by Timothy Blinks
From pundits to ordinary people, many of us hardly know what to make of Donald Trump’s tariffs. Is he serious? Doesn’t he know this will cause inflation? What about the stock market? Why is he doing this?
But Trump’s tariffs aren’t simply a childish spasm from a geriatric man-child or a symptom of his astonishing ignorance. They’re an important part of his program and appeal.
The Trump “Program”
It might sound absurd to talk about Trump having a “program.” After all, he’s a hateful buffoon, but he has no real ideas. He’s less a fascist than someone with fascist intuitions. Unlike a classic fascist, Trump is no idealogue, no militant, no writer of manifestos.
You can see this at his rallies. When he speaks, Trump doesn’t have a preordained message to deliver to the people. He improvises his messages and promises live, trying out ideas and phrases — drawing on those fascist instincts and tapping into the ugly id of American nationalism in his audience. He then runs with whatever whips the crowd up to the most toxic froth.
Trump also seems to have no desire to cosplay as a military leader, unlike classic fascists and authoritarians. He doesn’t respect the military, can’t understand why anyone would sign up as a soldier, and thinks anyone who dies for their country is a sucker rather than a hero — breaking with all previous political pieties.
This is because Trump doesn’t see himself as a general but a deal-maker. His only value is self-interest. His main political goal is to make every power-holder personally loyal to him. He is more mafioso than Mussolini, more feudal than fascist. “It’s less about the master race than loyalty to the master — and cruelty towards the scapegoats,” as Julian Walker put it in the Conspirituality podcast episode “Is It Fascism?”
For Trump, every policy and decision is personal and transactional — and he is trying to win every transaction. (Remember, every handshake is a power struggle for this man-baby.) Trump can’t, say, understand why the U.S. might support Ukraine to uphold a political ideal or serve a geopolitical strategy. Weapons for minerals, defence for exploitation: this is the only logic he can understand and act on.
As U.S President, then, he must make sure America wins every transaction. Trade is less an exchange and more of a contest. To hurt China or Canada is to put America First.
All this is why tariffs are such a natural step for Trump, even if they might just be a means to an end — a measure that sets up annexation, or at least a trade deal renegotiation that he can say he won.
The sex appeal of tariffs
So why are tariffs so appealing to the MAGA movement — south and north of the border? It’s because tariffs are a slap in the face to globalization and the neoliberal order.
You couldn’t vote against globalization until Trump and his imitators and acolytes came along. For decades — ever since the 90s — every single electable politician has been a neoliberal, a herald of free market globalization. Yet since the far-right has started running candidates who bluster about dismantling neoliberalism, they have found shocking success.
It turns out people are quite happy to vote for politicians who promise to bring back factory jobs with protectionism and tariffs. Extra points can often be scored by denouncing shadowy global organizations with an alphabet soup of acronyms like the WEF, WTO, IMF, NATO, and even the UN. (For those keeping score, that’s the World Economic Forum, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the good old United Nations).
After decades of free trade, privitization, and exploitation by globe-spanning corporations, attacking neoliberalism is popular — and populist. This makes sense. The electorate might not know how to define neoliberalism, but they feel its effects.
You can just feel the neoliberalism
Today members of the working class cannot work with dignity for decent pay. This is because of the loss of manufacturing and decent unionized jobs, the Wal-mart-ification and then Uber-ization of service industry jobs, and the subjugation of farmers and resource workers to ruthless international markets.
The neglect of social programs means that workers drawn to help others are too often underpaid, precarious, and burnt out. Meanwhile, those that these programs are meant to help — people with disabilities, mental health troubles, or just needing medical care or a place to live, for example — are too often left to rot, struggling and fighting the system just to survive.
Tax breaks and subsidies for billionaires and mega-corporations have not trickled down, they have passed society’s bills on to those least able to pay. The mobility of capital and corporations means regimes compete to see who can best exploit workers and subsidize corporations, in a cruel race to the bottom. In moments of crisis, the government has bailed out banks not homeowners and corporations not employees. What a neat way to socialize losses! — even as they’ve privatized profits by essentially refusing to tax them, as well as by handing public property, utilities, infrastructure, and projects to the “wisdom” of the market. For decades there’s been a wholesale wealth transfer that has made the rich richer and everyone else poorer.
Meanwhile, the financialization of housing means everyone but landlords and real estate investors gets to live in fear of losing their homes. (And just think, if they’re truly lucky, hard-working, and successful, our children might one day get to take on almost-unimaginable debt in the name of home ownership!)
