Critics of the Trumpist revolution believed in the "end of history," and as history has pulled forward, they are trying with all their might to stop it. Where they are still in power, they act as if they have closed their eyes and are still living in the peaceful times before Trump, before Brexit and before Kaczynski. And one by one their governments are falling.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
Donald Trump has yet to officially check into the White House, and he has already made a series of bullish announcements. We will take over the Panama Canal! We will buy Greenland! We will reduce Canada to the role of the 51st US state! On top of that, the usual promise for Trump: the United States will be the greatest and most powerful in history!
It's easy to laugh it all off as typical megalomania of Trump - a master of attrition and self-advertisement. Trump will probably not fulfill any of his bombastic promises. In his previous term, his biggest achievement was a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. Little has come of the famous "building a wall on the border with Mexico, which Mexico itself will pay for," for example. That's on the level of facts.
At the emotional level, however, there is a trap here. On the one hand stands him, a man with panache and the imagination of a mythomaniac, and on the other the dull technocrats explain point by point why this, this and yet that is ridiculous, impossible, unthinkable. In the eyes of his admirers, can Trump lose such a clash?
Trump has been setting up the argument this way for many years, and now he has on his side - at least temporarily - Elon Musk, who is matching him in the competition for promises from space. And while Musk also has trouble keeping them, he also boasts a few successes. Tesla and SpaceX are not blowups.
And yet Trump's opponents still eagerly play their role as boring technocrats. Especially those who like to describe themselves as "liberals," "centrists" or "people of common sense."
Why?
I'll venture the thesis that it's not at all because of their fondness for boring technocratic procedures. It's a bit like the final scenes of Scooby-Do episodes: pull off the mask of a centrist and you'll see a technocrat. But that's just a rundown before the main final twist. Pull off the technocrat's mask, and you'll see... the terrified face of a man who believed Fukuyama that the "end of history" had arrived.
Press pause, if only by force
When I listen to centrist diagnoses of the state of global politics, I am reminded of sociologist Andrew Pickering's text on the U.S. government's struggle with the Mississippi River. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been trying for years to control this river, including with the help of dikes. It's a frustrating battle, as time and again the river behaves in ways not intended and spills over in undesirable places.
As Pickering concludes, the whole endeavor is nothing more than an attempt to stop time - to hold the river back within limits that the Corps has deemed optimal.
Centrists often act as if they want to put a "pause" on u in a similar way. Preferably somewhere around the turn of the 20th century. Back in the "golden era," when free-market globalization was advancing, the United States was the undivided hegemon, and there was a consensus stretching from the left to liberals to the right that there was not much to bury in the current state of affairs.
That's why liberal centrists are sounding the alarm, terrified by the vision of any change. I emphasize the word "any." Because they are terrified of both change from the right and the left.
Yes, they will warn against the oligarchic authoritarianism of Trump and Musk, but at the same time they react with panic to any idea to seriously raise taxes for billionaires, and thus reduce their influence at least a little. Not to mention the - in their view, completely insane - idea of legally preventing the accumulation of such gigantic fortunes.
Yes, they are very concerned about Trump's climate denialism, but they are no less concerned about the leftist ideas of combining the energy transition with radical economic policy reform and leveling inequality.
Yes, they warn of Trump's racism, but they immediately add that the Left's humanitarian pipe dreams of universal human rights are also dangerous.
This is the easiest way to know a modern liberal-centrist: he is in a state of constant terror at the thought that anything in this best of worlds would change. And his entire political ambition, his entire plan and grand vision, comes down to preventing that change.
It's no coincidence that after Trump's 2016 win, centrists defined the problem in terms of "populism." Populism is a popular aggravation; such an aggravation is a "wave," and waves, as we know, are dangerous. The populism scare is handy because it allows one to jump freely between attacking the "populist right" and attacking the "populist left." Those who don't believe it should read how many mainstream media in 2020 juxtaposed Sanders and Trump, even though their programs were diametrically opposed. And in Poland, let him take a peek at Cezary Michalski's journalism.
False vision of history
The centrists have a ready retort to this charge: it's not that we don't want any change. It's just that we think the Left wants to do it too fast, too radically, without thinking. It should be done slowly, gradually, sensitively. Economists should be asked for their opinion. And the episcopate.
The problem with this argument is that the history of the last hundred years of capitalism shows that social change rarely occurs at such a tortoise pace as liberal centrists would like. This is best seen when one traces the history of a particular country.
Take France. If you took a time machine back to 1934, you would land in a country significantly different from today's standards. People there worked 48 hours a week - Monday through Saturday. Paid vacations? No such innovations were used. Nor were workers guaranteed the right to strike. Nor did many basic public services exist, such as universal health care. Moreover, women did not have the right to participate in elections. In other words, it was a country full of inequality.
