From time immemorial, persons who feel oppressed and/or ignored by the powerful have resisted those in authority. Such resistance often changed things, but only sometimes. Whether one considers the cause of the resisters to be virtuous depends on one’s values and one’s priorities.
In the United States, over the past half-century, there emerged a latent resistance to what was seen as oppression by “elites” who enacted changes in social practices offensive to certain religious groups and ignored rural populations and persons whose standards of living were declining. At first, resistance took the path of withdrawal from social involvement. Then it took a more political form, finally taking on the name of Tea Party.
The Tea Party began to have some electoral successes. But it was dispersed and without a clear strategy. Donald Trump saw the problem and his opportunity. He offered himself as a unifying leader of this rightwing “populism” and catapulted the movement into political power.
What Trump understood is that there was no conflict between leading a movement against the so-called Establishment and seeking power in the state via the Republican Party. On the contrary, the only way he could achieve his maleficent objectives was to combine the two.
The fact that he succeeded in the world’s strongest military power heartened like-minded groups all across the world, who proceeded to pursue similar paths with steadily increasing numbers of adherents.
Trump’s success is still to this day not understood by the majority of leaders of both U.S. mainstream parties who search for signs that he will become what they call “presidential.” That is to say, they want him to abandon his role as the leader of a movement and confine himself to being the president and leader of a political party.
They seize upon any small sign that he will do this. When he softens his rhetoric for a moment (as he did in his February 28 speech to Congress), they do not understood that this is precisely the deceptive tactic of a movement leader. Instead, they feel encouraged or hopeful. But he will never give up his role as movement leader because the moment that he did this he would lose real power.
In the past year, faced with the reality of Trump’s success, a counter-movement has emerged in the United States (and elsewhere) that has taken on the name of Resist. The participants understood that the only thing that can possibly contain and eventually defeat Trumpism is a social movement that stands for different values and different priorities. This is the “why” of Resist. What is more difficult is the “how” of Resist.
The Resist movement has grown with remarkable rapidity into sometimes impressive enough that the mainstream press has begun to report its existence. This is the reason that Trump constantly inveighs against the press. Publicity nourishes a movement, and he is doing what he can do to crush the counter-movement.
The problem with Resist is that it is still at the stage where its many activities are dispersed and without a clear strategy or at least not a strategy they have yet adopted. Nor is there any unifying figure who is able at this point to do what Trump did with the Tea Party.
Resist has engaged in manifold different actions. They have held marches, challenged local congressional representatives in their public meetings, created sanctuaries for persons menaced with state-ordered expulsions, interfered with transport facilities, published denunciations, signed petitions, and created local collectivities that meet together both studying and deciding upon further local actions. Resist has been able to turn many ordinary persons into militants for the first time in their lives.
Resist however has a few dangers before it. More and more participants will be arrested and jailed. Being a militant is strenuous and after a while many people tire of it. And they need successes, little or big, to maintain their spirits. No one can guarantee that Resist will not fade away. It took the Tea Party decades before they got to where they are today. It may take Resist equally long.
What Resist as a movement needs to keep in mind is the fact that we are in the midst of a historic structural transition from the capitalist world-system in which we have lived for some 500 years to one of two successor systems – a non-capitalist system that preserves all of the worst features of capitalism (hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization) and its opposite, a system that is relatively democratic and egalitarian. I call this the struggle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre.
We are living in the chaotic, confusing situation of transition. This has two implications for our collective strategy. In the short run (say, up to three years), we must remember that we all live in the short run. We all wish to survive. We all need food and shelter. Any movement that hopes to flourish must help people survive by supporting anything that minimizes the pain of those who are suffering.
But in the middle run (say 20-40 years), minimizing the pain changes nothing. We need to concentrate on our struggle with those who represent the spirit of Davos. There is no compromise. There is no “reformed” version of capitalism that can be constructed.
So the “how” of Resist is clear. We need collectively more clarity about what is happening, more decisive moral choice, and more sagacious political strategies. This does not automatically come about. We have to construct the combination. We know that another world is possible, yes, but we must also be aware that it is not inevitable.
