NORMAN BIRNBAUM - Modes of denial: On the legend of US liberal hegemony
For all its loathing
of Trump, the US liberal elite shares with him a common delusion: that US
hegemony can persist in the 21st century. Trump is not the cause of the
disruption but a consequence of it
At the memorial
service for the late John McCain, our divided political elite came together to
voice their apprehensions about our democracy. Better late than never; having
indulged in an increasingly preposterous American moral imperialism for
decades, it is indeed time for them to reconsider. A good place to begin would
be with the cliché, common both here and abroad, that Trump is undermining or
has already destroyed a ‘liberal world order’. But what ‘liberal world order’
are we talking about?
When NATO was founded
in 1949, it included Portugal and Turkey, hardly exemplary democracies.
Franco’s Spain was a de facto member since its military alliance
with the US in 1959. The UK fought a bitter war in the early fifties in a
futile attempt to keep Kenya, and France vainly defended its hold on Indo-China
and later Algeria. The US hardly concentrated on exporting democracy, since it
was busy with installing compliant dictatorial regimes around the globe. No
doubt, the domestic institutions of the western nations provided for freedoms
unimaginable in the Soviet bloc, but the comparison is facile. Move to the
recent past and include in the recent version of order the oil kingdom of Saudi
Arabia and the indispensable power, China – neither of these regimes bear the
imprint of John Stuart Mill or John Dewey.
The collapse of
democracy in the eastern members of the European Union is recent, but it
preceded the advent of Trump. To what extent the economies of the US and the EU
generate optimal conditions for the development of a liberal culture is a large
question to which the voters for the UK Independence Party, the Front National
and the Alternative for Germany, as well as those attending Trump rallies in
our own country, offer rather depressing answers. Trump is not the cause of the
disruption or even the decomposition of what went before, but a consequence of
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