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598... Cet étonnant paragraphe suffira à situer le caractère peu ordinaire de l'article (*) que nous présentons :
« 8 mai 2017 – Le président américain Donald J. Trump et le Premier ministre britannique Boris Johnson ont envoyé aujourd’hui leurs félicitations à Marine Le Pen, du Front National français, pour son élection à la présidence de la République. Le Pen a battu de peu Alain Juppé, des Républicains, après que Juppé ait échoué à rassembler un soutien suffisant à la suite d’une primaire contre Nicolas Sarkozy qui a fracturé son parti. Le destin de Juppé ressemble à celui d’Hillary Clinton l’année dernière, quand nombre des jeunes électeurs de Bernie Sanders, son adversaires qui faisait campagne contre l’inégalité, refusèrent de la soutenir dans l’élection finale. Dans le discours pour son élection, Le Pen a annoncé qu’elle ouvrirait immédiatement des négociations pour modifier les conditions de l’adhésion de la France à l’Union Européenne, avant un référendum sur l’adhésion de la France à l’UE. Il y a moins d’un an, un référendum semblable fit sortir le Royaume-Uni de l’UE, conduisant Johnson à la direction du parti conservateur et à la fonction de premier ministre après la démission de David Cameroun... »
Ainsi commence l’article du 8 mars 2016 de Prospect.org, (site de The American Prospect, magazine de la gauche progressiste US) sous le titre de “Le Trumpisme, un phénomène transatlantique”. L’ironie est donc, – revenons à mars 2016, – dans ceci qu’au temps où un candidat incontestablement de tendance néo-isolationniste est bien placé dans la course à la présidence et bouleverse le monde politique US, jamais nous paraît-il des auteurs et commentateurs des USA n’ont autant considéré, dans la perspective neo-isolationniste ainsi ouverte, que les situations politiques française (et européennes) et américaine étaient aussi proches sinon similaires. La thèse de l’article est nette et claire, sinon évidente pour notre compte mais si peu réalisée par tant de commentateurs-Système, sans parler des directions-Système : Trump (et Sanders avec lui, certes) est une manifestation américaine (et non pas “américaniste”, dans ce cas) d’une dynamique transnationale qui se définit comme une résistance puissante et sans cesse en expansion contre la globalisation.
Ces termes ne nous sont pas habituels pour cette sorte de problème, mais l’on comprend bien que l’on parle de la même chose : la globalisation c’est le Système dans ce cas, et les résistances se constituent en forces antiSystème. L’intérêt de l’article, pour un média de cette sorte (The American Prospect), et un média de tendance progressiste, est bien entendu d’affirmer deux choses : 1) lier l’évènement central aux USA d’événements en cours ou en devenir en Europe, ce qui rompt avec une tradition d’ignorance, d’indifférence ou de dédain du monde politique US pour tout ce qui n’est pas USA ; 2) de considérer, disons sans malveillance sinon avec une certaine bienveillance de l'objectivité des mouvements, US et non-US, nettement étiquetés “de droite” et diabolisés comme tels par la pensée-Système, – et par la gauche européenne, et également pa celle qui se dit antiSystème comme on verra plus loin. Par exemple, pour les USA, le texte, comme on le voit, mêle directement ou indirectement les voix des électeurs de Sanders à ceux de Trump, ne serait-ce qu’en refusant de soutenir Clinton. Il serait effectivement temps de considérer les choses du point de vue le plus fondamental possible, et cesser de s’interroger sans fin alors qu’on se dit “modernes” sur tel ou tel mouvement à l’aune des événements des années 1930, ou de la pureté antiSystème de tel ou telle... Il existe aujourd’hui une dynamique furieuse, un “torrent diluvien” qui ne permettent plus de se perdre dans des considérations qui doivent impérativement être mises dans la case de l’inconnaissance.
Au reste, les gens de American Prospect, notamment par la plume (le 8 mars) de l’un de ses fondateurs, Robert Kuttner, situent au plus haut niveau possible de l’histoire des USA ce qui se passe en cette année 2016 : « L’année 2016 est en train de se constituer comme la plus sérieuse crise institutionnelle des USA depuis la Guerre Civile, – et le reclassement partisan le plus important depuis 1932, et peut-être même depuis 1860. » (« The 2016 election year is shaping up to be America's most serious constitutional crisis since the Civil War—and the most important partisan realignment since 1932 or maybe since 1860. ») Pour nous, le simple fait de cette identification et de cette classification de l’événement vous met dans la catégorie antiSystème.
