Preamble—The Monster Mash
This essay was written in the summer of 2016. Like much of the English-speaking Left, I thought Trump didn’t stand a chance at winning the presidency. The British writer Richard Seymour, American gadfly documentarian Michael Moore, and professor Allan Lichtman, who predicted the previous 30 years of presidential elections, were of the few that predicted Trump’s win. Even as of Tuesday afternoon on election day, I’d thought he was gonna tank.
As this preamble is being written, four days into Trump as President-Elect, already hate-crimes have spurted up throughout the country. Giving hope, protest movements have sprung up “from the Redwood Forest, to the Gulfstream Waters.” To put it simply, the Left, understood broadly as the spectrum ranging from social-democrat all the way out to anarchist, with some exceptions, understated what seems to be an “organic crisis” of the American political system. While Donald Trump is certainly bourgeois, he is absolutely not what the American bourgeoisie wanted. One is reminded of Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which the liberal bourgeoisie, at first opposing a new authoritarianism from Napoleon’s nephew, and participating with the proletariat and intelligentsia in the 1848 revolutions, ended up buttressing the power of a demagogue. That was preferable, of course, to allowing a “social republic” or “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as the communist movement was calling for at the time.
This is to say, it now seems clear that the American bourgeoisie and, as both Trump and Bernie Sanders put it, the “Political Establishment” and “Billionaire Class,” were fully prepared—as the Wikileaks emails show—to lose an election rather than allow a real rising of the poor and working classes by virtue of a potential presidency for a moderate social democrat like Sanders. As is predicted in the essay, a good chunk of working-class and union-household voters went with Donald Trump.
In his seventh thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin writes that what appears to be a “state of exception,” a suspension of normal legal and juridical rule—as theorized by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt—was actually the norm for the oppressed. What is the election of Trump, and the rising of the alt.right, but something exceptional that is really a hyper-real manifestation of tendencies laying dormant in American society, ready to pounce when neither the working classes nor bourgeoisie are strong enough to rule their state? As the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who saw the rise of fascism, put it, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” It is to these monsters that we shall now turn.
In the ongoing Great Recession, a range of voices, from liberal to socialist, have wondered why there has not been an “uptick” in extra-parliamentary class struggle, and often actually blame the working class itself, implicitly, given the focus on “individualism,” cheap consumer goods and the like.1 This essay will argue, contrary to popular understanding, that the poor do “rise,” but not in a fashion that those on the Left may wish for. The growth of right-wing populism and appeals to class has garnered at least as much success as progressive electoral projects, from SYRIZA to Bernie Sanders. Indeed, while the Left downplays an explicit class-orientation and merely speaks about austerity and the “1%,” the populist right makes explicit appeals to class and class consciousness. While the most popular American socialist in recent memory, Bernie Sanders, spoke of the “billionaire class,” he counterposed it to the “people,” while on the other hand, conservatives from Margaret Thatcher to Donald Trump have spoken the language of class, with Trump even calling for a “Workers’ Party.” Liberal and Marxist thinkers, from Georg Lukács all the way to Thomas Frank, have written off the appeal of right-wing populism as some kind of “false consciousness.”2
This is to assume what needs to be explained, that is to say, to ignore the symbolic as well as real and perceived material gains promised to the poor and working class public by right-wing populists. In very basic terms, right-wing populism points at the compromised liberal or social-democrat promising pie-in-the-sky-in-the-bye-and-bye, and calls them crooked, dishonest or, in more polite terms, calls their plans “unrealistic.” Their own tax-cutting plans, meant to split working classes by pitting private vs. public sector workers, in material terms, leaves relatively more liquid money in the pockets of voters than do liberals and social democrats. Right wing populists often will have “signature” issues for which they promise to deliver the goods; take former Toronto mayor Rob Ford and his promise of “subways, subways, subways.” As someone with some experience organizing around transit access in the Greater Toronto Area, I can say that Ford’s plans to build subways through poor and working class communities were far more popular than the social-democratic urbanist darling plans of “Transit City.” These gains may be real, or they may be perceived. Beyond this, there are the symbolic gains, the “rising,” which may well have an authoritarian, as opposed to an emancipatory, quality of “one of us,” a white straight man, salt-of-the-earth, Huey Long, Donald Trump, or Nigel Farage.
