Historian Mario Del Pero on Trumpism and the rift generated by the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis.

Trumpism and its ability to generate consensus in American society have deep roots, and they are also closely related to the role the United States have played in the world, its capacity to exercise hegemony. Together with Mario Del Pero, a historian and leading expert on U.S. foreign policy who teaches History at Sciences Po in Paris, we revisited the themes discussed in a series of lectures and seminars held at the Ciampi Institute of the Scuola Normale in Pisa, where he has been a guest in recent weeks.

“All the administrations before Reagan used a ‘limitationist‘ rhetoric, as Robert Osgood, Kissinger’s advisor, called it. They all made speeches about the limits of international projection in response to the failure in Vietnam, internal protests, the fact that the fear of communism and the USSR were no longer mobilizing forces, and the dollar crisis, which lost 50% of its value against the Yen and the Mark in the 1970s. Kissinger talked about a realist policy and the nedd to delegating responsibility to allies, and opening up to China to contain the USSR. It was a discourse that acknowledged limits and a retreat from large modernization and democratization crusades in Latin America and Vietnam. Carter took this discourse further, influenced also by the oil crises: in his July 1979 speech, he called for austerity, a patriotic speech that nonetheless signaled the need to accept limits, even in consumption.

Then came the Reagan revolution….

“Reagan made the opposite speech: ‘The sky is the limit‘. In 1979, the conditions were set for this shift, especially after the appointment of Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve. Interest rates soared, and with them, the dollar became very strong because U.S. bonds provided returns similar to those of much weaker countries. And with a strong dollar, exporting economies had a ready market for their goods. The Soviets invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran revolution, which revived the Cold War, helped Reagan’s election and triggered an aggressive foreign policy based on three pillars that I discussed in an essay I called “Weapons, Dollars, and Words”. The arms pillar was reflected in the renewed military and technological spending. Although it never returned to the levels of the 1950s, it reversed the trend of the previous decade. The dollar became a tool to import goods and capital. Amid a general liberalization of capital returns, the U.S. absorbed loans, direct investments, and stock market capital, and imported goods because it had liquidity and capital to consume more. Lastly, the discourse changed: with Reagan, the American exceptionalism narrative returned, a sunny and optimistic nationalism, far from the trumpian dark and rough nationalism. The U.S. once again became the great power, with the parallel decline of the Soviet Union. This phase marked the beginning of what I like to call the ’empire of consumption,’ no longer that of production, which became an imperial asset. Because everyone had an interest in this, there’s a paradox where everyone lends money to the imperial country, starting with China and Japan, to subsidize American consumption. This mountain of liquidity turned into easy credit for domestic consumption. It was one of the biggest failures of contemporary America: having so much liquidity in a phase of transformation and using it for consumption and speculation rather than retraining workers and intervening where factories were closing. Even Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ missile defense program was based on the idea of reducing interdependence: the missile defense plan was framed in terms of renewed sovereignty and autonomy.

There was plenty of contradictions and problems in this imported consumption based way of leaving

Each of these pillars contained contradictions that exploded in 2008: monumental trade deficits, dependence on foreign income, a collapse in personal savings, and wages remaining stagnant. American families became increasingly indebted, and their asset became real estate. The rising value of homes became the tool that allowed the middle class to continually renegotiate their debt and take on even more. When the housing bubble burst, the debt remained.

Arms: you have this extraordinary military power, but you can’t afford to lose a man anymore. In Iraq, there were just over 4,000 deaths—54,000 fewer than in Vietnam, but it was still politically unsustainable. The highly technological military power, at least until the arrival of drones, could only be used sparingly in asymmetric wars.

As for the exceptionalist rhetoric, when it goes too far, it alienates part of the rest of the world. The hegemon must deal with both internal and external consensus. Cold War liberalism aligned these two forms of consensus: the language used internally could also be used internationally, while Bush Jr.’s hyper-nationalism rallied U.S. society for a few years but alienated the rest of the world. International surveys showed a sharp decline in European support for American leadership. The new post-1970s rhetoric mobilized domestic public opinion in favor of active and costly foreign policies, but tended to alienate the rest of the world.

In 2008, these contradictions exploded: the collapse of the housing market with the subprime crisis, the failure of the wars, and the global rejection of the U.S. Obama managed to piece things back together somewhat, but after 2008, the issues remained. And the one that grew more acute was the trade-off between inequality and consumption: income grew, wealth grew, but consumption didn’t. The increase in wealth was poorly distributed, and billionaires didn’t have the consumption capacity to compensate for the growing inequalities. The gap between Musk’s consumption and that of an average person is much smaller than the wealth gap. Consumption becomes a kind of social safety net, compensating for inequalities and wage stagnation.

The 2008 financial crisis was also a moment of reckoning for globalization…

With globalization came deindustrialization, which devastated parts of the country while growing others, but as consumers, all benefited. Nike Air Jordans, for instance, halved in price over ten years. People consumed more at a constant inflation rate. But the benevolent narrative of globalization was swept away by the 2008 crisis. Also swept away were cosmopolitanism, the idea of openness, integration, and mobility. I believe Trump is also a product of this.

