mannequin challenge¹

One of the images that has most haunted me since the election is that of Clinton and her close allies doing their version of the “mannequin challenge” on the campaign plane. It wasn’t only the smugness of this scene which irked (but just check out the sheer amount of self-satisfaction packed into Hillary’s grin); it was the sense that this simulation of stasis — reminiscent of the eerie scenes in Westworld in which the android-hosts are temporarily put into sleep-mode — actually revealed what the Clinton campaign was composed of: decommissioned political robots playing out an exhausted programme one last time before being permanently taken offline. The uncomfortable irony is that this final-day promotional video’s injunction — don’t stand still, vote today — is, unfortunately, exactly what too many of Clinton’s potential supporters did. But it was also what Clinton’s whole campaign had done: stayed still. While Trump’s campaign was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement, Clinton’s offered only more of the same. Or the same, but less. Its message was not only that nothing much will change, but also that nothing much needs to change.

This paralysis cannot be attributed only to the complacency and insularity in the Clinton camp; it is instead a symptom of a broader pathology afflicting the “centre-left”. “Centre-left” has to be placed in inverted commas here because the malaise is in large part a consequence of this group’s failure to register that the “centre” to which it is attached and from which it takes all its bearings has disappeared. In addition to the parallels with Brexit, there are clear echoes of the last UK General Election. Rather like Ed Miliband, Clinton lost essentially because she was unable to mobilise her own supporters. It turns out that there wasn’t much of a surge to the right: as Gary Younge points out in an invaluable piece, Trump “may have led the charge to the right but comparatively few marched with him”² (he ended up winning a lower proportion of the vote than losing candidates John Kerry, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Gerald Ford). Instead, there was an evacuation of the centre. Like Boris Johnson, Trump is opportunistic; but it is this opportunism which enabled him to respond to transformed conditions and to be seen to respond to them — something which his own party’s ruling establishment, just as much as Clinton’s Democrats, were singularly unable to do.

The mood that Trump and Brexit caught is a dissatisfaction with capitalist realism. Yet it isn’t capitalism that is being rejected in these inchoate revolts, but realism. When Simon Reynolds wrote about Trump a few weeks ago, he picked up on a quotation from The Art of the Deal “I play to people’s fantasies”.³ The turn to fantasy is crucial to the current success of the right represented by Trump and Brexit.

What both Trump and the Brexiteers are selling is a fantasy of nationalist revival. The automatic deference to economic “good sense” and corporate “expertise” on which capitalist realism has relied. Genuflections to… which only a few months ago were a requirement for anyone serious about pursuing power, have now become toxic. Rather than adding to her authority, Hillary Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street confirmed her reputation as a stooge of the status quo; just as the appeals made by David Cameron — who already seems like a figure from a long-ago era — to “experts” proved in the end to be disastrously counterproductive. In the fantasy of nationalist revival, “experts” are refigured, not as avatars of an economic reality principle, but as spoilers and obstructors, enemies of the resurgent will.

The Brexit vote was practically a case study of what Paul Gilroy calls postcolonial melancholia. Trump’s rise — Make America Great Again! — is the American equivalent of the same phenomenon. As Gilroy points out, this melancholia has its manic and jubilatory aspects, but it is rooted in a longing for an idealised past, and a denial of the complexities and perplexities of the present… Since it is organised around desires that are impossible to satisfy, the flight into fantasy will of course be very far from some harmless exercise in escapism; immense damage will inevitably be done in the attempt to preserve these //// of restoration and “purification”. Postcolonial melancholia is caused by “the loss of the fantasy of omnipotence”, at the same time as it is a compensatory strategy which renders the disappearance of a sense of omnipotence as a merely temporary matter, soon to be rectified. It is precisely the fantasmatic dimension of feelings of omnipotence that is denied in Trump’s rhetoric. The omnipotence was real — the fall into vulnerability and malaise is to be attributed to a depressive stupor, which will be overcome by a recovery of will and belief: nationalist magical voluntarism.

The jubilatory denial of the constraining power of economic conditions — and ultimately of any conditions — accounts in part for the striking differences in libidinal tenor between the Clinton and Trump campaigns. Clinton’s buttoned-up poise, her rendition of an obsolete “good sense”, and her failure to recognise that the “centre” ground on which she stood had collapsed beneath her, was a personification of capitalist realism at its most staid and shopworn: entirely devoid of any capacity to inspire, and mired in a near-past for which few express any nostalgia. If Obama came to represent a version of capitalist realism — the narrative arc of his presidency, after all, saw euphoric “change” and “hope” quickly declining into deadlock and impasse — he nevertheless possessed a grace, equanimity and charisma that Clinton could never muster. He gave late-period capitalist realism and geopolitical realpolitik a serious, personable and thoughtful face; and, in spite of all the disappointments and jading, his being president at all still possessed a quality of the unexpected and the momentous. For all that Clinton’s accession to the presidency would have been momentous, it didn’t feel that way. Her status as tarnished dynastic insider always overshadowed her position as gender outsider.

