The Trump Era: Extreme Right-Wing Conservatism + Big Capital
June 2017
Author, Ma Zhongcheng is a researcher of the Center for World Socialism Studies, attached to Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
On January 20, 2017, Trump was sworn in as the President of the United States. His success in winning the White House as a complete outsider in the political circle was inseparable from the strong support of right-wing extremist forces within the Republican Party and conservative forces in the military industry, oil, financial consortiums, the military and intelligence agencies. The basic political ideas expressed by Trump in the election were not just Trump’s personal will, but the consensus of the extreme right-wing conservative forces of the Republican Party.
The financial crisis that started in the United States and swept the world since 2008 has had a great impact on the “new world order” with “neoliberalism” and “neo-imperialism” as its actual content, which was shaped by the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trump’s successful election is, on the one hand, a passive product of the serious setbacks and challenges suffered by the United States’ world strategy, and on the other hand, it is also an active choice of the American ruling class to make strategic adjustments in order to ease domestic and foreign crises. The beginning of the Trump era may be the last fight of the American ruling class to maintain its global hegemony.
Trump’s rise to power marks that the American politics, which has been turning right-wing since the end of the Cold War, has entered an extreme state. If there is no strong socialist movement in the United States and abroad to stop it, the United States may enter a long-term historical period dominated by right-wing forces. Sorting out the reality and history between Trump, the Republican Party, and American conservatism will help us see the past, present, and future of American capitalism.
1. How the Trump era began
1. Trump’s election was a long-term and elaborate plan by the extreme right conservative forces in the United States.
In fact, in the 2012 election, the Republican Party had already introduced billionaire Romney to compete with Obama for the presidency. Although Romney’s personal assets of $300 million were far less than Trump’s net worth of $4.5 billion today, he was still a rare wealthy leader in the history of the Republican Party at the time, reflecting that the Republican group had long had a plan to replace professional politicians with big capitalists and big tycoons to directly take power. In the 2016 election, Trump won the White House with 304 electoral votes and 62,985,106 popular votes, while his opponent Hillary Clinton won 227 electoral votes and 65,853,625 popular votes, 2.7 million more popular votes than Trump. In the 2012 election, Obama won 332 electoral votes and 65,915,795 popular votes, while his opponent Romney, who appeared as the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, won 206 electoral votes and 60,933,504 popular votes.
Comparing the two elections, we can find that Hillary’s 2016 popular vote was very close to Obama’s in 2012, while Romney’s 2012 popular vote was 2 million less than Trump’s 2016 popular vote, which was smaller than the 2.7 million difference between Trump and Hillary. Judging from the popular vote, these were two evenly matched elections. When the two super election machines of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party started, the number of voters they could mobilize remained roughly at a relatively stable level. What determined who would become president were some extremely small variables.
Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016 not only had similar votes in the popular vote, but also had similar campaign platforms. Many of Trump’s so-called sensational slogans that were hyped by the media were actually copied from Romney’s campaign. For example, in terms of China policy, Romney accused China of “cheating” the United States in terms of trade, exchange rates and intellectual property rights, putting American workers at a disadvantage. Romney attacked China for stealing the intellectual property of American companies and accused China of “manipulating exchange rates” to lower the prices of Chinese goods. “This predatory pricing method has greatly reduced American jobs.” He claimed that once he was elected, “China would be listed as a currency manipulator on the first day of his presidency.” Today, Trump is also promoting this kind of campaign political platform, and the two are exactly the same.
For example, in terms of domestic affairs, like Trump today, Romney proposed an energy independence plan. He believed that the United States should develop alternative energy sources and reduce its dependence on foreign oil resources, and proposed that the United States should achieve energy independence by 2020. He advocated reducing government intervention and regulation of enterprises, reducing taxes on enterprises and the rich, reducing government deficits, and reducing government social spending. He advocated the abolition of Obama’s health care reform plan, believing that it was a “disaster” for the US economy. He said that the problem in the United States is that it needs “more and more jobs” and that tax cuts should be given to companies instead of tax increases: “If I am elected president, I will implement a plan to create 12 million new jobs.”
