In particular, the United States has been seen as the migratory goal of a very large percentage of the world’s population. This was once largely true. In the period that ran roughly from 1945 to 1970, the United States was the hegemonic power in the world-system in which life was indeed better economically and socially for its inhabitants.

And while the frontiers for immigrants were not exactly open, those migrants who managed to arrive in one way or another were by and large content with what they regarded as their good fortune. And others from the countries of origin of the successful immigrants kept trying to follow in their footsteps. In this period, there was very little emigration from the United States other than on a temporary basis to take very well-paying employment as economic, political, or military mercenaries.

This golden era of U.S. dominance of the world-system began to come undone circa 1970 and has been unraveling ever since, and increasingly. What are the signs of this? There are many, some of them within the United States itself and some of them in changing attitudes of the rest of the world towards the United States.

In the United States, we are now living through a presidential campaign that almost everyone speaks of as unusual and transformational. There are a very large number of voters who have been mobilizing against the “Establishment,” many of them entering the voting process for the first time. In the Republican primary process, Donald J. Trump has built his search for the nomination precisely on riding the wave of such discontent, indeed by fanning the discontent. He seems to have succeeded, despite all the efforts of what might be thought of as “traditional” Republicans.

In the Democratic Party, the story is similar but not identical. A previously obscure Senator, Bernie Sanders, has been able to ride a discontent verbalized on a more left-wing rhetoric and, as of June 2016, has been conducting a very impressive campaign against the one-time supposedly unchallengeable candidature of Hillary Clinton. While it doesn’t seem he will get the nomination, he has forced Clinton (and the Democratic Party) much further left than seemed possible a few short months ago. And Sanders did this without ever having stood for election before as a Democrat.

But, you may think, all this will calm down, once the presidential election is decided, and “normal” centrist political judgments will prevail again. There are many who predict this. But what then will be the reaction of those who very vocally supported their candidates precisely because they were not advocating “normal” centrist policies? What if they are disillusioned with their current champions?

We need to look at another of the changes in the United States. The New York Times ran a long front-page article on May 23 about gun violence, which it called “unending but unheard.” The article was not about the well-reported massive gun shootings that we call massacres and that are considered shocking. Instead, the article pursues shootings that the police tend to call “incidents” and never get into newspapers. It describes one such incident in detail, and calls it “a snapshot of a different source of mass violence – one that erupts with such anesthetic regularity that it is rendered almost invisible, except to the mostly black victims, survivors and attackers.” And the numbers are going up.

As these “unending but unheard” deaths by violence go up, the possibility that they may go beyond the confines of Black ghettos to non-Black zones in which many of the disillusioned are located is not so far-fetched. After all, the disillusioned are right about one thing. Life in the United States is not as good as it once was. Trump has used as his slogan “make America great again.” The “again” refers to the golden era. And Sanders also seems to refer to a previously golden era in which jobs were not exported to the global South. Even Clinton now seems to look back at something lost.

And that is not to forget an even fiercer sort of violence – that propagated by a still very small band of deeply anti-state militias, who call themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom (CCF). They are the ones that have been defying the government’s closure of some land for their cattle or indeed for their usage. The CCF people say the government has no rights and is acting unconstitutionally.

The problem is that both the federal and local governments are unsure what to do. They “negotiate” for fear that asserting their authority will not be popular. But when the negotiations fail, the government finally uses its force. This more extreme version of action may soon spread. It is not a question of moving to the right but of moving towards more violent protest, towards a civil war.

All this time, the United States has been truly losing its authority in the rest of the world. It is indeed no longer hegemonic. The protestors and their candidates have been noting this but consider it reversible, which it is not. The United States is now considered a weak and unsure global partner.

This is not merely the view of states that have strongly opposed U.S. policies in the past, such as Russia, China, and Iran. It has now become true of presumably close allies, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, and Canada. On a worldwide scale, the feeling about the “reliability” of the U.S. in the geopolitical arena has moved from nearly 100% during the golden era to somewhere far, far lower. And it increases daily.

As it becomes less “safe” to live in the United States, look for a steady increase in emigration. It is not that other parts of the world are safe – just safer. It is not that the standard of living elsewhere is so high, but it has now become higher in many parts of the global North.

Not everyone can emigrate of course. There is a question of cost and a question of accessibility to other countries. Undoubtedly, the first group that may increase their emigration will be the most privileged sectors. But, as this comes to be noticed, the angers of the more middle-class “disillusioned” will grow. And growing, their reactions may take a more violent turn. And this more violent turn will feed back onto itself, increasing the angers.

Can nothing alleviate the attitudes about the transformation of the United States? If we were to stop trying to make America great again and start trying to make the world a better place for everyone, we could be part of the movement for “another world.” Changing the whole world would in fact transform the United States, but only if we stop longing to go back to a golden era, which was not so golden for most of the world.

What is really at issue here? Is this a constitutional coup as Pres. Rousseff has called it repeatedly? Or is this a legitimate act of holding the president responsible for grave misdeeds by her and members of her cabinet and advisors, as the “opposition” claims? If the latter, why is this occurring only now and not, say, in Rousseff’s first term as president before she was easily re-elected in 2015 by a significant margin?

Rousseff is a member of the Partido dos Trabalhores (PT) that has been long led by her predecessor in office, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula). One way to view these events is to see it as part of the story of the PT – its coming to power and now, quite probably, its ouster from power.

What is the PT, and what has it represented in Brazilian politics? The PT was founded in 1980 as a party opposed to the military dictatorship that had ruled Brazil since the coup of 1964. It was a socialist, anti-imperialist party, bringing together Marxist groups, large civil associations like the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement or MST), and Catholic movements of the liberation theology persuasion.

From the point of view both of the military and of the traditional Establishment parties in Brazil, the PT was a dangerous revolutionary party, which threatened the conservative economic and social structures of the country. The United States viewed its “anti-imperialism” as directed primarily at the U.S. dominant role in Latin American politics, which indeed it was.

