Lexington and Concord: A Marxist Appraisal

Daniel Lazare 

A quarter of a millennium ago, “embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord.  What are Marxists to make of a battle that occurred in a pre-industrial era on the edge of what is commonly referred to as the civilized world? 

A good place to start is Lenin’s “Letter to American Workers,” published in Pravda in August 1918: 

The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains.  That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these ‘civilized’ bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world. 

Plainly, Lenin wanted to draw upon America’s revolutionary traditions in order to persuade workers to oppose US intervention in the Russian Civil War.  But what stands out about his letter is how much it got wrong. 

Lenin’s ostensible colonial slaves not only held some 460,000 people – 21 percent of the population as of 1770 – in real slavery, but were otherwise some of the happiest and freest people on earth.  Thanks to widespread property ownership, 60 percent of white males had the vote, three or four times the figure in England and Wales.  White Americans consumed three or four times as much meat as British laborers, twice as much milk, and a third more butter, with the result that Americans who enlisted in the Revolutionary War were more than two inches taller than their British opponents.[1]  This is why some 20 percent of Hessian troops deserted upon landing in the New World.  Why risk your life for George III when you can melt into a countryside that was far freer and more abundant than anything at home? 

Oppressed is therefore the last word to describe colonial Americans.  To be sure, social tensions were rising as economic acceleration from the 1760s on led to a growing gap between rich and poor.  But the process was still in its infancy and hardly compared to Paris where a few years later thousands of desperate poor people would riot over the price of bread.  

An 1842 newspaper interview with a certain Captain Preston, a 91-year-old veteran of the battle of Concord, summed the problem up.  Why, his questioner wanted to know, did he go to war? 

“Did you take up arms against intolerable oppressions?”

“Oppressions?  I didn’t feel them.”

“What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?”

“I never saw one of those stamps.  I certainly never paid a penny for one of them.”

“Well, what then about the tea tax?”

“I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.”

“Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?”

“Never heard of ’em.  We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac.”

“Well, then, what was the matter?  And what did you mean in going to the fight?”

“Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to.  They didn’t mean we should.”[2] 

Colonists fought not for change but for a return to the status quo ante.  Rather than revolutionaries hoping for a great leap forward, they were restorationists seeking to turn the clock back prior to 1763 when Britain had begun tightening up imperial controls after decades of benign neglect.  

Any number of historians have wrestled with the problem of American restorationism.  They range from the Prussian-Austrian diplomat and writer Friedrich von Gentz, who argued in 1800 that the American Revolution was no revolution at all, to Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in 1833 that Americans were born into a natural state of liberty, and Louis Hartz, whose classic 1955 study, The Liberal Tradition in America, said that Americans had little to rebel against because they lived in a country in which feudal oppression had never taken root.  But the most outstanding is Robert R. Palmer (1909-2002).  Best known on the left for his 1941 study, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution, his real masterpiece is a two-volume work published in 1959-64 whose aim was to get to the bottom of “American exceptionalism” by probing political developments elsewhere in the world from 1760 to 1800.  

Entitled The Age of the Democratic Revolution, it examines, among other things, an aristocratic revolt that broke out in France in 1787, two years prior to the storming of the Bastille, and another revolution that broke out two years later in Brussels.  The first was the culmination of trends underway since the death of Louis XIV in 1715 in which aristocrats tried to claw back privileges that an increasingly powerful and centralized monarchy had taken away.  By the 1780s, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, the aristocratic counter-offensive had reached the point where “four quarterings of nobility were needed even to buy a commission in the army,” meaning that one had to prove that all four grandparents were aristocrats before landing a spot in the officer corps.  Hobsbawm went on: 

[A]ll bishops were nobles, and even the keystone of royal administration, the intendancies [i.e. provincial governorships], had been largely captured by them.  Consequently, the nobility ... undermined the state itself by an increasing tendency to take over provincial and central administration.[3] 

