There Is No Alternative — There Is No Going Back
“There is No Alternative” — 1980s UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s famous “Tina” — is an expression as widely used as ever. But it has a new meaning. When Maggie said “Tina,” it meant countries, banks, businesses, trade unions, all had to accept neoliberal capitalism. They had no choice. It was that simple.
Now neoliberal capitalism in its globalized form — implying free trade and worldwide movement of capital to capture the lowest labor and regulatory costs — is collapsing. Keeping Maggie-style neoliberalism is not itself an alternative. We cannot go back. However, there’s still no other alternative people can agree on even at a national level in most cases and certainly not at a world level. What Tina means to me is that only fog lies beyond the inevitable collapse of the old way of being.
You can think of it as German sociologies Wolfgang Streeck’s “interregnum,” in which governance has failed but there’s “no masterplan of a better society.” Or you might prefer early 20th Century Italian Marxist formulation: “The old world is dying and the new struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” Or to invert an overused colloquialism, there is no American dream.
Trump’s Contradictions
Is this true? Doesn’t Donald Trump have a vision of a nationalist capitalism that will bring factories back to the US and recreate a slightly smaller but rapidly growing version of the globalized form of neoliberal capitalism — all behind a protective wall of tariffs? If he does have such a vision, as admirers sometimes claim, it’s more like a confused, half-remembered dream than a well-thought-out plan. It’s rife with contradictions. Some examples:
* At times, Trump’s ideal economy appears to be strictly national. At other times, it sounds more like “spheres of influence.” The US is at the center of an “Americas” sphere. With or without Canada as part of the core, the US economically and politically dominates an empire of sorts extending from Greenland and Alaska in the north at least through Central America, which can act as a penal colony, among its other colonial functions.
Is South America part of this, too? Hard to say. Brazil is bound to come under Trump attack soon, as it’s picking up soybean and corn sales to China from Trump’s loyal and avid supporters in farm country. Brazil may potentially pick up oil sales to China lost by US producers, as well. What will emerge in terms in US relations with Brazil and others in South America is impossible to say.
Nor is it clear to what extent China and Russia will be allowed their spheres of influence. Or quite where the UK and Europe fit in all this. Or Africa. Maybe Trump will be content to let some of them figure that out for themselves.
* Trump’s economic endgame isn’t any more clearly defined than the geography of his playing field. He wants factories back in the US. But is his goal near-total national or regional self-sufficiency? Or is he more interested in fostering a few export-oriented sectors that will provide good-paying jobs for the “working class” males who form his loyal base? This would imply that the US continues to import most things, albeit without the huge trade deficit that it has had for decades.
*Has Trump accepted that domestic manufacturing with higher wages for factory workers implies higher costs and therefore higher prices for the goods people buy? The one thing globalized capitalism most clearly succeeded in delivering was cheap consumer goods. Now Treasury Secretary that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream.” Does Trump understand that? Do his voters accept that?
* Trump wants low gasoline prices, but he also wants the US to be the dominant producer and exporter of crude oil and natural gas. You can’t have both. He can bludgeon buyers to favor US supply over that from his buddies in Saudi Arabia and Russia. He’ll find it harder to get US oilmen to expand production when they know they won’t be able to make a juicy profit with prices where they are. And with China dead set on moving off oil and natgas and offering the world cheap and efficient renewable equipment, pushing up oil demand will be tough, too. Probably impossible outside the US.
Conditions of Collapse
Okay, so Trump’s vision is fuzzy. But can’t we go back to 2023, or 2015, or some other polite and plentiful time when centrist Democrats ruled the US and the universe? That’s pretty clearly what a lot of liberals on either side of the Atlantic want, from ordinary folk to New York Times and Financial Times columnists. One reason is election results, which continue to demonstrate how despised the old ways are in much of America — and across Europe.
Then there are the economic factors: Repeated close shaves with implosion, including (but not limited to) the 2008 financial collapse, the 2020 closures due to the Covid pandemic, and now tariffs and other onslaughts from Donald the Disruptor.
But serious as they are, such human political and economic factors might conceivably be fixed. What ensures there is no going back is the fact that the old way is literally unsustainable. Nothing to do with the advertising catch-phrase version of sustainability. The Earth is rebelling. Droughts, floods, wildfires, storms of all weird sorts are popping up all over, all the time. The World Meteorological Society reported 151 extreme weather events last year, with the US Federal Energy Management Agency alone responding to a major weather-related “disaster” every four days, according to author Paddy
Even increasingly common earthquakes are linked in some places to Earthly abuse. This relationship is indisputable around sites of intense drilling for oil and gas: In the Netherlands, where what was once Europe’s biggest source of natural gas was permanently shut down last year because the Earth was moving under the small . Something similar is starting to happen in parts of US shale country.
The number of multi-million-person cities threatened by rising ocean levels and more intense storms, or , or both, is multiplying exponentially as oceans rise and the weather becomes more erratic. The specter of fundamental shifts — by such major determinants of planetary conditions as the (AMOC) that encompasses the Gulf Stream — hangs over us. We may be just one more El Nino away from Hollywood-style cataclysm. Something big enough that even the enormously powerful Global Growth machine can’t ignore it.
Maybe temperatures in Washington, London, Brussels, and Beijing will go over 130℉ in high humidity and people will start to die on the streets, right under the noses of power public officials and financiers. The way they did in London just before Britain finally adopted the that started moving it away from use of coal for household heating as well as power generation and direct operation of factories. I hope not, but it’s a very real possibility.
Learning to Dance
This is why, personally, I haven’t taken to the streets to protest the anti-democratic actions of Donald Trump. It’s not that I like him or what he’s doing. Or that I don’t understand he’s a danger to democracy as it’s been practiced in the US in recent decades. But before I go out on the streets, I want to know that I and the people around me are not marching to get back to the situation that got us into this lethal pickle. I need to know that people understand that there is no going back, even if going forward may mean mayhem.
There may even be some advantages to the economic collapse Trump is toying with. The harm Donald the Disruptor may do at his most brutal is considerable, but it isn’t as bad as the baking, burning, and flooding the Earth will bring if the abuse we heap on it is unremitting. Whatever his motivations, which are certainly not mine, Trump’s teardown of international trade will reduce the CO2 and methane emissions, and the plastic packaging, and the mining and minerals extractions.
I am aware of the arguments made by many, including more than a few in the environmental community, that Biden & Co had us on a positive track in terms of emissions. Maybe not a perfect track, but “less bad” than Trump’s, they say. My view is that economic growth under Biden was worse in climate terms and would have brought on the wrath of the Earth faster than a quick economic collapse under Trump.
Recession, depression, much less economic collapse will be tough on a lot of people. Given time, they can adapt. More food can be grown closer to where it’s consumed and can be stored so that people have something to eat in the winter. Heat in winter and cooling in summer is the next priority. Basic antibiotics, critical vaccines to keep childhood diseases at bay, hopefully insulin and basic cancer treatments to mitigate the effects of the poison that will long remain in the land, sea, and air as a deadly testament to humanity’s delusional 300-year, fossil-fuel power binge. Whether we’ll have that adjustment time — and whether people will make use of it if we do — is yet-another unknowable.
A friend of mine recently recounted how, during his 40 years of living in Africa, he would marvel at how much less many African families consumed than what a typical American family would consider absolute necessities. And yes, he said in answer to a question, that African family would still dance. There’s hope. Not in turning back. But in moving forward into the impenetrable fog and feeling our way, with friends and family, to places where we can learn again to dance.
