
The Trump Onslaught: What We Must Prepare For
Donald Trump and his entourage are so confused, conflicted, and detached from reality that it is difficult to anticipate what they will actually attempt and how much they will be able to carry their intentions through. We know their intentions include eliminating all barriers to their power; scapegoating of stigmatized groups; redistribution of wealth and income upward; and a war on the world to impose US domination and environmental destruction. Their efforts to realize these objectives will result in enormous destruction. Those efforts are also likely to result in a substantial pushback that could either overcome the MAGA project or simply fade away in the face of repression and despair.
What Is Social Self-Defense?
Can a Trump tyranny be impeded, rolled back, and eliminated? Or are we on the road to a long-lasting autocracy as many in the MAGA movement intend? The answer hangs in the balance. This is the first of a series of Strike! Commentaries on social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut.
A “Constructive Program” for Social Self-Defense Against MAGA Tyranny
A future shaped by Donald Trump, MAGA, and Project 2025 is a threat not just to one or another group, but to our society as a whole – to the things that make our lives together something other than nasty, brutish, and short. To resist and eventually overcome such forces, we need to create bastions of what the Polish activists who overthrew their country’s authoritarian regime in 1989 called “social self-defense.” That will involve many methods, including mutual aid, on-the-ground protection of those under attack, combating lies and slanders, protests, electoral strategies, direct action, and many others. Constructive programs carried out from below can be a crucial part of that struggle.
Inequality and the Polycrisis
Notwithstanding its many downsides, the era of neoliberal globalization had one significant claim to success: the growing wealth of once-poor countries, based largely on their ability to export into the global market. The era of polycrisis appears to be reversing that dynamic. The presidency of Donald Trump is likely to further aggravate global inequality and poverty.
Trump, Trumpism, and the Polycrisis
“Polycrisis” is a word that has recently come into use to characterize the way crises in many different spheres – ranging from geopolitics and economics to climate and pandemic – are aggravating each other and even converging. Trump and Trumpism, like similar leaders and movements around the world, took off in the era of polycrisis and reflect many of its themes. They are also likely to severely aggravate the dynamics of the polycrisis.
Macroeconomics Meets the Polycrisis
The convergence of crises now often referred to as “the polycrisis” was heralded by the global economic crisis known as the Great Recession. Since then neither national nor global institutions have proven able to control the destructive gyrations of the global economy.
Great Power Struggle Over Fragmented Global Networks
The global convergence of crises that has been dubbed the “polycrisis” has emerged in tandem with the decline of globalization. But what is replacing globalization is less a new system than a chaotic scramble. This is one of a series of Strike! Commentaries on “The Polycrisis and the Global Green New Deal.”
What Ever Happened to Globalization?
Globalization has been the hallmark of the economic world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Since the Great Recession of 2008, however, globalization as we knew it has been changing fast. That change is an important part of what is being called the “polycrisis,” the convergence and mutual aggravation of geopolitical, economic, governance, climate, and other crises. This commentary examines the rise and fall of globalization as we knew it. The next commentary explores what is emerging from it. Both are part of a series on “The Polycrisis and the Global Green New Deal.”
Will Polycentrism Solve the Polycrisis?
Unilateral US dominance is increasingly challenged in the era of overlapping crises that is now often being referred to as “the polycrisis.” This has led many countries to advocate for what they call “polycentrism,” a world order in which no single country is dominant. But simply having a larger number of elites plundering their own and other countries is unlikely to provide a solution to the polycrisis. That requires that countries pursue not only interests of their own elites, but the common global interest that has been so rubbished in the unipolar era.