by Frank Brenner
A wealthy New Yorker moves into the
White House, promising radical change. A keynote of his campaign rhetoric is
about the country's “forgotten men”, who he promises will be forgotten no
longer. Intellectually he's a lightweight and it's obvious that he has no clear
idea of what he wants to do once in power. He treats complicated subjects with
remarkable glibness. He gathers around him a “brain trust” of powerful,
ambitious men. He is a master of using new media to maintain a direct
connection with millions of his followers. Early on he assumes what is in all
but name dictatorial powers. His government will eventually round up and
imprison thousands of 'enemy aliens'. And he will lead the country into war.
No, this isn't Donald Trump – it's
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Since the election, comparisons
between Trump and Adolf Hitler have become routine. Novels that anticipated the
rise of an American fascism – including Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here
and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America – are doing a brisk business. The
comparison is understandable and justified given the sinister nature of the
Trump campaign – its racist scapegoating and misogyny, instigation of violence
and embrace of fascist forces of the alt-right. (1)
But the deeper you go in making that
comparison, the more limited it seems. The differences between Trump and the
fascist leaders of the Thirties are, if anything, more striking than the
similarities. Trump has no worked-out ideology, no Brown or Blackshirts
terrorizing the streets, and while he is an A-list celebrity, the widespread
scorn and derision he garners shows how far he still is from the fanatical
adulation of a fuhrer-cult. Labelling Trump a fascist doesn't explain much. The
label long ago lost any precise meaning tied to social class and political
program. It now typically functions as a vague synonym for authoritarianism or
more commonly a free-floating term of abuse. (2)
The vagueness of the fascist label bespeaks
a deeper problem – the disorientation of the left. There is widespread shock
and anger over Trump's election but precious little insight or useful analysis.
'Whitelash' was popular as an explanation among liberals and even some radicals
immediately after the election, but it simply ignored the millions of workers
in rustbelt states who had voted twice for Obama and this time voted for Trump.
Or rather it didn't just ignore them, it excoriated them, as in this bit of
rhetorical vitriol from the NY Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman on election
night: Trump voters “don't share at all our idea of what America is about. For
them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial
hierarchy.” (3)
Sexism also became a favoured
explanation: Hillary Clinton lost because she was a woman. Protesting sexism
was the main theme of Women's Marches that took place the day after Trump's
inauguration. These marches were vivid displays of a left lost in a fog. The
turnout was impressive, in the millions, and yet these millions were clueless
about what to make of Trump. Slogans like “The Future is Female” or “I'm With
Her” were embarrassingly banal. In the march I attended the only whiff of
something other than feel-good feminism had to do with the campaign for a $15
an hour minimum wage, but this was very much a sidebar issue.
The notion that it should be a women's
march that kicks off the resistance to Trump is already a measure of how far
off the mark this resistance is, how clueless it is about why he won. He
didn't win because of some conspiracy of the patriarchy, he won because of
class issues. And by not addressing those issues, these marches were ignoring
millions of women, the ones who voted for Trump – 53 percent of white women
overall and 61 percent of white women without a college education, working
class women in other words. No doubt many of these women would kick Trump in
the groin if he assaulted them in the way he famously bragged about, but they
voted for him anyway because other things mattered more to them, above all else
economic insecurity. When it comes to these women, it would seem the message
from progressives is “I'm NOT With Her”. (4)
*
* * * *
A few words are in order about a
layer of left-wing activists and intellectuals for whom this election has been
a watershed moment. I'm thinking of the generation that came of age in the 80s and 90s, shaped by the trifecta of
the fall of the Berlin Wall, post-modernism and identity politics. The
radicalism of this generation (as compared to traditional Marxism or Sixties
radicalism) supplanted grand narratives with petty ones. It wasn't that racism,
sexism or homophobia are petty, it's rather that the politics of dealing with
those issues became that way. Grand narratives (and obviously I'm thinking of
Marxism in particular here) are about freedom, petty narratives are about
fairness – within an unfree system. You could make a similar criticism of the
politics behind phrases like 'social justice', 'human rights' or 'sustainability'.
The vagueness common to all these phrases (weasel words, as they're known in
the advertising trade) is a necessary expression of a bad bargain with
capitalism.