One year ago, the French 2017 presidential elections seemed very assured. There were three parties that mattered: the center-right Les Républicains (LR), the center-left Socialists (PS), and the far-right Front National (FN). Since in France there are normally two rounds with only two candidates permitted in the second round, the key question always is which of the three will be eliminated in the first round.
It seemed sure at the time that the FN would be in the second round, incarnating anti-Establishment sentiment. It seemed equally sure that President François Hollande, were he to seek re-election, would lose badly. This meant that the LR candidate would be in the second round. This would be especially true if LR chose Alain Juppé and not former President Nicolas Sarkozy. Most people thought that Juppé was far more likely than Sarkozy to attract Socialist and centrist voters and thereby more likely to win the presidency.
Hence the general view a year ago was that the Establishment parties would prevail and that Juppé would win. How wrong these expectations turned out to be. If Trump’s election in the United States and Brexit’s victory in the UK were unexpected, they pale beside the current unexpected situation in France. There are six plausible candidates for the presidential elections, and all of them (yes, all of them) claim to be anti-Establishment. Furthermore, which two of the six will be in the second round is, as of today, anyone’s guess. Between now and April 23, 2017, the first round of the presidential elections, the electorate seems extremely volatile.
Here’s why. France’s complicated system is intended to favor the two main Establishment parties. It usually works. It presumes however that everyone is called upon to vote twice. This time, there have been four times to vote – first of all in two rounds in the primaries and then two times in the presidential elections. That means that a voter in the first round of the primaries had to anticipate the result in the third election (first round of the presidentials) to decide for whom to vote in the first round of the primaries. The result of this impossible task for the voters is that the results of the primaries could be very surprising, and indeed they were.
The LR primaries were the first, occurring on Nov. 20 and Nov. 27, 2016. In this primary of right and center-right voters, there were three main candidates. The two with seemingly strongest support were Sarkozy and Juppé. The third, and far behind in the polls, was François Fillon. Fillon campaigned as somewhat anti-Establishment, emphasizing the evil of financial misappropriations, of which Sarkozy was being charged and Juppé convicted in the past. He also was ultra-conservative on social issues, appealing to a Catholic vote.
Fillon surprised everyone. In the polls he had been running third with only about 10% of the voters. In the vote, he jumped about 30 points and came in first. His victory was so decisive that Sarkozy, who came in third, endorsed him (if only to hurt Juppé). And Fillon easily prevailed over Juppé in the second round two to one.
Next came the left primaries. Anticipating a humiliating defeat, Hollande withdrew from the race before the primary. His Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, immediately entered the race and was expected to win, at least in the first round. Valls stood as the Establishment candidate, supported by the right wing of the French left and quietly by Hollande.
Two former ministers of Hollande stood as left candidates against Valls. Arnaud Montebourg had resigned because of the austerity policies of Hollande. Benoit Hamon had been fired by Hollande because he opposed these policies within the cabinet. Both of them felt that Hollande and Valls had betrayed the left. It was expected that Montebourg would come in second to Valls, and perhaps might win in the second round.
None of this happened. Valls came in second, not first, in the first round and Hamon, not Montebourg, won. Hamon had refused to endorse the record of Hollande and Valls in their time in government, and insisted on discussing new future policies, offering one of importance. Suddenly, the left within the left primary seemed strong. Hamon picked up endorsements from many different left factions and was able to trounce Valls in the second round with almost 58% of the vote.
Two other persons are in the race. One is Emmanuel Macron, a former minister of Hollande who thought his policies were insufficiently pro-neoliberal, and formed his own party, En Marche! Macron refused to enter the left primary. He stood on his program – very neoliberal in economic matters but at the same time very progressive on all social questions. The other person in the race is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has for years proposed himself as the left of the left. He calls his party “La France insoumise,” meaning those on the left who resist and will not allow themselves to be subjected. For this reason, he has rejected as not leftist all those who have served in Hollande’s government, even if they later resigned or were fired.