A breaking point occurred in 1787 when Louis XVI, the Sun King’s great-great-grandson, tried to impose taxes on the nobility in a last-ditch effort to stave off bankruptcy.  But aristocratic law courts known as parlements refused to go along on the grounds that no one could tax the nobility other than the nobility itself.  In invoking what it said were ancient constitutional principles, the nobility’s ultimate goal according to Palmer was to return France to a bygone era “in which the King ruled over a confederation of provinces, each guarding its own liberties and exemptions in taxes and administration, and each carrying on its own affairs through its own churchmen, its own nobles and gentry, and its own opulent dignitaries....”[4] 

The upshot was a restorationist revolt not unlike that of Massachusetts a dozen years earlier.  The revolt was serious business.  In June 1788, it led to “the day of the tiles” in the alpine city of Grenoble, an outbreak of fighting in which townsfolk shouting, “Vive le parlement,” showered rooftiles on royal troops below.  But what is perhaps most remarkable about the revolt is the attitude of the Third Estate, which was entirely in favor.  Observes Palmer: 

It is one of the puzzles of the Revolution that class animosity, or antagonism between noble and non-noble, should have been so little in evidence in 1787 and much of 1788.  The Parlement of Paris, despite all that could be known of it from its own published remonstrances, enjoyed a wide popularity with both Third Estate and nobility at this time.  There were of course exceptions ... [but] most politically conscious persons of the moment were concerned mainly with absolutism, and would admire any group of men that stood up against arbitrary and non-responsible government.[5] 

La Journée des tuiles en 1788 à Grenoble, 1890 painting by Alexandre Debelle (Musée de la Révolution française)

French sans-culottes lined up in support of the nobility in much the same way that America’s embattled farmers lined up in support of Virginia grandees like Washington and Jefferson.  

The other event that Palmer scrutinizes is the so-called Brabant Revolution of 1789.  The Austrian Netherlands, as Belgium was known, was “a European China,” in the words of one historian,[6] a country that had been in a state of near-suspended animation ever since a local duke had pledged to respect local traditions and institutions in return for a grant of power over the country as a whole.  Known as the “Joyous Entry” of 1356, the result more than four centuries later was an assemblage of provincial assemblies, guilds, churches, monasteries, and whatnot little changed from the high Middle Ages.  Now under the control of the Habsburgs, it was a prize possession that Joseph II of Austria, the very model of an “enlightened despot,” set out to modernize.  Joseph expected his subjects to be grateful; after all, who could say no to efficiency and reform?  Instead, peasants, artisans, and nobles joined forces against an unprecedented assertion of imperial authority that threatened to overturn everything they knew and understood. 

Once again, to paraphrase Captain Preston, local people had always governed themselves and always meant to, yet distant imperial authorities in Vienna didn’t mean they should.  Self-government was again understood as loyalty to ancient institutions and opposition to interference from abroad. 

But then came Act II.  In Brussels, conservative opponents of Habsburg interference parted ways with modern-minded reformers like the lawyers Jan Baptiste Verlooy and Jan Francois Vonck, both of whom supported Joseph II’s reforms even while opposing the royal absolutism behind them.  Soon, traditionalists were denouncing Verlooy, Vonck, and others as radical intellectuals seeking to lead the people astray with “detestable philosophe-ism.”[7]  “Vonckists” were soon forced into exile. 

A similar rupture occurred in France.  After siding with the aristocracy against the crown in 1787-88, the Third Estate – otherwise known as sans-culottes, people too poor to afford fancy knee britches – reversed course in mid-1789 and sided with the crown against the aristocracy.  As nobles fled abroad by the hundreds, Louis XVI was re-dubbed the “citizen king .... the father, the brother, the friend of all the French” after donning the tricolor revolutionary cockade and leaving his palace at Versailles so he could be with “his” people in Paris.  It was a fiction that all sides maintained until June 1791 when the royal family tried to escape to Austrian lines.[8]  The flight to Varennes, the town a hundred miles or so from the German border where Louis was arrested, profoundly discredited the moderate faction known as the Girondins and left the sans-culottes no choice but to turn against the monarchy as well.  With the revolution now as anti-royalist as it was anti-aristocratic, Louis’s execution in January 1793 marked the start of its most radical stage. 

