What kind of world will it be that sees Donald Trump maramlading the White House and Marine Le Pen’s French right besieging the Elysée after having conquered Parliament? It will certainly be a world in which the State will have to rethink itself.
Paradoxically, the advent of the most rigidly authoritarian forces risks producing the greatest disorder on the world scene.
The delicate balance of US federalism will be definitively upset by the arrival of Trump’s armies on the Mall in Washington. The state is the problem, not the solution, the slogan of anarcho conservatism will become the flag of the southern states that will ask their champion-turned-president to practice the new strategy of galloping privatizations. But this will trigger a head-on clash on key issues, such as the environment, energy, immigration and above all on international relations, with the decoupling of the US superpower from the Atlantic platform and a new gentlemen’s agreement with Moscow.
The ties between the different areas of the country could come under strain, with the central power finding an unprecedented convergence with the most autonomist forces, such as the leaders of states like Texas or Alabama. The American strategy would split into an autonomist policy of the lower middle classes of Trump’s states, and instead the compass of the so-called deep state that would maintain harmony with the financial forces of the North. A new war of secession that this time would see the most reactionary components on the attack, with the aim of freeing the most similar components throughout the West to give an irreversible blow to the social conquests of the last century.
France would be a natural interlocutor, together with Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, awaiting the German giant’s move to the right. A shivering scenario that would make us remember with tender nostalgia the protests against the stars and stripes imperialism of a few decades ago. The left would find itself completely disconnected from this dynamic. The popular base of these reactionary turns, where it is precisely the classes most linked to material production that request anti-globalization protection but also distance from a cumbersome state, completely displaces the front of the parties that are heirs of the workers’ movement.
The embarrassment with which the American election campaign was followed, in which the opposition to an American power seen as unitary and homogeneous still resonated in radical culture, in which Donald Trump was only the bad cop compared to the good one embodied by Joe Biden, shows the inability to grasp the changes in political dynamics.
The lack of critical mass on the left, in the transition between the old area of consensus – the world of work and literary intellectuality, moved to the right – completely dispersed and the inability to find new references in the professional components of the digital sphere, leaves the left completely impotent. The difficulty of creating alliances and giving shape to government platforms, as we see in Italy, and in France, but also in Germany and in Spain itself, where the reduced majority of Pedro Sanchez is wearing out, announces a century where the progressive alignment will be completely silent in the face of the clash between two right-wing parties, the radical and the liberal.
A picture in which the moderate center, which the old electoral school saw with the pendulum to conquer, seems completely dried up. The geography of the consultations of these last rounds throughout the West sees a practically homogeneous map: the big cities, with the historic centers swollen with pensioners and recipients of public incomes, on the left, while the countryside and the suburbs, where the game between globalizing dynamics and the technological forces that protest by throwing themselves to the right, are played. The black hole that unbalances the game is the absence of a political and electoral protagonism of a vast area of digital activities and professions that are absent from the electoral scene. In that chessboard of new forces there is the only resource that could give space to a left of the 21st century, where the party form is sensitive to the ambitions of deliberative participation that millennials are accustomed to today.
In essence we find ourselves with a right wing in government and an open construction site on state and parties to be redesigned. Without a left wing that can have an impact. The situation is truly confusing, and unlike what Chairman Mao claimed, the outlook does not appear positive at all.