The difficult complementarity between internal and external consensus was visible with Obama: the more popular and cosmopolitan he was globally, the less popular he was in the U.S. The accusation Sarah Palin made against him was that he didn’t believe in American exceptionalism, which was a roundabout way of saying, ‘You’re not a patriot.’ In forms less pronounced than Bush’s (in reverse: his popular 9/11 response was unpopular abroad), Obama’s presidency was a moment when some significant segments of American society perceived a decline, a departure from ‘white America,’ the beacon on the hill.

The reaction to Obama was the Tea Party, which incubated many of the ideas we see today. The rhetoric of the Tea Party targets the ‘undeserving‘—those who don’t deserve it and don’t work (a veiled reference to minorities)—contrasting the hardworking America with the elites. This quickly evolved into opposition to opposition. Senate leader McConnell said of Obama, ‘We will make sure he serves only one term.’ The birther conspiracy theory about Obama’s missing birth certificate soon took hold—this was also the moment when Trump re-entered the political scene, after having criticized welfare in the 1980s or buying a full-page ad to accuse the Central Park Five (five Black teenagers wrongfully convicted of a crime, later exonerated).

In those years, a benign narrative of globalization died, replaced by the idea that the U.S. had lost sovereignty and thus freedom. Interdependence became a form of dependency on others, particularly China, which was used to generate fear. Trumpism is many things, but it is also the fear of depending on others: the discourse on bringing supply chains home is framed as a matter of sovereignty and threat. After 2008, this fear of interdependence was skillfully exploited in an apocalyptic discourse, almost bordering on the grotesque. If we look at the fundamentals, in the era of interdependence, the U.S. hasn’t lost—it has actually gained a lot: for every city in Ohio or Michigan that loses jobs, there’s one in the South or West that gains. Yet, this narrative of the U.S. being one of the losers of globalization persists. Tell that to the industrial districts in Italy, so glorified in the 1990s, where factories closed and bingo halls opened. This narrative continued under Obama, when the Democrats lost at the local level and certain social divides deepened, which, when reexamined today, we can say that Ferguson or the death of Trayvon Martin incubated the visceral reaction that followed.

Let’s return to the categories you used, what about Arms, dollar and narrative after 2008?

Arms: Obama bears responsibility for drone use. While these mitigate damage, they don’t bring about regime change, and public opinion has become increasingly anti-interventionist, as seen in recent years, for example with the stance on Ukraine. The extraordinary military primacy is no longer a tool for ambitious policies. The exceptionalism discourse: in different ways, both Obama and Trump engage in an anti-exceptionalism rhetoric. In a significant interview with a foreign media outlet, Obama said, ‘I believe in American exceptionalism as much as you believe in the exceptionalism of your country.’ Trump does not claim special missions for the U.S.; his nationalism asserts that every country should pursue its own national interest by any means necessary, which is why he admires Putin or Xi Jinping. Biden tried to reignite the democratic mission idea by citing Roosevelt, but this rhetoric failed to generate support. If arms and words fail, consumption should remain. But after 2008, and with the new banking regulations approved under Obama (the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010), there was an initial scaling back, and then with inflation post-2020, the ability to consume collapsed. We saw this dissatisfaction in this election cycle. The outcome of 2008 and Bush’s wars led to the success of a political proposal promising disengagement, fewer rules, and, above all, an end to interdependence. However, this did not translate into results: despite tariffs, the U.S. trade deficit did not shrink, and, for example, during Trump’s years, the deficit with Vietnam tripled. Keep in mind that the interdependencies we talked about earlier allowed the U.S. to maintain consumption without inflationary spirals, effectively freezing wages.

The conservative Max Booth, an advocate of the new neocon imperialism, has just published a biography of Reagan, which is highly critical and identifies some of the roots of Trumpism in Reagan’s policies. Many genealogies can be built regarding the evolution of the Republican Party and certain societal reactions in the U.S., but for me, 2008 remains a crucial turning point. The crisis of those years delegitimized a benevolent narrative of globalization, led to a rejection of cosmopolitanism, openness, and exchange, and fueled understandable fears and the ugly instincts these fears generate.

Talking of hegemony, it is true that the US have lost some of the “leader of the world” aura, but the Trumpian narrative seems to have some kind of appeal at least in Western societies…

There is a new, partially hegemonic discourse in white Western societies that leverages fear and the demand for protection, the delegitimization of elites (political, intellectual, scientific), and institutions. This is a discourse that runs through all societies where the middle class has been affected by global integration processes. As Milanovic explains, globalization has created a global middle class and super-rich but has hurt the most advanced industrial societies. There are common fears and patterns, as well as different forms of immigration with shared elements—no wonder Trump uses Haitians as a target. This Trumpian discourse, and not just his, holds hegemony. And if it comes from the pulpit of the White House, anything can be legitimized. This leads to a demand for protection, isolation, and closure, which produces fragmentation. After half a century of integration, which created a profound infrastructure—hundreds of thousands of Chinese students in the U.S., shipping containers traveling, etc.—is this discourse hegemonic? The answer must be impressionistic, but I fear it is. We’re looking at Trump’s social, historical, and economic origins, as well as his content and tone. Today, a portion of Western society votes right not despite Trump or Salvini but for them. The humiliation of the weak, the systematic verbal violence—evidently capture the imagination. I’m not sure if it’s hegemony, but it certainly has a grip on the imagination. Institutions and politics may be delegitimized, but they continue to have significant pedagogical power. If the president of the United States uses such tones, why shouldn’t I do the same at the bar?”