Constitutional crisis and radical democratic possibility

The first thing to note about the present crisis is the degree to which Trump, not even a month into office, has upended the constitutional order

The US is experiencing a major political, social, and economic rupture with Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Whatever follows, it will be necessary to distinguish a pre- and post-Trump epoch. If the US can eventually rebuild its republic, the changes will have to be conceived as a fundamental modification of what went before. An inherent discontinuity will exist in the story that the US tells both itself and the world. This break alone represents the true death knell of US exceptionalism. The resulting historical narrative will put the US in line with all republics throughout history that have experienced dramatic ups and downs.

Republics are supposed to be defined by stability in an unstable world. As the political philosopher JGA Pocock showed, they have long been conceived in terms of cycles of virtue and corruption that mediate the impact of fortune. But this perspective must be reconciled with the modern experience of popular struggles, and even revolution, in securing the extra-constitutional basis for democracy. In the context of the US’s own history, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement symbolised pivotal moments in the country’s “re-founding.” Today’s transformations, in theory, if not yet in practice, could very well go beyond even these major shifts. What are the changes occurring in the basic institutional structure of the US State? What do they anticipate about the resistance that could very well emerge in response?

The lineaments of the US’s constitutional crisis

The first thing to note about the present crisis is the degree to which Trump, not even a month into office, has upended the constitutional order. In effect declaring himself the supreme authority, he has openly declared war on the separation of powers, including Congress’s control of the public purse. He issued an Executive Order to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funds that had already been appropriated by the legislature, which a federal judge has temporarily stayed. In contrast, the earlier premise of US democracy was that while presidential administrations may come and go, the underlying structure of the State remains intact. Even when the US has undergone moments of dramatic institutional change, they have always taken the Constitution as their reference point.

The fascist intellectuals and cadres of the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement, however, have a completely different definition of the US. In their view, the US has been captured by a ‘Deep State’. Implicitly or explicitly, their goal is to use Trump’s ‘Führerprinzip’ to recapture the true spirit of the country, which is embedded in the ‘great white race’ that dispossessed Native Americans and enslaved Africans. The legal arguments that they marshal about the Constitution are simply the means to the end, in terms of realising the will to dominate. That is why birthright citizenship is also on the chopping block. By attacking the 14th Amendment and promising the return of a caste system, Trump’s regime is attempting to restore the US not merely to a pre-Civil Rights but pre-Civil War status quo in terms of the basic complex of legal rights and entitlements.

Ideologically and culturally, especially given the apparently overwhelming power of the social media giants, this belief system appears to have gained significant traction in US society. Progressive ‘doomers’ see the country descending unstoppably into the abyss. But the reality is that the great structures of US political and economic power are bound to engender powerful contradictions that will subvert and upend expectations of what exactly will occur. Most recently, for example, Trump has declared war on the system of free trade that the US itself helped impose on the world. There is a very strong likelihood of severe financial and economic consequences, even if temporarily delayed.

For many decades now, the US has experienced the extreme concentration of wealth at the top. Unsurprisingly, the resulting tension now engenders what Giovanni Arrighi would have called a ‘terminal crisis’ in the system. With the amount of leverage that has been built up through financialisation, including massive amounts of corporate and household debt, it is only a matter of time before a shock brings the whole creaking edifice down. That could very well occur with a trade disruption because of the imminent tariff war. It could even come from outright military conflict with another major power. Regardless of how they are triggered, the charges have already been set, and they are ready to detonate.

Under these circumstances, it is important to understand how the political effects of the constitutional crisis feed into economic disruption. They provoke the very real possibility of a truly epochal realignment of US society. MAGA cultists crow about their supposedly decisive victory over ‘woke’ ideology. But the reality is that the extraordinary degree of concentration of political and economic power means, now more than ever, that ordinary people are experiencing a fundamental inability to address their grievances under the current system of government.

In the event of a financial crisis, the Federal Reserve would likely backstop the system. But if the bailout of the banks in 2008 and the resulting political ramifications in terms of the election of Trump himself in 2016 provide any indication, any rescue of capital is likely to produce a profound backlash. The transformation of the US Bailout State into a personalised mechanism of “executive grace and favor,” as the political economist Martijn Konings put it recently in a piece for the American left publication Jacobin, is bound to create a crisis in the truest, revolutionary sense of the word.

