Wayne O'Leary

The Two Populisms

Donald Trump has evidently made it his life’s mission, in the name of “America first,” to weaken the post-World War II international order and disrupt all institutions that in any way contribute to its maintenance. A recent case in point was his stupid assertion that the European Union (EU) is America’s economic “foe,” deliberately created to oppose the US on trade and damage our economy — a Continent-wide plot to competitively undercut America’s place in the world.

The Donald, who knows nothing about history and couldn’t care less, is blissfully unaware of the EU’s original twin purposes, which were (1) to form a unified postwar democratic bulwark in Europe against expansive Soviet Communism and (2) to replace the destructive, bellicose state nationalisms of the 1930s with peaceful and mutually beneficial economic cooperation among member nations, thereby forestalling any repeat of the late European conflict. Attitudes toward America were never part of the equation.

But ignorance has never stopped Donald Trump, and so he’s providing inspiration and moral support to the forces in Europe (called “populist”) that are rending its fabric in the name of anti-globalism. His encouragement is selective, however; it’s given only to the disrupters of the political right, whose anti-global critique borders on fascism. There is a whole other branch of reformist populism challenging Europe’s establishment from the political left that expresses the truer meaning of the word, which harkens back to anti-corporate movements of the 1930s and earlier in North America.

In actuality, the media-defined populist challenge transcends Europe and is, in its various strains, worldwide in scope — existing everywhere that economic globalization supported by centrist government has dominated for a generation and is now under siege. It was resurgent in American politics in 2016, and its respective “left” and “right” manifestations are alive and well in the current Democratic and Republican parties. Elsewhere, populist governments of the left have just assumed power in Mexico, Iceland and New Zealand, while populist movements of the right have recently triumphed in Chile, Columbia, Slovenia, Denmark, and the Czech Republic.

For the moment, Europe is the center of the drama, and there’s no getting around the fact that the Continent’s version of populism has assumed a decidedly rightward tilt. Greece under the intrepid Alexis Tsipras is resisting the trend, as are Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Slovakia and Lithuania. The UK, meanwhile, appears poised to move leftward following its first post-Brexit election.

Elsewhere, however, slavish imitations of Trumpism are increasingly the rule among Europe’s official or unofficial leaders, most prominently Orbán in Hungary, Kaczyski in Poland, Salvini (who’s channeling Mussolini) in Italy, Kurz in Austria, and Babiš in the Czech Republic. Even where centrist parties remain in charge, as in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, right-wing populists are only a step away from power.

The populist revolt, whether from left or right, is an understandable reaction to what has happened to an obviously flawed EU since it reached maturity in the wake of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Under Maastricht, which established a common currency (the euro), a “flexible” labor policy based on open borders for employment, and stringent fiscal rules applied to member states, economic sovereignty has diminished.

The authority to set individual national interest rates no longer exists; neither does the authority to employ deficit stimulus spending, establish capital controls, or devalue currency. Those powers have been transferred to Brussels, Belgium, the seat of the EU, which has made austerity its policy of choice as world economic conditions have deteriorated.

This all transpired in conjunction with the rise of multinational corporations and the spread of economic globalization over the past generation. The multinationals now call the tune, and the co-opted EU responds to their desires and priorities. If they bring about financial panics or recessions by generating market chaos, as in 2008, individual nation states in the EU can’t effectively counteract the effects, especially the poorer, indebted ones along the Continent’s southern rim (Greece, Spain, Italy). Add in the Middle East migration crisis of 2015 and after, and you have a perfect storm.

The question then becomes how to respond. The populist right has one answer, an unenlightened and destructive one borrowed from their transatlantic Trumpian role model: lash out, attack existing establishments indiscriminately, and destroy (rather than reform) institutions of government. In the process, look for racial or ethnic scapegoats, appeal to xenophobic nationalism and religious conservatism, and reject democratic institutions in favor of authoritarianism.

This approach is especially prevalent in Eastern Europe among the former Soviet satellites, not long removed from Communism and lacking strong traditions of representative government. There, the favored Blackshirt tactics include undermining a free press and the rule of law, crippling the judicial system, interfering with open elections and the independent civil service, and opposing all immigration in the name of cultural purity. Hungary’s strongman Victor Orbán, a leading practitioner and unabashed Trump admirer, proudly calls this “illiberal democracy.”

But there’s another, more hopeful response, slower to develop, which is gaining momentum within the populist left. The best example is what is taking shape in Great Britain, where a progressive alternative to the disruptions of corporate-led globalization and austerity politics began germinating long before the Maastricht Treaty or Donald Trump or the disintegration of the EU, which Britain left last year. It dates, in fact, to the original maven of austerity, Margaret Thatcher, in the 1980s.

Years of grinding fiscal belt-tightening and budget cutting, begun by Thatcher and carried forward by successive governments, especially since 2010, have finally reached the critical stage. In reaction, the left-wing shadow Labour government of Jeremy Corbyn, expected to take office shortly, intends to address Britain’s slow-bleed austerity crisis with a program of “moral economics” calculated to reverse the perceived spiritual and moral decline brought about by contemporary unfettered capitalism.

Labour’s plan includes the expected: constraining finance, undoing austerity policies, raising corporate taxes, increasing public investment, and targeting chronic unemployment and excessive deregulation. It includes as well the unexpected: reversing decades of failed privatization (of water, gas, electricity, and railroads) with selective municipal socialism and instituting a system of worker-owned and -managed private-sector cooperatives.

Corbyn’s Labourites consider their post-Keynesian approach a “democratization” of the economy aimed at rescuing it from the ghost of Thatcherism. If it works, populism at large can be simultaneously rescued from the fascistic forces that have lately hijacked its good name.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2018

Populist.com