MUST READ: Right-Wing Populism and the Republican Party

A Conversation with Ingar Solty and Max Bohnel on the Republican National Convention

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From August 27 to 30th, the Republican National Convention (RNC) took place in Tampa, Florida, where the party officially nominated Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate and Paul Ryan as his running mate for vice-president. The U.S. foreign-correspondent for German-speaking public radio networks and progressive newspapers, Max Bohnel from New York (previously a Middle East foreign correspondent in Jerusalem), travelled to Tampa and reported on the convention. His conversation with Ingar Solty is a slightly reworked version of a piece published in the print as well as the online edition of the German daily newspaper Neues Deutschland.

…in the United States elections are won in the first instance by money, and in view of the high abstention rate, in the second, by mobilization of the base. ”

IS: The party elite reacted to this tricky situation with a demonstration of its power. In short succession all party bigwigs endorsed Romney: George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan. In addition, at the start of March party strategists Ross Douthat and David Frum appeared to have taken advantage of a sexism scandal on the part of the right-wing populist and secret kingmaker Rush Limbaugh, to discipline the entire right-wing of the party. From that moment onwards Romney had the support of the right-wing. At the party convention Romney will thus find the right words to excite the party’s base. He is aware in the United States elections are won in the first instance by money, and in view of the high abstention rate, in the second, by mobilization of the base.

MB: How do you assess Romney’s decision to choose Paul Ryan as his running mate in this context?

IS: Romney’s decision in favor of the market radical Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate should help to electrify the base close to the Tea Party. At the same time, with this decision Romney has probably done a disservice to his campaign, because Ryan is the extra ammunition Obama needs to be re-elected. The 2012 election boils down to a negative electoral campaign. This has to do with the fact that on the one hand about half the population rejects Romney, but Obama in view of the sluggish economic situation and the remaining unpopularity of his policies including the health care reform cannot undertake a positive campaign. On the other hand, the decision of the Supreme Court regarding campaign financing encourages this very development. The newly legalized campaign funds known as “Super-PACs” though not allowed to directly support candidates, are permitted to provide unlimited money for negative campaigning. Thanks to Ryan, Obama, as a moderate neoliberal politician espousing austerity, can now warn about the specter of the right-wing libertarian Ryan, who with his policy approach antagonized even the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

MB: How can we conceive of a right-wing intellectual who advises Romney or does the preliminary work for him and the republicans in the media or academically?

IS: Romney’s brain trust reflects his origin as an elite republican. Connections to the right-wing fringe exist only with the advisor Jim Talent. It is striking that Romney does not have any political-economic vision. In 2008 Obama early on surrounded himself with many economists with different positions, from the classic neoliberals with Wall-Street connections (Paul Volcker, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner) via the Third-Way neoliberalism of Austan Goolsbee up to moderate Keynesianism (Jared Bernstein, Christina Romer and at the beginning also James K. Galbraith). In contrast, in Romney’s team the Hayek ideologue Ryan, who intended to privatize the popular Social Security and Medicare systems for retirees and only backpaddled in his RNC speech now regarding Medicare, corresponds most closely to a high-profile economic expert.

Otherwise Romney’s advisors are distinguished as being a crude mix of party cadres close to him from his time as the governor of Massachusetts and Bush administration remnants. Figures such as Cofer Black, Max Boot, Michael Chertoff, Eliot A. Cohen, Norm Coleman, Michael Hayden, Kim Holmes, Robert Kagan, Eric Lehman, Dan Senor, Vin Weber and Dov S. Zakheim originate mainly from the ‘neocon’ milieu. Most of them have a connection to the “Project for a New American Century” and to the Heritage Foundation, and come from the security apparatuses or the academic departments connected to them. Insofar as large sections of the security apparatuses were privatized during the “War on Terror,” with a Romney victory one can expect a return of the revolving-door principle in which high-ranking managers from profit-oriented private security firms such as Chertoff, Black and Hayden will (once again) assume positions in the state. To give just one example, Black is the chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions, a sister company of the Prince Group, the world’s largest security and mercenary company which during the Bush administration plundered the state by means of untendered public contracts, and was jointly responsible for the cost explosion of the over $4-trillion “War on Terror.” Next to them, there is only a number of obscure exile-Cuban lobbyists with whom Romney evidently wishes to appeal to Hispanics, in particular in the populous southern swing-states with large electoral colleges such as Florida.

