Craig Calhoun: “Donald Trump won’t be able to do whatever he wants”

  • A discussion on how inequality, deindustrialization, and the decline of social mobility have fueled right-wing populism in the United States and its global implications

VilaWeb
26.01.2025 - 21:40

Craig Jackson Calhoun is an American sociologist considered one of the world’s leading authorities on nationalism, who is currently the University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He served as the director of the London School of Economics from September 2012 to September 2016, when he became the first President of the Nicolas Berggruen Institute. Previously, he was the President of the Social Science Research Council and a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at New York University, where he also directed its Institute for Public Knowledge.
Calhoun is a strong advocate for applying social science to address issues of public concern and was in Barcelona last week, invited by the Fundació Josep Irla to deliver the inaugural lecture for the academic year, coinciding with Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States.

–What does the election of Donald Trump tell us about the United States as a nation?
–The most important thing is that there had already been a degeneration of American democracy. The history of democracy is not just a formal system with a checklist: a free press, elections, and other elements. It’s a process, a movement of increasing popular rule and participation. The US started with very little democracy and it had a historical story of increasing democracy – that was partly true history and partly national myth. What has happened in the last 50 years is that the country has been divided in many ways. Americans have been divided. Inequality was partly organised regionally, so that whole communities were divided from each other, whole parts of the country. It wasn’t just spread everywhere as class, and it wasn’t experienced as class division because it was experienced as regional. So workers experienced deindustrialisation, but other people experienced an improvement in their living standards. And throughout this period, the liberal centrist Democrats and Republicans, both political classes, more or less ignored the people who felt displaced or harmed.

–Does this elite neglect explain Trump’s rise?
–Most elites continued to believe that the country was moving forward. But many others, especially non-elites, but also some of the elites, came to believe that America was broken, that it was damaged.

–So the answer is yes.
–Not just that: It is the level of inequality in the country and also the way it has been organised. And it’s the end of social mobility.

–The well-known theme we know here as the “social lift”.
–Throughout most of American history, a defining characteristic of the US was that if you were not well off, you could hope that your children would be better off. This started to falter in the 1970s and came to an end with the century. And then the financial crisis and other things make it worse, the pandemic makes it worse, and all of that prepares the way for the rise of the far right and the election of Trump.

–Do people really believe that Trump is a solution to this?
–Some people believe Trump has a solution, but many people, more people, believe the country is broken and they have been betrayed by the old elites. And so, even if they’re not sure Trump has a solution, they think: The country’s broken anyway; let’s give him a chance.

-But this is extremely dangerous.
– Extremely dangerous, yes. People think that since the system is broken, we need strong leadership. We need our country to have a sense that we need stronger leadership, and we need to be confronted with the weaknesses of the conventional political system. And Trump is one of the big beneficiaries of that.

-Does this mean that this election goes beyond the candidate, that we will have Trumpism for some time?
-He has already said that he would like to run for re-election, even though he cannot. But in any case, the challenge for the Trump right in the near future is to sort out the fact that on the one hand it has a lot of billionaire backers – let’s say the oligarchs of America – and on the other hand it has backers who are poorer people who are angry about corporate capitalism. They both support Trump because they’re angry at the same old leaders, but they now have different worldviews and agendas. The future will depend on whether they can find common ground.

-Musk vs. Bannon?
-Yes. Look at the fight between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon is part of the international far right, but that’s very different from Elon Musk, the billionaire from South Africa who leads U.S. technology companies. There’s a coalition, but a big gulf exists between them.

-The human factor complicates things; dealing with Elon Musk shouldn’t be easy.
-Should not be easy. No. And my best guess is that Elon Musk will not remain closely integrated. It is difficult to have two charismatic leaders at the same time.

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-Does authoritarianism unite them? Take that image of Trump signing a bunch of executive orders – are those consistent with the Constitution or not…
–Absolutely crazy thing. Some of them that clashed with the constitutional order and that really were not… Will be in the courts for years. But this idea of Trump as somebody who says I want this, I’m going to get this no matter what the Constitution says, that’s not authoritarianism. So I would make a distinction between, if you will, personal power and more organized authority.