In the past year, a social movement has sprung up; while predominantly popular amongst those whose income is comfortably middle class, it features—and speaks on behalf of—a healthy amount of poor and working class Americans. On the backs of the offshoring of jobs and growing gap between rich and poor in both absolute and relative wealth and income terms, in the face of epidemics of hard drugs and the economic draft turning small town boys and girls into cannon fodder, a movement of Americans from outside of the elite urban enclaves, on one hand, and the bible belt, on the other, has made its anti-systemic voice heard. The cadre of this movement, as one activist puts it, are “mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.”3 That movement, of course, is the movement around Donald Trump, the bridging of the “alternative right” with the old-right “paleo-conservatives.” The anti-systemic social movement that Donald Trump has helped coalesce predated and will outlast him, and, I argue here, needs to be seen as a distorted refraction of class struggle. It is a “rising” of the poor and working classes, but the direction of that rise ain’t exactly clear. After all, what do we mean, politically, when we say “rise”? For every “rising” of the far-left, of oppressed and marginalized people, there have been far more “risings” of the right, at least in advanced capitalist countries. The Ku Klux Klan was a rising of the petit-bourgeois whites of the south, meant to defeat the governing Reconstruction authorities. Franco and Mussolini took power in “risings” of social movements that were bound together like sticks, or, in Italian, fasci. Let’s not mistake “rising” for something inherently emancipatory!
One thing that must be kept in mind, however—and certainly has been by Trump and his advisors, without offering fundamentally transformational, anti-systemic politics—is that the “poor do rise” in support of policies that would offer less harm than technocratic neoliberalism. The simple fact that Trump promised fewer “overseas entanglements” should not be understated as part of his appeal, like India’s Modi, a man who deftly plays the Chinese off of the Americans. As Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa said, while Clinton may be better for America at the moment, Trump would be better for the world; there is indeed a perception, in our post-neoconservative age, that the far right is less belligerent on the level of foreign policy. The discrediting of the neoconservative imperialist consensus, at least within “conservatism,” has seen electoral losses for this worldview across the world.
The rascal philosopher Slavoj Žižek often attributes the quote “Behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution” to Walter Benjamin.4 Whether or not Benjamin ever directly made this point, it is certainly the implication of his “Concept of History” essay.5 After all, Hitler’s rise came after the left destroyed itself, starting with Social Democracy’s sell-out of the 1919 communist revolution, all the way through fractious spreads and adventurist turns throughout the 1920s and culminating in tragic disagreements during the Communist “Third Period” in which the slogan was “After Hitler, then Us.” At this time, Socialists, anarchists, Communists, Bundists, Trotskyists, and so on, were all, literally, knives drawn, shooting each other in the street—and the two largest forces on the Left and the Labor movement, the Communists and the Social Democrats, refused to form a United Front against fascism.6 Similar, if geographically specific trajectories took place in other rises of historical fascism and right-wing authoritarianism, from the hoodwinking of anarcho-syndicalism by Italian fascism to the hollow popular-front “resistance” mounted by France and Spain against fascist uprising or occupation.7 One can even generalize this to the rise of nationalist populism in Eastern Europe following the collapse of state-communism.
In the absence of a well-organized and united left, right-wing populism will be the means with which the poor rise. Religion can only promise so much, and destitution tends to lend itself to wanting earthly salvation, especially in an era of mass consumption. Of course, this is not to say that the Left can hot-house revolutionary social conditions in which the popular masses have no excuse but to revolt against their conditions, such as was the case, for example, with the first sparks of the Arab Spring in Tunisia. Nor is it even to say that it is the most destitute of the working classes that lead revolutionary movements: If we are to expand “the poor” to “the poor and working classes,” we can understand how the poorest casual day-laborer as well as the well-paid, highly-skilled metalworkers, the latter of whom took a leading role, were protagonistic players in the Russian revolutions of 1917. Nor is this a fuzzy call for “left unity” that often ends in lowest-common-denominator coalitions or liquidating into tragic experiments like SYRIZA or the Bernie Sanders campaign, both of which showed thirst for left-wing change drowned out by both structural imperatives and cowardice. There was and is no iron law that reformists have to sell out, but it just so happens that they often do.
