THE SWAN SONG OF LIBERALISM IN THE MAGA TRUMP ERA
- Gonzalo Santos
- Nov 24, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 24, 2024
This article describes the wonderful liberal philosophy for a just and stable society by American political philosopher John Rawls, who published his seminal "A Theory of Justice" in 1971, at the very cusp of the "1968 World Revolution" in the U.S. and everywhere in the planet - East & West, North & South - a youthful rebellion which not coincidentally rejected not just the Cold War bipolar world order imposed by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., but their world dominant ideologies, too: Marxism-Leninism & Wilsonian/New Deal liberalism.
I've argued that much in my recent essay on the crisis of U.S. democracy and the rise of the MAGA neo-fascist project, here.
Here's the problem with this otherwise very enlightened and instructive article, which eloquently advocates rescuing and rehabilitating Rawls's vision and prescriptions to move forward in this Trumpian Age:
Such liberal Rawlsian ideas DID swept the academic world and indeed informed, inspired, and guided the most audacious and clear-headed U.S. liberals AT THE VERY PEEK of their power and ideological hegemony, when all other rival conservative ideologies were reduced, after the New Deal and World War II, to playing a "loyal opposition" role, and in many ways had become pro-establishment, tamed avatars of the liberal vision and domestic and international order.
If there was ever an optimum chance to pursue and implement the Rawlsian Liberal Project, it was in the 1970s. And yet, the liberal side of the U.S. duopoly fell fall short of doing precisely that.
How come?
Well, U.S. imperialist wars and interventions in the Third World, for one, got in the way - the liberal elites were not about to voluntarily promote a truly Rawlsian equitable, just, and democratic world order at a global scale that ceded U.S. global hegemony! Many of the countries the U.S. liberals targeted for covert or military intervention were, appallingly, incipient democracies who wanted to replicate the U.S. New Deal social contract in their own societies!
In fact, the liberal Democrats of the reining duopoly were not even willing to do that - pursue Rawls's project - domestically, as they became much more beholden to the Wall Street bankers and financial speculators, industrialist magnates and polluters, and set to purge the labor movement of its more radical, progressive wings, all in the name of waging the Cold War at home.
Same with the ethnic rebellions, the radical wings of which were violently targeted for repression in the J.E. Hoover Era, rather than invited and brought into a deeper, broader, more inclusive, more radical, liberal Rawlsian project.
So, you see, the liberal side of the U.S. duopoly had its chance to go "full Rawlsian" back when they controlled all the levers of power - economically, politically, and ideologically, not just domestically but worldwide. And they blew it! If it’s any comfort, the Marxist-Leninist Nomenklatura of the oppressive, equally imperialist Soviet Union blew it, too!
The Rawlsian Liberal Project died in the jungles of Southeast Asia and Central America, in the predatory jungles of Wall Street and consumerist Madison Avenue, and in the vision and lives of Malcolm X AND Martin Luther King were snuffed out by assassins' bullets with FBI complicity. (The Russian Socialist Project died in the streets of Prague, in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, and in the economically stifling, politically asphyxiating, corrupt and bureaucratic, one-party Communist Party/State.)
By 1980, the previously tamed U.S. conservatives went on the ideological and political offensive, with the illiberal "Reagan Counterrevolution" nostrums of privatization, unfettered greed, and aggressive reassertion of empire, a counterrevolution which over the next 45 years would zig-zag into ever-deeper, broader, more radical conservative ideology and exclusionary, divisive politics, up to today's re-installment of the MAGA Neo-Fascist Project.
The liberal wing is not only politically beaten and on the ideological retreat, they're becoming the timid avatars of the raging Trumpists, and the entire system of political duopoly is in imminent danger of replacement by an authoritarian monopoly model of plutocratic rule!
John Rawls, if he were alive today, would be weeping. More importantly, brilliant observer and thinker of our modern world that he was, he would now be subjecting his theory of justice and society to a scathing criticism. He would have understood that it was ahistorical and too detached from its actual world-system context; it did not take into account the rise, consolidation, or the demise of U.S. global hegemony in a system of imperialist capitalism that it presided. It did not take into account the secular trends of historical capitalism itself, nor the fact it was approaching its terminal systemic crisis.
He would probably now go further, in light of what has happened over the past half century, take it into account where we - and the whole world - are today, and treat theoretically the question of justice and social stability in this era of transition between the chaotic end of historical capitalism and whatever comes next - if anything.
And he would surely understand the need for a more robust theory of justice and planetary survival to transcend this era, trapped in a downward spiral the rapacious, chaotic, irrational, immoral, and illiberal system of late capitalism.
He would, that is, go beyond liberalism and capitalism, today as discredited and buried as Marxism-Leninism and Soviet Communism. And whatever philosophical turn he took, it would surely embrace the efforts to save and remake the world "from below and from the left." And the last thing he would advocate is to try to save the American duopoly and its pair of corrupt parties - the liberal as well as the conservative parties - that are sinking any chances for a vibrant, participatory, inclusive democracy.
With that said, we can take from John Rawls the best of his vision and incorporate it to the new vision currently emerging from the mobilized, defiant, resisting victims of the dying world order. Perhaps this time this new vision can prevail before we utterly destroy the planet and ourselves. Let's dedicate ourselves to hasten that hopeful day.
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