Si nous les suivons, et c'est le cas, nous voyons donc la très grande Histoire, – la métahistoire, selon nous, – se faire sous nos yeux, littéralement au jour le jour et en Temps réel, alors que ce Temps ne cesse de se contracter et l’Histoire d’accélérer. De même, et pour répondre à Kuttner, on peut avancer l’hypothèse que les évènements en cours ou à venir très-vite en Europe (France-2017 ?) sont eux aussi d’une importance fondamentale. Il est d’ailleurs complètement évident, selon nous, – et c’est la thèse de l’article que nous citons ci-dessous, – que les uns et les autres s’influencent entre eux avec des effets multiples pour les uns et pour les autres, effectivement comme dans le cas d’une contre-globalisation, ou plus exactement selon notre arsenal dialectique, comme une globalisation de l’antiSystème.
Nous voyons donc cet événement exceptionnel, pour la première fois en deux siècles, – depuis le “déchaînement de la Matière”, – d’une mise en place d’une synchronisation historique, ou métahistorique certes, entre les grands évènements historiques des USA et les grands événements historiques d’Europe (et du Rest Of the World, qui ne peut rater cette occasion, Russie en tête bien entendu qui a été la première à distinguer et à saluer officiellement la dynamique que représente Trump). Jusqu’ici, les USA étaient hors de l’histoire du monde. (1860 et 1932, – la Guerre de Sécession et la Grande Dépression, – sont les deux dates fondamentales de l’histoire des USA, et ne sont pas des dates fondamentales pour l’Europe et le reste. Kuttner serait désormais tenté de placer à égalité 1860 et 2016, avec 1932 en deuxième position.) Aujourd’hui, en 2016, les USA entrent dans l’histoire du monde pour la grande mission métahistorique et eschatologique de l’achèvement de l’effondrement du Système. La globalisation, œuvre du Système, est arrivée à son terme, la surpuissance devenue désormais autodestruction.
Reste la triste position de la gauche antiSystème européenne, si la chose existe réellement, – ce qui n’est pas une question inutile... A cause d’un pan complètement affectiviste de sa position politique, – sa position vis-à-vis d’une immigration tendant, qu’on le veuille ou non, à l’absence totale de contrôle, – elle se trouve complètement en porte-à-faux, pour se retrouver aux côtés de l’UE et de la Commission, de Washington-Système, du FMI, du Corporate Power, de l’OTAN, de Soros & Cie, tous partisans de l’ouverture “sans-frontières” des frontières, de l’immigration massive, de la dilution de toutes les identités en une masse atteignant le seuil critique du paradis de l’entropisation, pour constituer un “marché unique” global. Cette gauche antiSystème affirme le principe de la souveraineté contre le Système ; comment peut-elle tenir cette position si elle combat, volontairement ou pas, directement ou indirectement, le principe de l’identité qui est nécessairement la poutre-maîtresse de la souveraineté ? A elle de voir, et de voir très vite parce que l’Histoire n’a jamais été aussi vite sous nos yeux, au rythme du système de la communication en surpuissance, jouant à plein de son effet-Janus.
Voici dont l’article de prospect.org du 8 mars 2016 de Charlotte Cavaillé, Noam Gidron et Peter A. Hall. Le titre (« Trumpism as a Transatlantic Phenomenon ») est accompagné du sous-titre : « Donald Trump's revolt against the forces of globalization has many echoes in Europe. »
(*) Merci à notre lecteur Perceval 78 pour avoir signalé cet article dans son quasi-florilège, quasi-quotidien, des articles de dedefensa.org
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MAY 8, 2017—American President Donald J. Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sent congratulations today to Marine Le Pen of the French National Front on her election to the Presidency of France. Le Pen narrowly beat Alain Juppé of the Républicains, after he failed to rally enough support in the wake of a divisive primary contest with former President Nicolas Sarkozy. Juppé’s fate resembled that of Hillary Clinton last year when many young supporters of Bernie Sanders, an opponent campaigning on the issue inequality, failed to turn out for her in the general election. In a victory speech, Le Pen announced that she would immediately open negotiations to alter the terms of France’s membership in the European Union to be followed by a referendum on French membership. Less than a year ago, a similar referendum took Britain out of the EU, bringing Johnson to the leadership of the Conservative Party after David Cameron’s resignation.