Louis XVI wearing the tricolor hat of the revolution

Rather than a continuation of the aristocratic revolt of 1787, the radical stage that the Jacobins ultimately ushered in was its antithesis.  As for America, an Act II arrived there as well, although the process took a bit longer.  Washington’s victory at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 clinched the power of the Virginia ascendancy.  Six years later, a new constitution strengthened the neo-aristocratic “plantocracy” all the more by granting slaveowners a broad range of privileges such as extra representation in the House and the Electoral College, veto power in the Senate, and indirect control over the White House and the Supreme Court.  As a result, nine of America’s first 15 presidents were slaveholders while the rest lined up in support.  When an abolitionist avant-garde went on the offensive in the 1820s, planters used their constitutional advantages to push the Fugitive Slave Act through Congress and the Dred Scott decision through the Supreme Court, both of whose purposes was to wipe out opposition and establish a pro-slavery dictatorship over the nation as a whole.  

The strange rhythms of American political development thus served to prolong the revolution’s Girondin phase by some “four score and seven years.”  When the dam finally broke, Radical Republicans used their control of a rump Congress to ram through legislation that pro-slavery forces had bottled up for years.  In addition to a military draft, these included a national bank (the slaveowner Andrew Jackson had overthrown an earlier version in 1832), tariffs (which the export-oriented plantocracy had also opposed), and land grants and loans to build the first transcontinental railroad, another project that the anti-industrial South had fought to a standstill.  Comparisons with the Jacobins were duly noted.  A British journalist described the Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens as “the Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America, all rolled into one,” while a northern newspaper compared the abolitionists to “the ‘Committee of Twelve’ of the days of the Reign of Terror.”  Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, leader of the antiwar Democratic Party faction known as the “Copperheads,” warned in 1863 that the war would produce “universal and social revolution, anarchy and bloodshed, compared with which the Reign of Terror in France was a merciful visitation.”[9]  

Engraving by Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert, c. 1800. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. The scene depicts the Insurrection of 2 June 1793, when over 80,000 armed Parisians and National Guardsmen besieged the National Convention, demanding the arrest of 22 Girondins.

Indeed, Republicans and Jacobins were clearly on the same track.  Faced with widespread domestic insurrection, they responded in broadly similar ways, i.e. by centralizing political power, taking control of national finances, and mobilizing industrial production, particularly that of armaments.  The Americans even imposed an income tax just as the French had in 1790.  Republicans emulated the Jacobins in ideological terms as well.  Previously, Jefferson had been seen as the great champion of American democracy while Hamilton was seen as an economic royalist who was hostile to the people and to the French Revolution too.  “All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln wrote in 1859.  But now attitudes began to shift.  As Palmer notes, French revolutionaries preferred Hamilton, which is why they awarded him honorary citizenship in 1792, while snubbing Jefferson.  The reason is clear. They were suspicious of Jefferson, whose famous statement that “mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body” marked him as an enemy of the sans-culotte urban masses.[10]  His friendship with the Marquis de Lafayette also rendered him suspect since Lafayette, a defender of the monarchy, had gone over to the counter-revolution just a few days earlier. 

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton, on the other hand, was a familiar social type as far as bourgeois French revolutionaries were concerned, a progressive banker and industrialist much like the Belgian-Dutch bankers Édouard de Walckiers, Balthazar-Élie Abbema, and Jean-Conrad de Kock, who were in France at that moment lobbying to extend the revolution to their home countries.[11]  Even though Hamilton was less than comfortable with the prospect, Jacobins thus saw him as one of their own.  This was a view that Republicans now adopted since Jefferson viewed states’ rights as a check on federal power while Hamilton stood for centralization and the martialing of national resources.  Since that was what the Union most needed, his star rose while Jefferson’s fell.  