A bargain, one might add, that few
adherents of these ideas are even conscious of having made. The liberal
academic Mark Lilla writes about how in recent decades, ideologies (especially
of the left) have been “replaced by a soft dogma for which we have no adequate
name. This dogma begins with basic liberal principles like the sanctity of the
individual, the priority of freedom, and distrust of public authority, and
advances no further ... Since it presumes that individuals are all that count,
it has next to nothing to say about collectivities and their enterprises, and
the duties that come with them. It has a vocabulary for discussing rights and
identities and feelings, but not class or other social realities.” As an
example of this “soft dogma”, Lilla notes how “race is now largely conceived of
as a problem of individual identity, not one of collective destiny requiring
individual sacrifice to reach a common goal, as it was by the American civil
rights movement.” Feminism has travelled a similar path.
A Marxist would understand the “soft
dogma” Lilla is describing as an expression of an atomized political
consciousness, and chalk that up to the hollowing out of working class
collectivities like unions and the sinking of mainstream left parties into the
swamp of neoliberal austerity. It's an atomized consciousness that, as Lilla
goes on to say, is “at once anti-political and anti-intellectual. It cultivates
no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are
going.” Hence a slogan like “The Future is Female”, which advertises a
consciousness that has no idea about (or interest in) what the future should
be. You could say that Lilla's “soft dogma” is what happens to liberalism
in the absence of any pressure on it from a revolutionary left. (5)
This goes some way to explaining
Obama's enduring popularity among left-liberals, and their nostalgia for him
now that he's gone from the White House. That many of Obama's policies paved
the way for Trump doesn't seem to matter. Critical thinking is largely reduced
to a 'He may not have been perfect, but' attitude. And soon after the but, some
form of the word 'decent' will crop up – a suitably earnest and usefully vague
term, ideal for a soft dogma. By these lights even a Wall Street shill like
Clinton can begin to look like 'progress'. (6)
This also sheds light on the biggest
anomaly of the current political situation: that the return of ideological
politics – and specifically the return of class politics – has come not
from the left but from the populist right. True, the Bernie Sanders campaign
showed that there was a widespread yearning for a more ideological politics on
the left, but it's a yearning that got sandbagged by the Democratic Party
establishment. By contrast, Sanders's counterpart on the right, Trump, was able
to defy his party's establishment and still win the nomination. Underscoring
this contrast, Trump was ready to run as an independent if he didn't get the
nomination, whereas Sanders fell in line behind Clinton at the convention
despite clear evidence that the nomination process had been rigged. The
Democratic Party is toxic to the left, but it's a toxic relationship the left
seems unable to break free from, like a battered spouse in an abusive marriage.
There are many reasons for that, but a major factor is the continuing hold over
the left of a consciousness that has “next to nothing to say about
collectivities” and “about how we got here and where we are going.”
*
* * *
*
In the women's march there was a
slogan I saw on some signs, which went something like this: I Can't Believe I
Still Have to Deal With This Shit. Of course the sentiment this expressed was
aimed at Trump's misogyny and vulgarity, but you could give the slogan a
different twist by defining shit in economic terms. For a lot of workers who
voted for Trump, their version might read, I Can't Believe I'm Back in the
1930s.
Which brings me back to my
comparison of Trump and Franklin Roosevelt.
Let's begin with the word 'deal'.
It's a word that crops up a lot in American politics. Before FDR there was the
Square Deal (Teddy Roosevelt) and after him the Fair Deal (Harry Truman). Trump
has added an aesthetic touch with his book, The Art of the Deal. Not that this
is a political program like the other 'deals', it's rather a hodge-podge of
how-to-get-rich-quick blather and shameless self-promotion. But since a large
part of Trump's electoral appeal was based on his supposed prowess as a
deal-maker, we can enlist him in this American political tradition.
Deal is an odd word for politics.
You don't hear it anywhere else in the world. Behind it is the notion that
politics is like business: voters are 'in the market' for a government, and
they 'buy in' to the politician who will give them the best deal. But to state
the obvious – or rather what should be obvious in any country where market
ideology hasn't become a state religion – this is a debased notion of
democracy, and like much else in capitalism, it is a shiny appearance masking
an ugly reality. The art of the deal is to make it appear that both
sides are winners but this is more the exception than the rule in business or
politics. Capitalism is a class society because in the great majority of
cases, deals produce winners and losers – and that economic divide has now
reached neo-feudal proportions, with society dominated by a super-rich one
percent that is an economic aristocracy in all but name.