Egalitarianism or Anti-Capitalism?
In his New York Times editorial that this book is addressing, the liberal journalist and academic Thomas Edsall points out that “those bearing the most severe costs of inequality are irrelevant to the agenda-setters in both [Democratic and Republican] parties. They are political orphans in the new order. They may have a voice in urban politics, but on the national scene they no longer fit into the schema of the left or the right.”8 Since the writing of his editorial in early summer 2015, major candidates from both political parties, Bernie Sanders for the Democrats and Donald Trump for the Republicans, attempted to shift the narrative to encompass those on “the losing end of globalization,” so to speak. The former failed, and, as is likely inscribed in his “popular front” left-social democratic worldview, largely capitulated after having some tiny influence on a non-binding party platform. The latter succeeded largely due to contingent circumstances of the party’s establishment picking too many candidates, as much of the advanced segments of capital, notably the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) and tech sectors, were already dead-set on Hillary Clinton going back some years, as has been shown in her numerous speeches articulating her “private” pro-finance view to bankers and those at other financial institutions. A larger key, however, to Trump’s success was his articulation of the emerging worldview of the “alternative right,” combined with firm opposition to neoliberal free-trade policies and even “American exceptionalism.”
Another key issue with Edsall’s formulation, however, is understanding the lack of working class or sub-altern rising in the United States (and Canada). This is to reduce the problem with post-crisis (and indeed any) capitalism to merely “inequality,” as if inequality were a causal mechanism of itself; of course, inequality breeds inequality, but inequality is a necessary component to the reproduction of capitalist social property relations and the need for what Karl Marx called a “Reserve army of labour.” And further, the categorization of “the poor” as opposed to “the working class(es),” who are on a sharp trajectory towards poverty, in particular amongst millennials, seems to imply a precious image of panhandlers, for whom we have a noblesse oblige to “do something about.”9 It is not inequality that is the problem; it is capitalism; and it is not merely the poor who must rise; it is the working class as a whole. While, as Edsall mentions and is also written about elsewhere in this book, African Americans have been engaging in militant challenges to the status quo, most working class white people have not been doing so. Meanwhile, in just four hours in formerly prosperous West Virginia, no fewer than twenty six people overdosed on Oxycontin.10 From the 1990s onwards, big agribusiness has encroached on the land of small-holding farmers and ranchers. The leadership of the labor movement, with some exceptions, have gotten so comfortable with concession bargaining that for many unions strikes are an exception, not the norm.
The “wages of whiteness,” the social wage of not being victimized due to skin color, is certainly a determining factor in explaining the quiescence of the white working class to struggle on class lines, to “rise” in a progressive and anti-racist direction. Yet even these wages have depreciated and/or been outsourced. Edsall mentions the cheapening of consumer goods and, implicitly, the availability of cheap credit, misreading the purpose of Keynesianism priming the pump with private debt.11 Certainly the cheapening of consumer goods is an effect, not a cause, of inequality. The labor movement has had very few recent tangible victories, in particular within the private sector, and even those victories have been in largely “modern” industries like technology, e.g. the Communications Workers of America (CWA) victory at Verizon. Whole sectors like trucking and logistics are either not unionized or without fighting rank and file cultures. All of this, leading to job attrition and casualization, is overdetermined by the development of a collaborating, staff-led, and distant union bureaucracy, comfortable in both the U.S. and Canada (with some exceptions) to being nothing more than a “stakeholder” in the “democratic process.” So, is it any surprise that we see formations like “Teamsters for Trump”?12 It’s to be expected that, of course, police and border-police unions, if we can call them “unions,” were all out for Big Don. Yet one top union bureaucrat said to the New York Times, “There is deep economic anxiety among our members and the people we’re trying to organize that I believe Donald Trump’s message is tapping into.”13 And, in comparison with the dullness of a labor meeting or the fractiousness of the far left, a new movement has appeared, even calling for a “Worker’s Party.”14
Fun Fascism
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s masterpiece Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the fifty-something German woman, Emmi, and her young Arab migrant lover, Ali, are all set for a fancy dinner out. They sit down to eat at an old fashioned and traditional “German/Italian” restaurant. Emmi is effusive, “Hitler used to eat here.” This is followed immediately by an awkward moment. Here is a working-class German woman, tossed aside by her embourgeoisified offspring, who has, awkwardly but touchingly, fallen in love with a migrant who finds in her the embodiment of a spirit of hospitality that lies beneath the surface of depersonalized, capitalist, mid-seventies West Germany. She was so excited to go to a “high class” restaurant (actually quite pedestrian seeming, to the audience), because it was once the favorite of her Führer.15 She is a lovely human being, and anti-racist. Yet fascism clearly brought her joy, not unlike the joy portrayed in Fellini’s Amarcord, in its carnivalesque glory.
