By José Ernesto Nováez Guerrero on March 12, 2024 from Havana
serigraphy by Roberto Marta
On February 21-24 the Gaylord Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, United States, hosted a new edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference.
This 2024, marking the 50th anniversary of the event, Donald Trump, Argentine President Javier Milei, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and VOX President Santiago Abascal, among others, were all present.
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is organized by the American Conservative Association and has been held since 1974 -it is the oldest and most significant forum of its kind in the United States-. In that year Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, gave the inaugural speech at the Conference and took advantage of the space to launch his famous vision of the country as “A shining city on a hill”.
Since then, the event, which is structured around the defense of the “fundamental” values of American society, with its particular reading of family, freedom and democracy, has been growing and is now considered one of the main gauges for choosing the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidential elections.
Among its main sponsors are the Human Events organization, a conservative magazine founded in 1944; the Young America’s Foundation, an organization that seeks to educate young people in the idea of individual freedom, free enterprise and the defense of traditional values; and the infamous National Rifle Association (NRA), in charge of defending the interests of the powerful military-industrial complex in the country.
Entry to CPAC is expensive. This year the price was $295 per ticket and up to $700 for those who wanted to have the premium experience. Despite that, some 10,000 people overflowed the halls of the space, many of them wearing caps, dresses and T-shirts where you could read the slogan of former President Donald Trump: MAGA (Make America Great Again).
CPAC 2024
In a space where some of the stars of conservative politics in the West were present, the great figure was undoubtedly Donald Trump.
The former president just comes from a victory in the South Carolina primaries, where he ousted his main rival in the electoral race within the party, Nikki Haley. And it should be taken into account that Haley counted on the weight of having been governor of that state between 2011 and 2017.
Despite the multiple open processes against him, Trump seems to be the undisputed candidate for these elections. Practically unopposed in his party, at least from the electoral point of view, and facing a Democratic party whose main candidate -current President Joe Biden- has a worn-out image due to the internal economic situation, the war in Ukraine and what seem to be symptoms of senility; a situation that his adversaries are relentlessly taking advantage of.
In his speech at the conference, Trump lashed out at Biden, accusing him of being “the most incompetent president in the history of the country”. He questioned the proceedings against him, claiming that his only crime is his defense of the United States from those who want to destroy it.
The issue of immigration occupied an important space in his speech. With his characteristic charge of racism and supremacism, the tycoon accused migrants entering through the southern border of being “criminals” and “rapists”. As if on a loop, he again promised to “finish the wall” and will undertake “the biggest deportation in history.”
In attendence President Bukele of El Salvador announced the death of globalism and warned against the “dark forces” conspiring against the United States. While Abascal called to make “the West great again”, warning of the risks of globalism and socialism, with their climate and gender agendas.
In his turn, Argentine President Javier Milei gave a speech very similar to that of Davos, and was also responsible for starring in one of the most embarrassing moments of the summit when he greeted Trump with an almost childlike admiration and obeisance, while he seemed on the verge of tears from emotion.
The most immediate political outcome of the event is to significantly boost the candidacy of Trump, who appears to be the great favorite of the conservative forces within U.S. politics. Possibly this will translate into increased funding for the country’s costly electoral spectacle.
Some considerations on the rise of the far-right
Looking beyond the immediate U.S. political scene, this edition of CPAC allows us to note certain phenomena that have been underway for more than a decade, but which are becoming increasingly evident.
The first is the organizational and articulatory effort on the part of the Western ultra-right. For these economic and political actors, the return of Donald Trump at the head of the world’s leading economy and main military power would contribute to energize their agendas and political objectives at the global and regional level.
In the short term, they could reverse defeats such as the one suffered by VOX in the recent Spanish elections, Bolsonaro in Brazil or the right wing in Colombia. It also further oxygenates numerous parties and organizations in Latin America and, more strongly, in Europe, where they already dispute with some success the political and social spaces of the left across the spectrum; as well as liberal, moderate and globalist sectors within the right itself.
The fertile ground for the advance of these forces is provided by the crisis of the economic model of neoliberal globalization itself, which rested -from the eighties until the beginning of 2000- on the aggressive deregulation and financial penetration in numerous markets, fundamentally benefiting the great Western interests.
The globalist elites developed their agendas through debt, bribery, pressure, blackmail or direct military intervention; what researcher Naomi Klein called “the shock doctrine”.
As long as U.S. dominance remained more or less unquestioned, this agenda was able, not without setbacks, to continue. But the crisis of the unipolar model, together with the emergence of new actors and alliances that are gradually beginning to successfully challenge its hegemony, has placed the United States and the entire Western European bloc in an extremely complex situation.