Thaddeus Stevens

Which brings us back to Lexington and Concord.  Given the convoluted nature of subsequent events, what are we to make of embattled farmers who set the process off?  Were they progressive, reactionary, or what? 

The answer is complex.  Even in Virginia, America had never had a European-style hereditary aristocracy, although planter dynasties like the Randolph and Lee families came close.  But the concept was utterly alien to a Puritan New England dominated by tradesmen, laborers, farmers, and a budding merchant class.  Consequently, social revolution was almost completely absent, which is why New Englanders found it so easy to place themselves under the control of lofty Virginia planters.  Rather than undermining American conservatism, the constitutional arrangements that crystallized in the 1780s reflected and reinforced it.  Palmer is worth quoting at length on how American “revolutionaries” tried to keep change to a minimum: 

Pennsylvania and Georgia gave themselves one-chamber legislatures, but both had had one-chamber legislatures before the Revolution.  All states set up weak governors; they had been undermining the authority of royal governors for generations.  South Carolina remained a planter oligarchy before and after independence, but even in South Carolina fifty-acre freeholders had a vote.  New York set up one of the most conservative of the state constitutions, but this was the first constitution under which Jews received equality of civil rights – not a very revolutionary departure, since Jews had been prospering in New York since 1654.  The Anglican Church was disestablished, but it had had few roots in the colonies anyway.  In New England the sects obtained a little more recognition, but Congregationalism remained favored by law.  The American revolutionaries made no change in the laws of indentured servitude.  They deplored, but avoided, the matter of Negro slavery.[12]  

The contrast with France could not be more striking.  The very opposite of restorationist, the revolution was an attempt to make society anew.  When informed of the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI asked: “It is then a revolt?”  To which the Duke de Liancourt replied: “No, sire, it is a revolution.”  In other words, it was not a revolution in the old sense of revolving back to some pre-existing golden age, but a new kind of revolution seeking to advance into a bold bright future.  The French Revolution, Palmer wrote in a subsequent work, entailed: 

...the ‘invention’ of revolution itself, the launching of the belief – or, as some would say, ‘myth’ – that human problems would be solved by a vast phenomenon in world history known as ‘the revolution.’  No one had made any such supposition before 1789, not even those Frenchmen who, in the curse of events, became revolutionaries.[13] 

The French Revolution was so revolutionary that it revolutionized revolution itself.  If 1789-94 marks the start of the modern political world, then “the shot heard round the world” was a final expression of the ancien régime, one that left the old order exhausted – and the French monarchy in particular burdened with debt from its intervention on the American side – but made no attempt to overthrow it.  It was progressive to the degree that it created a national arena for northern bourgeois development.  But it simultaneously strengthened the southern plantocracy by showering it with constitutional privileges and protections.  Civil war became inevitable the moment the Constitution was ratified in 1788. 

What followed in 1861-65 was thus a repudiation of the same sort that followed the flight to Varennes.  Where one generation of revolutionaries strengthened slavery, another overthrew it.  Where one ushered in a decentralized federation, the second consolidated control.  Whereas the Gettysburg Address echoed Jefferson’s rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence to a degree, it gave it a new twist.  It called for “a new birth of freedom,” and while vowing that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” it did so in a manner that implied a new concept of popular self-rule in which democracy would no longer be checked and divided to the point of self-nullification,  but consolidated so that ways, means, and ends – of, by, and for – would all be unified.  

A successful bourgeois revolution in the 1860s would have required a Jacobin-style clean sweep.  Instead, the minimal reforms of the 1780s led to renewed minimalism by the end of the 1860s.  “Up to now we have witnessed only the first act of the Civil War – the constitutional waging of war,” wrote Marx in August 1862.  “The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”  The forecast would prove tragically incorrect.  Reconstruction was cut short, the Constitution was put back on its pedestal, and southern Confederates were returned to power.  Since blacks now counted for five-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment as opposed to three-fifths before the war, the white southern ruling class wound up with more seats in the House and more votes in the Electoral College than previously while still depriving black Americans of the vote.  The conservative democracy that issued forth once national unity was assured was heaven for bankers and industrialists in that it provided for a strong legal framework, absolute guarantees for private property, a total absence of financial regulation of just about any sort, plus a rich and variegated consumer market.  But it was hell for workers and racial minorities. 

