Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States. The liberal media in Ireland, as elsewhere, is lashing itself into an agonised froth of fury, fear, and self-loathing. In the
Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole's hermeneutical skills have risen to the level of telling us that America has told the rest of the world to fuck off. A maudlin fool who passes as a feminist, Una Mullally, is wailing that white American women have 'failed Hillary Clinton': it doesn't seem to occur to Ms Mullally, from her redoubt on Tara St, that perhaps the real problem might be the other way around: that Mrs Clinton failed American women.
We'll all be absorbing this result for some time, but we must get away in the meantime from the idea that this was an enormous surprise. Apart from anything else, the polling information showed that the two candidates were very close as we came up to America's election day. A Trump victory was always on the cards. But liberals are as capable of self-delusion as most of us, and the leadership of the American Democratic Party, along with middle-class urbanites on America's coasts and their equivalents in Europe, just could not countenance the idea that the American electorate overall could vote an authoritarian, racist misogynist ignoramus into office. Alas, democracy, like sex, is for everyone, and the democratic process can only be less than itself if we allow such persons to be excluded from it.
Nevertheless, the result is momentous, for America and for the international political and economic system. And the date on which this result has been declared is one which resonates across the last century. November 9 was the date of Kristallnacht, the pogrom in Germany against Jews and Jewish property and businesses that exposed the real character of the Nazi weltanschaung in 1938. November 9 was also the date of the breakdown of the Berlin Wall, in 1989 - a hopeful moment whose potential has been betrayed by the putatively liberal leaders of the West over the last three decades. With the space for an expansive and humane 'New World Order' coming in the wake of the collapse of state communism, the United States and its allies in Europe had an extraordinary opportunity for peaceful development. Instead, in what the late Peter Gowan termed a 'Faustian bargain', the United States, under the 'liberal' and 'peacemaking' Clinton presidency, sought global dominance via its control of the world financial system, producing the conditions for a bloated and unequal growth in the 1990s and early 2000s, and laying the ground for financial turbulence and collapse in 2008. Make no mistake: we may argue over who voted for Trump (or for Brexit in the United Kingdom), but the conditions of possibility for the new neo-authoritarian and aggressively nationalist politics were laid down in the midst of the Clinton-Blairite-EU hegemony.
Finding intelligent reactions to the Trump victory is as yet difficult. Here are some articles that are worth a look:
First, Jeffrey StClair on Counterpunch:
Next, the editors of Jacobin:
Adam Shatz, on the
London Review of Books blog:
Naomi Klein on the Guardian website:
Juan Cole from The Nation website:
Conor