The PT however did not seek power through guerrilla insurrection but rather through parliamentary elections, sustained and supported by extra-parliamentary demonstrations. It took four presidential elections to bring finally a PT candidate, Lula, to office in 2003. The Brazilian Establishment never expected this would actually happen and never accepted that it could possibly continue. They have devoted their energies ever since to bringing the PT down. They may have gotten their way in 2016. Historians in the future may look upon the period 2003-2016 as the fifteen-year PT interlude.

What in fact has happened in this interlude? The PT in office was something far less radical than the opponents of the PT feared, but still radical enough to have made them relentless in their desire to destroy the PT, not merely as the holders of the presidential office but as a movement with a legitimate place in Brazilian politics.

If the PT was able to come to electoral power in 2003, it was because of the combination of the growing attractiveness of its program and its rhetoric and the declining geopolitical strength of the United States. And what did the PT do with its time in office? On the one hand it sought to succor the poorest strata of Brazil through a redistributive program known as the Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program that included the Bolsa familia (Family Allowance), which did indeed improve their income level and reduce the enormous inequalities from which Brazil suffered.

In addition, Brazil’s foreign policy under the PT marked a significant shift away from Brazil’s historic subservience to U.S. geopolitical imperatives. Brazil took the lead in creating autonomous Latin American structures that included Cuba and excluded the United States and Canada.

On the other hand, Brazil’s macroeconomic policies remained quite orthodox from the point of view of neoliberal emphases on market orientations of governmental policies. And the PT’s multiple promises to prevent environmental destruction were never seriously implemented. Nor did the PT ever carry out its promises of agrarian reform.

In short, its performance as a left movement was a mixed bag. As a result, groups within the party and in its larger political alliances were constantly defecting. This resulted in the weakened position that made it possible in 2015 for the enemies of the PT to implement a plan to destroy it.

The scenario was simple. It centered on charges of corruption. Corruption has been massive and endemic in Brazilian politics, and important figures of the PT itself were by no means exempt from the practice. The one person not subject to such charges was Dilma Rousseff. What then to do? The person who took the lead in the impeachment process, President of the Chamber of Deputies Eduardo Cunha (and an Evangelical Christian) was himself removed from office because he is being indicted for corruption. No matter! The process proceeded on the basis that Dilma Rousseff failed in her responsibility to contain the corruption. This led Boaventura dos Santos Sousa to summarize the situation as one in which the one honest politician was being ousted by the most corrupt.

Rousseff has been suspended from office and her Vice-President Michel Temer has assumed office as Interim President, immediately appointing a far-right cabinet. It seems almost certain that Rousseff will be impeached and removed permanently from office. She is not the real target. The real target is Lula. Under Brazilian law, no president can have more than two successive terms. It has been everyone’s expectation that Lula would be the PT candidate again in 2019.

Lula has been Brazil’s most popular politician for a long time now. And while his popularity has been somewhat tarnished by the corruption scandal, he seems to remain sufficiently popular that he would win the election. So the right forces will try now to have him actually charged with corruption and therefore ineligible to run.

What will happen then? No one is sure. The rightwing politicians will fight among themselves for the presidency. The army may decide once again to take power. What seems sure is that the PT is finished. The PT sought to exercise its power as a centrist government, balancing its program. But the serious budget deficit and the decline of world prices for oil and other Brazilian exports has disillusioned a large swatch of its voters. As in many other countries today, massive discontent leads to a rejection of normal centrist politics.

What a successor movement of the PT might do would be to return to its roots as a consistently left anti-imperialist movement. This will be no more easy than it was for the PT in 1980. The difference between 1980 and now is the degree to which the modern world-system is in structural crisis. The struggle is worldwide and the Brazilian left can either play a major role in it or slip into global irrelevance and national misery.

Spain, like governments in west European parliamentary systems, has long had two main parties: the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and the social-democratic PSOE. They have been alternating in parliamentary majorities since the end of the Franco regime and sometimes they formed a coalition government. As in most such systems, other parties were essentially insignificant by-standers that could get at most a few concessions for their political objectives.

The last elections in Spain changed everything. A new party, Podemos (We Can), which had grown out of the oppositional street movement, the Indignados, emerged with a substantial number of elected deputies on an anti-austerity platform. This program was primarily aimed at the PP, the party in power, and its leader, Mariano Rajoy, which had been an unrelenting supporter of the neoliberal program imposed by outside lenders on the government.

There was a second new party that emerged with a smaller but still significant number of deputies. Its name was Ciudadanos (Citizens). It campaigned against the PP as well, but on the grounds of corruption, and espoused a centrist program.

The king initially asked the PP, as the party with the largest number of elected deputies (but with a smaller number than previously when it had had an outright majority) to try to form a government. After a short while, Rajoy recognized that none of the three other parties was willing to join in a government with the PP and informed the king that he was unable to form a government with a parliamentary majority.

The king then turned to the PSOE as the party with the second-largest number of deputies (but also with a smaller number than previously) to try to form a government. The leader of the PSOE, Pedro Sanchez, sought to create a coalition of PSOE, Podemos, and Ciudadanos whose combined votes were enough to create a majority. He acquired the agreement of Ciudadanos, but Podemos was not at all ready to join such a coalition.

The leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, posed three conditions for entering a PSOE-led government. Number one was the appointment of Iglesias as deputy prime minister along with four key cabinet posts forPodemos deputies. Number two was support for a referendum on independence in Catalonia. And number three was the exclusion of Ciudadanos on the grounds that they were strongly opposed to holding such a referendum and supported the PP’s hard line on such referenda.

The PSOE rejected all three conditions, essentially because they were close to Ciudadanos on its positions, and saw the demands of Podemos as a move to replace it soon thereafter as the second, if not the first, party in parliament. In the face of the firm no of the PSOE, Podemos had to decide whether to vote for the PSOE government even if not a member or to vote against it. The question really was whether Podemos as a movement would seek power through parliament or through street action.