Voters might not be savvy enough to say “that’s neoliberalism,” but they certainly feel all these effects. They might not always understand the causes of their economic deprivation and social alienation — especially if they’re still captive to the cult of capitalism and the mysticism of the market. But they do know that liberal and neoliberal elites have ruined their lives and futures.
So when Trump and Pierre Pollievre rant against some globalist elites, it feels magical. These guys are cutting through the bullshit. They’re naming hard truths the political class and commentariat avoid and obfuscate.
By attacking the neoliberal consensus, these tin-pot populists get to have their cake and eat it too. They can be a billionaire and ex-president — or party insider and ex-cabinet minister — yet position themselves as rebellious outsiders, casting down oppressive elites.
Anti-globalization from left to right
Once upon a time, of course, anti-globalization was a leftist cause. It was the leftist cause of the 90s, arguably, from the Zapatista Uprising to the Battle of Seattle to Naomi Klein’s No Logo.
But anti-globalization was never taken up by the electoral left — certainly not by progressives who were electable. Actually, the 90s is when progressives went neoliberal, from Jean Chretien and Paul Martin’s Liberals to Tony Blair’s Labour to Bill Clinton’s Democrats. These progressives — not the conservatives of the 80s — entrenched globalism and established a neoliberal consensus as unquestioned and unquestionable.
This stonewalling meant that supposedly progressive governments never addressed the challenges or concerns of a leftist populist anti-globalization movement. 9/11 then drove resistance to neoliberalism largely underground. The left had to pivot to the struggle against a neoconservative “war on terror” that justified invasions overseas and surveillance at home.
But that anti-globalization sentiment didn’t disappear, it just went underground and metastasized with jingoism and xenophobia into a far-right cause. And now that the electable right-wing will run on anti-globalization rhetoric and at least notionally oppose neoliberalism, they seem bound to keep getting elected.
Of course what right-wing anti-globalization lacks is international solidarity. And this is what has held up the coronation of Poilievre and right-wing populism in Canada.
The anti-globalization leftists of the 90s made a point of drawing links and fostering solidarity between autoworkers in Detroit and coffee farmers in Mexico. But America and Canada can’t both be first, right-wing slogans aside. It’s all a zero-sum game for their creepy ideology. Trump pursuing his goals will inevitably mess with Poilievre, since their solution to globalization isn’t solidarity but extreme nationalism.
Of course, all electable progressives have to offer as an alternative to the Trumps and Poilievres of the world is a return to neoliberal globalism. Biden’s Democrats offered a return to normalcy but addressed none of the causes of Trump’s rise. So Trump returned, with a fascist vengeance as he consolidated power and his base belligerently radicalized.
As cultural critic Henry Giroux told Rabble Radio, “Neoliberalism has been as powerful as the divine right of kings” but “it now suffers from a legitimization crisis” and so it “now embraces a neo-colonial logic.”
Indeed, Trump’s radical nationalism has also reached a neo-colonial, expansionist fever pitch, where he seems to genuinely want to swallow up a neighbour like his hero Putin. And maybe fear of that will drive Canadians into the arms of our most neo-liberal of progressive alternatives yet — a central banker and Goldman Sachs alumni that can’t even be bothered with the pretty boy feminism and woke tokenism of Justin’s Liberals. But what will be left when the dust settles?
Things are bleak, but do you want to stop there?
We’re facing a bleak situation, no doubt about it. We’re caught between a MAGA movement that’s becoming explicitly fascist and all the tired political forces trying to defend the existing neoliberal order.
Mark Carney’s Liberals might just win this election, largely due to the damage Trump has done to the Canadian wing of his movement. Even in this “best case scenario,” this will not change the fact that we’re in the death throes of a neoliberal order that is poisoning itself. Even if it manages to totter onwards in places like Canada, neoliberalism is signing its own death warrant by making large regions of the world unlivable through wars, economic exploitation, and — above all else — climate catastrophe.
This is fuelling not only an extinction event on a geologic time scale — which is a tragedy beyond the limits of human language to express, and which deserves more than half a sentence in some ranting editorial — but the largest mass migration in human history.
We’re only experiencing the tiniest, earliest ripples of this migration, but its force is already threatening the existing liberal order. Fear of migrants and refugees, of course, has helped fuel the MAGA movement and its far-right cousins in Europe, Canada, Australia and other colonial states — along with the economic deprivation and anxieties created by decades of neoliberalism.
