The American Empire is being dismantled by the current American president because of a pee tape. (Please read this post before going any further.) But what exactly is the American Empire, and, therefore, what exactly is Trump dismantling for the enemies of the state he commands? We know three things for sure. One, American Empire followed the British Empire. Two, it became a reality right after the Second World War. And three, it had two key capitalist allies: Germany and Japan. The former anchored empire in Europe, the latter in Asia. This empire was, as Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin wrote in The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, informal, but it was supported by a national and international institutional system that came together, part by part, in the first half of the 20th century.
In the second half of the 20th century, it was clear to the capitalists around the world that the US alone had, as Panitich and Gindin wrote, “the capacity to play the leading role in the expansion, protection, and reproduction of capitalism.” This was the first part of the second half of the 20th century (“the Bretton Woods era”). In the second half (after the Nixon Shock), American capitalism was not only reinforced by Germany and Japan, but packaged, exported, and replicated by almost every state on Earth. And so, we live in a world that has the United States as its image. This is globalization, and also neoliberalism.
Trump is reversing all of this and returning to an economic order the Western world has not seen since the age of Spanish and Dutch expansion. His program can only be described as a neo-mercantilism. In Patrick Allitt’s 18th and pivotal lecture (more about this in future posts) of the third series of his Teaching Company lectures on the British Empire, he describes mercantilism as the economic philosophy that Britain, under the guidance of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, rejected and replaced. With mercantilism, the state was in a war of all other states against all other states. Robbery was authorized. Pirates were not stateless. Gold was loved. I win, you lose; I lose, you win. High-tariffs were the order of the day. This sounds like Trump’s doctrine. A new mercantilism.
Mercantilism did not survive the three successive naval wars between the Dutch and Britain. As for the British Empire, it did not survive the two massive and successive world wars of the 20th century. World War I brought the British Empire down to its knees; WWII left the door wide open for the American one. It entered the new order by way of the very thing that the GOP now claims to hate, Big Government.
The US is the first empire in the world with huge state expenditures (35 percent of the GDP) devoted to the management of its population (French philosopher Michel Foucault called this “biopolitics”), and to have a huge part of this population not in poverty. If you go back to the British Empire, you find a state that spent very little on its subjects and the absence of anything like a middle class in the American sense. In this empire, when you spoke of the middle classes, you meant those who were not born to the manor proper. For example, if Charles Darwin was born in the US in the second half of the 20th century, his kind of wealth, which was tied to one of the most celebrated industrialists of the 18th century, Josiah Wedgwood, would have placed him far above the middle class. In the British Empire, however, he was merely middle class. He wasn’t born properly.
Although professor Patrick Allitt is, oddly, not deeply interested in the class structure of the British Empire in his history of that empire (maybe for him it’s a given), he does layout a course in the first lecture, “The Sun Never Set,” that recognizes the significance of a cultural process that’s closely related to the massification of the national feeling in the second half of the 19th century (this is also mentioned in the opening lecture), the mass production of luxuries. What Allitt describes as the British “sweet tooth” has as its background the exploitation of black African labor, the bio-physical transformation of Caribbean islands, the industrialization of time, the source of wealth of a character in a novel by Jane Austin (Mansfield Park), the popularization of addictive but nutritionally empty commodities, the power of the navy, empire. To miss the importance of the British sweet tooth is to misunderstand not only the nature of this nation’s period of military and economic supremacy but also capitalism itself. Britain realized it in the 18th century and globalized it by the end of the 19th.
The first globalization of capitalism had, as its center, the gold standard (Allitt, sadly, has little to say about this monetary scheme in his lectures). The British economist who pretty much managed Great Britain’s post-WWI structural transition from the top of the world to a position that would eventually be below the US’s primary allies, Japan and Germany, John Maynard Keynes, wrote in 1933:
I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt, but almost as a part of the moral law. I regarded ordinary departures from it as being at the same time an imbecility and an outrage. I thought England’s unshakable free trade convictions, maintained for nearly a hundred years, to be both the explanation before man and the justification before Heaven of her economic supremacy.
In the second era of globalization (which began after the Nixon Shock in 1971), the US dollar would became the world currency. An empire ordered by and orbiting the greenback is exactly what the neo-mercantilist Trump is dismantling at this moment.
Fox Business Network host Dagen McDowell said on Friday that conservatives would be “shouting to the high heavens” if former President Obama had implemented massive tariffs the way President Trump has.
McDowell, speaking on Fox News’s “Outnumbered,” said there has been a lack of criticism for Trump over escalating trade conflicts between the U.S. and other countries.
“If President Obama had pulled what we’ve seen in the last six months, we would be shouting to the high heavens, blowing the roof off this building about how Obama was killing the American farmer,” McDowell said.
Explain to your 2015 self how Russia will manage to install a compliant puppet as America’s president and pull his strings to undermine American influence and values for Putin’s benefit worldwide—and how this will happen before your eyes, with everyone watching.
— James Gleick (@JamesGleick) July 7, 2018
