The Case for Trump & Restraining Liberalism
Steve Turley, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
I had a conversation with Steve Turley and Alexander Mercouris about the election victory of Donald Trump as a reaction to the excesses of liberalism. Turley recently published the book “Fight!: How Trump and the MAGA Movement are Changing the World”.
Liberalism represents an unusual and extraordinary development in human civilisation as it elevates the dignity and autonomy of the individual above the group. However, the literature on liberalism reveals that it thrives when it is constrained. Liberalism is a revolutionary ideology in terms of challenging traditional political and social structures. Liberalism therefore thrives in opposition to outdated forms of government such as absolute monarchy or communism. In victory, liberalism becomes unrestrained, exhausts itself and commits suicide.
Liberalism has the benefit of tempering some of the more ruthless aspects of nationalism, yet nationalism is the glue that keeps society together and must thus limit the excesses of individualism. Over the past decades, liberalism has begun to free itself from the nation-state and important social structures / hierarchies that ensure social cohesion.
Liberalism has become the leading ideology and collective identity of the Political West, which has resulted in neglect of the fact that the excesses of liberalism can produce profound social, economic, cultural and political problems.
"...outdated forms of government such as ... communism" - how is communism an outdated form of governance? It remains extant within the world for all to see, and compared to the outdated forms of governance in the West, it is thriving.
Seeing the latest overwraught political moment in the US regime as a struggle between Liberalism and Nationalism is I think slightly shortsighted, and betokens a predilection for fiction. In the political theatre of the US regime, one faction wears the colours of Liberalism, and the other faction wears the colours of Nationalism. Apart from this superficial difference, they are otherwise indistinguishable, save for the obvious differences around etiquette, privilege.
The US regime's current political moment says more about the US regime and it's attitude towards intelectual debate - they have provide two poles within which you must situate yourself, and nowhere else. The problem is that these poles are mere representations of ideas - and they are both located far away from any authentic revolutionary position - which is of course by design. Otherwise the Trump phenomenon would not be a phenomenon - do you honestly think those among us disaffected with the liberal world order would protest vote for the Trump if there were any real alternatives?
The problem with the West is that the Right has become the dominant political position, partly as a consequence of the misrepresentation of the Liberals as the Left (which has made the Right seem attractive as an opposing position to the accursed Liberals), and partly because the West is by nature conservative. And the problem with the Right is that they cannot admit of any possibility outside of that which they see as the acceptable range of values or positions. Anything that resides outside of their outdated (or conservative) experience is dismissed as irrelevant, or worse. This dominant Right perspective on (non) revolution and (no) change is the real source of the problem we are experiencing in the West. Until the Right loses it's position of primacy within the West, the people of the West will vacilate between slightly different expressions of the same authoritarianism.
Liberalism elevates the individual? I think you've lost the plot. No, liberalism elevates the fetish of capitalism and the pursuit of private profit above all else and MAGA personifies it!