Of course, the preceding paragraph is imaginary and not entirely likely since it anticipates three events for each of which the odds are at best 50/50. But the fact that this scenario is no longer far-fetched is revealing about some of the larger forces behind the meteoric rise of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries. Moreover, these forces are not idiosyncratically American, as some might like to think, but transatlantic in their scope and import.
Many commentators see Trump as something like Frankenstein’s monster—the inadvertent creation of a Republican Party that has campaigned for many years against an intrusive federal government, immigration, and the Obama presidency, often in terms with racist undertones. On this view, Trump is simply playing a familiar tune con fuoco and drawing support because voters recognize in it an acknowledged anthem of the American political right.
There is undoubtedly some truth in this. But “the Donald” is also riding waves of socioeconomic and cultural change that have swept over many nations, buoyed by political strategies for which there are some important foreign parallels. His closest counterparts are the radical right parties of Europe, such as the National Front in France and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which campaign on platforms opposed to immigration, hostile to the European Union in its present form, and scornful of mainstream politicians as members of a political establishment.
Like Trump, all of these parties are a reaction against globalization—the master process of the past three decades that has seen large increases in flows of goods, people, and capital across national borders. Promoted almost monolithically by mainstream governments of the center left and right, globalization and technological change have been widely presented as the key to prosperity in the contemporary world. But there are winners and losers in this globalization game. As manufacturing jobs have moved offshore, the secure jobs with decent pay that many people grew up to expect have disappeared, leaving those with lower levels of education to hunt for low-paid, precarious positions in the service sector on which it is hard to support a family.
Whether or not the parties seeking their votes have any genuine solutions, these people have real grievances.
There is a saying “some people are paranoid; I by contrast have real enemies.” Whether or not the parties seeking their votes have any genuine solutions, these people have real grievances. In that respect, it is not surprising that Trump, like most of his radical right counterparts in Europe, secures a higher proportion of his votes from people with lower levels of education and higher levels of dissatisfaction with their financial circumstances than his competitors do, and especially high proportions from older white men who are most likely to have seen the jobs they once hoped for disappear. The exception to this rule is the French National Front, whose charismatic leader, Marine Le Pen, also attracts considerable numbers of votes from the young, perhaps because the youth unemployment rate in France is 25 percent.
These people ask, “What have recent governments done for me?” and the answer is generally “very little,” partly because it is difficult to create good jobs, especially for the low-skilled, amidst a technological revolution and globalized economy. But the problem is compounded by the limits of what has been tried. In most parts of Europe, governments of the center-left and center-right have converged over the past three decades on similar sets of policies that privilege market competition over state activism. In the context of a political establishment that looks a lot like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, elections do not seem to make a great deal of difference. Can it be any surprise that there is widespread resentment against that establishment?
In the U.S. we have not had that problem. Instead, the Republican and Democratic Parties have moved much farther apart. But, in the context of a congressional system, the result of this polarization has been gridlock—an equally potent source of resentment. Current polls suggest that voters who believe that people like them have no say in what the government does are 86 percent more likely to vote for Trump than those who feel otherwise. On both sides of the Atlantic, we are seeing a massive revolt against politics as usual.
Of course, there is also a cultural side to this revolt. Scholars of European politics find that support for the radical right is strongest among voters who hold what are often described as authoritarian values, which emphasize the importance of maintaining order and existing social boundaries relative to the goals of participation and self-realization favored by people with post-materialist values. And it turns out that authoritarian values also predict support for Donald Trump quite well. Moreover, age and education are closely related to these differences in values. Younger and more educated Americans embrace various kinds of diversity, for instance, more enthusiastically than older people or those with less education. There may be something to the observation of the anthropologist Margaret Mead that, as people age in times of socioeconomic change, they become strangers in their own land.
The focal point for this clash in values on both sides of the Atlantic has become immigration. To some extent, that is a response to real policy problems, exemplified by the dilemmas of the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe. But radical right parties were running against immigration long before the current crisis, presenting it as yet another undesirable dimension of globalization, threatening not only jobs but national identity. And it is the last part of this message that seems to have struck home in Europe since studies show that hostility to immigrants is often highest in regions where there is relatively little immigration.