Macron assumes that his program would appeal to middle-class voters across the left-right spectrum. After the left primary, many Valls voters who were angry about Hamon’s leftist stance initially threatened to switch to Macron. Macron thereby seemed to pose a threat to Fillon in the first round of the presidentials. Mélenchon has no illusions that he could win this time but he is preparing the future. He is very unlikely to respond to Hamon’s call for left unity behind him.
Suddenly a new major development occurred. Fillon was exposed as having misrepresented himself as the paragon of financial honesty. He had put his wife and his two sons on the government payroll for what was asserted to be fictional work. This has not been unusual practice in France, but the amounts of money in this case were so large and the deed so contrary to the claims of Fillon’s candidacy that LR began a big discussion about a so-called Plan B – to replace Fillon with someone else.
It turned out that replacing Fillon would be still worse for LR than leaving him as the candidate. This was because there was no single candidate that was obvious. And the struggle to choose any one of them would tear apart LR. In addition, Fillon counter-attacked, apologizing for misdeeds, and asserting that he still could win. Plan B disappeared and Fillon remains the LR candidate. The question is how many voters did he lose for the first round of the presidential elections because of his transgressions.
So, as I said, everyone claims to be anti-Establishment. In reality, Fillon and Macron are close to playing that role. That leaves Hamon as the one with most credentials to represent a real change. But in order to win the first round of the presidentials he has to hold the Socialist party in line (so far he is doing that), attract Mélenchon’s voters, attract ecologist voters (so far he is doing this), and attract centrist voters. This is quite difficult.
So where are we? FN’s Marine Le Pen has received about 25% of the polls steadily for over a year. It seems she is at a plateau, but a high one. She is trying to appeal now to disillusioned Fillon supporters. Macron is rising in the polls. So is Hamon. Mélenchon isn’t budging. And, as the cartoonists are saying, Establishment is the others.
Should Hamon succeed, however, this will be a major worldwide event. It will be the first major race in recent years in Europe (or elsewhere for that matter) in which a left candidate, openly left, has won. This will reverse a worldwide trend of candidates and parties moving to the right.
As the economic turmoil continues to spread, the idea that one can win as a leftist may again become legitimate. It’s a bit equivalent to what might have happened had Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary in the United States. But remember, this all depends on voters guessing now who will be the candidates in the second round of the presidentials. Assuming Le Pen gets 25%, that leaves 75% to be divided among five other candidates.
The first round of the presidentials are not until April 23, 2017. This is a fairly long time for voters to make a difficult decision. The polls show that intensity of support is thin, especially for Macron. That is why we can expect great volatility in the polls. There is no way to be sure who can get the probable 20% needed to be in the second round of the presidentials on May 7, 2017.
President Donald Trump has made it clear that his presidency will have a position on everything everywhere. He has also made it clear that he alone will make the final decision on the policy his government will follow. He has chosen two priority areas in implementing his policies: Mexico and Syria/Iraq, which is the zone of strength for the caliphate of the Islamic State (IS). We may call these two areas the hotspots, in which Trump is acting in his most provocative fashion.
Mexico was arguably the principal subject of his entire campaign, first for the Republican nomination and then for the presidential election. It is probably the case that his incessant harsh statements about Mexico and Mexicans earned him more popular support than any other subject, and thereby won him the presidency.
Most politicians, journalists, and academic analysts describe the relations of China and the United States as one of hostile competition, especially in East Asia. I disagree. I believe that the top of both countries’ geopolitical agenda is reaching long-term accord with the other. The major bone of contention is which of the two prospective partners will be the top dog.
When Donald Trump says that he wants to make America great again, he is not in the least outside the general consensus of the United States. Using different words and different policy proposals, this futile ambition is shared by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, even Bernie Sanders, and of course the Republicans. It is shared as well by most ordinary citizens. Who is ready to say that the United States should settle for being number two?
Short-term prediction is the most treacherous of activities. I normally try never to do it. Rather, I analyze what is going on in terms of the longue durée of its history and the probable consequences in the middle-run. I have decided nonetheless to make short-term predictions this time for one simple reason. It seems to me that everyone everywhere is focused for the moment on what will now happen in the short run. There seems to be no other subject of interest. Anxiety is at its maximum, and we need to deal with it.
