by Robert Manne
In the United States, these patterns were observable in the most extreme form. Within the media and academe, the cultural revolution was embraced more enthusiastically than in any other Anglophone country. In small town and rural America and among the strong Christian communities, it was most strongly resisted.
Within the sphere of the economy, while the big-city cosmopolitan elites continued to prosper, the middle or working classes experienced thirty years or more of stagnation after thirty years of steadily accumulating wealth, a situation exacerbated by the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath for which the symbolic embodiment of the globalising cosmopolitans, the financial elites of Wall Street, were never asked to pay a price.
In addition to hostility to political correctness and neo-liberalism, in the United States the current era appeared to be one in which their country’s overwhelming post–World War II dominance in the military, economic and cultural spheres had been surrendered somewhat mysteriously and without a fight, despite victory over their Cold War rival, the Soviet Union.
While the Republican presidential candidates of 2008 and 2012, John McCain and Mitt Romney, embraced neo-liberalism and criticised political correctness in only an attenuated form, Democrat Barack Obama was able to corral sufficient votes for two handsome victories. In the 2016 election the Democrats failed to repeat this achievement. From the point of view of the parochials, the Democrats had embraced both political correctness and neo-liberalism, losing as a consequence, astonishingly enough, even more of the white working and middle classes than the first black president. The strong support of the cosmopolitans on the US east and west coasts and of the Latino and African-American minorities could not compensate for this loss.
Trump rejected very significant parts of neo-liberalism – most importantly global free trade and the neo-liberals’ obsession with budget deficits. He poured relentless scorn on political correctness. As a consequence, in large numbers the parochials – most significantly those from the rust-belt manufacturing and the coalmining states, which previously had supported the Democrats – were convinced they finally had a leader who represented them and who, in one blow, could restore their pride, revive their economic fortunes, make their country great again and break the stranglehold of the cultural and financial cosmopolitan elites. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters formed not an electoral bloc but a new political movement.
During the period before the election, the broad liberal Left vastly underestimated Trump’s appeal to the parochials, no one more comprehensively than Clinton. If Romney lost the 2012 election when he claimed in what he thought to be a private meeting of wealthy donors that 47% of Americans would not vote for him because they were welfare state bludgers, it might be said that Clinton lost the 2016 election when she said in a public speech in front of television cameras that half of Trump’s supporters formed a basket of racist and misogynistic “deplorables”.
Following the election, at least thus far, many members of the broad liberal Left have revealed only a partial understanding of the reason for Trump’s victory. Take as an example two intelligent pieces that have appeared recently. In the London Review of Books, R.W. Johnson explains the Trump victory almost exclusively in terms of the ballooning inequality and the stagnating position of the middle and working classes in the United States since the mid-’70s. In a London School of Economics blog, Michael McQuarrie argues, with greater precision, that the result can be explained by the victories Trump achieved in the formerly Democratic rust-belt states. What is wrong with both these analyses is that they concentrate exclusively on Trump’s challenge to neo-liberalism, while placing at the margins his challenge to political correctness.
In this they follow the work of Thomas Frank, who argued in his seminal work, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, that the neo-liberal elites pursued their economic interests by blinding the working and middle classes to their own economic interests with cultural and religious red herrings such as abortion, guns and immigration. In this kind of analysis – which, probably unconsciously, follows Marxism – economic interest forms the base of politics, and culture and religion merely its justificatory superstructure.
All this seems to me profoundly misleading. What Trump saw was that there are two forms of rebellion against the contemporary Western cosmopolitan mainstream, not one. There is no reason to believe the rebellion that Trump has led is restricted to the losers from neo-liberalism or that hostility to feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, animal rights and environmentalism is a displacement of economic concerns on to the spheres of religion and culture.
In a nutshell, Trump is the first presidential candidate – and, indeed, the first political leader of a major Western country – who has shown how power can be gained democratically by a program based on the rejection of the two revolutions of the post-’60s – the cultural and the economic. As it happened, fortune handed him the perfect opponent. There is no leading political figure in the United States who more closely symbolises both neo-liberalism and political correctness than Clinton.
A new kind of politics emerged in Europe following World War I. It was based on the militarisation of domestic politics. It saw communism and liberalism as the enemy. And it aimed to replace parliamentary government and the rule of law by a nationalist or racist dictatorship under the control of a charismatic leader. Because this kind of politics was genuinely novel, a new name for it was needed. What soon was chosen was fascism, after the symbol of Benito Mussolini’s party, the fasces, the hard bundle of wooden rods surrounding an axe that would sweep the old world away. Leadership of the movement fell to powerful orators, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, capable of intuiting the mood of frightened and wounded nations and of promising plausibly the restoration of former greatness.
Something new has happened in the US election but it does not have many of these core characteristics of fascism. Indeed, although clearly illiberal and authoritarian in temper, it is far too early to discern what its precise political character will turn out to be. Even Trump most likely does not yet know. All that we know for certain is that a movement has been pioneered not by a great orator but by a ruthless businessman and charismatic, larger than life reality-television “personality”. And that as the leader of this movement he has discovered a rhetoric capable of convincing a very large number of white Americans that their own personal fortunes and the fortunes of their nation can be revived simultaneously through the resistance he will offer to their enemy – the cultural and economic cosmopolitan elites.