As we all know, Trump’s anti-immigration stance is an important factor in his victory in the election. An important campaign strategy of Trump and the far-right conservative Republican Party behind him is to fabricate theories and incite public opinion, claiming that the culprit for the decline in ordinary people’s income is due to competition from lower-level foreign immigrants and people of color. In 2012, Romney also participated in the election with a clear anti-immigration tendency. Romney not only chose Ryan, a congressman from Wisconsin who is known for his tough anti-immigration, as his running mate, but also supported Arizona’s anti-immigration law. Romney also announced that strict employment laws should be adopted to prevent illegal immigrants from finding jobs, making their lives miserable and forcing them to “leave the country on their own.” Of course, this is slightly milder than Trump’s claim of forced deportation.
It can be said that Trump is more extreme and tougher than Romney in many ways, but their basic political ideas and campaign strategies are exactly the same. From Romney to Trump, the trajectory of the Republican Party and the entire United States moving towards extreme right-wing conservatism is clearly visible.
Some Chinese public opinion claims that Trump is just a pragmatic businessman, as if he has no class, political and ideological attributes. Therefore, as long as China and Trump do a good job in business negotiations and transactions, Sino-US relations will be more harmonious and smooth. In fact, comparing the two campaign platforms of Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016, it can be clearly seen that the ideas conveyed by Trump in the campaign are not the personal propositions of this political outsider, but the long-term and elaborate design of the entire Republican far-right conservative political forces and the military, oil and financial consortiums behind them to cope with the new political and economic situation. Without the strong support of the Republican far-right conservative forces and the consortiums behind them, Trump would not have been elected president. What China needs to deal with in the future is not the so-called political outsider Trump, but the more extreme right-wing American ruling class.
2. The American conservative and racist conglomerates behind Trump’s successful campaign.
In contrast to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Tea Party movement has received strong support from American conglomerates and American power institutions: the Tea Party’s opposition to excessive government intervention in the economy coincides with the conglomerates’ advocacy. Therefore, the movement has received behind-the-scenes support from many conglomerates. Billionaire David Koch brothers and real estate tycoon Trump have provided a lot of financial support for the Tea Party movement. Fox TV and The Wall Street Journal, owned by news tycoon Murdoch, have become active disseminators of the Tea Party movement. Fox TV also hired former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as its news commentator at the time.
Trump, a real estate tycoon, was one of the main financiers of the Tea Party movement eight years ago. The other financier is the David Koch brothers, the oil tycoons and the richest men in the United States after Bill Gates and Buffett. According to the famous American magazine The New Yorker, the American Rongchang Fund under the David Koch brothers has been a close partner of the Tea Party since the beginning of the activities. The father of the David Koch brothers, the oil oligarch Fred Koch, was one of the organizers of the extreme right-wing organization “John Birch Society” during the Cold War in the United States. This organization has a strong white racist color and fanatically believes in and promotes the neoliberal free market theory of Hayek and the Austrian school. Its core concept is to oppose communism. They believe that violence should be used to fight against communism represented by the Soviet Union. Whether it is the American civil rights movement that pursues racial equality or the social welfare system that eases class contradictions, they are all communist ideas and should be strongly opposed. In their view, the US federal government and the Democratic Party that inherited Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Cold War have been infiltrated by communists, and the entire United States is facing a red threat. Left-wing observers such as Noam Chomsky believe that the Tea Party is equivalent to an early fascism that threatens to bring together all right-wing demagogues.
The Koch brothers’ political spokesperson is Mike Pence, the main leader of the Tea Party, the third-ranking figure in the Republican Party, and the chairman of the House Republican Conference. Pence’s views are completely consistent with those of the Koch brothers and the Tea Party. They advocate Hayek’s market fundamentalism theory and oppose labor unions, big government, and welfare society. In order to attract the support of ordinary Americans, Pence made extensive use of religious cloaks and often quoted the Bible in his speeches in Congress. In 2009, with the support of the Koch brothers, Pence changed the original political landscape with the help of the Tea Party movement, quickly improved his political status in the party, and became the chairman of the House Republican Conference. On November 9, 2016, Pence became the new vice president of the United States, which means that the Koch brothers and the top Republicans have completely joined forces with Trump.