But if you had landed in France a decade later-in 1945-you would have found a very different reality. A 40-hour work week, public health care, paid vacations, voting rights for women, the right to strike for workers. All these revolutionary changes took place in ten years!
History is strewn with similar instances of sudden change. For example, sudden jumps in the tax burden for the wealthiest citizens. At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was able to increase the rate from 7 to 77 percent in a few years!
This is a forgotten - or: intentionally erased - part of the history of 20th century capitalist countries. They were the sites of revolutionary changes carried out not only by left-wing governments, but sometimes also by right-wing and liberal ones.
Granted, often this rapid change was necessitated by exceptional circumstances, such as the First and Second World Wars, and later the fear of the political power of the Soviet Union. But I guess we can't complain about a lack of "exceptional circumstances" either? The deepening climate (and, more broadly, environmental) crisis, wars, the increasing oligarchization of politics, successive successes of the far right... all the way to the war at the gates of the European Union.
Tusk to the rescue?
Worst of all, there is absolutely no sign that the centrists have learned their lesson. The closest to the right conclusions was, paradoxically, old man Biden - at least in domestic policy. He staffed the administration with various progressives who tried to push through whatever they could. But even that was met with grousing from some politicians and the media. This Biden listens too much to the left wing of his party! - they thundered.
Significant were the media reactions to the heavy negotiations with Joe Manchin on climate policy. Biden really had a comprehensive and extensive investment plan, including social issues. Almost the entire party was in favor. Blocking everything was Senator Manchin of West Virginia, whose vote the Democrats lacked. From media outlets such as the New York Times, there were increasing claims that Biden had pushed the leftist agenda too far and should let it go. In the end, a much less ambitious version of the initial plan was pushed through.
Nevertheless, successive political commentators, increasingly aware of the impasse the center has found itself in, are looking for positive examples. Most recently, political scientist Ivan Krastev did so in the pages of The Atlantic.
He begins with a correct diagnosis: the liberal center must accept that something has changed in the world: "People are able to completely change their views and political identities overnight; what seemed unthinkable just yesterday appears obvious today. The change is so profound that their own recent beliefs and decisions become incomprehensible to people."
He then moves on to a positive example of a politician who has learned his lesson. He is ... Donald Tusk.
Krastev writes: "Tusk's party took a more progressive stance on such controversial issues as abortion rights and the protection of labor rights, but at the same time surrounded itself with national symbols and appealed to patriotism. Tusk has offered Poles a new grand narrative, not just another electoral strategy."
That would be good! Except that we in Poland know well what the reality is. When it came down to it, there was no progress in the area of women's, minority or workers' rights. It's also hard to guess where Krastev read this "grand narrative" of Tusk's, because its absence from the Prime Minister is, as we know, programmatic. Let's not kid ourselves, the only narrative was simply "defeat PiS."
Krastev seems to have let himself get carried away with enthusiasm after the victory of the anti-PiS coalition in the parliamentary elections, although the quoted text appeared in the Atlantik not a year ago, but last week. However, the American example should give him food for thought: it is possible to win a single election, but that doesn't yet mean that the "populist right" won't get its this time in the next election cycle.
Hog Day
Centrist critics of Trump and Trumpism have failed to stop history. Instead, they have successfully brought about a situation in which any attempt to respond to "change a la Trump" with some version of "progressive change" is immediately demonized. In their view, the only responsible left is one that joins the centrist camp to defend or restore the status quo from before Trump's successes in the States, and PiS's in Poland. From before the 2016 British referendum that ended in Brexit, and from less than a week ago, when the far-right Herbert Kickl took the reins of government in Austria. Do you see the regularity?
History has moved on and is not looking back at Trump's critics, and they are stuck with the political version of Gopher's Day.
It looks more or less like this: the ratings of Trump, Kaczynski, AfD and Le Pen are going up, there is a panic that democracy is collapsing, liberalism is going away, the dark ages of authoritarianism have arrived.
Then the hastily pieced together broad center-liberal-left coalition counterattacks - Biden, Macron, Tusk win the election. Hurray! We are saved! See? Reason, centrism, moderation prevail, and succumbing to leftist fantasies only risks destabilization.
But then again the ratings of Trump, Kaczynski, AfD and Le Pen go up again, and all the fun begins again, and the political space of centrists inexorably shrinks
Even the diagnosis you are just reading is part of this repetitive pattern. The centrists do the same thing over and over again, which someone points out to them, after which they continue to do it, so someone continues to point it out to them....
This mood swing and repetition of disputes is getting tiresome, but that's a smaller problem. The bigger one is that such tactics clearly don't work in the long run. Large liberal-center-left coalitions win single elections, but the problem immediately returns. The far right is not weakening, but growing stronger.
It's like putting a dike on the Mississippi River. Sooner or later the river floods. Eventually, it may flood us all.