To paraphrase Lenin, that means a situation in which not only can the masses no longer live in the old way, but neither can the ruling class govern. It could very well become a conjuncture in which the spirit of the Paris Commune is rekindled within the wide scope of a Third Reconstruction. Such a period, following the previous Reconstructions after the Civil War and during the Civil Rights Movement, would imply a dramatic countermovement. Again, the conditions are crucial to understanding the character of the rupture and how it unfolds.

A team of unelected fiscal vigilantes led by Elon Musk have taken control of the US Treasury payments system. They are assuming the capability to withhold federal funding to recalcitrant states in response to opposition, real or imagined. How much can the ‘full faith and credit’ of the US government be asserted in a context in which the political compact of the union is splintering? Who will buy US Treasury securities under such circumstances? In this situation, perceptive observers have noted, the US would have the same reputation as an emerging market dictatorship, bogged down in domestic conflict and with its social bases fracturing.

Implications for the global periphery

Of course, the irony is that as the US implodes, it could also undermine the establishment leadership in countries across the global South. It clings with greater desperation than ever to the unravelling global order. The most obvious stumbling block would be the trade war that disrupts access to metropolitan markets. Moreover, Trump’s overnight decision to try and abolish the US Agency for International Development has dramatic consequences given that the US provides almost half of global humanitarian assistance. This is not to say that US foreign aid is innocent of the country’s geopolitical goals and its desire to assert hegemony. Far from it. But we must recognise the massive implications for many poor countries that have been compelled to rely on such aid to avert bigger disasters.

Even Trump’s policies on trade and aid, however, do not come close to capturing the full scope of unravelling. There is also the strong likelihood that the very order of global finance will come apart at the seams. If the US is undergoing a constitutional crisis of such epic proportions that it can no longer guarantee the value of its financial securities, then the prospect of external commercial borrowing for countries such as Sri Lanka will become even more impractical. The current IMF program anticipates that the country will return to international capital markets by its conclusion in 2027. Will there be a meaningful system of commercial finance, even at existing high interest rates, from which Sri Lanka can borrow if the hegemonic guarantor of that order, the US, is experiencing major convulsions?

It seems, then, that the paths are narrowing. Decisions are being made for Sri Lanka, and by extension many other countries in the periphery, without any further action needed from its political leadership. But for the country to weather the impending storm it will need to be far more proactive in how it responds to the likelihood of another major global crisis. In the very moment that the US is turning away from the republican imagination, Sri Lanka must engage its own democratic traditions from a broader perspective, including a new social contract with working people. The reality is that if global trade is further disrupted due to any number of potential shocks, then the country must be prepared for emergency measures. That includes buffer stocks of essential goods like rice and fuel, while rebuilding the public distribution system.

In addition, Sri Lanka needs to quickly develop its agro-industrial base. It must find substitutes for inputs and create a new productive ecosystem that draws from domestic resources. None of this vision is technically new in terms of concept. It is inspired by the creative thinking of policy makers and intellectuals who initially grappled with the economic crisis of the 1970s. But the urgency of the task does reflect the need to extend previous development thinking to accommodate the massive changes of today’s moment. A revived form of planning must respond to the political and economic contradictions that characterise the current phase of imperial decay. As Deutsche Bank put it, the US’s attempt to impose massive blanket tariffs on its main trading partners is the “largest shock in global trade policy since the collapse of Bretton Woods.” We must act accordingly.

At the same time, a renewed development paradigm for Sri Lanka does not necessarily reflect the principles of degrowth per se, now popular among ecologically conscious sections of the global Left. The people still expect a rise, as much as a transformation, of their living standards. Instead, the animating question is, what are the implications of a shift in paradigm for class and property relations, especially in the absence of sufficient external financing? There can be no doubt that this process will require a fundamental shakeup of society. It must build on the social mobilisation that briefly occurred during the Aragalaya. We must envision it as the necessary extension of that struggle. 

While the political leadership attempts to canvass ideas, the real strength will come from collective efforts to produce ideology and mobilise from below. They alone will marshal the extraordinary popular energies that are needed to contribute to the creation of a free and just order to replace the one that is breaking down.

The question is whether there will be enough of a shift in consciousness at the level of society to make it clear that it indeed reflects the new ‘common sense’, or the appropriate way to grasp the dangers of the current global moment. Meanwhile, the US’s current trajectory is likely to lead to even more domestic upheaval with tremendous international consequences. We must keep our eyes open to the potential changes that could happen across global society. They anticipate a potentially unprecedented revival of the radical democratic imagination. Comparisons may be drawn with the revolutions of 1792, 1848, and 1917, but they all point to the same direction: a moment in which crisis calls forth the dramatic creative capacity embedded in people’s enduring will to resist.