Coincidentally, since Trump was the main funder of the Tea Party movement, he received strong support from the Tea Party as soon as he entered the campaign. As early as 2015, Tea Party Queen and former vice presidential candidate Palin praised Trump as a “hero.” On January 19, 2016, Palin strongly supported Trump at a campaign event held at Iowa State University, calling him “a leader who can make America great again!”
As for the Tea Party movement, even American scholar Francis Fukuyama had to admit in January 2012: “In the United States, although the Tea Party is good at anti-elitism rhetoric, its members vote for conservative politicians who are loyal to the interests of the financiers and business operators they claim to despise.”
After the 2016 election, Trump and the Tea Party eventually formed a government composed entirely of conservative politicians and wealthy people.
3. The American racist tradition and Trump’s campaign strategy.
The 2016 US election tells us that when the working class has not yet been organized by the Marxist-Leninist parties to form a self-class, as a self-class, they will be attracted by various political organizations and ideologies. As Martin Jacques observed: “The working class does not belong to anyone. Contrary to the wishful thinking of the left, the working class is an expression of political variables, and its political inclination is unpredictable.” Since Reagan successfully ran for president by inciting the racist and religious emotions of the lower white class, the Republican Party has been using this strategy in every election. Therefore, although its economic policies are beneficial to the wealthy class, a large number of lower-class voters choose the Republican Party because of racial and religious factors.
In the 2016 election, Trump made many racist remarks, such as stopping all Muslims from entering the United States and that most Mexican immigrants are “drug dealers” and “rapists”, which caused great controversy on the one hand, but also achieved great success on the other. The target group in Trump’s campaign was mainly the lower-class white workers in the United States. His approach was to use Romney’s campaign strategy in 2012 more frequently and intensively, attributing the decline in workers’ income to immigrants and ethnic minorities, which successfully incited an unprecedented wave of white racism in the United States.
The racist label that Trump has been labeled with is inevitable, and it is not just the dirty water from his competitors. Behind Trump, Pence, and the Tea Party movement stands the Koch family, which funded the racist organization “John Birch Club” during the Cold War. This determines that the Tea Party movement and Trump’s political force will never be able to get rid of racism.
Hamilton and other founding fathers of the United States have frankly stated in the Federalist Papers that the fundamental purpose of the social system and mainstream ideology designed by the founding fathers of the United States for the United States is to make the proletariat and the working people “divided into so many parts” and to make the “unity of the proletariat, if not impossible, extremely unlikely”. This method “can be used as an example of the Federal Republic of the United States”. Racism has always been a powerful weapon used to divide the proletariat and the working people in American history.
The United States is a colonialist country. The genocide of Indians and slave plantations are the two main cornerstones of the founding of the United States and the realization of primitive accumulation of land and capital. It was in the process of slaughtering Indians and exploiting black people through slavery that the Anglo-Saxon whites in the United States, whether elites or poor, formed a unified interest group. This tradition has been maintained to this day and is still an important tool to induce the white working class to support American monopoly capital.
There are a large number of working class and petty bourgeoisie members in the Tea Party movement and among Trump supporters, but why do they fanatically support the wealthy Trump? One important reason is that they are organized by right-wing racism, nationalism, and even Christian thinking patterns. In American history, the phenomenon of the working class supporting those blatant political agents of the wealthy class is not uncommon. One important reason is that they are greatly divided in elections due to religious factors, moral and ethical factors, and racial factors, and then they are greatly divided on the most critical economic issues.
Trump and the Tea Party movement have two strategies: one is to incite the “middle class” (historically high-income working class and petty bourgeoisie) to fight the “lower class” (people of color, immigrants, the extremely poor, and workers from third world countries), making the lower-class people of color, immigrants, and third world workers in the United States the scapegoats of American monopoly capital.
The other is to sacrifice the car to save the driver. The Tea Party movement and Trump’s advocacy of free capitalism would have brought benefits to all classes, but the free capitalism of the United States has been corrupted by state interventionism and socialism and turned into crony capitalism, where the interests of taxpayers are divided up by a few crony companies and the lazy lower classes. Trump’s working-class supporters have been indoctrinated with the idea that the Anglo-Saxon whites in the United States are the backbone and elite of American society, and that Trump and the top American billionaires behind him (such as the Koch family, the Simons family, etc.) are the elites among the American elites. They represent the spirit of American free enterprise and the national interests of the United States, represent the traditional values of the United States and the West, and represent the right direction to save the country.
