Trump, our post-modern 1930s and DiEM25’s moment | Yanis Varoufakis
"Trump’s triumph completes the mortal wounding this era had suffered in
2008. But the new era that Trump’s presidency is inaugurating,
foreshadowed by Brexit, is not at all new. It is, indeed, a post-modern
variant of the 1930s, complete with deflation, xenophobia, and
divide-and-rule politics. Trump’s victory is not isolated. It will no
doubt reinforce the toxic politics unleashed by Brexit, the undisguised
bigotry of Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le
Pen in France, the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland, the
“illiberal democracies” emerging in Eastern Europe, Golden Dawn in
Greece.
Thankfully Trump is
not Hitler and history never repeats itself faithfully. Mercifully, big
business is not funding Trump and his European mates like it was
funding Hitler and Mussolini. But Trump and his European counterparts
are reflections of an emergent Nationalist International that the world
has not seen since the 1930s.
Just as in the 1930s, so too now a
period of debt-fuelled Ponzi growth, faulty monetary design and
financialisation led to a banking crisis that begat deflationary forces
which bred a mix of racist nationalism and populism. Just like in the
early 1930s, so too now a clueless establishment aims its guns at
progressives, such Bernie Sanders and our first Syriza government in
2015, but ends up being upended by belligerent racist nationalists."
