A couple days ago, I linked to Max Forte's January 2017article on The Dying Days of Liberalism How Orthodoxy, Professionalism, and Unresponsive Politics Finally Doomed a 19th-century Project, which included an excellent two-paragraph summary of Max Frank's latest book, Listen Liberal.

Now I'll provide a link to Forte's much longer article, Donald Trump, Empire, and Globalization: A Reassessment. Forte notes that no one predicted that after the election, "Trump would then move on to defeating Trump." Now that we've seen Trump repeatedly reverse himself and contradict his advisors, as well as abandon most of his major campaign pledges, Forte suggests that the best slogan for this regime is "“Trump Trumps Trump.”

But most important is that Trump has quickly transmogrified into an "establishment" figure:

There are now more Goldman Sachs figures in the Trump administration than in any previous administration.1 This is perhaps the most fundamental “reversal” of Trump’s course.... My thesis revolves around facts such as senior Goldman Sachs executives readily jumping aboard the engine of the “Trump train,” after being denounced in Trump campaign advertising, which suggests that they do not see Trump’s much touted nationalism as anything that needs to cause them any concern.

During the campaign, and for a while after the election, I had believed that Trump was hated and feared by Wall Street. Trump had crossed swords with bankers and financiers repeatedly as he put together his various deals, and reportedly detested them. In short, I beleived that Trump was indeed and outsider, and might actually "drain the swamp." Was I mistaken, or did something about Trump change? Forte notes:

While a candidate could win a presidential campaign, as an “outsider,” even as he was reviled by his own party elite, demonized by the mass media, shunned by the mass of corporate donors, and so forth, it also means that the status quo can win on the cheap. The establishment won, and all without the usual investments, and not so much as a single compliment to the winning candidate who would uphold their order—at little or no cost to them.

All that is said and done at these levels of power will never be known to the public or to historians. But in the context of TPTB enforcing their dominance, I think we should pay close attention to what Greek's former finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, reportedly has written in his just released memoirs:

Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice.

In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for self-justification during the Greek crisis. He explains, with a weariness born of nights in soulless hotels and harsh-lit briefing rooms, how the modern power network is built.

.... close members of Varoufakis’s family were threatened with violence when, with the masses in control of the streets and squares, he began to line up with those denouncing the initial bailout as unworkable. It was in response to these threats – delivered via an anonymous phone call with oligarchic calm – that Varoufakis says he left Greece for the US.

Or is it just Trump naturally falling in line with the interests of his class? Forte writes:

That there is no accident in Trump’s choices has a lot to do with his class prejudices and his class ambitions. His choice of cabinet members, with a preference for billionaires (or generals), shows who he tends to trust and respect. Some historians have said that Trump’s cabinet is the richest in US history, with a combined worth estimated as ranging from $11 billion to $14 billion....

Trump may have reversed himself in terms of the opportunistic targeting of Goldman Sachs, as a symbol, but there is little point in evading the fact that he entered the electoral campaign as the owner of a large family corporation. What is more difficult to explain is why Trump, as a national capitalist, lent himself so quickly to supporting a transnational capitalist class with economic and financial interests different from his own, which was also ideologically opposed to his campaign. I see many taking matters for granted, by resorting to easy assertions that “they are all the one percent,” or “they are all oligarchs”. That is broadly accurate, but also facile, because such commentary focuses (knowingly or not) on capital, in broad terms, and not on the capitalist class which is divided into competing factions. The elite political class of experts, managers, technocrats and legislators, certainly remains more united than ever against Trump since his victory—but the capitalist class is seeing some remarkable reconciliation thanks to Trump (at least for now). So why did Trump choose to perform this service?

The answer Forte settles on is that Trump "wants to make a transition away from a position as a national capitalist in order to enter the transnational capitalist class, where the real global power lies." But this leaves out any consideration of how the various factions in the oligarchic classes are reacting to Trump. And, personally, I have no doubt that some of them are reacting in the way Varoufakis reveals.

Finally, in the next to last section, entitled "Saving Neoliberalism," Forte engages in some conjecture.

Has Trump saved neoliberal capitalism from its ongoing demise? Has he sustained popular faith in liberal political ideals? Are we still in the dying days of liberalism? If there had been a centrally coordinated plan to plant an operative among the ranks of populist conservatives and independents, to channel their support for nationalism into support for the persona of the plant, and to then have that plant steer a course straight back to shoring up neoliberal globalism—then we might have had a wonderful story of a masterful conspiracy, the biggest heist in the history of elections anywhere. A truly “rigged system” could be expected to behave that way. Was Trump designated to take the fall in a rigged game, only his huge ego got in the way when he realized he could realistically win the election and he decided to really tilt hard against his partner, Hillary Clinton? It could be the basis for a novel, or a Hollywood political comedy. I have no way of knowing if it could be true.

So, what do you think?