The paradigm for all deals within
capitalism is the deal between worker and boss, with the worker supposedly
being paid for his/her labor which the boss uses to make a profit. Of course
many workers are paid badly – never more so than now – but the ideal 'deal' for
workers within capitalism is 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work'. Again
fairness – not freedom. The ideology of trade unionism can be summed up by this
ideal.
And yet it is a swindle that Marx
unmasked long ago. Workers aren't paid for their labor but their ability to do
work, which is to say whatever it costs to keep body and soul together so as to
come back the next day to do more work. If workers were paid for their labor
there would be no profits, so profits are unpaid labor – which is why the
socialist movements of yesteryear called such work wage slavery. The
term now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era – except if you visit an
electronics factory in China or a garment factory in Bangla Desh or a meat
processing plant in Texas or a WalMart or Apple store in your local shopping
mall.
But class consciousness was always a
hard sell in a country steeped in individualism. Workers in America were never
just workers, they were wannabe millionaires waiting for their lucky break. The
way out of economic misery wasn't resistance to capitalism but becoming a
capitalist yourself (or, until 2008 anyway, owning real estate). Nowhere else
has success been so slavishly worshipped, and ruthless exploiters (from the
robber barons of old to their modern descendants like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates
and Jeff Bezos) turned into secular saints. Trump has taken this process to a
new level, turning worship into political power, and the irony is that even his
business success is largely a fraud, just like the miracles of conventional
religions. But the myth of America as the land of opportunity explains much
about why deal-making remains a powerful political metaphor. It is a myth that
is not dead yet, even though social mobility largely is. That myth will only
die when workers stop being prisoners of the American dream.
The New Deal was not exactly a
swindle. Reforms like Social Security improved millions of people's lives. But
there was always a big gap between the reality of the New Deal and its public
image, especially the halo it got adorned with in Hollywood movies and popular
culture. To this day Roosevelt's name evokes a fuzzy, heart-warming vision of a
democratic utopia where decent people (think Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper)
triumph over the forces of greed and corruption.
The truth was much less inspiring –
a pragmatic patchwork of make-work programs and Keynesian economics to save
capitalism from itself and quell social unrest. Saving capitalism was decisive,
and that's what accounts for the narrow limits and tentative nature of the New
Deal reforms: many were rescinded after a few years, and huge problems (Jim
Crow, national health insurance) were never tackled – absences that haunted
American politics ever since. America's was the first welfare state but it was
also among the most meager. In that sense the New Deal was a triumph of style over
substance. Big Money was left firmly in control of the economy but the American
Dream was put on life support after almost being given up for dead during the
Great Depression.
To bring this off required a leader
who was himself a triumph of style over substance, more Wizard of Oz than
Abraham Lincoln. The patrician Roosevelt was a masterful politician in the sense
of being able to read the public mood and knowing how to respond to it. He
honed his common touch and used new media like radio (the Twitter of his day)
to make the men and women 'forgotten' during the Great Depression feel like
they had a friend in the White House. In marked contrast to the Calvinist
rectitude of predecessors like Coolidge and Hoover, Roosevelt projected an
avuncular image: he had a wry sense of humor
and you might even imagine having a drink with him, and that he would listen to
your troubles with sympathy. (That Prohibition was ended in his first year in
office no doubt helped burnish this image.) Occasionally Roosevelt's rhetoric
took on a social democratic tinge – his denunciation of “economic royalists”
and his “four freedoms” speech – but these were shout-outs to the left liberals
and union activists in his electoral base, and never became serious policy.
Roosevelt was into 'hopey-changey' politics long before Obama.
The historian Richard Hofstadter had
a useful insight when he wrote that at the core of the New Deal there wasn't a
philosophy or ideology but “an attitude”. A big part of it was pragmatic and
technocratic – get something done, no matter what, and not worry about larger
moral issues, as the earlier Progressives had. Another part was “a kind of
pervasive tenderness for the underdog, the Okies, the sharecroppers, the
characters in John Steinbeck's novels, the subjects who posed for the FSA
photographers” such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. A tenderness, in short,
for “the little people” – until (as Hofstadter noted ruefully) “a certain
revulsion set in” at the obvious condescension.