MB: So no great minds in Romney’s campaign?

IS: Well, let’s say Romney’s campaign does not possess a real intellectual superstructure. His oldest and closest advisor Beth Myers – party member and wife of another very wealthy hedge fund manager – appears to be in line with the policy approach that Romney would follow: politically practical neoliberal policies domestically, and aggressive policies in matters of foreign affairs. The problem is that Obama leaves him little room to breathe on both levels. This is so because since the collapse of the green-capitalist reform agenda Obama has been pursuing a competitive export-oriented strategy based on an intensified exploitation of the American workforce domestically. This is flanked by an aggressive geopolitical strategy in the Middle East, in Central Asia and in the Asia-Pacific region. The aim is to ensure that the rise of China takes place under the global hegemony of the United States and that the U.S. option of a maritime continental blockade of China will dispel any idea of a challenge to the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. Romney distinguishes himself only marginally from this aggressive approach to the integration and containment of China.

MB: Are there parallels between American and European right-wing populism?

IS: Right-wing populism as a manifestation of the crisis of political representation in neoliberalism is a multinational phenomenon in the advanced welfare-state capitalist countries. At the same time, it is differentiated in part by its social bases and its worldviews. In countries where right-wing populism has a stronger working-class base, such as in the Netherlands, France or Austria, it takes this fact into account insofar as it combines nationalist with anti-neoliberal demands such as opposing the raising of the retirement age.

Furthermore, as in the French National Front or the Swedish Democrats, its roots are still in part located in anti-Semitic right-wing extremism/classical fascism, while in the United States it presents itself as an authoritarian radicalization of a neoliberalism headed into crisis, and as Islamophobic instead of anti-Semitic. It is this ‘right-wing libertarianism’ flanked with Islamophobic and classist authoritarianism to which the future of the radical right belongs. In Germany, in contrast, state repression, the historic debt mortgage of the right, and the Nazi nostalgia appear to have slowed down the import of ‘right-wing libertarian’ ideology from the United States; with Thilo Sarrazin, Peter Sloterdijk, Henryk M. Broder, Ralph Giordano etc., its ideas enter society rather through the established parties of the so-called center. Right-wing populism in the United States, unlike in Europe, does not have its own political party. This is both a strength and a weakness; a strength because it can take advantage of the established republicans, a weakness because institutionalization (as the Tea Party caucus in the Congress) is usually accompanied by a de-radicalizing co-optation.

MB: What does that entail for the future of right-wing populism in the United States? Doesn’t that turn it into a dog that barks but can’t bite?

IS: It is generally the case that right-wing populism as a reactionary political project in the United States as well as in Europe, does not have an independent and coherent political project available to it, but ultimately runs on naked resentment. Incidentally, this is also why it is often futile to try and hold a ‘rational’ discussion with the right-wing populist’s core base, because the resentment fulfils a basic social-psychological need of people who are subjectively and sometimes even objectively powerless (think of the isolated small-business owner struggling under capitalist competition etc.). This is the need to channel the rage against the system, which has put them into this situation, against those further down below.

The reactionary nature of right-wing populism and, as a result, the lack of a coherent political project also explains its historical intellectual weakness. The internal contradictions are enormous and they even run through their most important ‘intellectuals.’ In the U.S., right-wing populists like Michael Savage are simultaneously protectionist nationalists and enthusiastic supporters of the American Empire, while Ron Paul promotes free trade, but as a ‘non-interventionist’ rejects the military preservation of global capitalism in the context of the American Empire. For this reason U.S. right-wing populists – analogous with historical fascism – have up to now been viewed sceptically by the ruling classes, even if, similarly to Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany, which was financed early on by Fritz Thyssen and other large capitalists, their organizations have been generously financed by some of the richest men and women in the United States.

Right-wing populism nevertheless remains dangerous because the deeper the crisis of representation becomes, the less the political elite of the transnationalized bourgeoisie, to which Romney belongs, can keep the right-wing populists under control. Their precarious situation provides the desire to be more than simply cattle providing voters for the upper-class (party) elites. And the history of far-right movements has shown that the economically and politically dominant classes, when their grasp to power is at risk in the face of strong movements from the organized working-classes, may lose their hesitation to embrace the ‘vulgar’ people from the far right, whose hatred toward the organizations of the working-classes then comes in handy, quite quickly. •

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