Iglesias was in favor of the first but knew he risked being ousted within his own party if he used his majority among the Podemos deputies to give passive support to a PSOE government. So he threw the question to the individual members of Podemos in an internal referendum, and the vote came out as a literal tie. Iglesias then announced that Podemos would vote against the PSOE proposal in its second try. The king, having made May 2 as a deadline for the whole process, called for a new election.

There were three side battles going on at the same time. One concerned Izquierda Unida (United Left or IU) and its relation with Podemos. IU was a coalition of Marxist and Green parties that had been active in theIndignados movement, within which it tended to clash with the more populist groups that later became Podemos. At a local level, IU had been ready to form coalitions with the PSOE. But now they have indicated that they might join forces with Podemos in the next parliamentary elections, which would strengthen the chances of Podemos.

The second was occurring within Catalonia. There were two main coalitions in the regional elections that favored a referendum. One was the politically centrist Junts pel Si (United for the Yes-vote), led by the outgoing regional president Artur Mas. The other was a left coalition called Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP). The CUP made as a condition of its support to Junts in the regional parliament that Artur Mas step down, which he finally did. A compromise candidate was a little-known Carlos Puigdemont whose party was part of the Junts grouping. He promised to hold the referendum within eighteen months, thus forcing a showdown with the Spanish government, or at least with the PP and the PSOE, both considering such a referendum illegal.

The third side event by accidental timing was the developments in the Basque country.  For decades there has been a movement ETA seeking independence by armed conflict. There was always a party sympathetic to ETA which sought to operate legally. The Spanish government regularly outlawed such parties. The leader of one of them, Arnaldo Otegi, just at this moment finished a term in prison and was released. He is the head of Sortu, the latest version of a party operating legally. He was received as a hero in the Basque country, to the dismay of the Spanish government.

Otegi indicated that ETA might agree to end its armed uprising if there was some indication of willingness by the Spanish government to accede to a Basque autonomous government. He said somewhat bitterly that the PP and Rajoy had not been willing to move an inch. Of course, to the PP, Basque autonomy was even worse than Catalonian autonomy. And concessions now could feed support in Catalonia for the independence referendum. The PSOE was further embarrassed by this development.

So what may we conclude? Three things, possibly. The first is a question about the possibility of real success of populist anti-austerity movements. Podemos in many ways had modeled itself on Greece’s Syriza, and the difficulties the latter has been having has raised questions in Spain and elsewhere as to the consequences of such a movement, pursuing a parliamentary path.

The second is whether it is really possible for states to resist decentralizing pressures of ethno-national movements. For example, in Great Britain today, as it debates British withdrawal from the European Union, everyone is aware of the consequences of so-called Brexit for Scotland’s movement for further decentralization and eventual independence.

And thirdly, is there any way that any government is able to maintain an anti-austerity policy in the middle run, amidst the pressures that reduced government real revenues are imposing on states throughout the world?

Spain is in economic terms far more important for Europe and the world than Greece. As this drama plays out in Spain, the world will be watching, reacting, and drawing lessons.

In Peru on April 10, 2016, the leading candidate was Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the notorious former president Alberto Fujimori, presently imprisoned for human rights abuses. Definitive figures are not yet issued, but it seems she has about 40% of the votes. Second place was won by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski with probably 21%. Third place was occupied by Veronika Mendoza with about 19%.

What does this mean? A report by Reuters on the elections had a headline that summarized the views of most commentators: “Two pro-business candidates make Peru runoff.” The descriptive adjectives the media have been using about the three are “conservative” and “populist” for Fujimori, “center-right” for Kuczynski (who is a former World Bank economist), and “leftist” for Mendoza.

There seems virtually no difference between the two candidates in the runoff as far as priority to the so-called free market is concerned, and the stock market rewarded these commitments by an immediate jump after the first round. Their difference resides largely in Kuczynski’s more centrist views on social questions plus the fears that Fujimori arouses because of memories of her father’s authoritarian regime.

Turn the clock five years back to the previous election and the descriptive adjectives are quite different. The two candidates on the second round are again Fujimori (whose labels were the same) and Ollanta Humala who was said to be “left-leaning.” This label for him derives from the fact that, in still earlier times, he was endorsed by Hugo Chavez and seemed to many achavista.

Humala himself was sensitive to this charge and quite ostentatiously avowed being closer to Lula and the PT in Brazil than to Chavez. The truly conservative candidate Mario Vargas Llosa said that choosing between Fujimori and Humala was a choice between “AIDS and terminal cancer.” Nonetheless, he reluctantly endorsed Humala in the second round, deeming Fujimori the worst possible president.

Humala won the election very narrowly and promptly began moving to the right, opening Peru still further to the free market. He betrayed most of his promises, although he did make some improvements in the situation of the indigenous populations of Peru. In the current elections, Humala endorsed no one but certainly did not support Mendoza.

Flash back to 2006 and the descriptions are again different. It was a three-way race between Lourdes Flores Nano, said to be “conservative,” Humala described as a “staunch populist” and Alan Garcia who had been president previously (1985-1990) and who was the candidate of APRA (a party with long left-wing roots) and described in 2006 as “center-left.” Unlike 2016 where the second round is said to be a struggle between the populist right and the center-right, that of 2006 was said to be a struggle between the populist left and the center-left. Garcia won and again, once in office, moved steadily to the right.

Once again, go back to the previous election, that of 2002. It was witnessed by outside observers including Jimmy Carter and was said to be fair. It was won by Alejandro Toledo, a conservative but not a populist. The voters for third place center-right candidate Lourdes Flores seemed to throw their votes to Toledo rather than to Garcia.

That election took place after a long turmoil in Peru. In the 1980s in Peru, there were two guerilla uprisings of considerable severity. One was that of Sendero Luminoso, a self-proclaimed Maoist movement that succeeded in controlling various rural areas. It was led by Abimael Guzmán, previously a university professor in philosophy. Sendero used extreme violence against whomever they defined as being part of the political elites of Peru. The second movement, Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) was somewhat less violent and identified itself more with Cuba’s regime.