Along with this tenderness came “a
kind of folkish nationalism, quickened no doubt by federal patronage of letters
and the arts, but inspired at bottom by a real rediscovery of hope in America
and its people and institutions. For after the concentrations camps, the
Nuremberg Laws, Guernica and... the Moscow Trials, everything in America seemed
fresh and hopeful, Main Street seemed innocent beyond expectation, and in time
Babbitt became almost lovable.” It's worth pausing over that last image, and
the shadow it casts over the feel-good glow of the New Deal.
To make Babbitt “almost lovable” was
to make Gatsby almost forgettable. It was to dispel the ominous (and
subversive) sense “of the ugliness under the successful surface of American
life”. Instead a new optimism came to prevail: “the New Deal flourished on a
sense of the human warmth and the technological potentialities that could be found
under the surface of America's inequities and its post-depression poverty.”
Surface and underside got flipped, and the prevailing mood shifted to “Happy
Days Are Here Again.” The Babbitts, thus reinvigorated, would eventually find
an outlet for all that “human warmth” in McCarthyism. This was the inevitable
price of saving capitalism. (7)
The New Deal was the great triumph
of American liberalism, but precisely because it was so amorphous, an attitude
more than an ideology, and also because it was so bound up with the personality
of a president, the liberal credentials of the New Deal seemed more
self-evident than they really were. That Hitler and Mussolini expressed
enthusiasm for the New Deal in its early days might just seem an aberration,
but maybe it also underscores another side of the New Deal that the liberal
narrative would rather ignore. Roosevelt was an icon of democratic values but
he ran an administration with a big streak of authoritarianism in it. He began
his tenure by assuming sweeping powers over the economy and ended it by running
the biggest war machine in history. To be sure, he assumed those powers out of
necessity rather than ideology, but he clearly came to see himself as the
indispensable president – running in and winning an unprecedented four
elections – a record and mindset more dynastic than democratic.
The New Deal was not the comforting
reaffirmation of democratic values and institutions it is so often portrayed
as. Rather it was a manifestation of a much more troubling truth – that liberal
democracy breaks down whenever there is a major crisis, and seems to cry out
for rescue by a strong leader. If you dim down its liberal halo, New Dealism
looks like a benign authoritarianism that a relatively wealthy country could
still afford in the Thirties, whereas bankrupt Europe's authoritarianism had to
be much more brutal. That the New Deal ultimately failed to bring about a
sustained economic recovery – which only happened when the massive outlays to
fund a world war kicked in – just underscores its problematic legacy.
*
* * *
*
Obama was supposed to be the new
FDR, but the comparison turned out to be a damning one. Tens of millions of
“little people” lost their homes while Obama protected the bankers from “the
pitchforks” and made sure nobody on Wall Street went to jail for the 2008
financial crash. On the surveillance state, on Mideast wars, on deporting
immigrants, on neoliberal trade policies, on mass incarcerations, even on the
closing of Guantanamo – there was more continuity than discontinuity between
Obama and the previous Bush administration. Obama's one New Deal-like
achievement, Obamacare, is a jerry-built program that does a better job of
generating profits for private insurers and big pharma than providing adequate
coverage for poor patients, and even that looks like it won't long outlast
Obama's tenure. This was reformism so tepid that it brings to mind the quip: if
you walked any slower, you'd be moving backwards.
Trump is all for moving backwards at
breakneck speed. On the face of it, it seems as if history has done a u-turn,
with Obama as a failed Roosevelt being succeeded by Trump as a gung-ho
reactionary far to the right even of Hoover. Yet there are some notable resemblances between
him and Roosevelt. His championing of the “forgotten men and women” of the
working class was a direct echo of FDR, as were his promises to rebuild
American infrastructure and revive the smokestack industries decimated by
globalization. And he made a point of meeting with the leaders of the building
trades unions in the oval office soon after the inauguration to talk up his
infrastructure plans, the sort of political gesture you'd associate with a
traditional liberal Democrat. Trump railed against liberal elites, Roosevelt
against moneyed ones, but both pitched their appeals to working class
resentment. When on his final campaign rally, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump
declared, “Today the American working class is going to strike back,” you'd
almost think for an instant that you were listening to Eugene Debs and not a
billionaire purveyor of snake oil. (It's impossible not to be struck by the
terrible irony of this situation and what it says about the near-total
disengagement of contemporary progressives from the life and struggles of the
working class.)