This is the same conservative democracy that is now in an abject state of collapse.  Congress has been gridlocked for a generation, corruption is rampant, and economic polarization is shooting through the roof.  Institutions like the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court have never been more unrepresentative.  Workers’ revolution is more urgent than ever amid war, economic crisis, and a growing dictatorship.  But bland and patriotic celebrations of events like Lexington and Concord will do nothing to bring it about; instead, only the most ruthless criticism will do.  What Marx said about Germany in 1843-44 goes double for the US in the 2020s: 

Criticism dealing with this situation is criticism in hand-to-hand combat. ...  It is a question of permitting the Germans not a single moment of illusion or resignation.  The burden must be made still more oppressive by adding to it a consciousness of it, and the shame made still more shameful by making it public.  Every sphere of German society must be described as the partie honteuse [shameful portion] of German society, and these petrified conditions must be made to dance by singing to them their own melody.[14] 

All institutions and events that have contributed to this disgraceful situation must be presumed guilty until proven innocent.  Instead of restoration, America needs a real revolution to drive society forward. 

---

[1] Eric Vriesen, An Essay Examining the Living Standards of American Colonists, English Workers, and American Plains Indians in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Kingston, Ontario: Queen’s University, 2011), 19, 26, available at https://www.econ.queensu.ca/sites/econ.queensu.ca/files/student_papers/270.pdf.

[2] Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: New American Library, 1972), vol. 1, p. 284.

[3] E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 78-79.

[4] R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014), 343.

[5] Ibid., 340.

[6] Janet L. Polasky, “Traditionalists, Democrats, and Jacobins in Revolutionary Brussels,” The Journal of Modern History 56, no. 2 (June 1984), 228.

[7] Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 248. 

[8] E.L. Higgins, The French Revolution as Told by Contemporaries (New York: Cooper Square, 1975), 155.

[9] James M. McPherson, “Some Thoughts of the Civil War as the Second Revolution,” Hayes Historical Journal 3, no. 5 (Spring 1982).

[10] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1954), 165.

[11] Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 416.

[12] Ibid., 174.

[13] R.R. Palmer, The World of the French Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 3.

[14] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 133-34.

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The crisis of Democracy and the 2024 elections

by Dan Lazare

10.18.24

The one safe prediction we can make about the upcoming presidential election is that it can only result in a further intensification of the crisis of US democracy.

George Washington presiding over the Constitutional Convention

This is not Marxist boiler-plate in which bourgeois democracy is always bankrupt and capitalism is always in its death throes.   This is the real thing.  A lot of concerns are weighing on voters’ minds as Election Day nears, the economy, the climate crisis, inflation, and housing prices, to name just a few.  But among the most pressing is an across-the-board constitutional breakdown that is rapidly accelerating.  For example:

-- The Electoral College, which nearly quadruples the clout of voters in lily-white Wyoming versus those in minority-majority California, is playing an increasingly outsized role.  In the first two centuries of the American republic, the EC overturned the popular vote on only three occasions: in 1824, 1876, and 1888.  But it has already done so twice since November 2000 and may well do it a third time next month.

-- The Senate is more imbalanced than at any point since 1820.[1]  Thanks to equal state representation, it allows the 54 percent of the population that lives in just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty.  A majority can be gleaned from senators representing just 17 percent of the country while a filibuster can be gleaned from 41 senators representing as little as eleven.

-- The House is so heavily gerrymandered that Republicans next month may enjoy as much as a 16-seat advantage according to estimates by the Brennan Center for Justice. 

-- The Supreme Court is increasingly undemocratic not just in terms of decision making but structure.  Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote (i.e. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barret), while four were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas).  Given that Clarence Thomas, the oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship will likely continue well into the mid-2030s.  If Trump wins a second term, it will continue even longer.