The struggle of the Peruvian government against these movements consumed their energies in the 1980s. In 1985, Alan Garcia of APRA was elected president. He was then a young star, and from APRA. He won the election easily against a “left” candidate, and received widespread endorsement throughout the world. Initially the economy took a positive upturn. But then he ran into difficulty both from the limits of his economic policies and the summit of guerilla strength. He went from a 90% popular approval level to 10-15%.

This was the context for the 1990 elections between Vargas Llosa running on a platform of neoliberal economics and the then obscure candidate of a populist and moderate coalition Fujimori, who was supposed to be unelectable. To great surprise, he won, and then to greater surprise he dissolved parliament in 1992 and undertook a vigorous and successful attempt to crush the guerilla movements, capturing the head of Sendero.

By 2001 he was so unpopular that he was threatened with impeachment. He escaped to Japan where he resumed his citizenship there. He was tried and convicted in absentia. In 1995, he went to Chile, assuming he would be safe there. But Chile extradited him to Peru, and he was then imprisoned, where he still is today.

All of this occurred in the context of one of the most radical regimes in recent Latin American history. On October 3, 1968, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, then Commander of the Armed Forces, led a bloodless coup against the then president Fernando Belaunde. Belaunde’s regime was beset by a scandal involving licenses to oil fields in northern Peru. Upon seizing power President of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces, Velasco promptly nationalized the oil fields in question, to great internal applause.

Velasco pursued a program called Peruanismo and was considered “left-leaning.” In foreign policy, Velasco pulled away from ties to the United States and drew close to Cuba. Relations with Pinochet’s Chile were very strained. He undertook land reform and nationalized a number of industries. In reality however these economic efforts were not a great success. The agrarian and the fishing sectors ran into difficulty and the government ran into great debt. Inflation became hyperinflation and in 1975 there was a further military coup and Velasco was deposed.

And further back in Peru’s history there was the founding of APRA by José Carlos Mariategui in the 1920s as a Marxist movement committed to the rights of the indigenous communities. This radical program was miles apart from the program of his 1980s successor as head of APRA, Alan Garcia.

What we see in the continuing drama of Peruvian politics is that every time a so-called left or left-leaning government came to power, the regime soon thereafter moved to the right. Given Peru’s size, location, and economic importance, this has made Peru a prime battleground of Latin American politics. The story of each country has its particularities. But Peru’s history seems to embody the difficulties for the Latin American left. Why left regimes move rightward has long been a matter of debate in Latin America and throughout the world. But it has not been a matter of reunification and compromise among the left forces. In the coming decade, eyes will continue to be focused on the Peruvian left’s evolution in the worldwide struggle of the global left during the structural crisis of the modern world-system.

But there is something happening that needs to be explained. It is not Trumpism, but Anti-Trumpism. The explanations of Trumpism are virtually endless. No one could have missed them. I do not wish to discuss what accounts for Trumpism – both the level of his support and the fact that he seems to be a Teflon candidate. Every time he does something outrageous and receives criticism for it, the outcome seems to be that his poll numbers rise further just because of the criticism.

What is not discussed very much is the phenomenon of what I shall call Anti-Trumpism. It is of course normal that there are those who oppose the choice of a particular candidate. What is unusual and needs a closer look is why the opposition seems to take on an almost hysterical tone, in which there is a suggestion that the election of Trump would transform the world (or at least the United States) fundamentally and permanently.

There is a group of lifelong Republicans who say that the candidacy and actions of Donald Trump so offend their moral sensibilities that they could not under any circumstance vote for him. Were he the chosen candidate of the Republican convention, they would be forced to do something else than vote Republican. This means for some supporting a putative new ticket labeled Independent Republicans, for others abstention from voting for anyone, and for still others even voting for Hillary Clinton.

This group is possibly quite small, although it includes some very prominent conservative Republicans such as many associated with National Review, for a long time the principal journal speaking for neo-Conservatives. This group sees a Trump candidacy as a disaster for the Republican Party, one that could prove long-lasting.

There is a much larger group who say that everything conceivable must be done to prevent Trump from receiving the nomination. They too see a Trump candidacy as a disaster. This group emphasizes less the moral shame of a Trump candidacy and more the impact it would have both on the election of a Republican president in 2016 and on the ability of Republican candidates to win Senatorial seats in a number of closely contested elections, and therefore the majority in the Senate.

These persons are largely to be found in the so-called Establishment mainstream of the Republican Party. Like the morally repelled, this group also thinks that a Trump candidacy would have a long-lasting negative impact on the Republican Party, primarily by changing its internal structures and personnel in key positions. This group is divided into those who are supporting Ted Cruz as an acceptable, if less than perfect, alternative, and those (a smaller group) who support John Kasich. Cruz is of course more consistently far to the right than Trump but he is much more predictable.

Why then the hysteria? I think it is clearly that Donald Trump is truly a candidate who is not under the control of the so-called Establishment, which does not know what he would really do, were he the president. For example, at the moment, there is much debate and concern about the choice of a replacement for Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. Who knows who Trump would select, and whose advice (if anyone’s) he would solicit? That would not be true of any other person chosen as Republican candidate.

When these critics say that Trump as candidate would transform the Republican Party into something quite different from what it has been up to now, they are probably right. What is however most unlikely is that he would pursue a Tea Party agenda.

Look at all the hints he has thrown out about his actual agenda. He does not intend to send troops on the ground anywhere. He does not intend to support so-called free trade treaties. He does not intend to revoke the diplomatic opening to Cuba or the agreement with Iran. He is for a bi-state solution in Israel/Palestine. He will not change Social Security. He is not terribly concerned about issues like abortion. His latest outrage about punishing those who have abortions, and the swiftness with which he recanted when he saw the negative reaction his remarks evoked is actually further evidence about how little he cares about the subject. And perhaps most important of all, he is open to increasing taxes on the truly wealthy. Close your eyes for a moment and he sounds suspiciously like Hillary Clinton.