Also like Roosevelt, Trump is all
about attitude rather than ideology. For generations mainstream politics has
preached the virtues of pragmatism as essential to moderation and realism, and
the antithesis of extremism. Trump ran the ultimate pragmatic campaign.
Oblivious to any kind of consistency or principle or facts, he said whatever
would get him attention and support. And mainstream assumptions to the
contrary, he demonstrated that pragmatism could take you to extreme places, to
the politics of scapegoating the likes of which we haven't seen since the
heyday of European fascism. (Which, by the way, was something well understood
by Mussolini, himself an admirer of pragmatism.)
The comparison only goes so far.
Marx's famous riff on Hegel goes: History repeats itself, but first time as
tragedy, second time as farce. Trump's 'deal' will not be a revival of
Roosevelt's but a gross caricature of it. There won't be much tenderness for
underdogs, especially of the Mexican or Muslim variety. Saving capitalism will
be, in large measure, focused on enriching the fortunes of Trump, his family
and his cronies. And instead of the fuzzy glow of the New Deal's “folkish
nationalism”, Trump's nationalism is much more in your face, directly evoking
the 'America First' rhetoric of Roosevelt-era Nazi sympathizers like Charles
Lindbergh.
Nor is Trump ever going to be
mistaken for an icon of democracy. His contempt for democratic norms was
evident in the campaign, in his cabinet choices of billionaires and generals
and the raft of executive orders from his first days in office. (Although even
with that, Trump's racist order to impose a Muslim travel ban does have a
precedent in the liberal Roosevelt's mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans.)
One way to think of the relationship between Roosevelt and Trump is this: we
have gone from the New Deal's Norman Rockwell-ish Americanism that made even
Babbitts “almost lovable” to a billionaire Babbitt occupying the White House.
(8)
In a widely read article in The
Atlantic, neo-conservative David Frum laid out a plausible scenario of what
authoritarian rule would look like under Trump, and the model he sees Trump
emulating is not Thirties totalitarianism but the “illiberal democracy” touted
by Hungarian leader Viktor Orban: “Opponents of the
regime are not murdered or imprisoned, although many are harassed with building
inspections and tax audits. If they work for the government, or for a company
susceptible to government pressure, they risk their jobs by speaking out ...
Day in and day out, the regime works more through inducements than through
intimidation. The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s allies.
Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy
terms from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by favoritism; those
on the outside suffer from the general deterioration of the economy.”
Hungary is still a
democracy in the technical sense that there are elections, but the deck is
stacked in favor of incumbents, and government media generate “an endless
sequence of controversies that leave culturally conservative Hungarians feeling
misunderstood and victimized by liberals, foreigners, and Jews,” which sounds
much like what Fox News does in America. Frum cites one Hungarian political
observer who makes the astute point: “The benefit of controlling a modern state
is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the
guilty.”
This is a crucial
distinction between the 'soft' authoritarianism of Orban (and potentially
Trump) and the Gestapo/concentration camp totalitarianism of the last century.
Because of that history, Frum rightly argues that we have “an outdated
image of what 21st-century authoritarianism might look like. Whatever else
happens, Americans are not going to assemble in parade-ground formations, any
more than they will crank a gramophone or dance the turkey trot.” Which isn't
to say that the new versions of authoritarianism have no violent edge to them,
it's just that we need to look for it in different places: “In a society where
few people walk to work, why mobilize young men in matching shirts to command
the streets? If you’re seeking to domineer and bully, you want your storm
troopers to go online, where the more important traffic is. Demagogues need no
longer stand erect for hours orating into a radio microphone. Tweet lies from a
smartphone instead.” (9)
It's a
chilling picture because it's so plausible. Still, because of his politics,
Frum makes some dubious assumptions, particularly his confidence that a Trump
economic policy of big tax cuts and big spending on infrastructure will lead to
economic prosperity and lots of jobs that will make for a relatively quiescent
working class. In fact, there isn't any sign in his first budget proposal that
Trump is following through on his promise for infrastructure spending (though
this was also true of Roosevelt in his first year). But the larger problem with
this assumption is that it leaves out the possibility of another major economic
crash and the political turmoil that would let loose in Trump's working-class
base, the more so because of the expectations he created to get elected. Also
it was hard to anticipate the full extent of Trump's ineptitude and the chaos
of his first months in office. Being a strong-man leader means being effective
in the real world, whereas Trump still looks like he's operating in a reality
tv show.
