The messy ideological morass that has given us President Donald Trump 2.0  

What has just happened in the United States, as well as in Europe and other parts of the world, where far-right ideologues have won elections or appear to have soared suddenly in popularity?

We have had 10 years to contemplate the catastrophe of rising neo-fascism. We, therefore, don’t have patience for those who might blame Donald Trump’s win merely on a certain X.com influencer whose value system was distorted by bullying as an apartheid-era high school student in Bryanston – though his $175-million campaign gifts to Trump probably did buy some millions of votes.

It’s a much longer trajectory that we must explain to fight back better. We remember how shocked we were in 2014 by India’s turn to Narendra Modi, the BJP Hindu fundamentalist who was seen as sufficiently responsible for the 2002 mass murder of Muslims that the US had banned him from visiting until then.

Or how in 2016, we shuddered at the openly fascistic Rodrigo Duterte’s victory in the Philippines, followed by unexpected British so-called populist support for Brexit – when the majority appeared to be under the sway of xenophobia and voted to leave the European Union – and then in November 2016 by Trump’s stunning defeat of the corporate neoliberal Hillary Clinton. Then, one major country after another shifted to the far right.

We were appalled in 2018 when in Brazil (controlled by the Workers Party since 2003), Jair Bolsonaro – the Trump of the Tropics – won the presidency. At the same time, Boris Johnson took Britain far further into rightwing populist turf, especially in his successful 2019 election campaign. Conspiracy theories abounded in 2020 when the far right faced legitimate Covid-19 public health emergency measures across the world.

The 2022 rise to power of Mussolini-supporting Georgia Meloni in Italy was followed by last October’s victory for Javier Milei in Argentina. This year, we witnessed Geert Wilders’ party win in The Netherlands, the Freedom Party of Herbert Kickl winning most votes in Austria, the near-victory of the French far-right, and a neo-Nazi resurgence in several German provinces.

And as a telling sign of how fascist creep has moved mainstream, much of the respectable Western elite joined a veritable Axis of Genocide, as rulers in Washington-London-Berlin-Brussels-Paris found themselves not only facilitating Israel’s murder mayhem of Palestine and now Lebanon, but also crushing civil liberties of Palestine-solidarity dissent at home.

And away from Europe, in addition to present-day India, the authoritarianism and even dictatorial control over society in Russia, China, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia mean the majority of countries invited to become BRICS members at the leaders’ summit here in Johannesburg last year suffer from ruling classes just as hostile to democracy, human rights, environmental sanity and worker interests as Donald Trump.

The G20 will be hosted next week in Rio de Janeiro by a former metal-worker leader, Lula Ignacio da Silva, and aside from a fascism-revival festival for the majority of states in that body, one durable feature is that the US presence will continue to be utterly Sinophobic (hating China) – from Joe Biden to Trump won’t make much difference – even if the latter claims not to be yet another neoconservative warmonger.

When a year from now, the G20 is hosted by another former mineworker leader in Johannesburg, it is fair to predict that Trump will be tearing up so many multilateral agreements – especially to slow planet-threatening climate change – that he will claim to be too busy even to attend, as he considers our part of the world as a “shithole” zone, friendly to Palestinians, whom he’ll no doubt permit Benyamin Netanyahu to wipe off the face of the Earth.

Indeed, here in South Africa, the ongoing ascendance of xenophobic attitudes in society and some openly Afrophobic political parties, plus the barely disguised white supremacism and top-down class-war politics of the junior ruling party, echo loudly throughout this Government of Neoliberal Unity.

And by listening carefully to the political whispers of white big money, we already hear champagne corks popping and toasts to Trump in the rich, revanchist-dominated neighbourhoods of Sandhurst and the Atlantic Seaboard.   

On the other hand, the slide we are witnessing into a period of profoundly anti-worker ideology – faux-populist fascism – has been briefly interrupted by the occasional upsurge of brave leftist leaders who rally genuine popular support: Jeremy Corbyn in England in 2017, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US during the late 2010s, the attempt in some Latin American countries – most encouragingly today Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaun – to pull off a new “Pink Tide” during the early 2020s, and a few weeks ago, the Sri Lankan election of Marxist president Anura Kumara Dissanayake.

In Britain, the recent election of the Labour Party and back in 2020, the return of Biden’s straightforward corporate neoliberal imperialism were signs that the far right could be beaten back, even if by run-of-the-mill imperialist, neo-colonial politicians.

In France, in contrast, the brilliant construction of an anti-neoliberal and anti-fascist New Popular Front led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon won a plurality of voters in July. It meant Le Pen’s hard-right tradition remains out of power, even if President Emmanuel Macron refuses to accept his third-place status and give the left a fair share of government in Paris.

But aside from a few scattered, momentary corrections, our global ideological compass is swinging radically to the right just as we desperately need what the New Popular Front advocated: a reaffirmation of democratic values and a programme that is pro-worker, pro-environment, pro-women, pro-children and pro-peace. Here and everywhere, the fight against imperialism, racism, patriarchy, ecocide and capitalism, more generally, has never been more urgent.

After all, there is no doubt about the corporate neoliberal and rightwing-populist failure to manage what the World Economic Forum admits is a polycrisis ranging across the life-threatening man-made catastrophes: geopolitical rifts with consequences that may include a nuclear conflagration, soaring inequality, economic volatility, parasitical financialisation, runaway unregulated technological change, new pandemic threats, climate-system meltdown and biodiversity collapse.

How should we see this ideologically so that our socialist values can be reasserted with the confidence they deserve? After all, our ideas are so threatening to the far right that they led Trump to proclaim last November: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

A few months earlier, he threatened, “using federal law, section 212 (f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, I will order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists”.

What is it that makes the tools of reactionary capital so fearful of our left traditions – and how can we gain sufficient strength to justify this fear? The South African Federation of Trade Unions will debate the state of the working class and trade unions at the end of November. The left across the world must make this evaluation or accept that we are doomed for decades to come. DM