The economic and ecological pain that ordinary and previously-privileged people in the West are starting to feel is nothing less than the apocalypse of colonialism — supercharged by capitalism — coming home to roost. Indigenous and colonized people have been living in post-apocalyptic landscape for centuries; the rest of us are just catching up.
Yet elites, whether they are tiring neoliberals or aspiring fascists, seem determined to avoid any action that might avoid disaster, or even save their own skins. There will be no Green New Deal in the 21st century, even if it took a New Deal to save capitalism and liberal democracy in the 20th century. Democratic socialist candidates and measures are excluded before they can even be put to voters.
So voters have been left to choose between different flavours of unfettered capitalism. Do they want it with a progressive smile or a grinding jackboot? Neoliberals or neofascists?
What can we do?
With “choices” like this, electoral politics are currently a self-defeating dead end. Does that mean there’s nothing we can do?
Absolutely not! There is so much we can and need to do. Leftists and all people of goodwill need to:
- critique and discredit neoliberalism and nationalism
- foster solidarity across borders and class-consciousness among all victims of colonialism and capitalism
- offer egalitarian ways of organizing and defending ourselves from fascism
- model and foster mutual, reparative relationships with nature, in the vein of countless Indigenous cultures
- make the ruling class afraid
.
Easy, right?!
Actually, there are workable models we can look to for inspiration. I’d like to point the reader to the democratic confederalism of Abdullah Öcalan and its implementation in Rojava.
Never heard of it? You’re far from alone. It’s a crime that every leftist isn’t talking about the Rojava revolution every day, I reckon, since it offers a socialism that is ecofeminist, anti-authoritarian, anti-colonialist, radically democratic, modular, and revolutionary. (For a good 101, check out The Women’s War podcast.) It seems like the left in the West has too much of a Eurocentric, racist hangover to recognize that brown people in the Middle East have invented a revolution we could all be following.
(We’re often too busy trying to rehabilitate a 19th century vision of revolution that’s been discredited historically and culturally outside of our social bubble – yes, Marxism, I mean you. Well, that and alienating the working class and economically marginalized with our woke jargon and educational privilege. We need to get intersectional and destroy the heteropatriachy, sure, but we also need to find different, fun, direct ways of saying that!)
The left in the West also needs to escape purity tests and cycles of denunciation — we need to build inclusive, action-orientated movements. Armchair critique will get us nowhere. Self-proclaimed radicals have substituted analysis for action too often, stroking their chins and theorizing the inevitability of both fascism and the collapse of capitalism, implicitly breeding passivity. As breadtuber Contrapoints exclaims, “The left doesn’t want to vote… they don’t even want to smash — they want to theorize the inevitability of smashing as they’ve been doing for almost two centuries now.” That’s not enough!
Fortunately, the unprecedented deprivations and crises we face also offer opportunities for action and organizing like we have never seen before. To take one example, the housing crisis means tenants can band together and challenge the power of landlords like never before — in fact, we will have to do this simply to survive.
The housing crisis provides concrete, immediate struggles — a rent strike against a demovicting landlord, for example — that we can engage in and even win, building confidence and power. And if we start questioning why one group of people get to own other people’s homes — or land at all — we’ll start tearing up the roots of settler colonialism, private property, and nationalism.
Our organizing can and should work outside of and beyond the electoral process for many reasons — not least because voting at the ballot box is an ineffective way to influence politicians. Politicians might make promises that appeal to ordinary voters, but they only implement measures that economic elites and business interests approve of. Saying this isn’t rhetorical exaggeration based on a feeling, but the hardnosed, factual conclusion of a 2014 study by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found. (Vox helpfully summarized the study, if you want to learn more but don’t want to fully wade into academic waters.)
This means that to get politicians to do what we want, we need to make the ruling class afraid. We need to remember that no politician ever ran on the New Deal or the Civil Rights Act. The Democratic Party didn’t grant civil rights or implement the New Deal because they were the party of racial justice or the working class — they were the party of slavery, segregation, and crony capitalism. They acted in the 30s and 60s because they were facing crises and powerful mass movements that challenged the status quo. They acted because they were afraid of revolution and didn’t want to preside over the collapse of the system they stewarded.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless, but as Chris Hedges recently put it in a speech at the Workers Strike Back Conference, “Hope comes when we physically defy those in power. Hope is not comfortable or easy. … Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something.”
More could be said, but you don’t need to hear it — you already know what you need to know in order to act. You knew it before reading this article. Things are dire, but there’s good work to be done everywhere. Strap in.
