The Disorganization of America: Post-Fordism, Irrational Capitalism, and the Decline of Universalism

This paper argues that the second presidency of Donald J. Trump represents the decline of both American democracy and American imperialism. American power was at its peak during the postwar boom and early Cold War when its imperialism could appear to be universalism. In this period, American democracy was legitimized by Fordist mass society. This period was the height of social liberalism, in which inequalities within the United States were being reduced. Imperialism is the capitalist attempt to solve the intractable contradiction between global economy and the nation-state. This intractable contradiction reasserted itself as growing international economic competition became the full-scale globalization of industrial capitalist production. Neoliberalism responded to the crisis tendencies of globalization by undermining the national social contract and disorganizing social life. With the collapse of its superpower adversary, the Soviet Union, the United States sought to use military dominance to shore up its declining relative economic power. This attempt, doomed to failure, unveiled naked American imperialism, undermined the universalistic ethos that previously legitimized American democracy, and produced fascist tendencies that fueled Trump’s rise to the presidency. This president’s rise to power is the product of the intractable contradictions facing imperialism in the age of globalized production.