This week the conflict surfaced of the presumed difference between Trump’s economic nationalism and Clinton’s globalization, the former thought in the liberal media a betrayal of enlightened internationalism (similar to the condemnation of Britain’s exit from the EU) and, on the side of constructive economic statesmanship, a world order of free trade and peaceful harmony. The Great Obfuscation: Both are mere alternative strategies to ensuring US unilateral global hegemony, to be realized through military power and a geopolitical framework of counterrevolution. Trump and Clinton feed from the same Wall Street trough. Both are imperialist, their differences cosmetic, confrontational with respect to Russia and China, unquestioning about America’s right to dictate the conditions, acceptance, and demand for systemic legitimacy of world capitalism (under, of course, US leadership).
Foreign policy is the elephant in the room, more decisive than domestic policy, though crowded off the stage (both Sanders and Warren conspicuous by their silence) in defining America’s progression down the road to fascism. Trump and Clinton both have willing accomplices to that end in a white working class that, unlike fifty-sixty years ago possessed the democratic vitality for preserving and pushing further a radical agenda of social welfare, and now a kept class ideologically beaten down so far as to throw in its lot with the forces of reaction and, in trickle-down fashion, upper capitalism itself.