Let me start by saying that I think 95% of the policies Donald Trump will pursue in his first year or so in office will be absolutely terrible, worse than we anticipated. This can be seen already in the appointments to major office that he has announced. At the same time, he will probably run into major trouble.
Every country has mixed feelings about its future, but some are more self-confident than others. At the present moment, there are very few countries in which self-doubt does not seem greater than self-confidence. This seems to me true of the United States, both western and eastern Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and most of Africa and Latin America. The biggest exception to this global worry and pessimism is China.
China tells itself that it is performing better in the world-economy than just about anyone else. To be sure, it seems to be performing less well today than a few years ago, but so is the rest of the world, and it is still doing better than the others.
When François Fillon won the first round of the presidential primary of the right on November 20, 2016 with 44% of the vote, the French newspaper Libération headlined the story “The French Miracle.” The miracle was that all the polls up to the last minute had predicted he would come in third in a field of seven with little more than 10% of the vote.
This has been a bad year for pollsters, but a gap of this kind outdoes by far the far smaller predictive error in the U.S. elections. How did this happen and what does it portend for the general election to come?
Almost everyone is astonished at Trump’s victory. It is said that even Trump was astonished. And of course now everyone is explaining how it happened, although the explanations are different. And everyone is talking about the deep cleavages that the election created (or it reflected?) in the U.S. body politic.
I am not going to add one more such analysis to the long list I’m already tired of reading them. I just want to concentrate on two issues: What are the consequences of this victory of Trump (1) for the United States, and (2) for U.S. power in the rest of the world.
Resist? Resist! Why and How?
Commentary No. 444, March 1, 2017
From time immemorial, persons who feel oppressed and/or ignored by the powerful have resisted those in authority. Such resistance often changed things, but only sometimes. Whether one considers the cause of the resisters to be virtuous depends on one’s values and one’s priorities.
In the United States, over the past half-century, there emerged a latent resistance to what was seen as oppression by “elites” who enacted changes in social practices offensive to certain religious groups and ignored rural populations and persons whose standards of living were declining. At first, resistance took the path of withdrawal from social involvement. Then it took a more political form, finally taking on the name of Tea Party.
The Tea Party began to have some electoral successes. But it was dispersed and without a clear strategy. Donald Trump saw the problem and his opportunity. He offered himself as a unifying leader of this rightwing “populism” and catapulted the movement into political power.
What Trump understood is that there was no conflict between leading a movement against the so-called Establishment and seeking power in the state via the Republican Party. On the contrary, the only way he could achieve his maleficent objectives was to combine the two.
The fact that he succeeded in the world’s strongest military power heartened like-minded groups all across the world, who proceeded to pursue similar paths with steadily increasing numbers of adherents.
Trump’s success is still to this day not understood by the majority of leaders of both U.S. mainstream parties who search for signs that he will become what they call “presidential.” That is to say, they want him to abandon his role as the leader of a movement and confine himself to being the president and leader of a political party.
They seize upon any small sign that he will do this. When he softens his rhetoric for a moment (as he did in his February 28 speech to Congress), they do not understood that this is precisely the deceptive tactic of a movement leader. Instead, they feel encouraged or hopeful. But he will never give up his role as movement leader because the moment that he did this he would lose real power.
In the past year, faced with the reality of Trump’s success, a counter-movement has emerged in the United States (and elsewhere) that has taken on the name of Resist. The participants understood that the only thing that can possibly contain and eventually defeat Trumpism is a social movement that stands for different values and different priorities. This is the “why” of Resist. What is more difficult is the “how” of Resist.
The Resist movement has grown with remarkable rapidity into sometimes impressive enough that the mainstream press has begun to report its existence. This is the reason that Trump constantly inveighs against the press. Publicity nourishes a movement, and he is doing what he can do to crush the counter-movement.
The problem with Resist is that it is still at the stage where its many activities are dispersed and without a clear strategy or at least not a strategy they have yet adopted. Nor is there any unifying figure who is able at this point to do what Trump did with the Tea Party.