In any case, Trump’s immoderation was a break with all of this. His displays of unbound libido have a performative dimension. Trump’s “unprofessional” “lapses”, his seeming faux pas, his ready descent into racist invective and misogyny, his hate-mongering: these are significant not only for their attraction to those already evincing such attitudes. They also have an appeal to some of those who don’t share them, and who might even deplore them: what such outbursts come to signify is both an “authenticity” — a simulation of “straight talking” — and, equally importantly, a performance of libidinal freedom. I’m by no means the first to note the parallels with Silvio Berlusconi, Trump’s most obvious precursor. Franco Berardi has rightly argued that much of Berlusconi’s appeal came from his “ridiculing of political rhetoric and its stagnant rituals”. Voters were invited to identify “with the slightly crazy Premier, the rascal Prime Minister who resembles them”. Voters too don’t always say the right thing (and they certainly say things in private which they wouldn’t want broadcast in public); they too have contempt for the staid conventions of parliament. Needless to say, “resemblance” of this sort is always cultivated and engineered; voters are directed into selecting and identifying with some of their own traits at the expense of others. Like Berlusconi, Trump disdains law and rules “in the name of a spontaneous energy that rules can no longer bridle”. Those disquieted or even disgusted by his racism and misogyny could nevertheless still be excited by Trump’s disregard for politesse, procedure and precedent. It was Trump’s excess which allowed him to appear as the “candidate of change”, something which many of his supporters insistently cited as the reason that they voted for him. Simon Reynolds refers to

the edgy promise of a less boring politics. The New York Times recently quoted a voter who confessed to flirting with the idea of voting for Trump because “a dark side of me wants to see what happens… There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen.”⁴

As such, you might say, Trump was less the glam than the punk candidate, possessing the same combustible, fissile mixture of the reactionary and the… that characterised so many punk acts. Punk’s political… boredom… mid-Seventies stasis was so enervating that any change would be better. Well, after Brexit and Trump, we can say with certainty: boring dystopia is over. We’re in a whole other kind of dystopia now.

In Trump’s case, the fantasies of national restoration reassure, mitigating the sense of risk that he provokes. It’s almost as if the fantasies give permission to indulge in the excitement… Vertiginous change and a restored past, all in the same moment; Trump has found a way to renew the formula that the right has successfully deployed since Reagan and Thatcher. (And one perennial problem for the revolutionary left is that it doesn’t have the same recourse to reassuring fantasies, the same appeal to a restored past, with which to leaven the leap into the unknown.)

Then there are the fantasies of class… at which Trump excelled. “The real story of this election”, Fukuyama argued,

is that after several decades, American democracy is finally responding to the rise of inequality and the economic stagnation experienced by most of the population. Social class is now back at the heart of American politics, trumping [hah!] other cleavages — race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, geography — that had dominated discussion in recent elections.”⁵

Martin Jacques made similar claims in the Guardian:

The wave of populism marks the return of class as a central agency in politics, both in the UK and the US. This is particularly remarkable in the US. For many decades, the idea of the “working class” was marginal to American political discourse. Most Americans described themselves as middle class, a reflection of the aspirational pulse at the heart of American society. According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population. […] Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt. […] The return of class, because of its sheer reach, has the potential, like no other issue, to redefine the political landscape.⁶

Bernie Sanders…; but the version of class politics offered by Trump and Brexit is nothing new at all. It repeats a divide-and-rule strategy used by Nixon, Thatcher and many other right-wingers for many years. What we have seen in both Trump’s win and Brexit is a perpetual obfuscation of class via race and nationalism. Both Trump and the Brexiteers proffered a highly racialised account of class politics, as the very term “white working class” implies. The depredations that the working class have faced under neoliberalism were relentlessly attributed to racialised others: immigrants, economically aggressive foreign powers… Converting class antagonism into racialised and nationalistic resentment has been central to the success of UKIP, but it didn’t invent so much as intensify a strategy that has served the right well for forty years.

On the face of it, it’s incredible that Trump could in any way persuasively appear to be a man of the people — to come off, in the astonishing words of his son, as “a blue collar guy with a big balance sheet”. It’s not as if Trump, who inherited his wealth (and effectively squandered much of it) is even a self-made man who came from any kind of modest background. No doubt this is one more example of the subordinated being seduced into identifying with the rich (and thus, for instance, opposing the imposition of higher taxes on the super-wealthy). If Trump is a “blue collar guy with a big balance sheet”, then those who engage in this fantasmatic identification are blue-collar folk who don’t yet happen to have a big balance sheet (but who, in the fantasy, will surely get one in the end). But this doesn’t answer the question of how Trump in particular — and of all people — was capable of engendering this fantasy. I think that there are at least four (strongly related) reasons for this: his ability to seem to be in tune with working-class worries and concerns; his… liberal-professional elite; his comportment; and his position in the media ecology.