Fascism, and its relative within the liberal-democratic camp, right-wing populism, needs to be understood, as the historian Dylan Riley points out, as “Authoritarian Democracy.”16 The point may come as a surprise to those liberals and anti-capitalists alike who see democracy, either in its parliamentary, Soviet, or even council form, as predicated upon the instantiation of the popular will of the masses by way of selective participation, often merely voting. The normative essence of the very word “democracy” seems to be done violence by terming right-wing populism and fascism to be democratic. Yet, in theoretical terms, fascism and right-wing populism lay claim, quite explicitly, to the popular will, to the interests of the poor and working classes, as against a corrupt, venal, and decrepit establishment, an establishment that may or may not be under undue influence by foreigners and the “speculative” or “financial” side of capitalist property relations. This needs to be juxtaposed with simple “reactionary” or “conservative” politics, which promise “stability” and “law and order.”
Fascism promises fearless law and the most orderliness of order (trains-a-runnin’ on time), but much more, and to be honest, to most true-believers in fascism, these are “noble lies,” the truth of fascism is its democratic—and enjoyable—core. This is as true to the German farmer and Italian artisan who felt forgotten by the Left and sold out by the bourgeoisie as it is for the 4Chan posting, diverse, and queer-friendly but deliberately offensive “for the lulz” denizens of the today’s Alt Right, as well as their more extreme L.A.R.P.ing comrades amongst the many and sundry militia groups, Putin-admiring “neo-reactionaries.” This is to say that when liberals and socialists alike are aghast at how Donald Trump—and to be more specific, Trump’s “base” whom he plays to, are “anti-democratic,” their opposition is merely to what some of us call “bourgeois democracy.” Looking further afield, one sees, beyond the electoral machinations of far-right parties and “strong-men” from the Front National in France to the Golden Dawn in Greece, from Putin’s social base in Russia to the BJP in India, reflections and refractions on existing social movements, largely comprised of the poor: the lower working classes, the lumpen, and the petit-bourgeoisie. In other words, the poor do rise.
Physiognomy of the Alternative Right
As was mentioned, the Alt Right are the key movers of this movement. The Alt Right is largely an online movement of millennials, which can lead us to deduce that a majority may have come from bourgeois backgrounds but have little to no economic hope, and are working service sector jobs or perhaps selling pot and “flipping” on Ebay. Unlike other players within the Trump movement, the Alt Right are not often thought of as a working class-based movement, partially because they often appear to be ostentatiously wealthy, a movement for “rich kids of Instagram.” As pointed out by Alt Right informal leaders Milo Yiannopolous (largely referred to by the honorific of his first name) and Allum Bokharri, a queer man and an Iranian man, for the majority of this subset of outsiders, coming together on old-fashioned web discussion sites like 4Chan and Reddit, this was politics “for the lulz,” that is to say for the sheer enjoyment of it.17 As Bokhari and Milo point out, “Long before the alt-right, 4channers turned trolling the national media into an in-house sport.” Yet this movement, largely male, started to coalesce in response to the increasing influence of feminism, or what they called “misandry” in online spaces, especially in video games. “Gamergate,” targeting well-known feminist online personalities, notably Aneta Sarkeesian, known for her YouTube videos on misogynist tropes in computer games, was the coming-out party for this crowd. Admittedly, this crowd has a minority, known as “1488ers,” that are neo-Nazis. But, say Milo and company, they are harmless and realize they have been hegemonized by queer reactionaries of color. Aside from constituting the backbone of the “Men’s Rights Activism” movement, this crowd is attempting to fight against an “onslaught of SJWs” (Social Justice Warriors) in countercultural enclaves from science fiction to, most recently, the 2016 summer blockbuster remake of Ghostbusters. A bullying campaign against star Leslie Jones on social media ended with Milo himself getting banned from Twitter, no small feat considering that Jihadi groups still can post.