Resist has engaged in manifold different actions. They have held marches, challenged local congressional representatives in their public meetings, created sanctuaries for persons menaced with state-ordered expulsions, interfered with transport facilities, published denunciations, signed petitions, and created local collectivities that meet together both studying and deciding upon further local actions. Resist has been able to turn many ordinary persons into militants for the first time in their lives.
Resist however has a few dangers before it. More and more participants will be arrested and jailed. Being a militant is strenuous and after a while many people tire of it. And they need successes, little or big, to maintain their spirits. No one can guarantee that Resist will not fade away. It took the Tea Party decades before they got to where they are today. It may take Resist equally long.
What Resist as a movement needs to keep in mind is the fact that we are in the midst of a historic structural transition from the capitalist world-system in which we have lived for some 500 years to one of two successor systems – a non-capitalist system that preserves all of the worst features of capitalism (hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization) and its opposite, a system that is relatively democratic and egalitarian. I call this the struggle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre.
We are living in the chaotic, confusing situation of transition. This has two implications for our collective strategy. In the short run (say, up to three years), we must remember that we all live in the short run. We all wish to survive. We all need food and shelter. Any movement that hopes to flourish must help people survive by supporting anything that minimizes the pain of those who are suffering.
But in the middle run (say 20-40 years), minimizing the pain changes nothing. We need to concentrate on our struggle with those who represent the spirit of Davos. There is no compromise. There is no “reformed” version of capitalism that can be constructed.
So the “how” of Resist is clear. We need collectively more clarity about what is happening, more decisive moral choice, and more sagacious political strategies. This does not automatically come about. We have to construct the combination. We know that another world is possible, yes, but we must also be aware that it is not inevitable.
The Absolutely Unpredictable French Presidential Election
Commentary No. 443, February 15, 2017
One year ago, the French 2017 presidential elections seemed very assured. There were three parties that mattered: the center-right Les Républicains (LR), the center-left Socialists (PS), and the far-right Front National (FN). Since in France there are normally two rounds with only two candidates permitted in the second round, the key question always is which of the three will be eliminated in the first round.
It seemed sure at the time that the FN would be in the second round, incarnating anti-Establishment sentiment. It seemed equally sure that President François Hollande, were he to seek re-election, would lose badly. This meant that the LR candidate would be in the second round. This would be especially true if LR chose Alain Juppé and not former President Nicolas Sarkozy. Most people thought that Juppé was far more likely than Sarkozy to attract Socialist and centrist voters and thereby more likely to win the presidency.
Hence the general view a year ago was that the Establishment parties would prevail and that Juppé would win. How wrong these expectations turned out to be. If Trump’s election in the United States and Brexit’s victory in the UK were unexpected, they pale beside the current unexpected situation in France. There are six plausible candidates for the presidential elections, and all of them (yes, all of them) claim to be anti-Establishment. Furthermore, which two of the six will be in the second round is, as of today, anyone’s guess. Between now and April 23, 2017, the first round of the presidential elections, the electorate seems extremely volatile.
Here’s why. France’s complicated system is intended to favor the two main Establishment parties. It usually works. It presumes however that everyone is called upon to vote twice. This time, there have been four times to vote – first of all in two rounds in the primaries and then two times in the presidential elections. That means that a voter in the first round of the primaries had to anticipate the result in the third election (first round of the presidentials) to decide for whom to vote in the first round of the primaries. The result of this impossible task for the voters is that the results of the primaries could be very surprising, and indeed they were.
The LR primaries were the first, occurring on Nov. 20 and Nov. 27, 2016. In this primary of right and center-right voters, there were three main candidates. The two with seemingly strongest support were Sarkozy and Juppé. The third, and far behind in the polls, was François Fillon. Fillon campaigned as somewhat anti-Establishment, emphasizing the evil of financial misappropriations, of which Sarkozy was being charged and Juppé convicted in the past. He also was ultra-conservative on social issues, appealing to a Catholic vote.
