The rise of the right

In the US, Donald Trump remains among the least popular presidents in modern history. Given the buoyant state of the US economy, at least relative to the widespread misery of the prior decade, this unpopularity reinforces the political disillusion reflected in the 2016 election results. Only Jimmy Carter, who engineered a vicious recession in the midst of a colonial rebellion in Iran, was less popular than Mr Trump at this point in his tenure.

This makes ongoing assurances that the US is in the midst of a fascist insurgency led by Mr Trump perplexing. There seems little doubt that he (Trump) would be comfortable were such an insurgency to arise. But the available evidence only supports that conclusion when it is parsed using dubious methods. In fact, the establishment data supports conclusions decidedly inconvenient for the neoliberal left.

The other major players in the ‘rise of a global right’ storyline – Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Viktor Orban in Hungary – have mixed results in terms of their ongoing political support. Only Mr Duterte has anything approaching majority popular approval for his policies. Left widely unconsidered is how this political consolidation by ‘strongmen’ mirrors economic consolidation in Western economies.

In the US, neoliberal framing of the rise of Mr Trump – that his election represents a reactionary response to Barack Obama’s liberalism and race – follows a similar argument used to explain the rise of a reactionary right during Bill Clinton’s first term. As argued below, in both instances ideology was put forward by political reporters to describe events that more closely fit social responses to economic dispossession.

The recently merged worldviews of American liberals, the radical left, the establishment press and the CIA, NSA and FBI vis-à-vis the ideological roots of current political discontent, emerged from the neoliberal project launched shortly after WWII. A central goal then was to dissociate American capitalism and the Great Depression from the rise of European fascism. In fact, the rise of European fascism ties directly to American history, capitalism and the Great Depression.

In the US, the early-mid 1990s saw a rapid rise in the number of right-wing militia groups. This is claimed by political reporters to share cause with the rise in racist hate groups that began with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The movement in the 1990s culminated with the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, killed 168 people and injured around 700 more.

The popular explanation for the rise in militias was of a reactionary response to then president Bill Clinton’s liberalism. In fact, Mr Clinton won election on a liberal platform. But like Barack Obama, he governed from the neoliberal right from the day he entered office. Nevertheless, the ideological dividing line posed by political reporters was Mr Clinton’s liberalism versus the conservatism of the Reagan / (George HW) Bush years.

The data only superficially supports the hypothesis of a reactionary response to presidential politics. In both cases the number of white supremacist and / or militia groups rose in the first term, and then followed economic recovery lower in the second. Were ideological opposition the motivating factor for the rise, there is no obvious reason why it would reverse in both men’s second terms. What did change was the state of the economy.

Although Mr Clinton remained president until 2000, the militia groups experienced a rapid decline from 1995 forward. In fact, in 1995 the US job market began to recover, with finance and finance-dependent companies boosting hiring for the first time since 1989. The dot-com bust of the early 2000s was brutal for stock issuing corporations, but it didn’t result in mass layoffs that persisted. The next recession that did, the so-called Great Recession, began in 2007.

To flog the proverbial dead horse here, the labor market recession that led to Mr Clinton’s electoral victory in 1992 was caused by the S&L crisis – by bank looting and over-leverage. It was the first ‘modern’ recession in the sense that 1) it was caused by finance and 2) it led to a very long period of labor market weakness. The next recession of this type was the Great Recession.

With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the number of militia groups once again began to rise. When Mr Obama entered office, unemployment was increasing, and millions of people were losing their homes to foreclosure. Mr Obama made his primary focus restoring banker bonuses and ‘smoothing the runway’ with foreclosure prevention programs whose purpose was to slow home foreclosures to manageable levels for the benefit of bankers.

Following a milquetoast stimulus bill loaded with Republican devices like tax cuts, Mr Obama quickly shifted his political energy to cutting public spending. As unemployment reached a bit over 17 percent, Mr Obama was working with Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare. The first hint of popular rebellion was the 2010 mid-term election when Republicans took control of the House and Senate away from Democrats.

During this back-and-forth the number of militia groups grew rapidly. When economic decline slowed and then began to reverse, so did the number of militia groups. When economic growth slowed again in 2015 – 2016, the number of militia groups again rose. In fact, in the two modern labor market recessions caused by excessive growth in private debt – 1989–1995 and 2007–2016 – the growth and decline of militia and racist groups closely followed the state of the overall economy.

Enter Donald Trump, who launched his 2016 presidential as a caricature of the European fascist leaders of the early-mid twentieth century. His racist and xenophobic slanders combined with a populist critique of neoliberal economic policies: 1) would have put Democrats on the defensive if they had knowledge of what he was talking about; and 2) enticed liberals and an erstwhile political left to recreate neoliberal explanations of the rise of European fascism.

Excerpted from: The Rise of the ‘Rise of the Global Right’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org