Those
objections aside, however, the dangers of the authoritarian scenario that Frum
describes are still very real. It could well be that Trump's ineptitude, and
even more so his nepotism and corruption, will impel him to grab more executive
powers to protect himself and his cronies. And it's an open secret that a major
terrorist incident or a military confrontation, possibly in Asia or the Middle
East, will be the 'crisis' that will give him the opportunity for assuming
those powers.
But there is
a deeper problem with this authoritarian scenario. Not that it's wrong in its
description of how a Trump presidency might unfold, quite the contrary. Rather
what's wrong is the assumption behind it that such a presidency would be a
radical break from the past. It's the same assumption behind the comparisons of
Trump to Hitler, and it's one shared by most everyone in the Trump resistance.
But in an accompanying article to Frum's in The Atlantic, the writer
Jonathan Rauch does a nice job of showing how wrong-headed that assumption is.
Rauch did a
little thought experiment: “For this article, I set out to develop a list of
telltales that the president is endangering the Constitution and threatening
democracy,” in other words, a checklist to know exactly when Trump crosses the
line into authoritarianism. But Rauch soon found out he couldn't do it: “I
failed. In fact, I concluded that there can be no such list, because many of
the worrisome things that an antidemocratic president might do look just like
things that other presidents have done.” Rauch follows that eye-opening
statement with a riff on presidential history:
“Use presidential power
to bully corporations? Truman and Kennedy did that. Distort or exaggerate facts
to initiate or escalate a war? Johnson and George W. Bush did that. Lie
point-blank to the public? Eisenhower did that. Defy orders from the Supreme
Court? Lincoln did that. Suspend habeas corpus? Lincoln did that, too. Spy on
American activists? Kennedy and Johnson did that. Start wars at will, without
congressional approval? Truman did that. Censor 'disloyal' speech and fire
'disloyal' civil servants? Wilson did that. Incarcerate U.S. citizens of
foreign extraction? Franklin D. Roosevelt did that. Use shady schemes to
circumvent congressional strictures? Reagan did that. Preempt Justice
Department prosecutors? Obama did that. Assert sweeping powers to lock people
up without trial or judicial review? George W. Bush did that. Declare an
open-ended national emergency? Bush did that, and Obama continued it. Use
regulatory authority aggressively and, according to the courts, sometimes
illegally? Obama did that. Kill a U.S. citizen abroad? Obama did that, too.
Grant favors to political friends, and make mischief for political enemies? All
presidents do that.” (10)
Rauch immediately
qualifies these remarks: a lot of these actions can be thought of as “ordinary
presidential assertiveness” rather than “dangerously illiberal”, all these
presidents were “small-d democrats” and there was usually pushback from other
government institutions whenever presidents went too far. This is meant to be
reassuring but it minimizes the obvious – which is that the list is so long and
has so many names.
One name it doesn't
have is Nixon because Rauch thinks of him as a special case: an outright
criminal and underminer of democracy. But it is possible to look at all this
presidential history, Nixon included, and come to a different conclusion: that
there has always been a dark side lurking within liberal democracy, and that
this dark side makes itself felt time and again, in virtually every presidency.
This has long been the view of Marxists, anarchists and other radicals: that
liberal democracy is window-dressing for rule by a corporate elite. In this
light “ordinary presidential assertiveness” is indeed ordinary but also
“illiberal” because it is less a function of personality than of ruling class
hegemony. And Nixon was exceptional only in pushing this assertiveness beyond
what was acceptable to the ruling class. So, in making sense of Trump, what
matters most may well be his continuity with the past “because many of the
worrisome things that an antidemocratic president might do look just like
things that other presidents have done.”
* *
* * *
To read Trump in terms
of his continuity with the past isn't to underestimate the danger his
presidency poses. But it is to see that danger not as a one-off but as the
outcome of a political system and its economic underpinnings.