Milo and others have pointed out the very real affinities the Alt Right share with the far-left, in particular the sixties New Left. Indeed, it is quite reasonable to point out that young people get involved with the Alt Right for the same reason that young people got involved with the New Left, especially in its later “adventurist” years.18 Politics could be fun, it could be far out. Or, in contemporary parlance, politics could be for the lulz. On a deeper level, the left-critique of cultural appropriation and embrace of “identity politics” has the script flipped. Alt Right types proudly admit the affinity, as seen above, calling their movement one specifically based on the opposition to the cultural appropriation of European traditional culture.19 Going beyond the Internet subculture, then, one sees a wide ferment of far-right social movements. There are the neo-reactionaries who argue against democracy and for monarchy. Their inveighing against Whig models of history brings to mind Walter Benjamin, while at the same time blaming Benjamin’s Frankfurt School friends and “Cultural Marxism” for a decline in Western Civilization.20 There are the militia members who openly compare themselves to Black Panthers, while some of their comrades sit, heavily armed, outside a NAACP chapter. It should be noted as well, given Trump’s aforementioned call for a “Workers’ Party,” that in the words of Marxist sociologist Charlie Post, “Although Trump is a capitalist, he does not represent any significant segment of his class.”21 Post points out that, whether practicable or not, the Republican establishment, committed as they are to the programs of big business, both “Main Street” and “Wall Street,” from the Chamber of Commerce to the Business Roundtable, fear Trump’s ideas, whether protectionist or nativist. Capital wants rationalized migration, not deportation. Does this mean that Trump is an anti-capitalist? Far from it. Yet the imaginary of the Trump movement doesn’t see capital as intrinsically connected—indeed, capital can be constrained by strongmen, controlled by states, in the interests of the people. The truth behind Trump’s persistent and admiring statements about Putin and Saddam Hussein, as well as his oft-satirized early campaign theme of “China…. I love China,” is his belief that he, like those states, could, in a properly Machiavellian sense, have the virtue to tame fortune.
Like with other cases of right-wing populism, progressives often point out that, numerically speaking, the majority of Trump’s supporters are not working class (all the while denouncing the working class as either uneducated idiots, the labor aristocracy, or both). Yet while pointing out that much of Trump’s support comes from the “new middle classes,” Post points out that half of Trump’s supporters earn less than $50,000 a year.22 Even more of them, however, come from upper middle-class white men without a college or university degree—shopkeepers, salespeople, the classic “new middle class,” who may, on a relative level, still be economically secure, but correctly see their own position on the verge of proletarianization. Post also provides an important reminder that Trump, while displaying signs of fascism, is not, in the last instance, a fascist. “Fascism becomes a mass movement with the potential of taking political power when left-wing movements threaten but fail to take power and capitalist classes continue to fear challenges from below.”23 Trump has not displayed any indication that he wants to overturn representative democracy, and his admiration for dictators is really nothing new in American politics.
Winning them over, or defeating them? What is to be done.
It is mythical to believe that the Left will always—inexorably—be where people turn at times of crisis, or that “rising” will occur within the shared definition of everyone from left-liberals (like Edsall) to the far-left. Right-wing populism of the Trump variety, or regional variations ranging from the relatively anti-racist former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to the brutally racist Greek Golden Dawn, not only promises redemption from the depredations of what instead of capitalism they call “globalism,” but it also—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly—ties this to a sense of “greatness.” This is almost intangible, a Lacanian “Objet Petit A”—greatness being what once was, and what will be, but does not exist now. In the face of the success of this populism, it may be suggested that the Left should offer its own populism, its own “cognitive mapping” that would address the same very-real sources of alienation that attract poor and working class, even middle-class white men to the Trump movement and others of its type. Merely providing another form of populism, of rhetoric that addresses particular interests in a universal frame as opposed to universal interests in a particular frame, such as in the case with modern social democrats from Hugo Chávez to Bernie Sanders, is insufficient. Rather, it gives us pointers that the poor who can be mobilized on behalf of reaction can also be mobilized against the “one percent” or the “oligarchs.” The question, however, is to mobilize as a working class against a ruling class, and this question relies less on populism than on a vision of a future that is imminent within the present.
