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 it... read more:

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