EU President Donald Tusk. Photo: Kancelaria Premiera. Flickr. Some rights reserved.After Brexit, a new popular rightwing nationalism has taken flight, not just in Britain but across the globe. Donald Tusk, president of the European Union, in an interview with the German newspaper Bild, said: "as a historian I fear Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilization in its entirety." Jean-Claude Juncker agreed with him.
After Trump, the era of Neoliberalism is over. Even Fukuyama thinks so, the man who wrote The End of History in big letters on the remains of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We were already creeping towards Neoconservatism and now we have a new global populist nationalism. In the Financial Times, Fukuyama explained that the troubles are within, by which he means national economic troubles after the crash of 2008. Whichever way you look at it, he concludes, we are in for a 'rough ride' after Trump. I'm not a liberal in any everyday sense. I aligned myself with a Marxist tradition long ago that critiques the lineage of liberalism that sits easily with laissez-faire capitalism.
The Trump campaign has been one of rhetorical conflation, to understate things significantly, and one big conflation was that of liberalism with political correctness. In many ways there is nothing wrong with a general hegemonic structure of feeling that says we treat each other with respect. In others, it merely ices anaesthetic permafrost over the conflictual nature of social relations. I do have some issues with political correctness and what the last year has shown in great detail is that political correctness heals nothing. Richard Sennett's early, great work teaches us again and again that social structures are not bound completely by harmony and good feeling towards our fellows, but equally by small scale, low-level conflict. The Sociologist Erving Goffman pioneered this view, that cities function through a trillion tiny acts of self-defense and signals of aggression that never lead to actual violence.