Fillon surprised everyone. In the polls he had been running third with only about 10% of the voters. In the vote, he jumped about 30 points and came in first. His victory was so decisive that Sarkozy, who came in third, endorsed him (if only to hurt Juppé). And Fillon easily prevailed over Juppé in the second round two to one.
Next came the left primaries. Anticipating a humiliating defeat, Hollande withdrew from the race before the primary. His Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, immediately entered the race and was expected to win, at least in the first round. Valls stood as the Establishment candidate, supported by the right wing of the French left and quietly by Hollande.
Two former ministers of Hollande stood as left candidates against Valls. Arnaud Montebourg had resigned because of the austerity policies of Hollande. Benoit Hamon had been fired by Hollande because he opposed these policies within the cabinet. Both of them felt that Hollande and Valls had betrayed the left. It was expected that Montebourg would come in second to Valls, and perhaps might win in the second round.
None of this happened. Valls came in second, not first, in the first round and Hamon, not Montebourg, won. Hamon had refused to endorse the record of Hollande and Valls in their time in government, and insisted on discussing new future policies, offering one of importance. Suddenly, the left within the left primary seemed strong. Hamon picked up endorsements from many different left factions and was able to trounce Valls in the second round with almost 58% of the vote.
Two other persons are in the race. One is Emmanuel Macron, a former minister of Hollande who thought his policies were insufficiently pro-neoliberal, and formed his own party, En Marche! Macron refused to enter the left primary. He stood on his program – very neoliberal in economic matters but at the same time very progressive on all social questions. The other person in the race is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has for years proposed himself as the left of the left. He calls his party “La France insoumise,” meaning those on the left who resist and will not allow themselves to be subjected. For this reason, he has rejected as not leftist all those who have served in Hollande’s government, even if they later resigned or were fired.
Macron assumes that his program would appeal to middle-class voters across the left-right spectrum. After the left primary, many Valls voters who were angry about Hamon’s leftist stance initially threatened to switch to Macron. Macron thereby seemed to pose a threat to Fillon in the first round of the presidentials. Mélenchon has no illusions that he could win this time but he is preparing the future. He is very unlikely to respond to Hamon’s call for left unity behind him.
Suddenly a new major development occurred. Fillon was exposed as having misrepresented himself as the paragon of financial honesty. He had put his wife and his two sons on the government payroll for what was asserted to be fictional work. This has not been unusual practice in France, but the amounts of money in this case were so large and the deed so contrary to the claims of Fillon’s candidacy that LR began a big discussion about a so-called Plan B – to replace Fillon with someone else.
It turned out that replacing Fillon would be still worse for LR than leaving him as the candidate. This was because there was no single candidate that was obvious. And the struggle to choose any one of them would tear apart LR. In addition, Fillon counter-attacked, apologizing for misdeeds, and asserting that he still could win. Plan B disappeared and Fillon remains the LR candidate. The question is how many voters did he lose for the first round of the presidential elections because of his transgressions.
So, as I said, everyone claims to be anti-Establishment. In reality, Fillon and Macron are close to playing that role. That leaves Hamon as the one with most credentials to represent a real change. But in order to win the first round of the presidentials he has to hold the Socialist party in line (so far he is doing that), attract Mélenchon’s voters, attract ecologist voters (so far he is doing this), and attract centrist voters. This is quite difficult.
So where are we? FN’s Marine Le Pen has received about 25% of the polls steadily for over a year. It seems she is at a plateau, but a high one. She is trying to appeal now to disillusioned Fillon supporters. Macron is rising in the polls. So is Hamon. Mélenchon isn’t budging. And, as the cartoonists are saying, Establishment is the others.
Should Hamon succeed, however, this will be a major worldwide event. It will be the first major race in recent years in Europe (or elsewhere for that matter) in which a left candidate, openly left, has won. This will reverse a worldwide trend of candidates and parties moving to the right.
As the economic turmoil continues to spread, the idea that one can win as a leftist may again become legitimate. It’s a bit equivalent to what might have happened had Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary in the United States. But remember, this all depends on voters guessing now who will be the candidates in the second round of the presidentials. Assuming Le Pen gets 25%, that leaves 75% to be divided among five other candidates.
