Jeff Noonan

Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT

According to leading cosmopolitan liberals, the post–WWII order has been a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The main threat to this Golden Age, they maintain, is right-wing populist nationalism in general and Donald Trump in particular. I argue that their position is a Eurocentric ideological inversion of reality. In truth, Trump is not a threat to the liberal-capitalist order, but a pure expression of its life-destructive competitive dynamics. His “America First” foreign policy is a response to the contradictions of global political economic forces. The paper begins with an examination of the real drivers of the liberalcapitalist system, confronts the ideological illusions of liberal cosmopolitanism with these darker realities, argues that an empirical examination of Trump’s record reveals that he is more consistent with than an opponent of post-war political economic dynamics, and concludes with a review of the manifold lifedestructive effects that order has had on the peoples of the Global South and workers everywhere.

KEYWORDS

Trump; liberalism; cosmopolitanism; capitalism; Global South

From: International Critical Thought 2020 10 (2)

Editor: Wang Yi