Séminaire en présense de Jeff FAUX : Trump, Biden, and the New American Isolationism
Partager cette page
JEFF FAUX
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024, 16.30-18.30 (CET)
CY EPPS
92 Rue Notre Dame des Champs, 75006 Paris, France
The PICASSO Room
Metro 4 Vavin
RER B Port Royal
AGORA is excited to present a talk by Jeff FAUX, one of America’s leading progressive thinkers on US economic and foreign policies. With more than fifty years of involvement in domestic and international labor organizing, Jeff is a careful observer and nuanced thinker who will explain how growing domestic tensions are changing US foreign policy and will continue to do so no matter who wins the 2024 US presidential election.
This seminar will be in person in Paris and on Zoom. If you would like to receive the Zoom link, please contact : Brian SCHMITT at brian.schmitt@cyu.fr
The Talk
Much is being made of the turn towards isolationism in American politics and culture. For many Europeans this change is ascribed almost exclusively to Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans. Given anti-immigrant rhetoric, the contempt for international agreements, and, more recently, his off-the - cuff comments saying that he'd let Russia "do whatever the hell they want" with NATO members who are in arrears, this impression is understandable.
But the source of growing skepticism about the US governing class’s “internationalist” foreign policy is not limited to the reactionary and racist Republican Right.
Americans of both center and left are also disillusioned by the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, the quagmires of the Ukraine and Gaza, and the confused global War on Terror. At a time of rising domestic needs, a climate crisis, and political polarization they are questioning the diversion of economic and political capital to what seems to be a hopeless effort to police the world.
The anger of Democrats and independents over what they see as Biden’s betrayal of his promise of a modest foreign policy helps explain the erosion of his political base in this election year. Many more have temporarily held back their criticism to avoid helping elect Trump in November.
In this talk, Jeff FAUX brings his fifty-plus years of in-depth involvement in progressive US politics to examine the domestic pressures on US foreign policy hidden by simplistic political language. He has written for example, that Trump is not an “Isolationist”, but a corrupt opportunist who hides his global business interests behind a belligerent nationalism.
Faux argues that the United States’ inevitable withdrawal from the role of global hegemon does not mean a withdrawal from international responsibilities. We may be witnessing a regression to an historic norm.
Whoever wins in November, Faux says, domestic politics will increasingly weaken the capacity of the US governing class to maintain its current role – whither you want to call it “leading the free world” or “global imperialism.”
Transition to a more stable equilibrium will not be easy for the governing classes of either the United States or its client/allies. But a first step is to use language that clarifies rather than hides the domestic pressures that are changing US foreign policies.
JEFF FAUX
Biography
Jeff Faux founded the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) of Washington, D.C, America’s leading research organization on the economic conditions of workers and their families. He was EPI’s president for twenty years and is now the Institute’s Distinguished Fellow.
He is the author of The Servant Economy: Where America’s Elite is Sending the Middle Class (Wiley 2012). He is also the author of The Global Class War, The Party’s Not Over, and Community Development Corporations: New Hope for the Inner City, and co-author of Rebuilding America, The Star-Spangled Hustle, and Reclaiming Prosperity.
Among other honors, he received a Carnegie Scholar Award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Weinberg Award from Wayne State University, a fellowship at the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and an honorary doctorate from the University of New England.
He directed economic development programs for the War on Poverty, and was an economist with the State and Labor Departments. He has been a member of five different trade unions, a small-business man, a merchant seaman, a blueberry farmer, and served on a municipal planning board in the state of Maine.