Already a term has been coined for this new politics: Trumpism. While Trumpism may prove ephemeral, more likely it will begin to reshape politics in several parts of the industrialised world, as fascism, a rather different right-wing movement, did in an earlier and quite different historical era.
Weekend Australian, 19 November 2016
THE MUSCOVIAN CANDIDATE?
General Michael Flynn has tendered his resignation as Donald Trump’s national security adviser after a mere twenty-five days of service. The reason can be stated simply. On 29 December 2016, former president Barack Obama expelled thirty-five Russian officials in response to proven Russian hacking of the emails of the Democratic National Committee. On the same day, Flynn engaged in several phone conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Shortly after these conversations, Russian President Vladimir Putin unexpectedly announced that no Americans would be expelled from Russia. President-elect Donald Trump tweeted his approval. He always knew Putin was a “smart guy”.
In the following weeks, Flynn absolutely denied to both the media and Vice-President Mike Pence that he had discussed sanctions in his conversations with Kislyak. Unhappily for Flynn, US intelligence had records of these conversations. In his denials, Flynn proved that he was not only a liar but also a fool. As a former director of the Defence Intelligence Agency under Obama, he ought to have been aware that US intelligence routinely intercepted the Russian ambassador’s pho
ne conversations.
At first, US intelligence informed Trump that Flynn had not told the truth about discussions on sanctions with Kislyak. Nothing happened. In apparent frustration, no fewer than nine current or former members of American intelligence agencies provided the relevant information to the Washington Post. President Trump now had no alternative to asking for Flynn’s resignation. Apparently he hoped US citizens would believe that when Flynn discussed the question of sanctions with Kislyak, he did so without Trump’s knowledge or authority. The president was furious about the leak. He tweeted: “The real scandal is that classified information is illegally given out by ‘intelligence’ like candy. Very un-American!” The incident was not, however, without its amusing aspect. Trump’s media spokesman Sean Spicer claimed that one of the reasons Flynn phoned Kislyak was to convey his warm Christmas greetings. Spicer was apparently unaware that Russians celebrate Christmas on 6 January, not 25 December.
Flynn’s resignation will soon fade in political memory. What will not fade is the question of the relations between Trump and the Putin regime during the 2016 presidential election campaign. As further details emerge, this question is likely to be raised periodically throughout the first year of the Trump administration. It could possibly lead to the impeachment of the president.
One matter is already accepted even by Trump. During the course of the campaign the Putin regime was involved in a rather successful plan to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and to assist the candidacy of Trump. The most effective method was Russian hacking of the emails of the Democratic National Committee.
In the early northern summer of 2016, Russian intelligence turned to WikiLeaks, chosen as the vehicle for publication most likely because of its reputation as a politically non-aligned source of significant leaked material. Between July and November 2016, WikiLeaks published 58,000 Democratic Party emails. The most damaging leaks demonstrated that the Democratic leadership had secretly worked to help Hillary Clinton and to harm Bernie Sanders, and that Clinton had admitted, in confidential speeches to Goldman Sachs, that she had led a life of privilege somewhat divorced from the experience of the American middle class and that her private and public views were sometimes rather different.
Following the presidential election, all US intelligence agencies released an unclassified report that argued with “high confidence” that Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC emails. At the same time, evidence emerged suggesting, potentially at least, a far more sinister connection between Trump and Russia.
In September 2015, Republican opponents commissioned a report on Trump from the US firm Fusion GPS. Once Trump won the party’s nomination, the commission was maintained by a Democratic Party supporter. Fusion GPS employed a British firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, one of whose principals was former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, who had worked in Moscow in the late 1980s and the early ’90s and then headed the MI6 Russian desk in London before going into private business. Steele was so alarmed by what his Russian informants revealed that he continued his research even after his contract with Fusion ended and passed his dossier on to old FBI contacts.
After the election, Republican senator John McCain was told about the dossier by a former British ambassador to Russia, Andrew Wood. McCain sent an emissary to London and passed the dossier, this time formally, to the FBI. In turn, US intelligence agencies passed a two-page summary to Obama and Trump. CNN reported that this summary had been shown to both. Almost immediately, as was well reported, BuzzFeed published the full dossier. Because the claims in the Steele dossier were at that time unsubstantiated, in general the media chastised BuzzFeed and did not report the dossier’s contents.
For his part, Trump tweeted: “Totally made up facts by sleazebag political operatives … FAKE NEWS! Russia says nothing exists.” And later: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” As new information has accumulated and intelligence leaks have mushroomed, media assessments of parts of the Steele dossier have at last begun to appear. For citizens to grasp the meaning of these assessments, some knowledge of its content is required.
