With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, Europeans have put on a new costume, that of the rabbit in the headlights of the car. Paralyzed. Hesitant until the last moment on the way to take to escape the worst. Before finding the right path, you still have to understand the danger. What is the software of the American president? On what ideology prosper Trumpism?
In a column published on February 15 in The worldthe economist Thomas Piketty gives his version: “Trumpist protrusion […] Show his attachment to authoritarian and extractivist capitalism the most aggressive, which is basically the real and concrete form that most often taken economic liberalism in history. “His demonstration could be attractive if it was not largely false. If Trump’s authoritarian drift can obviously be disputed, Trumpism is not the child of liberalism. He is his negative.
During most of the 20th century, liberal capitalist democracies prospered in parallel with authoritarian, even dictatorial socialist regimes. The collapse of the USSR and its vassals turned everything up. On the ruins of the Berlin Wall, the idea that a single political and economic model was going to conquer the planet, and seduce all peoples, flowered. By extension, we even ended up confusing capitalism and liberalism, naively imagining that the creation and the accumulation of wealth were going hand in hand with the rule of law and respect for individual freedoms. The spectacular boom of China at the edge of the new century revealed that not only could capitalism blend into the dictatorship but that in addition, it perfectly adapted the state’s stranglehold on business.
Capitalism of connivance
The 2008 major crisis was not only a financial crisis. It has sustainably shaken the foundations of our liberal democracies, undergoing confidence in multilateralism, globalization and free trade. Consequently, a new model has spread to Russia, Hungary, Turkey, India, each time with its local, even cultural specificities. The systemic rocking of this new century has a name: Authoritarian National-Capitalism (NACA), according to the expression of economist Pierre-Yves Hénin, professor emeritus at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Trumpism is only its American version.
In fact, this famous NACA relies on three pillars: an identity nationalism which has replaced communism as ideology, a restriction of individual freedoms and a discreet capitalism with more or less osmosis depending on the country between public and private capital. An ideological matrix has light years of chemically pure liberalism. Economically, Donald Trump’s Maga (Make America Great Again) is getting even more away. Uninhibited protectionism and the trade war triggered with prohibitive customs duties against Canada, Mexico, China and Tomorrow Europe are an attack on liberal values while the United States has paralyzed the main body of conflict settlement within the World Trade Organization.
The expansionist aim of the American president on Greenland, the Panama canal or even Canada cheerfully tramples the rules of the rule of law. Finally and above all, allegiance to the American president of a good part of the bosses of the American multinationals of Tech – out of opportunism or for fear of the retaliations – gave birth to a capitalism of connivance. The free competition game, the very essence of economic liberalism, is biased by political bargaining, intimidation and nesting between private and public funds. The United States has become a nation where oligopolies and monopolies thrive, to the detriment of the consumer, who will pay the addition in terms of inflation. An extortion capitalism where kleptocracy and violence are now made possible by the dismemberment of the federal state, wrongly assimilated to the order of public finances.
The ditch is gaping with the European model. Because the European Union is above all a construction based on respect for the rule and the norm, any reference to nationalism having been erased. She will not be able to respond to Trump’s attacks by monitoring her method, but defending her values. By finding new alliances, without confusing sovereignty and identity nationalism. The only way to ensure the survival of the European ideal.
.