There is of course a real distinction to make between Trump and Clinton. The biggest difference is Trump’s unceasing use of anti-Muslim rhetoric, whereas Hillary Clinton is building her strategy around appealing not only to women but to non-White populations. The second difference is that Trump centers his discourse around the issue of immigration, which appeals in particular to the so-called Reagan Democrats, who are largely White and older voters, either unemployed or in great fear of becoming unemployed.

There is a third difference. Whenever a journalist or even a supporter challenges him on one of these hints, he tries immediately to change the subject or silence the challenger. Or if he doesn’t succeed, he backtracks on his hinted agenda. He wants the nomination desperately. Therefore he is very inconsistent and very pragmatic. But this is precisely what worries the Establishment. They don’t know what he will really do as president.

So, anti-Trumpism has indeed a rational foundation. But can it succeed? It seems at the moment most unlikely that Trump will fail to have the necessary majority of votes for the Republican nomination. What then will happen in the elections? Whether Trump as candidate will alienate enough traditional Republican voters to lose his campaign against the Democratic candidate and those of Republican senators in ten states or so, or rather attract more new voters to the Republican tickets as he claims, is yet to be seen.

But is a Trump candidacy an irrevocable catastrophe for the United States and/or for the Republican Party? This seems to me a great exaggeration, however you feel about Trump.

There is an underlying theme in this litany of pessimism (or is it optimism?). Europeans – both the sophisticated and the “ignorant” – have become impervious to rational arguments. They are almost all acting irrationally, responding to their emotions and not to reflective analyses. But is this so, Charlie Brown? It makes for a good comic strip, but does that mean the EU will actually cease to exist?

I am not here giving my views about whether the EU is good or bad, should or should not be supported or undermined. Rather, I wish to analyze what I think will actually happen. Will the institutions that now make up the European Union continue to exist ten or twenty years from now? I suspect they will. To see why I think so, let us review together what may make Europeans – both the sophisticated and the “ignorant” – hesitate about taking the fatal step of dismantling what they have been working so hard to create for the last seventy years or so. There are some reasons that one might call economic, others that are geopolitical, and finally still others that might be called cultural.

Let us begin with the economy. The situation in terms of current income, both for the states and for most individuals, is bad everywhere in the EU. The question is whether dismantling Europe would be likely to improve it, or in fact make it worse.

One subject of constant debate is the Eurozone – will it survive? Take for example what happened in Greece in the two 2015 elections there. Alexei Tsipras, the leader of the now-governing party Syriza, was elected in the first election on an anti-austerity platform. He then, in negotiating with the EU for a further loan, retreated on just about everything he had promised the Greek voters. He agreed to measures demanded by the EU that severely hurt the real income of the majority of the population. For this, he was denounced for betraying his promises by left forces within Syriza who withdrew from the party and established their own list. Yet in the next election called very swiftly by Tsipras, he received the mandate again. The Greek voters chose him rather than the left forces within Syriza.

It seems clear, at least to me, that the Greek voters paid no attention to the left denunciations because above all they did not want to leave the Eurozone. Tsipras had made maintaining the euro a priority and the left forces sought instead to resume an autonomous currency. Apparently, the Greek voters believed that the very real negatives of being in the Eurozone were, in their view, less than the probable greater negatives of recreating the drachma.

The situation is roughly the same concerning the so-called safety net features that European governments had installed, such as pensions and unemployment benefits. Virtually all the countries in the EU have been cutting the safety net back for lack of funds. These cuts have been resisted, sometimes successfully, by left or left-of-center parties. But is there any reason to suppose that, were the European Union to disappear tomorrow, these governments would have more funds to distribute? The left parties often say so, condemning what they see as the neoliberal pressures of the EU bureaucracy in Brussels. But look around the world. Can you point to governments not under the purview of Brussels that have been able to increase welfare-state expenditures?

If there is no real advantage in terms of real income levels in dismantling the EU, are there other reasons to do it? The EU has played an important geopolitical role since its inception, and has been growing steadily in membership. The United States has been publicly supporting the rise and expansion of the EU but actually trying to undermine it. The United States has seen the EU as a major geopolitical danger. It is obvious to most observers that the EU’s geopolitical strength is the result of numbers. A dismantlement would end this strength and reduce the separate European states to no practical importance geopolitically.

In the end, most European leaders and movements understand this. However much some of them rail against the EU as a structure, are they ready in fact to yield the advantages that a large singular entity gives them? Rightwing groups, especially in eastern Europe, see the EU as one pressure on the United States to offer them military protection against a putatively aggressive Russia. Leftwing groups in other countries, such as France, use the strength of the EU to contain what they think are putatively aggressive actions by the United States. What would either of these groups gain by the dismantlement of the EU?

Finally, there are the so-called cultural links between the United States and Europe. They are publicly proclaimed and more quietly disdained as a remnant of U.S. hegemonic dominance in the first twenty-five years after 1945. Once again there are varying motivations. The left parties and movements want to use their unified structure as a mode of regaining the cultural autonomy (even superiority) they felt they had before 1945. The rightwing forces want to use their strength to insist upon their cultural autonomy on so-called human rights questions. Once again, in union there is strength.

What I see happening is more and more rhetoric and less and less real action. For good or bad, my sense is that the institutions of the EU will survive. This does not mean they won’t change. There is, and will continue to be, a real political struggle within the EU about the kind of collective institution it ought to be. This intra-European political struggle is one part of a worldwide struggle about the kind of world we wish to build as an outcome to the structural crisis of the modern world-system.

The resulting policy was one that reduced the level of taxation radically on the wealthiest sectors of the population and thereby increased the income gap between this wealthiest sector and the rest of the population. Firms, especially large firms, were able to increase their profit levels by reducing and/or outsourcing jobs.

