Even Trump can’t bring back the past

By R.W. JOHNSON
At the moment, the world is reeling from the admittedly very ugly sight of Donald Trump’s assault on a great deal of received wisdom and settled expectations born of a more generous age. Think, for a moment, of the contrasts:

– in 1944 British, American and Canadian troops stormed ashore to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe. They took heavy losses but achieved their aim. They made no demands for reward or reparation. They merely handed the liberated countries back to their citizens, hoped they would govern democratically and well – and then they departed.

– at the same time the Red Army stormed into Eastern Europe. They too took heavy losses but defeated the Nazis. Then, however, they ransacked the defeated countries and took enormous amounts of booty back to Russia. They also settled into a long-term occupation, turning these countries into effective Soviet colonies for the next 45 years.

– in 2022-2025 the US under Biden donated nearly $200 billion worth of military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, seeking to help them resist the Russian invasion. At no point did the US say that it wanted anything in return for this aid, nor did any of the European powers and the UK which also contributed heavily to Ukraine’s defence. Now, however, Trump demands half of all Ukraine’s mineral rights – worth some $500 billion – in return for the aid given by Biden, although Trump’s administration has given no aid to Ukraine, and doesn’t intend to.

Trump, in other words, is behaving very much like Stalin in 1944-5, though Stalin could at least point to the hideous human losses Russia had suffered in the war. Trump has no such rationale. His demand is pure imperialism, as are his demands on Panama, Canada and Greenland.

We are back in the world of The Ugly American (1958), the influential novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer which depicted the crass, arrogant and insensitive side of the American presence in South-East Asia, and suggested that with such behaviour the US was doomed to lose its fight against Communism in that region. The book shook the American Establishment and long remained influential. It was one of the principal reasons that Kennedy launched the Peace Corps.

The problem with Trump is that too many people find him so appalling that they can hardly sit still as they speak of his many vices and failings, insisting he is a new Hitler, etc. This gets one nowhere. The two big questions about Trump are (i) what changed in American politics to bring such a man to power? And (ii) does Trump herald a permanent sea change ? I shall attempt to answer both questions, starting with the first.

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One of the great hates of the MAGA faithful is globalization and those who support it – “the globalizers”. In part this reflects the resentment of poorer, less educated people who are often deeply rooted in their particular locality, for the more cosmopolitan upper classes who can easily fit in in many different places, who in a sense come from anywhere and nowhere.

But there was a firm economic base to this. From the 1970s on, more and more voices greeted the wonderful new vista of globalization. With recurrent rounds of freer and freer trade and the rise of newly industrialised states in Asia the goods of the world were on offer as never before. Many of these states had never mattered economically before, so their rise greatly expanded the world market — which expanded still further with the collapse of Communism. No longer were Russia and Eastern Europe an autarchic world to themselves – they had eagerly joined the free market scrum.

And most of all there was China. In their eagerness to embrace the new China of Deng Hsiao-ping with its vast market and its incredibly cheap mass-produced goods, politicians and businessmen threw caution to the winds. They effectively ignored the dreadful warning of the Tiananmen Square massacre, that Chinese Communism was as ruthless and cruel as before. Instead, Western elites convinced themselves that China was becoming a market economy and a trusted partner. So capitalism had globalized: nowhere was off-limits any more.

Few greeted this new age with more enthusiasm than Bill Clinton. True, many “dirty” heavy industries would now relocate to poorer countries, but — so the story went — the jobs lost in the West would be replaced by cleaner and more highly skilled jobs in new service industries. This celebration of globalization involved a sleight of hand: the unemployed coal miners, steel and auto workers could not easily be retrained as computer nerds or corporate lawyers. In fact they’d end up flipping burgers at MacDonald’s, earning a fraction of their previous wage.

Just as disillusionment set in over globalization, China’s “wolf warrior” emergence as a tough, authoritarian state determined to overtake the USA caused a fundamental reassessment. Too many businessmen had behaved as Lenin predicted they would: capitalists so keen to turn a profit that they would sell their opponents the rope which would then be used to hang them. Even Nixon and Kissinger, who had long claimed that their “opening towards China” had started China’s all-out pursuit of growth and world trade, now began to fret: “we may have created a new Frankenstein’, Nixon remarked.

