America’s president

NOT so long ago, America’s president effectively enjoyed the mantle of world leadership. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 had elevated the US to the status of sole global superpower, a position it enjoyed for the best part of two decades. Today, as China and many other countries openly challenge US-led Western hegemony, the US presidential election reads like a cautionary tale about the deep crisis of liberal politics and the so-called ‘rules-based international order’.
Four years ago, Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump was hailed as a return to ‘normal’ and the terminal demise of the far right. In 2024, Trumpism is not only alive and well but the man himself is poised to make yet another victorious bid for the White House.
Trump may still lose, of course, but only someone living in a fool’s paradise can argue that the liberal order is thriving. Whilst global capitalism continues to generate huge inequalities, ecological devastation and imperialist wars, the liberal centre protects the elephant in the room, thus creating the conditions for the far right to thrive by directing the rage of disillusioned masses towards paper tigers.
Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, only came into the race three months ago. Her boss Biden, unable to contain the Trumpian wave, had focused, instead, on backing Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, thus earning the moniker ‘Genocide Joe’. Harris has made it clear that her foreign policy vision is largely the same as Biden’s, and while the ongoing carnage in Palestine and Lebanon will not determine the election, it is already clear that large numbers of traditionally Democratic voters will either abstain or even cast their vote for Trump to punish Biden and Harris.
On the domestic front, America’s economy, like most so-called advanced capitalist countries, continues to be mired in a low-growth trap, which can be traced back to the global financial crisis of 2007-09, and even further to the 1970s. Those at the top of the tree, especially Wall Street, munitions, agribusiness and a host of other global monopolies, continue to make a killing, but the majority of working people have been seeing their living standards stagnate or drop for decades.
Trump explains all of this by blaming immigrants and all sorts of governmental welfare programmes. His contemporaries across the Western world do the same. But even as the far right spews relentless hate, Harris and mainstream liberals in the US and beyond will not cut big capital down to size.
The downward spiral will intensify no matter who wins the upcoming US presidential election, mainstream politics in many countries effectively reduced to a battle between the liberal centre (read: centre right) and far right. This crisis of liberal politics is indeed global, and while there is some distinctiveness to what is happening in non-Western postcolonial countries like ours, the broad trajectories are quite similar.
Here also entrenched bourgeois parties like the PML-N and PPP have demonstrated time and again that they are unwilling to break with the establishment-dominated status quo. The PTI too acquired power at the behest of the establishment but it is telling that so many young people continued to support it even after things soured between Imran Khan and the army top brass. The PML-N, PPP and other usual suspects offer no respite from the ravages of the system, and in fact, are reinforcing Pakistan’s militarised political economy. The PTI possesses only a mythical hero with a notional magic wand, but for many, this is much better than accepting the mediocrity and collaborationism of the Sha-rifs and Bhuttos.
In America, Pakistan and beyond, there is only one way out of this cul de sac — to acknowledge that global capitalism and various related manifestations of (liberal) imperialism are exacerbating material deprivations and hateful ideologies. Only a left-wing politics with a genuinely popular social base can break the cycle. It is cruel irony that Trump (and prominent supporters of his like Elon Musk) call Harris and the Democrats ‘radical leftists’, even though the latter are anything but.
Around the time that Trump first came to prominence, mainstream politicians with a genuinely leftist pedigree like Bernie Sanders were also contending to win over the support of working people. In a similar vein, Jeremy Corbyn was staking a claim to moving the British Labour Party meaningfully towards the left. The Sanders-Corbyn wave, and many others like it, was decisively defeated. Both in the Western world and here at home, left-progressive forces must regroup and try again. Else we will remain at the mercy of military establishments, plutocrats and the far right.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, October 25th, 2024