Trump, Conte, and Comparison in the Authoritarian World Order

• Published in: National political science review Vol. 19; no. 2; pp. 108 - 110
• Main Author: Smythe, S A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New Brunswick Transaction Inc 01.01.2018
• Subjects: Authoritarianism; Capitalism; Citizenship; Colonialism; Conte, Giuseppe (Prime Min); Crises; Detention; Euroscepticism; Fascism; Geopolitics; Immigration policy; Indigenous peoples; Jurisprudence; Noncitizens; Oppression; Political asylum; Political campaigns; Presidents; Prime ministers; Race; Refugees; Trump, Donald J; White supremacy; United States > US; Italy
• ISSN: 0896-629X

On 30 July 2018, U.S. president Donald Trump hosted a meeting with recently elected Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte, in which he expressed approval for the new Italian government's stance on immigration. Not long into this joint meeting with the press, he translated that into a compliment for himself and his own aggressive anti-immigration policies in the U.S. Conte readily agreed, remarking that Italy and the U.S. were "almost twin countries.. .there are so many things that bring us together" This comparison was troubling, not merely for the strategic and reductive display of ideological proximity, but the ways in which the exchange rang true, and what its historical implications may be for those migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers whose lives hang in the balance of the whims of two authoritarian regimes and their reactionary immigration policies. The invocation of being "twin countries" or otherwise identical regimes violently elides the discrete historical, geopolitical, and social valences of each nation-state. As a mode of critique, comparison (often enacted via the rhetorical devices of analogy and hyperbole) is rarely useful ethically, analytically or politically. If the ultimate aim is to bring about the end of the suffering inflicted by the violence of colonial regimes, and to dismantle the very systems or structures that maintain their power-namely, of ubiquitous racial capitalism- then a relational analysis that resists conflating two objects by studying the dynamic relationship between them is needed, since the desire to compare horrors makes a zero-sum game of human lives and human suffering rather than facilitating that work. However, this was clearly neither Trump nor Conte's aim, and there are indeed many striking similarities between Italy and the U.S., not least in their approaches to regulating citizenship and immigration, their borders, and their retrenchment into fascist and colonial logics. Many of these analogies are readily apparent, though their geopolitical specificities caution us to resist such neat and superficial comparison.