Here the word
progressive gets in the way. It is another of the weasel words that proliferate
in a 'soft dogma' left. Progressive is to be for progress – but progress
towards what? Everybody this side of the Republican Party is a progressive,
including the grandees of the Democratic Party, most of Silicon Valley and even
a chunk of Wall Street. That isn't a big tent so much as a big swamp in which
any vestige of utopia has sunk into oblivion. And without utopia, progress has
no meaning. Or rather its meaning becomes identical to the status quo – “the
present with more options,” as one writer put it. (11) Which is why progress
decays into a weasel word, since it suggests motion but is really about stasis.
History may no longer be
dead, but utopia continues to be. Utopian thought was criticized (often
legitimately) for projecting far-fetched fantasies on to the future, but now
the future itself has been foreclosed. In the 19th century, when
progress was in its heyday, the favored metaphor for it was a steam engine
barrelling along towards a radiant future. In our time, according to one
philosopher, the metaphor for progress should be “a magnificent, spacious
railway station, into which we are settled and from which we shall not depart.”
(12) The image this conjures up is surreal, like something out of a Bunuel
movie – a world of passengers waiting to go nowhere. The only exception is
technological: predictions abound of brave new worlds of artificial
intelligence and digital marvels. But these brave new worlds are for machines,
not humans, or possibly some 'interface' between the two, as in the new (and
creepy) catchphrase, post-human. Which is to say (as Kafka might have put it):
utopia is possible but not for us.
It could be argued that
we at least know what progress has been, if not what it will be. “In Trump,”
writes one socialist journal, “Americans confront an unprecedented challenge to
decades of progress we have made as a nation.” (13) This is true, of course,
but it is only a part of the truth. Back in the Sixties leftist thinkers like
Herbert Marcuse insisted that progress, so long as its context remains
capitalism, also means progress in domination. Along with the expansion of
individual rights has gone the expansion of the surveillance state, pluralism
and multiculturalism coincide with neo-feudal social inequality, human rights
become the pretext for new imperialist wars, and you could extend this list
indefinitely. If we choose to 'accentuate the positive' (as in “decades of
progress we have made as a nation”) then it becomes all but impossible to
understand where Trump comes from. He appears as a horrible accident instead of
an American-as-apple-pie political demagogue and thug, different from other
occupants of the White House perhaps only more in degree than in kind.
The 'progressive'
narrative also makes it hard to understand what the resistance to Trump needs
to do. Since progress is seen as being derailed by a bad president, inevitably
the struggle is cast as one to get the country 'back on track', much like Obama
was supposed to do after the disastrous years under Bush. Indeed you could say
that American liberalism has been trying to get the country 'back on track'
since the end of the Roosevelt era.
Now Bernie Sanders has
launched into a similar venture with his formation “Our Revolution”, an effort
to create a left counterpart to the Tea Party among Democrats. Its mission
statement says the group wants to “reclaim democracy” and wields the word
progressive a lot, as in “progressive leaders” and “progressive change.” The
goal is to “transform American politics to make our political and economic
systems once again responsive to the needs of working families.” (14) This is
boilerplate, obviously intended not to offend or frighten anyone. One might
wonder how an economic system like capitalism can ever be “responsive” to
anything except profit. But it's the words “once again” that are telling. This
is a “revolution” that takes us 'back to the future'. Or to put this another
way: like Trump, Sanders wants to make America great again.
But that's the problem
with progressive politics, even when espoused by a modern-day knock-off of FDR:
we're “once again” on the same track, the one that keeps taking us into ever darker places
with names like Reagan, Bush and now Trump. And even in what were supposed to
be relative bright spots on this track – Clinton, Obama – most of the lights
have gone out.
Walter Benjamin
rethought the progress metaphor in a radical way. “Marx says that revolutions
are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps
revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human
race – to activate the emergency brake.” (15) It's not just that the train is
out of our control, it's also that the track leads to an abyss. This idea jars
with linear notions of progress but it makes excellent sense: revolution
invariably begins by bringing the existing state of affairs to a screeching
halt. And it does that by tearing down bastions of power – palaces, prisons,
banks, armouries, manor houses, churches etc. Which is to say that after you
pull the emergency brake, you start tearing up the tracks. And when that's
finally done, you build new tracks to take you in a different direction. One
where greatness is found not in a national identity but in human solidarity.
