Donald Trump - the 47th president of the United States - has around three years and a half in office. In the ‘long duree’ scheme of things, this time or duration is paltry- especially when the agenda ‘on hand’ is huge. So, what is the Trumpian agenda?
Fundamentally, the framing of this question is only partially correct; it is what Donald Trump represents and what he seeks to do with presidential power and authority vested in him that is germane. What then does Trump represent? And what does he seek to do? The 47th president of the United States is representative of a paradox: the convergence and divergence of strands of conservative ideas and movement thereof.
As a New York Times essay, ‘This Idea tells a lot about what happened under Trump 2.0’ authored by Nathan Levine suggests, ‘real power’ in the United States rested anywhere except in the ‘political’. It lay in the interstices of the bureaucracy and managerial control of government.
In this schema, no matter the proverbial change in political guard in the country, politics in the organic sense was subordinate to managerialism. By way of an analogy, the ‘best’ grid that would describe this phenomenon, is the economist’s, the late Berle and Means typology on/of corporate control.
The duo asserted that over time real power in corporations had moved from owners of capital (shareholders) to managers of the firm. This skewed the ‘principal - agent relationship where managers would mostly work for and toward their own interests than that of the firm and its real owners.
Given the dispersal of shareholders and shareholding patterns of the modern corporation, ‘collective action’ to remedy managerial capitalism, in the Berle and Means schema, was rendered moot. Recent corporate history is replete and littered with instances of corporate malfeasance where corporate CEOs by virtue of stock options enriched themselves at the expense of shareholders.
Now, this analogy when grafted onto the political and politico-economic paradigms of the US, is revelatory: it suggests (validated by the NYT guest essay in contention) a tiny elite in the country that had created its clones across the world, having access to and having monopolized power in the country’s government, governance and administrative domains benefited at the expense of the working classes. It needs to be noted that the former was celebrated by the Economist newspapers of London as the ‘Heroic CEO’ and the latter was eulogized by the ace columnist Thomas Friedman of the same newspapers as the ‘Davos man’.
The Davos man was a supposedly a ‘rootless’, cosmopolitan’ person unattached to any nation or idea other than globalism defined self-interest. He had no identity other than this. But, in actual and real terms what does a rootless, cosmopolitan mean? If I may ‘usurp’ a term from existentialist philosophy, ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ would mean ‘nothingness’ - an airy, nothingness sated by mere profits and rate of return.
This would suggest a view and idea of man (woman) who merely was a bundle of utils, always balancing out the credits and debits of pain avoidance and pleasure maximization, in his or her ledger, with self-interested egotism as the highest ideal. But human beings are not wired this way. We are not a bundle of utils; we humans need an anchor and a root to attach ourselves to.
The optimal human then is one who balances self -interest, higher thinking and higher order thinking, self-transcendence, rootedness and other anchors in proportions that give meaning to life. This does not mean humans anywhere should abjure cosmopolitanism.
I may cite my personal journey and predilections here: I am in Kashmir right now; I speak Kashmiri eat food that has a certain cultural ingress and relate to people in the cultural idiom of Kashmir. But this does not mean I cannot relate to, or partake in the culture of an American, a French or English person.
While I am not being pretentious or elitist here, but I would like to think I am cosmopolitan: at this point in time, I am embedded in Kashmiri culture but this does not preclude me from savoring, partaking and getting enriched by other cultures.
I can, in crude terms, wear the Kashmiri pheran and hat in Paris (without jarring the sensibilities of my host society), carry myself well and saunter rather elegantly (this is, in a lighter vein where my vanity kicks in) on the Champs Elysees boulevard, and also speak French. The point here is while being rooted I can engage, enjoy, savor and get enriched by other cultures. The variable and the constant here is rootedness.
This idea of organic rootedness was undercut by globalism, its contents and discontents. The overall ideational ingress of globalism was a certain idea of liberalism that viewed human beings as atomized beings, whose nirvana lay in consumption, consumerism, rootlessness, undermining borders and nations in the process.
The ‘army’ to this line of thinking was fed by elite universities of the United States who manned critical positions and monopolized functions of government and governance. This had clear implications on domestic and foreign policies of the United States. Under these constraining conditions, even a US president – the most powerful man in the world - was rather helpless.
It is these ideas, their ‘path dependence’, the structures of governance and government which inhibited, precluded, pre-empted that Donald Trump is dismantling. Given their entrenched nature, Donald Trump is not a mere ‘disruptor’ or ‘insurgent; he is a veritable revolutionary.
The parallel may sound distasteful to Americans but Trump appears to be a ‘Che with a pen in hand’, setting out to not merely alter the paradigms of governance, society, politics, policies and international relations of not only the United States but the entire world.
To fructify this ‘revolution’, Trump is not merely disturbing the extant order but inducing disorder and injecting chaos and uncertainty in American politics, policy and world politics and economics. The apt analogue, in general terms, here may be the ‘big bang theory’ where after a huge bang the universe came into being and settled to its rhythms.
In personal terms, Donald Trump’s approach and style correspond to ‘singularity’. In other words, out of disorder emerged order but for this Trump must be mono-focally obsessed with end games. Will, the question is, the 47th president of the United States succeed?
Time will tell. We have three and a half years to know the answer!
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