-Go ahead
–I think we have both. That’s not to say that we don’t have authoritarianism, but it’s the difference between the dictatorial power of the individual head of state and the existence of a somewhat authoritarian system. It’s a question. And that’s a question for Trump, because if he has been authoritarian in his first term, he hasn’t been a very effective authoritarian. He was too chaotic. He was not able to build the kind of staff that would carry out his authority. It depends on having a number of others. This time he may be much more organized and effective, in my view and in the view of other people, but it remains to be seen.

-Do you think there will be limits?
–He’s not going to be able to do whatever he wants; it’s a lot more complicated than that. That’s why I distinguished this from a more authoritarian regime. Inside the U.S. and outside, this complete unilateralism is going to be challenged. First of all, every one of these things is going to have a cost, and he doesn’t anticipate the cost. He can take the Panama Canal, but it’s not that easy: taking the Panama Canal is going to have major repercussions. It will cost economically, it will cost militarily. It will provoke China. It will create big problems with all Latin American countries… And that’s the price. I think his personal desire to rule by decree will ultimately be self-defeating for him, although it may do a lot in the short term.

-The problem is that, given the current state of affairs, an impulsive or uncontrolled action could trigger a war with unpredictable consequences in a world that seems far from stable.
-I agree. I think we have achieved a certain stabilization of the world in the past. Stabilization doesn’t mean perfection or anything like that, but stabilization of the world. And especially the stabilization of the great power relationships in this world. First during the Cold War, but then even after the Cold War, it was maintained as a world of nation-states with a strong belief in the idea of sovereign nation-states. Although it did not work perfectly or gain universal respect, it was generally possible to believe in the stabilization of that world. But now I think that world is dead. What will be the new regime? I’ll give you my answer, but I have no power, so it’s not a very important answer.

–I do care.
–The chaos of a world war is a possibility, but that’s an incredible level of destruction, and my guess is that the major powers who have the capacity to wage that war will refrain from doing so. So it will be a multilateral world. China is not going to be powerful enough to dominate. I don’t think China is going to be the new hegemonic power. China just doesn’t have the capacity to do that right now. Will there be three, will there be five, will there be ten big countries? How will it be structured? It will not be one country, one vote in the United Nations General Assembly, where the vote of Liechtenstein is the same as the vote of the People’s Republic of China. Of course, there may be some lip service to that, but it is a great power project. And there are already several potential superpowers. Brazil? Iran? India? Turkey?

–You are one of the world’s leading experts on nationalism, and you have always maintained that it is almost impossible to define what nationalism is, because it depends on each moment, each actor, and each circumstance. It is clear that the nationalism that is on the rise is the worst kind – the one that has historically been the most dangerous. Do you think there is still room for other types of nationalism in these circumstances?
Great question. The places, including Catalonia, where the national project has been tied to significant ideas of social progress and trying to build a better country, are they just doomed? I hope not, and I don’t believe so. But what is the place? I think the place is first from a within and a focus on improving social conditions in countries. And to the extent that the nationalism is not just about aggression against other countries. It may be very hard but I think there has to also be a focus on building solidarity inside countries. And number two, I think that the nationalism of countries that are not contenders for hegemonic global power is important. There are countries that are not on that list of possible superpowers who may not be able to militarily rival those countries, but who can work to build their country. So I could assert that the most successful nationalists in recent years are Norwegians and Singaporeans, neither one of which had any agenda of global power. But they built effective internal relations, and they developed relatively clear strategic views of the world outside and how they would relate to it, play a role, benefit, and so forth.

–But in a world where brute force prevails, everything becomes much more complicated. At the event you held in Barcelona with the Fundació Irla, you said that your hopes are in Catalonia, in Barcelona. But you said this while sitting next to a Catalan political leader, Raül Romeva, who has been imprisoned by Spain for more than three years simply for defending his political ideas. Under these conditions, is there room for alternatives?
-Obviously, this is not good and it limits the chances for good realizations of Catalan visions. But it is instructive and clarifying.

–May I have a personal question at the end: Are you optimistic about your country?
–Less than I have been for most of my life. I am optimistic by nature, and I prefer to commit myself to hope. Hope is not quite the same as optimism. And I’m much less optimistic, but I still think it’s more likely that we will survive, that American democracy will survive the Trump disaster. But I am not confident.

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