The first round of the presidentials are not until April 23, 2017. This is a fairly long time for voters to make a difficult decision. The polls show that intensity of support is thin, especially for Macron. That is why we can expect great volatility in the polls. There is no way to be sure who can get the probable 20% needed to be in the second round of the presidentials on May 7, 2017.
Trump’s World Policy: The Two Hotspots
Commentary No. 442, February 1, 2017
President Donald Trump has made it clear that his presidency will have a position on everything everywhere. He has also made it clear that he alone will make the final decision on the policy his government will follow. He has chosen two priority areas in implementing his policies: Mexico and Syria/Iraq, which is the zone of strength for the caliphate of the Islamic State (IS). We may call these two areas the hotspots, in which Trump is acting in his most provocative fashion.
Mexico was arguably the principal subject of his entire campaign, first for the Republican nomination and then for the presidential election. It is probably the case that his incessant harsh statements about Mexico and Mexicans earned him more popular support than any other subject, and thereby won him the presidency.
Read More »
China and the United States: Partners?
Commentary No. 441, January 15, 2017
Most politicians, journalists, and academic analysts describe the relations of China and the United States as one of hostile competition, especially in East Asia. I disagree. I believe that the top of both countries’ geopolitical agenda is reaching long-term accord with the other. The major bone of contention is which of the two prospective partners will be the top dog.
When Donald Trump says that he wants to make America great again, he is not in the least outside the general consensus of the United States. Using different words and different policy proposals, this futile ambition is shared by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, even Bernie Sanders, and of course the Republicans. It is shared as well by most ordinary citizens. Who is ready to say that the United States should settle for being number two?
Read More »
The World in the Era of Trump: What May We Expect?
Commentary No. 440, January 1, 2017
Short-term prediction is the most treacherous of activities. I normally try never to do it. Rather, I analyze what is going on in terms of the longue durée of its history and the probable consequences in the middle-run. I have decided nonetheless to make short-term predictions this time for one simple reason. It seems to me that everyone everywhere is focused for the moment on what will now happen in the short run. There seems to be no other subject of interest. Anxiety is at its maximum, and we need to deal with it.
Let me start by saying that I think 95% of the policies Donald Trump will pursue in his first year or so in office will be absolutely terrible, worse than we anticipated. This can be seen already in the appointments to major office that he has announced. At the same time, he will probably run into major trouble.
Read More »
China is Confident: How Realistic?
Commentary No. 439, December 15, 2016
Every country has mixed feelings about its future, but some are more self-confident than others. At the present moment, there are very few countries in which self-doubt does not seem greater than self-confidence. This seems to me true of the United States, both western and eastern Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and most of Africa and Latin America. The biggest exception to this global worry and pessimism is China.
China tells itself that it is performing better in the world-economy than just about anyone else. To be sure, it seems to be performing less well today than a few years ago, but so is the rest of the world, and it is still doing better than the others.
Read More »
The French Miracle
Commentary No. 438, December 1, 2016
When François Fillon won the first round of the presidential primary of the right on November 20, 2016 with 44% of the vote, the French newspaper Libération headlined the story “The French Miracle.” The miracle was that all the polls up to the last minute had predicted he would come in third in a field of seven with little more than 10% of the vote.
This has been a bad year for pollsters, but a gap of this kind outdoes by far the far smaller predictive error in the U.S. elections. How did this happen and what does it portend for the general election to come?
Read More »
The U.S. Election: It’s over at last, or is it?
Commentary No. 437, Nov. 15, 2016
Almost everyone is astonished at Trump’s victory. It is said that even Trump was astonished. And of course now everyone is explaining how it happened, although the explanations are different. And everyone is talking about the deep cleavages that the election created (or it reflected?) in the U.S. body politic.
I am not going to add one more such analysis to the long list I’m already tired of reading them. I just want to concentrate on two issues: What are the consequences of this victory of Trump (1) for the United States, and (2) for U.S. power in the rest of the world.
Read More »