Contrary to how he was portrayed in the mainstream media Trump did not talk only of walls, immigration bans, and deportations. In fact he usually didn’t spend much time on those themes. […] [T]he heart of his message was something different, an ersatz economic populism, which has been noted far and wide, but also a strong, usually overlooked, anti-war message. Both spoke to legitimate working class concerns. […] Trump took the Bernie-style populism, emptied it of real class politics, reduced it to a jumble of affective associations, and used it to beat-up the smug liberals of the professional managerial class.⁷

“Populism”, Francis Fukuyma argued back in June, “is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like.”⁸ Yet these policies aren’t typically generated by “ordinary citizens” themselves; more often, they are attempts by elites to ventriloquise desires and anxieties “ordinary citizens” are held to have. Right-wing populism of the kind Trump and Brexit represent is a gambit in a struggle amongst different versions of the elite. Crucial to this process is the way in which the opposing elite is characterised. At least since Nixon, the right has identified the “bad” elite as a “liberal” clique, with its cosmopolitan ease, its remoteness from ordinary life, and its contempt for the supposed vulgarity, insularity and chauvinism of the subordinated classes. Such an elite really does exist, of course, and its domination of large areas of the left since the 1960s has made it easy for the right successively to pull different versions of the trick that Trump… in this campaign. Trump reassures and flatters his supporters: the problem is not you, he says, but the Others, once we’ve built the wall, everything will be OK. By contrast, the message from the left, Trump says, is that the problem is you; the Others are OK, deserving of special favours that won’t be granted to you.

Joan C. Williams claims, in a problematic piece that nevertheless makes some interesting points, Trump’s success is also the consequence of a particular kind of resentment, whereby “the white working class (WWC)” “resents professionals but admires the rich.”⁹ If Hillary Clinton, Williams argues, “epitomises the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite”, then, like something out of Ballard’s Kingdom Come — a poor novel but prescient social prophecy — Trump has come out of a fusion of celebrity culture and business that currently possesses far more hegemonic pull than the arid professional politics which Clinton drearily personifies. This form of populism depends upon television’s simulation of intimacy and familiarity — McLuhan remarked that when people see a film star on the street, they recognise them, but when people see a TV star, they typically think that it is someone they know. Trump’s presiding over The Apprentice, his willingness to appear on shows such as The Roast of Donald Trump, means that he feels like someone audiences personally know. As a representative of this “professional elite”, Clinton was too close, too familiar. At the same time, Trump’s position in the media ecology means that, in some respects, he could seem less remote than Hillary Clinton.

What we are seeing, evidently, is not an attack on the establishment from outside (or below), but the replacement of one form of establishment with another. And one reason that this insurgent establishment — neo-authoritarian and neo-nationalist rather than neoliberal — has been able to overcome its rivals is that it has stirred up a populist political fervour that capitalist realism tended to damp down. Capitalist realism secured its hegemony by de-activating people as political agents and re-interpellating them as entrepreneurial individuals. It wanted to close down political movements, not build them, all the better to organise and administrate policy from above.

Faced with Trump’s performance of unbound libido…

The danger here is in conflating this return of class with class agency. One of the most telling — and poignant — phenomena in the wake of the UK referendum on EU membership was a particular kind of dismay expressed by some of those who had voted leave. They were alarmed by the result because “they didn’t think their vote would count”. Still others claimed that a decision this momentous shouldn’t have been left to them. Brexit may have been supported by large numbers of the working class, but this is very far from its being an expression of self-conscious working-class agency.

It is certainly a mistake to oppose this current form of class politics to race. What is new is the disappearance of any countervailing pressures from the advocates of globalisation, free trade, etc. The tension that has defined the neoliberal right for forty years — in which ostensibly opposing positions in practice complemented one another — has now become a scission. What does this mean?

It means, first, that this right has retreated from its claim on modernity. Neoliberal ideology made neoliberalisation seem as if it were synonymous with modernisation. But it is exactly this modernity that the right is now rejecting. In place of the neoliberal embrace of a globalised present, there is now only a turn backwards, and inwards. The Brexit vote was driven by what Paul Gilroy has called “postcolonial melancholia”, and Trump’s rise has clearly been powered by the American equivalent of this phenomenon.

But the right’s retreat from modernity gives all the more impetus for the left to reclaim it. Current right-wing populism is responding to real problems of the neoliberal world. In addition to economic stagnation, it is also offering a balm for the existential deficit in contemporary capitalism: the banal nihilism of a world cored out by capitalist imperatives. Its answer, naturally, is nationalism. But this is by no means the only response to the problem of belonging. Control of their own lives.