The numerous paradoxes that will haunt Donald Trump in the coming months were on full display during the recent Senate vote to undo privacy legislation that was passed in the last few years of the Obama administration.

As part of a broader effort to treat internet service providers and telecoms operators as utility companies, Obama imposed restrictions on what these companies could do with all the user data from browsers and apps. Emboldened by Trump, the Republicans have just allowed these businesses to collect, sell and manipulate such data without user permission.

From the short-sighted domestic perspective, it seems like a boon to the likes of Verizon and AT&T, especially as they increasingly find themselves confronting their data-rich counterparts in Silicon Valley.

Telecoms companies have been complaining (not entirely without reason) that the Obama administration favoured the interests of Google and Facebook which, invoking the lofty rhetoric of “keeping the internet free” only to defend their own business agenda, have traditionally faced somewhat lighter regulation.

The Democrats, always happy to attack Trump, have jumped on the issue, warning that the Senate vote would foster ubiquitous and extensive surveillance by the telecoms industry – and Silicon Valley, of course, would never commit such sins.

Under the new rules, complained Bill Nelson, a senator from Florida, “your broadband provider may know more about your health – and your reaction to illness – than you are willing to share with your doctor”. Never mind that Google and Facebook already know all this – and much more – and generate little outrage from the Democrats.

The Democrats, of course, only have themselves to blame for such ineptitude. From the early 1980s onwards, centre-left movements on both sides of the Atlantic no longer discussed technology policy in terms of justice, fairness or inequality. Instead, they preferred to emulate their neoliberal opponents and frame choices – about technology policy, but also about many other domains – in terms of just one goal that rules supreme above all other: innovation.

The problem with building a political programme on such flimsy economistic foundations is that it immediately opens the door to competing narratives of just what kind of policy produces more innovation.

Within this debate, the entire history of the internet – a fluid and borderless object that can include everything from mainframe computers to software that powers servers – becomes an extremely contentious theme that, depending on how one slices and dices this very “internet”, can bolster demands for both greater regulation and greater deregulation of digital technologies.

Whatever Trump’s proclaimed departures from the deadening orthodoxy of the Republican party, he shares its bizarre view – endorsed and promoted by Fox News and a new breed of savvy media enterprises, such as Breitbart – that the Democrats are just a bunch of closeted socialists who invoke the highfalutin rhetoric of “human rights” or “humanitarianism” to disguise their real radical agenda.

This piercing insight doesn’t prevent Trump from also attacking Hillary Clinton and her lieutenants as being in the pay of Wall Street and Goldman Sachs: apparently, this is where ardent socialists plan the revolution these days.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A rare photograph showing Donald Trump using a computer. From the Twitter account of Kellyanne Conway, November 2016 Photograph: @KellyannePolls

However, even a cursory analysis of both Bill Clinton and Obama’s global cheerleading for American businesses during the past two decades would reveal them to possess a set of remarkably robust capitalist instincts. From treaties such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or the Trade in Services Agreement, to the close collaboration between the US Chamber of Congress and the Department of Commerce in pushing the country’s latest technological exports (such as “smart city” technologies sold by Microsoft, Cisco, or IBM), the Democrats have long embraced “America’s capital first” as their motto. In this, they were not so different from the Republicans of the pre-Trump era.

And yet, what Trump and the likes of John Bolton – who represent the unashamedly unilateralist, unhinged wing of the Republican party – take to be the Democrats’ poisonous mix of socialism and humanitarianism is often just a banal mix of capitalism and pseudo-humanitarianism.

It is precisely through constant rhetorical appeals to the universalism of the “global village” that Washington has traditionally justified its economic expansionism – a tactic at work since the days of Woodrow Wilson and hardly an invention of Clinton or Obama. Whatever its theoretical merits, multilateralism as practised by America has always meant “multi-markets” first – and all the rhetorical flourishes second.

Sometimes this rhetoric worked, sometimes it didn’t. But it still required some legitimising in the global arena. So every now and then, Washington had to play nice, rein in its own plutocrats, and make sure that their pillaging of the domestic population didn’t completely undermine the image of prosperity and freedom that underlined America’s dominance abroad.

Obama didn’t much deviate from that script. For example, when the Snowden revelations took place, his administration didn’t simply say, “We’re an empire, we run everyone’s communications, so get on with it”, as, say, the preceding Bush administration might have done. Rather, Obama’s did its utmost to deny that any excessive and authorised surveillance was happening.

There was some logic to it. Who would trust America’s tech companies otherwise? Why would government institutions in Germany, Russia or China agree to store their sensitive documents on servers there?

Obama’s reassuring answer: US intentions were good and it’s to be trusted. And didn’t Obama do his best to defend net neutrality anyway? Any effort to pierce this rhetorical bubble – by pointing out, for example, that restrictions on the free flow of data did not imply restrictions on the freedom of expression but, rather, should be seen as (protectionist) trade instruments, or that there’s a good case to be made for not surrendering a country’s technological sovereignty if one doesn’t want to end up living under Silicon Valley’s neo-colonial regime – was immediately dismissed as reactionary and authoritarian, usually by the same army of Washington thinktanks with close ties to Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

Goaded by the domestic telecoms industry, with little exposure to global markets, Trump may have done more to rekindle the debate about technological sovereignty than all the critics of America’s tech expansionism combined.

While in the short-term, one can imagine how deregulating America’s telecoms will yield short-term gains, it’s hard to imagine how the practices it will permit – including hijacking of our search queries and internet traffic to show more ads and, potentially, infect our devices with malware – could be reconciled with the vision of a heavily Americanised global internet that is voluntarily agreed to by all the parties involved.

It is this unwarranted trust in the Americanised internet that has underpinned the immense growth of one truly healthy sector of the US economy – technology.

Well, goodbye to all that: the era of the Americanised internet is over. Obama could always speak about the need to promote “internet freedom” in authoritarian states, even as he oversaw the most sophisticated surveillance programme in history. The tech sector kept expanding, entering even more foreign markets.

Trump, on the other hand, has no lofty rhetoric to fall back on and the deregulation agenda pursued by the Republicans will alienate whatever international allies he might have kept otherwise. Make America great again by eliminating America’s hegemony over the global internet: try that for a rousing slogan.

OBAMA UNDONE