Published in 1944 amid the ruins of nineteenth-century liberal civilization, Polanyi’s account is prescient of the dangers of the second global liberal order and its eventual unraveling. My guide to understanding our current global and political crisis is Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. The early twentieth century’s era of liberal globalization led to totalitarianism, the bloodletting of World War II, and the Holocaust.
This essay tries to identify and examine those underlying currents, which derive from the deregulation of the financial sector and liberal capitalism, from the rapaciousness of the national security establishment, and from the political logic that derives from their fusion. Those currents were caused by something else.
However fascinating and repugnant Trump is as a political performance, his campaign is but a buoy bobbing up and down, revealing the existence of powerful national and global currents, not directing them. Trump was elected because he is deplorable, and proud of it. What most distinguished Trump from Hillary Clinton in his public performance was his candor in admitting that the system is rotten and so is he. And his cabinet is oligarchy incorporated. But he is also a plutocrat, a scion of the very system against which he mobilized so much anger. The crisis of liberal capitalism has arrived, bringing us to the brink of total global war.ĭonald Trump was elected as the mouthpiece for a populist insurgency that humbled the biggest political machine in the United States.
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