The justification offered by its proponents was that this policy would in time recreate the jobs that had been lost and that there would be some trickle-down effect of the increased value that would be created by allowing the “market” to prevail. Of course, allowing the market to prevail in fact necessitated political action at the level of the states. The so-called market was never a force independent of politics. But this elementary truth was sedulously unnoticed or, if ever discussed, ferociously denied.

Is that day over? Is there what a recent article in Le Monde called a “timid” return by Establishment institutions to concern about sustaining demand? There are at least two signs of this, both of considerable weight. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had long been the strongest pillar of neoliberal ideology, imposing its requirements on all governments that sought loans from it. However, in a memo released on Feb. 24, 2016, the IMF worried openly about how anemic world demand had become. It urged that finance ministers of the G-20 move beyond monetary policies to encourage investments rather than savings in order to sustain demand by creating jobs. This was quite a turn-around for the IMF.

At about the very same time (February 18), the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a second major pillar of neoliberal ideology, released a memo that announced a similar turn-around. It said that it was urgent to engage “collectively” in actions that would sustain world demand.

So, my question, is reality creeping in? Well, yes, if only timidly. The fact is that, worldwide, the promised “growth” in value-added production has failed to occur. Of course, the decline is uneven. China is still “growing,” if at a much reduced pace, one that threatens to decline even further. The United States still seems to be “growing,” largely because the dollar still seems the relatively safest place for governments and the wealthy to park their money. But deflation seems to have become the dominant reality of most of Europe and most of the so-called emerging economies of the global South.

We are all now in a waiting game. Will the timid moves recommended by the IMF and the OECD stanch the reality of declining world demand? Will the dollar be able to resist a further loss of confidence in its ability to be a stable repository of value? Or are we moving toward a further, much more severe, wild swing in the so-called market, with all the political consequences this will undoubtedly entail?

Declining world demand is the direct consequence of declining world employment. In the past 200, even 500 years, every time there has been some technological change that did away with jobs in some productive sector, this was resisted by the workers who were losing out. The resistants engaged in so-called Luddite demands to maintain the previous technology.

Politically, Luddite resistance has always proved to be unsuccessful. Establishment forces always said that new jobs would be created to replace those lost, and growth would be renewed. They were right. New jobs were indeed created – but not among so-called blue-collar workers. Rather the new jobs were in so-called white-collar jobs. As a result, over the longer run, the world-economy saw a reduction of worldwide blue-collar jobs and a significant rise in the percentage of white-collar workers.

It was always assumed that white-collar jobs were exempt from elimination. These jobs presumably required a human interacting with other humans. It was thought that there were no machines that could replace the human worker. Well, this is no longer so.

There has been a great technological advance that permits machines to engage in calculations of enormous amounts of data hitherto the domain of lower-level financial advisors. Indeed, these machines can calculate data that it would take many lifetimes of an individual to calculate. The result is that these machines are in the process of eliminating the job positions of such lower-level “white-collar” jobs. To be sure, this has not yet affected what might be called the higher-level or supervisory positions. But one can see where the wind is blowing.

When “white-collar” positions were eliminated or reduced in number, they were indeed replaced by new “white-collar” positions. When, however, today, “white-collar” positions disappear, where is the container of new jobs to be created? And if they cannot be located, the overall effect is to diminish severely effective demand.

Effective demand however is the sine qua non of capitalism as an historical system. Without effective demand, there can be no capital accumulation. This is the reality that seems to be creeping in. There is no surprise then that concern is being expressed. It is not likely however that the “timid” attempts to deal with this new reality can in fact make a difference. The structural crisis of our system is in full bloom. The big question is not how to repair the system but with what to replace it.

Whether those who form a nation give rise to the creation of a state or a state creates the category of a nation and thereby rights within the state is a long-standing debate. Myself, I believe that states create nations and not the reverse.

The issue however is why states create nations, and what should be the attitude of the “left” to the concept of the nation. For some on the left, the concept of the nation is the great equalizer. It is an assertion that everyone (or almost everyone) has the right to full and equal participation in the decision-making of the state, as opposed to the rights of only a minority (for example, the aristocracy) to full participation. Today, we often call this a Jacobin view of the nation.

Jacobinism gives rise to the category of a citizen. Persons are citizens by birthright and not because they have a particular “ethnic” origin or a particular religion or any other characteristic that is attributed to them, either by themselves or by others. Citizens have votes (as of a certain age). Each citizen has one vote. All citizens are therefore equal before the law.

According to this perception of citizenship, it is crucial to consider all citizens as individuals. It is crucial to suppress the idea that there are groups who might be intermediaries between the individual and the state. Indeed, as an even more rigid view of the nation might suggest, it is illegitimate for such other groups to exist: all citizens must use the language of the nation and no other; no religious group can have its own institutions; no customs other than those of the nation may be celebrated.

In practice, of course, people are part of many, many groups that constantly assert their demands of participation and loyalty on the part of their members. In practice, too, and often under the guise of equal treatment to all individuals, there are innumerable ways in which the equal rights of all citizens can be abridged.

The idea of citizenship can get to be defined primarily as the suffrage. And there are multiple limitations on access to the suffrage. The most obvious and numerically important one is sex. Suffrage was limited by law to men. It was often limited by income, a minimum income being required to vote. It was often limited by race, by religion, or by how many ancestor generations had been resident in the state. The net result was that what was originally conceived as a great equalizer did not in fact embrace everyone or even a majority of persons. It often embraced a rather small group.

For Jacobins who thought of themselves as the left, the solution was to fight for expansion of the suffrage. And over time, this effort bore some fruit. The suffrage did indeed get extended to more and more persons. Somehow, however, this did not achieve the objective of making all citizens, all members of the nation, equal in access to the supposed benefits of citizenship – education, health services, employment.