What this notion gets right is that the right is successful in the face of left failure, but as opposed to understanding that, as Corey Robin shows, the right has always learned its tactics from the Left, not vice-versa.24 Developing a “counter-hegemonic discourse” against another “counter-hegemonic discourse” is not only insufficient, it is a waste of time. What is necessary in such circumstances is a concrete analysis of a concrete situation: What are the sources of modern grievances? What kind of political program, in the short and medium term, can win over potential recruits to the far-left? What other parts of the far-right should be seen as enemies, not as potential recruits to an anti-capitalist project? These are questions without easy answers, but it is useful at the very least to clear up detritus, not to concentrate, as liberals like Edsall, social democrats like Sanders and Chavez, and right-wingers like the Breitbart crowd all agree, on surface phenomenon like “elites” or “bankers.”
Blaming “elites” or “bankers” has the inner logic of classical anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. More importantly, however, it ignores the absolute necessity—not centrality, but necessity—of finance to modern capitalism, and indeed to capitalism historically. Finance, after all, predates capitalism. Yet it serves a purpose, not merely in facilitating the chaotic planning of the social relation we call “the market,” but of allowing itself to be seen as analytically distinct from capitalist social relations as a whole. Without the financial sector, since the decline in growth that has existed at least since the turn of the millennium, and in some accounts since the seventies, there would be no wealth-generation. With this in mind, there is not much difference between Trump and the right’s lauding of “makers” as opposed to hedge-fund managers with Sanders’s own (more sophisticated) critique of hedge fund managers counterposed with “progressive” or “soulful” entrepreneurs like Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream or “small businesses,” the former of which is a gigantic corporation, the latter of which are often far more exploitive of the poor and working classes than are Wal-Marts. To simplify, it is easy to attack individuals, and even sectors—such as finance—and point to them as the problem that can be excised, like a cancer, from the body politic. It is far more difficult to identify and examine capitalism structurally, as a set of social-property relations. Whether from the left or the right, going after a particular sector mystifies capitalist social relations, and does nothing to develop capacities to fight a system, instead of “banksters.”
The role of masculinity and whiteness overdetermine but don’t define a guiding element of the Trump movement. This leads some on the Left to say that this element has been led into the arms of the right by “identity politics” and so forth. While there is some truth to the fact that the Left, at least until 2008 and the economic crisis, did make a retreat from class and talking about capitalism, this won’t do. The misogyny, more than the racism (though not much more), is perhaps the singular guiding element to the Alt Right and its “Men’s Rights Activists” (MRA). And on what the MRA crowd has called “men’s issues,” the Left has not said enough, if anything. As opposed to talking about prison rape, for example, people joke about it. More seriously, the epidemic of white male suicide and opiate abuse, concomitant with the decline of the “industrial working class” and the dominance of organized labor by the often female and Black-led public sector, health care and service unions. This increase in the reserve army of the unemployed, in its gendered component, has not been sufficiently analyzed. Certainly, there are those who take MRA positions, then, that are lost causes, enemies, in other words. But others can perhaps be won over with arguments that allow them to understand their lot in life in relation to capitalism as a whole, which takes seriously their grievances but channels them toward the real problem.
