Liberalism is suddenly under threat in global politics, symbolised by Donald Trump’s inauguration yesterday as president of the United States. His coming to power is marked by many fearful voices saying his illiberalism threatens the world order put in place after the second World War, which was reinforced under US supremacy when the Soviet Union disintegrated.
The philosophy of liberalism established in the 18th-century Enlightenment and developed since then prioritises individual and human rights, freedom of expression, institutions balanced against and tempering political power and the rule of law. It is intimately associated with the development of capitalist markets, ownership of property and contracts of employment.
The liberal world order Trump threatens assumes US leadership in political, security and economic affairs, backed by matching institutions and values. In recent decades, it has privileged cosmopolitan and mobile individuals and companies under conditions of globalised markets underwritten by the end of national capital controls in the 1990s. As a result, inequalities have widened in worldwide and national spheres. Winners and losers are more sharply polarised in this world of neoliberalism and austerity.
Trump’s victory, the UK’s Brexit vote and the rise of right-wing populisms in Europe are widely attributed to a revolt of these losers. Using Albert Hirschman’s distinction between exit, voice and loyalty, their revolt represents a dramatic reassertion of national voice against cosmopolitan rights of exit for capital and the globally mobile and a demand for border closure against immigration as the price of national political loyalty. Their populist nationalism assumes a single homogeneous and usually white population pitted against untrustworthy and corrupt elites who have seized control of resources, remade entry and exit rules and despise the less well-educated majority.
Putin’s brain
A striking similarity of values and language unites these revolts, their leaders and theorists. David Brooks has pointed out in the New York Times that Trump's adviser, Steve Bannon, who founded the "alt-right" Breitbart News, blames globalism, multilateral institutions like the EU, Davos and multiculturalism for undermining national communities and Judeo-Christian values. He quotes Alexander Dugin, the Russian theorist of Eurasian civilisation and multipolarity approvingly, sharing his detestation of liberal globalisation.
Dugin, sometimes referred to as Putin's brain, is a specialist in international relations and sociology. He invokes early 20th century geopolitical accounts of world powers to propose an alternative order divided between several civilisational blocs at world level. He marries that to a radical Russian nationalism demanding its spheres of interest in Europe and Asia. It is an eclectic mix, drawing on Samuel Huntington, author of the celebrated Clash of Civilisations from the 1990s and the Italian and German fascist philosophers of the 1930s, Julius Evola, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.
Dugin welcomes Trump’s victory and looks forward to a US-Russian entente capable of draining the swamp of Nato, free trade agreements and globalised markets. He calls for a Nuremburg trial of the liberals and liberalism he holds responsible for such institutions.
Like Huntington, Dugin sees civilisations as strong unitary organisations of culture beyond the nation-state capable of acting in world politics. In his last book, Who Are We? published in 2004, Huntington foresaw the developing clash in the US between cosmopolitan and imperial liberals, whom he contrasted with "the overwhelming bulk of the American people [who] are committed to a national alternative and to preserving and strengthening the American identity that has existed for centuries". Trump claims to represent this alternative.
Global order ideologues
Liberals who challenge his claims and those who think like him elsewhere must understand the power and appeal of such ideas for those who have not benefited from the globalisation they attack. Ownership of liberal values is not confined to the ideologues of this global order but includes those social democrats and socialists who say it is unbalanced and increasingly unequal. Just as most clashes occur within civilisations and not between them, so too is it within nation-states and religions. The world is not polarised between such homogeneous blocs of identity formed at national or civilisational levels, but is far more plural and contested than that.
Liberal and social democratic elites who bought deeply into the cosmopolitan and globalist renewal of liberalism in the 1990s are now intellectually ill-equipped to understand or contest these revolts against that order. Others must show that the new tide of illiberalism can be opposed with universal values and institutions combined with local and national reassertions of the community and social solidarities which got lost in that period. Such new political forces are still struggling to find their voice.
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