Given this reality of continued inequalities, there arose a counter-Jacobin view of the left. The counter-Jacobin view saw the nation not as the great equalizer, but as the great mesmerizer. The solution was not to struggle to suppress other groups but to encourage all groups to assert their value as modes of living and modes of self-consciousness. Feminists insisted that not only should women obtain the suffrage but that women had the right to their own organizations and their own consciousness. As did communities of racial and ethnic groups, so-called minorities.

The result has come to be that the left has no single view of the nation. Quite the contrary! The left is torn between ever more deeply opposing visions of the nation. Today we see this occurring in many different forms. One has been the exploding character of demands linked to gender, the social construction of what had once been thought of as genetic phenomena. But once we’re engaged in social construction, there is no obvious limit to the rights of subcategories, already defined or yet to come into social existence.

If gender is exploding, so is indigeneity. Indigeneity is also a social construction. It refers to the rights of those who lived in a certain physical area earlier than others (“migrants”). Pushed far enough, every single person is a migrant. Discussed reasonably, there are today significant social groups who do see themselves as living in groups that are significantly different from those who exercise power in the state and who wish to continue to maintain their communities in their principal existing modes of living rather than lose these rights in these boundaries because the nation asserts the rights of a nation.

One last ambiguity. Is it left to be internationalist, one-worldist, or is it left to be nationalist against the intrusion of powerful world forces? Is it left to be for the abolition of all frontiers or for the reinforcement of frontiers? Is it class-conscious to oppose nationalism or to support national resistance to imperialism?

One could take the easy way out of this debate by suggesting that the answer varies from place to place, moment to moment, situation to situation. But this is precisely the problem. The global left finds it very difficult to confront the issues directly and come up with a reasoned, politically meaningful attitude toward the concept of the nation. Since nationalism is arguably the strongest emotional commitment of the world’s peoples today, the failure of the global left to enter into a collective internal debate in a solidary manner undermines the ability of the global left to be a principal actor today on the world scene.

The French Revolution bequeathed us with a concept intended to be the great equalizer. Did it bequeath us all with a poison pill that may destroy the global left and therefore the great equalizer? An intellectual, moral, and political reunification of the global left is very urgent. It will require a good deal more of a sense of give and take than the principal actors have been showing. Still, there is no serious alternative.

Sanders however persisted in his seemingly utopian quest. To the surprise of most observers, the size of his audiences at meetings throughout the country began to grow steadily. His essential tactic was to attack the large corporations. He said that they used their money to control political decisions and to quash debate about the growing gap between the very top earners and the vast majority of the American people who were losing real income and jobs. To emphasize his position, Sanders refused to take money from large donors at the top and raised his money only from individuals donating small amounts.

In doing this, Sanders touched a deep vein of popular discontent, not only among those at the very bottom of the income ladder but from the so-called middle class who feared they were being thrust down into the bottom stratum. Today, polls show that Sanders has gained sufficient support that he seems to represent a serious opponent to Clinton.

Sanders has his limitations, especially the fact that his appeal to racial and ethnic minorities seems to be limited. But he has succeeded in forcing public discussion of the income gap. He has pushed Clinton’s rhetoric to the left in her attempt to recuperate potential Sanders voters. Whatever the final outcome of the Democratic Party’s convention, Sanders has achieved far more than almost everyone predicted at the outset of his campaign. He has, at the very least, forced a serious debate about program within the Democratic Party.

In January of 2016, there seems to have begun a parallel campaign in France. It is similar in many ways to that of Sanders but yet it is also quite different because of the structures of the electoral institutions of the two countries.

Three left intellectuals decided to launch a public appeal for a left primary (primaire à gauche). They are Yannick Jadot, a long-time political activist in environmentalist groups; Daniel Cohn-Bendit, of 1968 fame but for a long time a political activist seeking to unite environmentalists, left socialists, and pro-European forces; and Michel Wieviorka, a sociologist who had been an advisor to left figures in the Socialist Party.

They wrote a public appeal denouncing passivity before the rightward trend of politics in France, including of course the growing electoral strength of the Front National. They called for a serious public debate about how to unite the left and left-of-center forces to affect the presidential elections expected in 2017. Before making public the appeal, the originators sought endorsements from well-known public intellectuals of multiple political stripes, including Thomas Piketty and Pierre Rosanvallon. And they persuaded Libération, France’s largest left-of-center newspaper, to devote an entire issue on January 11, 2016 to both the appeal and the multiple endorsements.

Two weeks later, on January 26, Libération devoted another issue to this appeal. By this time, 70,000 persons had signed the appeal. This issue contained articles by multiple public figures on what they saw as the primary issues to pursue and how best to pursue them. A lot of the debate centers on what is the function of a primary. The whole concept of a primary is an import from U.S. elections and is itself a response to the very unexpected results of the French presidential elections of 2002.

In the rules currently governing French presidential elections, unless one candidate receives a majority of the votes, there is a second round in which only the top two first-round candidates are on the ballot. The assumption had been that the first round was a sort of primary in which every political tendency would show its strength. It was assumed that in the second round the two main parties (center-right and center-left) would be the choice for the voters.

In 2002, however, the candidate of the far-right Front National edged out the Socialist Party. The choice for voters was now between the Front National and that of the mainstream right-of-center party. Faced with this choice, the Socialist Party then endorsed the center-right candidate for the second round, allowing him to win overwhelmingly. What had happened was simple. The left and center-left candidates were too many in the first round and this kept the Socialist Party from gaining enough votes to make it into the second round.

