Standalone interesting political articles thread

[DotCommunist]

The rise of disaster nationalism

The modern far-right is not a return to fascism, but a new and original threat.

www.newstatesman.com

Seymour. Interesting stuff about todays right vs old fascism. Particularly liked the bits comparing the optimism of interwar fascism and todays movement

Disaster nationalism evinces not the least trace of the utopianism of historical fascism, with its colonial fantasies of living space and a “new man” equipped for global domination by race science. Rather, apart from the Israeli far-right’s expansionist vision for Gaza and the West Bank, it offers a meagre, defensive nationalism scaled to an age of deflationary politics. It doesn’t feign anticapitalism or proffer what Michael Mann calls “class transcendence”, as fascists did in both Italy and Germany. To the contrary, it defends a more muscular capitalism freed from “woke” constraints, albeit with ethnic protections. There is no sense of the futurist Aufbruch (departure)that Roger Griffin says characterised interwar fascism, apart from the pathetic, suicidal romance of the lone-wolf manifesto[RS1] . Tomorrow doesn’t belong to them; they don’t want tomorrow. On the flipside of their obsession with disaster scenarios is nostalgia for a version of normality that is slipping away.

 

[JimW]

Survey of military-business collaboration across the global south:

https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/08/the-military-and-private-business-actors-in-the-global-south-the-politics-of-market-access?lang=en

 

[redsquirrel]

Interesting piece by Adam Tooze on Biden - arguing the continuities between the Trump and Biden governments as well as their differences. Certainly worth a read

Adam Tooze · Great Power Politics: What was Bidenomics?

Whatever happens in the election, Bidenism is over. The project anchored on the long-serving senator from Delaware and...

www.lrb.co.uk

https://archive.ph/3VvXH

The irony, of course, is that this narrative is anything but new. In all but name, this is MAGA, and credit for it belongs to the Trump team in the 2016 campaign. If we were to date it precisely, as good a moment as any would be Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Thursday, 21 July 2016, in which he portrayed the nation as besieged by violence and terrorism. That moment was telling because President Obama responded in the following days that he saw a very different country. Americans weren’t living in a gothic world of doom. They were taking their kids to school and to sports camp. They were getting on with finding real solutions to real problems. Trump wasn’t all that Republican or even conservative, he implied; Trump was just weird. Come November 2016, however, it wasn’t Trump but Obama who seemed out of touch. Obama would afterwards face the accusation, not just from Republicans but from those in his own party, that he had failed to recognise the discontent brewing in American society. The Biden team were determined not to make that mistake.

Biden’s team saw Trump not as a precursor, however, but as a symptom. The problem was not his sense of unease but how narrowly he defined it. Trump worries about migration, the dilapidation of American cities, foreign car imports and the state of America’s airports. The Biden team agreed with the diagnosis of malaise but interpreted it in far more capacious terms. They declared a triple threat: to USdemocracy from within, to Western hegemony from the rise of China, and to humanity as a whole from global environmental threats such as Covid and climate breakdown. You could argue that this is the consensus among centrists the world over. European policymakers agree with this account, so do their equivalents in Brazil or Australia and the crowd at Davos. The difference is that the diagnosis adopted in Washington matters, both because of America’s power and because of the intensity of America’s problems at home.

The daunting historical significance of the policies on tech and nuclear weapons that have been enacted under Biden is that they mark the definitive and self-conscious end of the globalising post-Cold War moment. This was a while in the making. The Obama presidency felt the first tremors. The US is obviously not the only accelerant – far from it. The challenge posed by Russia and China is real. But what has been so striking and concerning about the Biden administration is its lack of imagination in answering them. It doubled down on historic claims to USleadership ranging from the Second World War, via the space race, to the 1990s unipolar moment. And yet for all the gestures to historical grandeur, American statecraft of the 2020s is threadbare. To sell a clean energy Marshall Plan in Washington today, start by dismissing any pretension to the complex hegemonic calculus of the original. What the moment calls for is an America First export promotion. The alternative on offer from Trump’s team is even less substantial and far more unpredictable. If nothing better emerges in the coming years, the outlook is for a grim escalation of tension between a changing world and a vision of American power that, though technologically sophisticated, is in political terms increasingly anachronistic.