With the ousting of Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee for the presidency, the corrosion of democratic norms that began with Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election and his stoking of the January 2021 assault on Capitol Hill has entered a new phase. In the US, as in all other countries, constitutional niceties are disregarded when the regime is endangered. An America not altogether different from the one against which liberals warned in a second Trump administration has come into being.
In important respects, the US has ceased to be a functioning liberal democracy. Democratic government works only when rivals for power consent to be ruled by the winners. In the US, both parties regard the contest for the presidency as an existential struggle in which the future of the American republic will be decided. Neither of them will accept the outcome that is announced in November as legitimate.
American government is in the throes of a far-reaching crisis, and here there may be parallels with the final years of the former Soviet Union. An informal American politburo composed of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and others dislodged Biden from running again, leaving the state under the nominal command of a leader whose evident senility they denied weeks before. They have appointed as his successor Kamala Harris who has been abruptly transformed by compliant media from a vice-president commonly acknowledged to be barely competent into an uplifting national leader. While these machinations continue, the ruling progressive ideology is rejected by large sections of the population.
The concept of late Soviet America has some resonance. Mikhail Gorbachev emerged from the party oligarchy promising to rejuvenate the Soviet system. Obama, the enigmatic power-broker behind the vacant throne, is America’s Gorbachev, attempting to stabilise the regime in the face of Trump’s populist challenge.
Like Gorbachev, Obama aims for continuity. Under the guise of the Green New Deal, Biden ditched Obama’s neoliberalism for Hamiltonian protectionism (named after Alexander Hamilton, first secretary of the treasury during George Washington’s presidency and a strong supporter of tariffs) and Keynesian intervention in industry and infrastructure. Harris goes further, proposing to ban “price gouging” on groceries and other key goods. Price controls rarely achieve much beyond creating shortages in the commodity that is being rationed. It is not surprising that the proposal has been attacked as economically illiterate, nor is it likely that it will be implemented. As a political gambit, on the other hand, it is inspired. By mimicking populist economics, Harris is appropriating one of Trump’s chief electoral assets. Unless he can re-energise his campaign, the operation to instal her in the Oval Office could well succeed.
Yet Obama cannot renew the legitimacy of American government any more than Gorbachev could preserve the decomposing Soviet state. A Harris victory would likely trigger civil disorder of a kind more protracted and more lethal than the riots seen in Britain recently. If Trump wins and uses federal government to exact revenge on his enemies as he has threatened to do, the reaction will be little different.
As in the last days of the USSR, when the Soviet bloc fragmented, internal weakness translates into geopolitical retreat. A ubiquitous view has it that the US aims to run down its engagement in the Middle East and Europe in preparation for confronting China. There is undoubtedly a constituency in Washington that would like to extricate America from the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. But there is no way the US can prevent the absorption of Taiwan or counter Chinese expansion in the Indo-Pacific. Alongside building the world’s largest navy, Xi Jinping is stockpiling oil and gas, rare metals, computer chips and food supplies in readiness for a long siege. At the same time, he is insulating China from Western economic sanctions by shedding US government bonds and buying gold.
Contrary to a misleading trope, this is not Cold War Two. The West is much weaker than it was then. The Soviet Union did not dominate global markets as China does today. The American and European manufacturing base was not depleted by offshoring and green deindustrialisation. The US retains a formidable array of military hardware, and in some areas a technological edge. But its ability to wage prolonged war on any of the three fronts on which it is exposed – Ukraine, Taiwan and the Middle East – is doubtful. The West will be fortunate if it survives this global challenge as a coherent force capable of concerted action. For most of humankind, watching the carnivalesque contest for the presidency, an American-led international system is already history.
The dethroning of Joe Biden will be followed by other regime shifts. Robert F Kennedy Jr’s endorsement of Trump suggests the game is not over, but a Harris presidency would be transitional in any case. As the intractably divided country threatens to slide into disorder, authoritarian demagogues more disciplined than Trump will appear on the right and the left. And as in the former Soviet Union, geopolitical retreat will surely be followed by nationalist self-assertion. Whatever the outcome of this election, America will rise from the wreckage of the post-Cold War global order as a post-liberal great power.
[See also: Donald Trump’s identity crisis]
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This article appears in the 28 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump in turmoil