Globalization was a disaster for America’s working class. As heavy industries relocated abroad, and Chinese imports wiped out many other industries, wage levels stagnated at 1973 levels. In addition, the ceaseless inflow of legal and illegal immigrants exercised a strong downward pressure on wages. All the gains from the economy’s headlong growth went to the better educated as inequalities soared.

As in Europe, education, not class or economic factors, became the best indicator of political loyalties. The well-educated, well-paid and liberal-minded middle and professional classes easily dominated the political environment – and particularly the Democratic Party. The political correctness, fads and wokery born in the rather precious (and effectively one-party) world of university campuses spread to become the new Democratic gospel.

The egomanic Donald Trump had always fancied himself as president. When George Bush Sr. was running for re-election in 1992 he got a letter from Trump, volunteering himself as Bush’s vice-presidential nominee. Bush thought the idea ridiculous and threw the letter in the bin.

But, against the odds, by 2016 Trump had put himself at the head of a populist revolt against the new social and political world born of globalization. He promised to bring back hard-hat jobs by forcing industries to relocate back to the US; to stop the inflow of immigrants; to hold back the coming of the new non-white majority; to do away with affirmative action and the “diversity” policies which had favoured blacks, Hispanics and women over the white male working class; and to use tariffs to block the imports from abroad that had wiped out US industries.

Educated liberals were appalled, but failed to realise the depth of popular anger resulting from the changes wrought by globalization and by the reaction against their own political correctness. Hillary Clinton summed it up by dismissing her opponents as “a basket of deplorables”, entirely failing to realise that her own privileged wokery was a perfect symbol of what so many now found hateful.

So, we now have the whole Trumpian agenda in full stream. Trump seems drunk with power and self-love and, at least for now, he is getting his own way almost unchallenged. Out goes gender politics, out goes DEI, whole large agencies of government are being shut down on a whim. And so on. But what does it all amount to?

Like so many populist movements, Trumpism is focused on a Myth of the Golden Past. So he is promising to bring back yesterday. America will be made unchallengably great again, as in the Eisenhower period. Globalization will be reversed, as will affirmative action, gender politics and any number of liberal initiatives in government. Immigration will be slowed to a virtual halt, and white Americans will remain the majority. Women will no longer be allowed a leading role in the military and trans people will have no role at all. Traditional gender roles will be affirmed.

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But of course, you can’t really bring back yesterday. This was the theme of The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby thinks he can bring back the past era when he and Daisy were young, indeed everything that Gatsby has done since then has been predicated on that huge bet. Nick Carraway warns him, “But you can’t bring back the past, Jay”. “Of course you can, old sport”, replies Gatsby cheerily. At that moment, the reader knows that Gatsby is doomed.

Right now, Trump is so drunk on his own power that he too is in the “Of course you can, old sport” stage. And, to be sure, he will make things very uncomfortable for much of the world for some time to come. But you can’t bring back the past. The most you can do is create the illusion of it for a couple of years. All of Trump’s tariffs in his first term didn’t reverse globalization, nor will his tariffs now.

Moreover, the growth of India and China, together with a host of new middle powers like Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh, will guarantee that the US constitutes a steadily shrinking fraction of the world economy – whatever the slogan on MAGA caps. Trump’s Border Wall may be completed, but the desperate wish of huge numbers of poorer people to migrate to America means that some will always succeed – and many American employers will want them to. Canada, Panama, Greenland and Gaza are all likely to remain as they are. And so on.

Trump is a megalomaniac and a narcissist. He is also a hustler and a con man. He will continue to shout his own praises and boast of his achievements. If some of his “achievements” flop, he will simply invent others: fibbing has never been a problem for him. All of which may help maintain an illusion of great success. But at the end of it, as the shouting dies down, the hollowness of many of his promises will become apparent. Sadly, his many fanatical followers will probably be among the last to realise that they have been conned.