On the one hand, their economies are based on the structural imbalance of the world economic system that they have been building since at least the 16th century and, on the other, neoliberal measures and the counter-hegemonic dispute generate tensions and unrest that are directly reflected in the living standards of their populations.
The fear of losing security is one of the main strings that the conservative and fascist ultra-right is pulling everywhere. Their way of reaching the working masses, the main victims of the unstable situation, is through the promise of security and an iron fist; just as Bukele is doing in El Salvador or as Trump is promising to do in the United States.
A natural result of this new attitude is the return to a fierce nationalism, which is expressed both in the conviction of one’s own national supremacy and in the racist contempt for the “other”, often identified as the cause of the ills afflicting the nation.
If this dangerous cocktail is mixed, moreover, with the enormous quantities of junk information and the powerful ideological media at the disposal of the elites. It is not at all uncommon to find that many of these political positions give rise to sects -or pseudo sects- that embrace delirious conspiracy theories and see violence as a legitimate and necessary way to deal with otherness.
The struggle between globalists and nationalists expresses the fracture of a nation that must come to terms with an indisputable fact and its consequences: it is no longer the hegemon.
The loss of economic ground to countries such as China and the Brics bloc as a whole, the numerous open wars for the exclusive benefit of the military industrial complex, the progressive abandonment of the people for the benefit of corporations, generate deep tensions that have already had moments of expression in American politics. A good example is the assault on the Capitol in January 2021, when hordes of fanatical Trumpists, convinced that they had stolen the election from their president, brutally stormed the Congress.
Although the attack was unsuccessful it expresses another tendency that beats in these forces that today are articulated: ultimately, that now they do not hesitate to violate the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy if they consider it contrary to their interests.
It is what Bukele has done in the recent elections in El Salvador and it is what Trump and his clone Bolsonaro tried to do. It is what Hitler also did after his rise in 1933. While the left, even that which considers itself revolutionary, stops hesitantly at the threshold of bourgeois democracy, these children of capital do not hesitate to blow it to pieces when it ceases to be a useful tool. Perhaps from this comparison we could draw a useful lesson for the times to come.
Although the accusation of fascism is common, the truth is that many of the governments, parties and social forces that are part of the new process of re articulation of the ultra-right do not necessarily present a “fascist” ideology in the historical sense of the term. Moreover, this is not the first time that there has been a re-emergence and re-articulation of the ultra-right. We saw it in the 1980s, with Reagan and Thatcher. However, a closer look helps to clear certain mists.
While fascism has its first historical expression in the specific ideological forms of early postwar Europe, this does not mean that it does not have other forms of manifestation. Fascism is the ideological result of the crisis of the middle class, that is, sectors of the proletariat and the small and medium bourgeoisie that see how the relative stability they possessed as a result of their personal income or property is deteriorating as a result of inflation, debts, insecurity, etc.
Beyond its particular forms of manifestation, fascism expresses itself in a set of supremacist, nationalist, racist attitudes that are common to all times, although the subjects and cultural forms in which they manifest themselves change. The expression neo-fascists to refer then to these most extreme sectors of the conservative ultra-right is far from being wrong.
The second is that the conservative alignment of the 1980s responded to the new neoliberal globalizing agenda adopted by the North American and European elites at that time. Their militarism and nationalism served an agenda of global domination, which proved to go far beyond the defeat of the USSR and was expressed in the strengthening and expansion of NATO up to the present time.
In the current scenario, it is to be expected that the current trends will continue. Moreover, it would not be surprising if the voices that today are raised within this philofascist ultra-right to question the UN or NATO itself were to promote – or attempt in the not too distant future – a process of restructuring the geopolitical order that has prevailed since the end of the Second World War. After all, these structures respond to interests that are not necessarily their own. The bourgeoisie is far from being a homogeneous bloc.
Alongside this political and economic advance comes a symbolic offensive, which is connected with the dynamics of symbolic domination underway by international capital.
Unlike the “woke” or “progressive” agenda that this ultra-right despises, this capitalism without masks is determined to dispute rights, meanings and history. There are plenty of examples in the speeches and public interventions of the leaders present at CPAC 2024 and other similar forces emerging in other countries.
From all of the above, it is clear that it is necessary to closely follow and denounce all the forums of articulation of this new ultra-right. But also of a greater organization and theoretical and practical consciousness on the part of the revolutionary forces. Only unity and lucidity will be able to prevent the storms that are looming on the horizon of this epoch.
José Ernesto Novaes Guerrero, is a Cuban writer and journalist, a member of the Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS) and the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). He the Coordinator of the Cuban chapter of Network in Defense of Humanity (REDH).
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English