The dossier comprises fifteen separate memos varying in length from one to three pages, ranging in date between 20 June and 13 December 2016. As Steele has not visited Russia for twenty years, he relied on several Russian collaborators. They spoke to between fifteen and twenty anonymous sources – “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure”; “a former Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin”, and so on. One source is “a Russian emigre figure close to the Republican US presidential candidate”. We now know who he is, the Belarus-born US-based businessman Sergei Millian.
From these fifteen memos an extraordinary narrative of events emerges. In outlining this narrative I am not passing any judgement either about the general accuracy of the narrative or about the truthfulness of any particular claim.
On 20 June 2016, Steele reported that he had learned from his informants that Trump had been “cultivated” for a period of five years. The principal reason was that he was known to be an opponent of NATO. Trump had recently been fed information on Clinton and offered lucrative real estate deals that, for unknown reasons, he had declined. Because of his sexual behaviour, which had allegedly been recorded by the Russian domestic intelligence service, the FSB – and which included asking prostitutes in 2013 to perform “golden shower” acts on the bed in the Hotel Ritz-Carlton in Moscow where the Obamas had once slept – Trump “had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished”.
Independent evidence about Trump as a potential victim of sexual blackmail emerged soon after the publication of the dossier. On 13 January 2017, Paul Wood, a Washington correspondent for the BBC, wrote that “a retired spy” had told him that he had been informed by “the head of an east European intelligence agency” that Moscow had “kompromat” material on Trump, and that he had learned indirectly from a CIA officer that “there was ‘more than one tape’, ‘audio and video’, on ‘more than one date’, in ‘more than one place’ – in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow and also in St Petersburg – and that the material was ‘of a sexual nature’.”
On 19 July 2016, Steele reported that his informants had told him of a secret meeting in July between one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers, Carter Page, and Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft, the vast Russian oil company, where the possibility of a lucrative energy deal was discussed in return for the lifting of “Ukraine-related Western sanctions against Russia”. “Page had reacted positively”, the memo claimed, although he was “generally noncommittal”.
In mid-October, Steele sent a more detailed report of Page’s secret meeting with Sechin, which had been provided by one of Sechin’s close associates. The meeting took place on 7 or 8 July. It was claimed that Sechin offered a 19% stake in Rosneft to Trump’s people in return for the end of sanctions. “Page expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions would be lifted.”
Once more, subsequent evidence concerning this supposed meeting has appeared. We know that Page was indeed in Moscow on 7 and 8 July. Even more intriguingly, Reuters reported on 25 January 2017 that 19.5% of Rosneft had been privatised, with details of the purchasers shrouded in mystery. The informant for the Steele dossier reported that Sechin had offered members of the Trump team a 19% share in Rosneft. This seems entirely implausible: 19% of Rosneft is worth several billion dollars. What, however, does seem plausible is that Sechin offered the Trump team a share in the 19% of Rosneft that was being privatised in return for Trump’s willingness to lift sanctions. That the figure of 19 or 19.5% should have appeared both in the Steele dossier and in the actual privatisation six months later seems more than a coincidence.
Circumstantial evidence has subsequently emerged about the possible identity of the dossier’s informant regarding the Sechin–Page meeting. On 27 January 2017, London’s Daily Telegraph reported that on 26 Dece
mber an ex-KGB general, Oleg Erovinkin, was found dead in Moscow in the back seat of his car. Erovinkin worked as a “key aide” to Sechin, and was thought to be the link man between him and Putin. Erovinkin is rumoured to be the source of the details of the July 2016 conversation between Sechin and Page. Speculation has mounted that he was murdered in reprisal, on the orders of another ex-KGB man, the president of Russia.
In late July 2016, Steele reported in his dossier that his American-based Russian emigre source (Millian) “admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump team] and the Russian leadership”. On the Trump side, relations were under the control of his campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The emigre claimed that Russia was indeed the source for the recently published DNC email leaks. He explained that WikiLeaks had been used for reasons of “plausible deniability”. According to him, “the operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team. In return Trump’s team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue.”
On 22 August, the Steele dossier reported that someone described as “a well-placed Russian figure” had spoken about a recent meeting between Putin and the pro-Russian former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, following Manafort’s resignation as Trump’s campaign manager. Yanukovych had admitted that he had indeed paid substantial “kickbacks” to Manafort, as the Western media had reported. He had assured Putin, however, that there was no paper trail. Putin was not convinced.
Once again, there is evidence suggesting the plausibility of some, but by no means all, of these claims. All American intelligence agencies have concluded with high confidence that Russia was the source of the emails WikiLeaks published. Manafort remained Trump’s campaign manager from April until August. He resigned when the Washington Post revealed, with impeccable evidence, that he had received $12.7 million in kickbacks from Yanukovych. As the Post reported on 18 July, before Manafort’s resignation, at the Republican Party convention Trump supporters were responsible for changing the wording of a motion concerning Russian aggression in Ukraine – from “providing lethal defensive weapons” to “provide appropriate assistance” to the government of Ukraine against the pro-Russian separatists. On 27 July 2016, Trump himself spoke about lifting Russian sanctions and recognising Crimea as Russian territory.