Endnotes:
1. Interestingly, Roth
thinks it is misplaced to compare the election of Trump to his fictional
retelling of history with Charles Lindbergh defeating Roosevelt in the 1940
election. Because Trump is a con man (unlike Lindbergh, who was a real-life
hero), Roth believes that a better literary prototype for Trump is Herman
Melville's The Confidence Man. (Roth's comments were reported in The
New Yorker, 30 January 2017, p. 18.)
2. Part of the blame for
hollowing out the meaning of fascism has to go to Jurgen Habermas, who coined
the term Linksfaschismus, i.e. left-wing fascism, back in the Sixties to
denounce violent student protesters of the era. (Cf. Slavoj Zizek, Violence,
[Picador, 2008], p. 231, n. 9.) That
sent fascism on its way to becoming a banality, a term of abuse for anyone
whose politics you didn't like.
3. Quoted in In These
Times, Dec. 2016, p. 5.
4. The writer Rebecca
Solnit provides a good example of this mindset. Convinced that sexism,
including among left-wing men, was the real cause of Clinton's defeat, she is
dismissive of what she calls the “We Must Pay More Attention to the White
Working Class analysis”. “I've always had the impression,” she states
derisively, “... that white men get a lot of attention already.” Ironically
this makes the very point she is contesting since the issue isn't about attention
to white men but attention to the white working class, which includes
tens of millions of women, something that Solnit, for all her ardent feminism,
overlooks. (Rebecca Solnit, “From Lying to Leering,” London Review of Books,
19 January 2017: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n02/rebecca-solnit/from-lying-to-leering)
5. Mark Lilla, Afterword
(2016) in The Reckless Mind (NYR Books, 2001), p. 225.
6. One of the more
depressing features of Obama's tenure was the many liberal writers and
intellectuals who gave up speaking truth to power. Part of this was due to his
being the first black president, but a big part of it was also due to his image
as an intellectual, 'one of us' as it were, and [as Yale professor David Bromwich pointed
out] the persistent efforts he made to distance himself as a person from his
actions as a president. He wanted it known that personally he was distressed by
drone strikes and kill lists and by the security state's intrusions into
personal privacy. In other words, he was a decent human being, even though this
decency had almost no bearing on what he did as president. It was a stance
designed to be disarming and a lot of prominent writers and artists were happy
to be disarmed.
7. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of
Reform, (Random House, 1955), pp. 325-6.
8. A widely-reported aspect of
Trump's family history is how his father, Fred, refused to rent to blacks in
his housing developments in Queens and Brooklyn, something for which he and
Donald would eventually be sued by the Civil Rights Division of the Department
of Justice. Much less well known is that this kind of racism in housing was
public policy under the New Deal. In a recently published book, The Color of
Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, author
Richard Rothstein shows how New Deal programs for public housing were designed
to segregate blacks and whites, with Federal Housing Administration manuals
openly stating that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live
in the same communities.” This FHA policy persisted into the post-war era, when
the government subsidized the building of suburban subdivisions (including by
developers like Fred Trump) as all-white enclaves. FDR apologists claim his
inaction on Jim Crow was due to his need for support from Southern Democrats,
but as Rothstein points out, segregated housing in Northern cities like New
York and Chicago had nothing to do with placating Dixiecrats. It was motivated
by racial prejudice and, probably subconsciously but all the more effectively,
by that oldest of ruling class axioms – divide and rule. The bitter irony is
that this segregated urban landscape is one of the most enduring legacies of
the New Deal, one that continues to blight the lives of millions of
African-American families to this day. But the same legacy made a Babbitt like
Fred Trump, if not “almost lovable”, then certainly very wealthy and powerful.
You could say that without this aspect of the New Deal, Donald Trump would not
now be in the White House. (For an interview with Rothstein, see: http://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america.)
9.
David Frum, “How to Build an Autocracy”, The Atlantic, March 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/
10.
Jonathan Rauch, “Containing Trump”, The Atlantic, March 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/containing-trump/513854/
11. Russell Jacoby, The
End of Utopia, (Basic Books, 1999), p. 40.
12. The philosopher is Agnes Heller, a former disciple of Georg
Lukacs, whose idea is recounted by Michael Lowy in Fire Alarm, (Verso,
2005), p. 113.
13. Editorial:
“Resistance In These Times,” In These Times, Dec. 2016, p. 5.
15. Quoted in Fire
Alarm, pp. 66-7.