2. The Trump Administration Marks the End of the Cold War Dividend
Why has the Trump phenomenon emerged in the United States today at a time when the country is facing internal economic crisis and acute class contradictions?
On November 9 last year, the night Trump was elected, Alain Badiou, one of the most important philosophers in the world today, pointed out in a speech at the University of California that Western political oligarchs are gradually losing control of the capitalist machine, that is, reality. Faced with the ubiquitous crisis, all traditional governments have only the method of neglecting the fundamentals and pursuing the superficial. This has caused a lot of frustration, misunderstanding, and anger among people, and even caused meaningless rebellions. Under such circumstances, many people have turned to false innovations, absurd fantasies, and even returned to dead traditions in the dark.
Roosevelt’s New Deal brought the United States into a special period during the Cold War. Within the United States, the trend of polarization was curbed. When dealing with external relations, the imperialist characteristics of the United States were different from those of the old colonial era before World War II. Due to the confrontation between the two major camps of socialism and capitalism, especially with the failure of the Korean War and the Vietnam War, we saw a Cold War-style peace. After the end of World War II until the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the international situation gradually eased, and finally “peace and development became the theme of the times.” There are two reasons for this: First, the strength of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, the vigorous development of the national liberation movement, and the failure of the Korean and Vietnam Wars have relatively curbed the military and economic power of American imperialism. Second, class contradictions in the United States have been eased to a certain extent, and foreign aggression has shifted domestic contradictions. Therefore, the United States pays more attention to maintaining its alliance with Japan and Western Europe by moderate means. It tends to be conservative in using force to invade and threaten backward countries, and is more willing to try to compete with the Soviet Union for the world through soft wars and ideological control, and promote a new colonial order around the world.
In the more than 20 years since the end of the Cold War after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the whole world is still enjoying the previous “Cold War dividend” or “socialist peace dividend”. Although the socialist camp has collapsed, the military and industrial strength of countries such as China and Russia are no longer the same as in the imperialist era before World War I. Therefore, the whole world did not immediately return to the imperialist era before and after World War I because of the end of the Cold War. However, due to the ebb tide of the socialist movement, in some key areas where the influence of China and Russia is relatively weak, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and other regions, we have seen naked imperialist invasions by the United States and the West. In other words, the whole world has returned to the imperialist order of the 19th century in some parts and to some extent.
The intensity of the Kosovo War launched by NATO under the leadership of the Clinton administration was lower than that of the first Gulf War launched by George H.W. Bush, but the Afghanistan War and Iraq War launched by George W. Bush marked the trend of the U.S. foreign policy returning from neo-colonialism to old colonialism and old imperialism. In the more than 20 years since the end of the Cold War, the United States is still digesting the “legacy of the Cold War”. If it had successfully implemented the grand strategy of conquering and dismembering a few disobedient countries, the whole world might have returned to a state similar to the old imperialism and old colonialism of the 19th century.
The 2016 US election, in which Trump came to power, indicates that class contradictions in the United States have become the core issue of American politics. Although Trump is an agent of American monopoly capital, he will still partially fulfill his promise after taking office: on the premise of stubbornly maintaining and expanding the interests of monopoly capital, Trump will try to exploit, blackmail and plunder the Third World, follow the old path of old colonialism and imperialism, and let the Third World working people subsidize American workers to ease the crisis in the United States. According to Trump’s actions in the past few months since he took office, the United States is clearly strengthening centralization, inciting racism and nationalism, and significantly increasing military spending… A series of signs show that the trend of “returning to the ancestors” and “last gasp” in the United States is more obvious. The American working class, whose interests were severely damaged in the neoliberal era pioneered by Reagan, was confused by Trump, who incited racism, nationalism and xenophobia, introduced by American monopoly capital in the 2016 election.
The rise of the far-right conservative Trump administration heralds the arrival of the cold winter of American capitalism. Whether the American capitalist system will perish or move towards another spring in this process will depend on the development of socialist forces around the world.