Now that the threat of terrorism loosely linked to Islam has been added to the mix, in the wake of attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, this is a potent brew, strong enough to summon up fears for personal safety as well as for traditional ways of life. The results are visible not only in the 74 percent of voters in the Republican primary in South Carolina who agreed with Donald Trump that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, but also in the likelihood that the Alternative für Deutschland, a new party on the radical right, will gain an unprecedented share of the vote in regional elections in Germany this week.
In short, while there is much that is distinctive about Donald Trump, including the crudeness of his language and his claim to be able to make America great again, the circumstances that have given him a dominant hold on the Republican primaries are not uniquely American. His support reflects a revolt against the forces of globalization that has many echoes in Europe.
Trump is not simply riding a set of transnational socioeconomic waves. He is also steering his campaign in directions that have proved promising for radical right parties in Europe.
Moreover, Trump is not simply riding a set of transnational socioeconomic waves. He is also steering his campaign in directions that have proved promising for radical right parties in Europe. Those parties have always been hostile to immigrants and protective of what they imagine to be a traditional national culture, but two decades ago, they were also relatively conservative on economic issues, strongly supportive of lower taxes and leery about redistribution, much as the Republican Party has long been. This stance gave those parties a solid but small base among electorates accustomed to relatively generous European welfare states.
In recent years, however, seeing a chance to consolidate their support among working class voters, many of Europe’s radical right parties have moved to the left on redistributive issues. They have become more critical of inequality and more willing to countenance redistributive policies as long as benefits do not go to immigrants. By refusing to endorse an austerity budget, for instance, the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) precipitated the resignation of the prime minister in 2012; and radical right parties have been reaping benefits from such moves. They can now draw support from less-affluent voters who are attracted by anti-immigrant appeals but used to find the parties’ positions on economic issues uncongenial.
Much to the consternation of many Republicans, we see Mr. Trump making similar moves. His opposition to the favorable tax treatment of carried interest on which many hedge funds depend and his reluctance to propose sweeping reform of social security and some other benefit systems (other than the hated Obamacare) that have been mainstays of recent Republican policy reflect a well-judged effort to present himself as more centrist on economic issues than his primary opponents; and there is evidence that he is so perceived.
None of these considerations guarantee electoral success, of course. It may well be that Trump, Johnson, and Le Pen will all go down to defeat. But, before breathing a sigh of relief, even those who regard them as reprehensible should pause to consider the deeper implications of the economic and political developments on which current popularity of these politicians turns.
There have been parallel developments with some salient differences on the two continents. On both sides of the Atlantic, democratic governments have had difficulty delivering prosperity inclusive enough to encompass all citizens. In the U.S., rates of growth and employment have gradually improved in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, but policy regimes that sustain high levels of income inequality mean that most of the fruits of growth continue to go to the most affluent segments of the population. In most parts of Europe, economic growth has been slower and impeded by decisions of the European Union to privilege budgetary balance over growth.
As a consequence, concern is rising on both continents about the effectiveness and responsiveness of their democracies. Many Europeans feel that their fate is being determined by the European Union rather than national governments; and successive crises born of the euro and migration have called into question the capacity of the EU itself to respond to problems with timely or effective policies. In the U.S., a political system built on the separation of powers has ground to a halt in the face of partisan polarization in Congress and concerted attempts by the Republicans to block virtually all presidential initiatives. Not surprisingly, trust in the federal government is at historic lows.
In some respects, the victories of populist candidates on the political right and left can be seen as a natural response to such developments and a sign of the vibrancy of democracy. However, there is a paradox here. When anti-establishment parties get 15 percent or more of the vote in Europe, their success makes it more difficult for established parties to assemble coalition governments capable of decisive initiatives, thereby adding political dimensions to the diffuse sense of crisis permeating the continent. If “to govern is to choose,” as the French politician Pierre Mendès France once remarked, many European governments are finding it harder to do that. Whether the American government to be elected in November will find this task any easier also remains in doubt, given the likelihood of continuing divisions within Congress and between it and the president. In such circumstances, even President Trump may find it difficult to make America great again.
On balance, we should not let the mesmerizing reality show that the American primaries have become distract us from the underlying economic and political realities that call into question the effectiveness of democratic governance on both sides of the Atlantic. If governments cannot deliver inclusive economic growth or narratives of social solidarity rooted in something other than xenophobia, we may be living with the politics of discontent for many years to come.
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