The impact of the 2002 elections was traumatic for the French left. The old system was designed for a situation in which there are two main parties. It doesn’t work for a tripartite situation. To keep from repeating this defeat, the Socialist Party decided in 2011 to hold a party primary that was “open” to anyone. This primary was successful in that it kept most, albeit not all, candidates on the left from presenting themselves directly in the first round since they now could present themselves in the Socialist Party’s primary. The openness of the primary led to many centrist voters entering this primary. This made it possible for François Hollande to be victorious over a more left candidate in the Socialist primary. Hollande went on in the second round to defeat the right candidate, President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Now however that Hollande is president, the last thing he wants is a primary that he might lose. On the other hand, he has been losing support within the Socialist Party from segment after segment of more left figures who have been resigning or have been ousted from their positions in the cabinet. He risks the entry of more names on the first round, which might lead to a repetition of what happened in 2002. At the same time, Sarkozy is also faced with a strong demand for a primary within his party, a primary that he is by no means assured of winning.

The problem in both main parties is that they are each divided internally on multiple real issues. For the Socialists and left forces, there is the division between neoliberal versus “welfare state” programs. There is the cleavage on how one defines laïcité – in absolute terms or allowing for cultural identity. And there is the cleavage on whether to strengthen or weaken European institutions. Finally, there is the now hot issue of so-called déchéance de nationalité in which it is proposed that persons who are French citizens by birth may be stripped of their French nationality if convicted of anything defined as aiding terrorism. This was a proposition previously of the right and had been strongly opposed by the Socialist Party. There is much unrest in the party about this reversal of position, which was a response to the vicious attack by the Islamic State on November 13 that transformed public sentiment considerably.

Hollande is now running as the candidate with the conservative position on all these issues. He hopes to win by being the candidate who is fighting terrorism, and therefore deserves the support of centrist individuals. It is this Hollande that the appeal to left forces is trying to force into a public debate.

The parallel with Sanders is that the French group may be tapping into the same popular discontent that Sanders has used to make his bid. The difference is that they are fighting an incumbent president who is ready to use every conceivable pressure to force discipline on party members. We shall know perhaps six months from now whether the French group can be as successful as Sanders.

While both sides seem to pull back before a direct military confrontation, there is warfare in Syria and Yemen that is carried out by groups said to be proxies for the Saudis and the Iranians. Those fighting on the scene in Syria and Yemen do not seem to be encouraging anyone to act as quasi-neutral mediators. The groups in both Syria and Yemen are so deeply distrustful of each other that they seem to regard mediation as unviable. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to give priority to any strategy that combats effectively the still widespread strength of the Islamic State, which the United States (and others) have proclaimed as priority number one.

Our memories tend to be so short-lived that we have forgotten entirely that Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran were once close geopolitical collaborators. It was not so long ago.

We need not go back to the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 when Iran gave the new state crucial diplomatic recognition, leading to Saudi Arabia’s widespread acceptance in the community of sovereign states. The more interesting period is that of the 1960’s. When the world’s oil distributors suddenly and unilaterally reduced the prices they were ready to pay for crude oil, the government of (pre-Chavez) Venezuela suggested to the government of (pre-Ayatollah) Iran that they meet together, inviting also Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, to see if there weren’t some steps to counter this attack on their national income. They were very angry and blamed both the major banks and oil distributors (the so-called Seven Sisters) and the U.S. government, which they saw as supporting the banks, if not actually instigating their decisions.

A meeting did take place in Vienna from September 10-14, 1960. The five states founded the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). They invited other states to join OPEC. Over time, others did: Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Indonesia, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Gabon (which later withdrew).

At first, OPEC was merely a locus for discussion and exchange of information. When, however, Israel defeated a number of Arab states in the so-called Yom Kippur War in 1973, with the crucial and overt support of the United States, OPEC declared a global oil boycott. It was proposed by Saudi Arabia and Iran. The idea of militant action by OPEC had been proposed previously by more “radical” OPEC members. But until 1973, it did not have support either from Saudi Arabia or from Iran. These two states had been considered the states closest at the time to the United States. Their joint shift in position marked a major turning-point in the history of OPEC.

But notice the central geopolitical fact. Saudi Arabia and Iran were collaborating directly. There was no talk of millennial Sunni-Shiite rivalry. Instead, they were collaborating. And it worked. There followed a major rise in the world oil price, which benefited both Saudi Arabia and Iran.

In 1974, the meeting of the OPEC oil ministers in Vienna was invaded by supporters of Palestinian movements led by “Carlos the Jackal.” He threatened to shoot many, especially the Iranian Oil Minister. The story of how the hostages were finally released and for what price has never been really clear. There is however one crucial detail. Somebody paid ransom for the Iranian Oil Minister. Analysts have come to believe that the Saudi government did it on behalf of their Iranian colleague. Strange behavior if one believes that the two governments were motivated only by religious discord.

One final curious moment. In March 2007, there was a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The KSA government explicitly invited Iran to send someone to attend. The then President Ahmadinejad of Iran, considered at the time the Iranian leader most vocally and unconditionally opposed to any links with the Western world, accepted the invitation. He was met at the airport by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, a great gesture. Abdullah hailed the arrival of “brotherly nations.” The meeting came to naught, but once again indicated that geopolitical relations were not governed exclusively by religious criteria.

Why was OPEC able to achieve the boycott and the world oil price rise in 1973 and then again in 1979? What was different then from today in the Middle East? Two things mainly. The United States was still in 1973 what it is no longer in 2016, the decisive and geopolitically deciding nation. In the end everyone had to accommodate to the wishes of the United States, more or less.

On the other hand, U.S. geopolitical power brought with it pressures. When it gave its imprimatur to the Israelis in the Yom Kippur War, it needed immediately to balance this with some gesture in the other direction to appease at least Saudi Arabia, a crucial ally. There are many who think that the United States actually gave the go-ahead to Saudi Arabia and Iran to launch the boycott. Aside from appeasing them, it had the economic advantage to the United States of strengthening its hand in the trilateral competition among the United States, western Europe, and Japan.

Where are we then today? Saudi Arabia and Iran have collaborated closely in the past. It is not at all inconceivable that they may do so again in a relatively near future. The geopolitical turmoil is very great, and no analyst should eliminate any possible shift. Geopolitics may again trump religious differences. This is especially true because of the serious relative decline of U.S. clout in the region.