It is precisely in the combined and uneven development of global capitalism that we need to situate the specificity of the reactionary attitudes that emanate, often quite spontaneously and without holding personal prejudices, from the American white working class. The misogyny is rooted in shifts within the labor market, combined with the feeling of being disempowered by women, “cuckolded,” and thus, as anti-feminists, they refer to feminist men as “cucks.” Yet this reaction is rooted in something concrete. In turn, while there is absolutely no direct relationship between the downward mobility of the white working classes and immigration, both are intrinsically related as component parts of the process of the reproduction of capitalism. It may not be rational for white working class people to, like South Park satirizies, cry out “they took our jobs” and “build that wall.” On a certain level, perhaps disavowed, they know that this process—the process of capitalist social relations and its continued disruption, to use a buzzword, is as inexorable as the factories themselves going to Mexico or China.
Anti-Black racism and Islamophobia seem simultaneously less pronounced and more primordial, depending on what segment of the overall Trump movement one considers. On one hand, there is a cheering on “law enforcement” and the whole “Blue Lives Matter” spiel in the face of police violence. On the other hand, while claiming Black Lives Matter is a “George Soros front,” Alex Jones and other right-wing personalities have spoken about the militarization of police, an issue upon which Trump and his base seem to differ. Trump’s Islamophobia is in many ways an articulation of what is already U.S. policy. All potential immigrants to the United States coming from majority-Islamic parts of the world are “vetted.” The Muslim community is under heavy, regular surveillance, and the government depends a great deal on comprador Imams and “community leaders” to inform and monitor their own communities, much like the FBI would hire anti-communist Jews in the thirties and forties.
Many on the Left would, to return to an earlier point, imply that this growth in the use of prejudiced rhetoric needs a shift in the “hegemonic discourse,” or in other terms “political education” and “consciousness raising” among white people, or even “privilege checking.” Yet if the Sanders campaign, with its inherent and imminent flaws, showed anything, it’s that multiracial coalitions can be built around issues of common concern on a material basis. These struggles have to come from below, and cannot be merely hothoused, or will end up in dissipation. It is far less implausible for assemblies of non-unionized workers and the unemployed to unite under the banner of class struggles than it is to imagine the effort of politically educating the masses of the American white male working classes, shopfloor by shopfloor, filling station by filling station. The Left, as noted, has either bemoaned the old, traditional working class’s lack of militancy, and/or labeled it compromised or a “labor aristocracy.” But, in reality, the Left has not been able to engage this segment of the population, in the United States or in Canada. This is not, however, to say that there has been no upheaval.
There was indeed a cycle of protest, of struggle, from 2011 onwards, albeit unevenly. From the Wisconsin uprising to Occupy to the strike by Chicago schoolteachers, the recent victory at Verizon, movements that rise up from below have ebbed and flowed. These struggles, it should be noted, have largely dissipated, while the peace movement is dead. The only social movement with any social weight in the United States right now is Black Lives Matter, which is by nature coalition politics—though the radical left wing of BLM recently put out an excellent policy document.25 The very thought of systemic change, as opposed to reforms, has been erased from the activist vocabulary. This is not helped by a presidential candidate, for whatever good work he did in challenging and exposing the Democratic Party, calling his program of moderate Scandinavian social democracy a “political revolution,” while claiming no opposition to President Obama’s most egregious policies—especially his drone program.
The long and short of it is, as Adolph Reed pointed out in 2015, there is no Left in the United States. The Left has not fared well, with a few European exceptions, in the last decade, but on the other hand, people tend to respond, at least electorally, to arguments using broadly “left” themes: inequality, the environment, and social justice. Liberals like Justin Trudeau and Alexis Tsipras won elections on promises of opposing austerity and investing in infrastructure. Yet especially in circumstances where the working classes and poor can look back, even less than a generation, and see people doing better than they are today, it is a situation of profound sadness and anger, the type of sadness and anger that could be channeled into a revolutionary anti-capitalist political project. But alas, revolutionary anti-capitalists are few and far between, and reformism has been exposed as an emperor with no clothes.
So, we have Trump. As the saying goes, the band sucks, but the fans are worse.
Postscript: Make Racists Afraid Again
In Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, a country and western musician and rowdy drunk, Lonesome Rhodes, goes from being an advertising spokesperson, 50s version of a reality TV star, to a veritable political kingmaker, rousing the rabble with populist fury, until, while on a “hot mic,” he is heard talking about his fans and followers as “guinea pigs,” as dupes. Perhaps this was on the minds of some as a “hot mic” recording of Donald Trump suddenly appeared, a scant few weeks before election day, in which, put simply, Trump brags about being a sexual predator.
