Union.5 Perhaps the most resonant symbolic expression of the converging of positions occurred when Steve Bannon unexpectedly reached out in 2017 to Robert Kuttner, the left-liberal editor of The American Prospect, to discuss their common hostility to China and talk strategy about promoting economic nationalism.