-- Federalism is in shambles.  Since January, Texas has seized control of a portion of the US-Mexican border in the town of Eagle Pass, 140 miles west of San Antonio.  This is outright insurrection, yet the White House is paralyzed.

-- Racial imbalances are growing.  More than 80 percent of racial minorities live in the ten biggest states that are outvoted in the Senate while states that are rural and white tend to benefit most from the Electoral College.  The multi-racial urban majority thus finds itself more and more disenfranchised.

-- What makes this even worse is that reform is essentially impossible thanks to the dysfunctional amending clause laid out in Article V, which stipulates that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as a comma in America’s holy of holies.  Thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural change, no matter how modest.  The US is as frozen as the Celestial Empire on the eve of the 1911 revolution.

The upshot is a perfect impasse.  All advanced capitalist states are under growing strain due to the post-2008 “long recession” and a host of problems that go along with it.  But since no country is saddled with a constitution that is as ancient, dysfunctional, and all-encompassing as the US version, no one faces a mechanical breakdown of anywhere near the same magnitude.  It is the equivalent of a car with a missing headlight, a missing wheel, and a sputtering engine.  But even if it leaves Americans stranded by the side of the road, there is nothing they can do because Article V renders them powerless.  Even a constitutional convention is a non-starter since Article V stipulates that its decisions are merely recommendations subject to the same two-thirds, three-fourths rule.  Wealthy minority interests are using the breakdown to impose an increasingly rightwing agenda.  Yet the democratic majority is powerless to respond.  

Powerless under the existing system, that is, but not under a new one of its own making.

There is a way out -- not a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, but a constituent assembly along the lines of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917.  The difference is crucial.  Where one takes place under the Constitution, which describes how it may be called and what it can do, the other takes place over the Constitution since it is a gathering of the constituent elements – “we the people” and all that – who created it in the first place.  It is therefore free to operate on the Constitution as a whole, not according to the document’s rules, but according to its own, which is to say those of direct democracy.  If the assembly votes to ditch the Second Amendment, then out it goes.  If it votes to drop the Constitution in toto and draw up a new plan of government to take its place, then out it goes too.  

This is not a constitutional solution, since no such solution exists.  Rather, it is a revolutionary solution whose goal is either to create a new state or re-found the existing state on an entirely new basis.  Hence, it is one that only the industrial proletariat can implement.  

The US thus faces a classic choice between breakdown and revolution, between decay, authoritarianism, and a deepening social crisis on one hand and socialist democracy on the other.  The founding fathers have done us the favor of closing off all other escape routes.

As for the individual candidates running in 2024, they are an expression of the political crisis rather than in any sense an answer to it.

Kamala Harris is the candidate of the center-right status quo.  While she claims to stand for change, she has made it crystal clear that she will continue White House policies based on war, repression, economic royalism, and inaction in the face of accelerating climate change.  She represents the politics of muddling through, of doing whatever it takes to make it from day to day without regard to long-term considerations.  When vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz recently suggested that the Electoral College should go, the Harris campaign forced him to recant.  Even mentioning the structural crisis was more than Harris could bear.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is the candidate of lower-income voters who are “mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore,” to quote the 1976 movie “Network.”  They support him not despite the fact that he is a bull in a china shop, but because of it.  In their blind fury, they can think of no solution other than smashing stuff up and are therefore counting on him to do it.  His authoritarianism and destructiveness flow from a political structure that is broken, irrational, and increasingly undemocratic.  

For what it’s worth, this writer rates Trump’s chances at 41 percent and Harris’s at 39, with a 20-percent chance of January 6-style chaos instead.  But regardless of who wins, the great American breakdown will continue unabated.

 

---

[1] Frances E. Lee and Bruce L. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10-11.

 

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Second Time as Farce: Trump and Roosevelt

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 19^th 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.

14. https://ourrevolution.com/about/#mission

15. Quoted in Fire Alarm, pp. 66-7.

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