This didn’t do him in.
Instead, Trump was able to counterpunch, and, not unlike Bill Clinton, throw his survivors under the bus. Meanwhile, as the Hillary Clinton campaign went for “moderate republicans,” having pretty much given up on the industrial (and not just “white”) working class in the Midwest. The working class and the poor rose up on election day, and voted in Donald Trump.
Trump talks a lot about making America great again, and it is not unlikely that soon this vision will shift to one in which he denounces the racism of his followers. But the alt.right is bigger than Trump and they have a foothold in Trumpland by way of Steve Bannon, who has a seat in the administration. Racists and misogynists and homophobes are emboldened everywhere. Trans folks, people of color, queers, Muslims, Jews, and others have been attacked, while protests have been immediately mischaracterized, including labeling Black Lives Matter protesters“Terrorists.”
The time has come, then, to Make Racists Afraid Again. As Trump fails to carry through his program, his followers will be demoralized. Will they turn (alt) right? Or will they listen to radical left arguments? Time will tell, but we need to MAKE RACISTS AFRAID AGAIN! Only then will we move beyond this state of exception.
Endnotes
1 Thomas B. Edsall, “Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?” New York Times, June 24, 2015. Available online, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/opinion/why-dont-the-poor-rise -up.html
2 Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas (New York: Henry Holt, 2004); Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971).
3 Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” Breitbart, March 29, 2016. Available online, http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/.
4 Slavoj Žižek, “Only a radicalised left can save Europe,” New Statesman, June 25, 2014. Available online, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/slavoj-i-ek-only-radicalised-left-can-save-europe.
5 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arrendt (New York: Schocken, 1968): 253–264.
6 Matthew Worley, In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third Period (London: IB Tauris, 2004).
7 Dylan Riley and George Souvlis, “Fascism and Democracy: What Gramsci can tell us about the relationship between fascism and liberalism—and the rise of Donald Trump.” Jacobin, August 19 2016. Available online, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/trump-clinton-fascism-authoritarian-democracy/.
8 Edsall, “Why don’t the Poor Rise Up.”
9 Shaun Scott “Millenials Are Not Here to Save Us” Jacobin, February 18 2016. Available online, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/millennials-election-baby-boomers-revolution-capitalism/.
10 Laura Built, “One West Virginia city responds to 26 heroin overdoses in only 4 hours: ‘This is an epidemic of monumental proportions’” New York Daily News, August 17, 2016. Available online, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/west-virginia-city-26-heroin-overdoses-4-hours-article-1.2754742.
11 Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (London: Verso, 2006).
12 Facebook Page, “Teamsters for Trump,” August 23, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/teamstersfortrump/.
13 Noam Schieber, “Unions Lean Democratic, but Donald Trump Gets Members’ Attention,” New York Times, Jan 19, 2016. Available online, http://www.nytimes .com/2016/01/30/business/donald-trump-unions.html.
14 Nick Gass, “Trump: GOP will become ‘worker’s party’ under me” Politico, May 26, 2016. Available online, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trump-gop-workers-party-223598#ixzz4IAWq8n31.
15 Rainer Werner Fassbinder (dir/wr.) Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) Berlin: Filmverlag der Autoren.
16 Dylan Riley and George Souvlis, “Fascism and Democracy: What Gramsci can tell us about the relationship between fascism and liberalism—and the rise of Donald Trump.”
17 Bokharri and Yiannopolous, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.”
18 Ibid.
19 Lawrence Murray, “Multiculturalism in Action: #OurCulturesAreNotCostumes,” The Right Stuff, November 1, 2015. Available online, http://therightstuff.biz/2015/11/01/multiculturalism-in-action-ourculturesarenotcostumes/.
20 Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment. Available online, http://www.thedarkenlightenment .com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/.
21 Charlie Post, “The Trump Problem,” Jacobin, April 4, 2016. Available online, https://www .jacobinmag.com/2016/04/donald-trump-republican-party-primary-president/.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
25 Movement for Black Lives, Platform. Summer 2016. Available online, https://policy.m4bl .org/platform/.