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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Farrell Dobbs speaks: The Minneapolis General Strike and the Teamsters Union

We are providing below four lectures by a long time leader of American Trotskyism, Farrell Dobbs. They provide important lessons on how revolutionaries can intervene in the class struggle. The lectures were delivered by Dobbs to a Summer Camp of the Young Socialists in August of 1964. 

Farrell Dobbs 4 volume history of the Teamsters union

*Farrell Dobbs was one of the greatest leaders of the working-class upsurge of the 1930's. Shortly after being won over to Trotskyism through conversations with supporters of the Socialist Workers Party in Michigan, Dobbs became a leader and one of the key organizers of the Minneapolis General Strike of 1934. He was also the chief architect of the drive to organize over the road truck drivers into the Teamsters Union. That historic campaign resulted in the Teamsters becoming the largest union in the U.S.   Dobbs accomplished this in the face of fierce opposition from the bureaucratic national leadership of the Teamsters Union.  Dobbs achievement and his long-term impact on the American labor movement was nicely summarized in a New York Times obituary,

 

After the strike gained the union its recognition, Mr. Dobbs became secretary-treasurer of Teamster Local 574 and set out to organize the truckers of the Middle West into a body that spoke with one voice. By 1938 he led the drive that got 250,000 over-the-road union drivers a uniform 12-state contract.

Previously, the teamsters' union had deemed intercity truck drivers as not worth the bother, and the union's president at the time, Daniel Tobin, contemptuously referred to them as ''trash.'' The national teamsters organization was little more than a loose confederation of autonomous locals.

Mr. Dobbs went after the intercity drivers and organized regionally, before going full time into politics to do battle with the Stalinists. James R. Hoffa took over the regional council in the mid-1940's and expanded it into the South. When he replaced the discredited Dave Beck as the teamster president, Mr. Hoffa rapidly brought control by the central union to the West and East as well.

Mr. Hoffa, himself eventually convicted and jailed, remarked before his later disappearance that he could not agree with Mr. Dobbs's politics or his visions of unions as a political force. But Mr. Hoffa said Mr. Dobbs, using long-distance drivers to spread the word, was ''enormously beneficial'' to the American labor movement. (Wolfgang Saxon,  Farrell Dobbs, Trotskyist, Dead, Sought the Presidency Four Times,  New York Times, November 3, 1983)

He was one of 17 Trotskyists that were imprisoned during World War II for taking a principled position against imperialist war.  In later years he ran for President several times on the SWP ticket.  He became National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in 1953, succeeding James P. Cannon,  a position he held until his retirement in 1972. He was the author of a four-volume history and memoir of the Minneapolis struggles. Dobbs died in 1983.

SWP leaders James P. Cannon, left, and Farrell Dobbs during Smith Act frame-up trial in 1941.Both were convicted, jailed for 13 months for opposing the U.S. rulers’ imperialist war policy.

Many thanks to the creative work of Michigan historian Matthew Siegfried in providing the wonderful graphic images to accompany the audio of Dobb's lectures.

To start the playlist click on the image below.

To watch each segment individually select one of the following links:

Lecture 3 Trotskyist Leadership of Local 574 Part 1

Lecture 3 Trotskyist Leadership of Local 574 Part 2

Lecture 2 General Strikes and the Communist Party Part 1

Lecture 1 Overview and the Coal yard Strikes Part 2

     

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Karl Marx 200 years later

Marx statue in Trier

by Alex Steiner

On May 5^th the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx in the German city of Trier.  It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ideas of no one person of the past two centuries has had a larger influence on the course of history than Marx.  It is also just as true to say that no one since Jesus has had his ideas so bastardized and misused as Marx.  Marx's philosophy of emancipation was turned into an apology for state repression and social inequality at the hands of the Stalinists. Hundreds of millions of people had their impressions of Marx and his thought colored by that upside-down caricature. It is impossible to make an objective assessment of Marx and his work without that consideration.

As with all anniversaries of prominent figures, one can expect a litany of Op Ed pieces and academic forums.  Marx’s 200^th birthday is no exception.  It has dawned on the powers that be in his native country, Germany, that Marx can be commodified and turned into a tourist attraction. The most publicized of these rituals took place in the city of Marx’s birth, Trier, where a 15-foot-tall statue of Marx, presented to the city by the government of China, was unveiled on May 5.  The BBC reported that on the day prior to the unveiling,

President Xi Jinping on Friday gave a high-profile speech praising Marx as the greatest thinker of modern times.

He urged China's ruling Communist Party to go back to the roots of Marxism, and said the party would forever remain the "guardians and practitioners" of its theories.

Students and most civil servants in China must complete mandatory courses in Marxism.

The irony of this was not lost on the BBC reporter, who commented,

Despite this, China's capitalist system is home to hundreds of billionaires and a widening gap between rich and poor. [1]

Yet another news source not know for its radicalism, CBS, was also moved to comment on this strange event,

Promoting Marx is seen in part as a way for the Chinese president to strengthen ideological control and counter critics within the ruling Communist Party unhappy with his move in March to eliminate presidential term limits. Xi is also general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, an official that is also not term-limited. [2]

There is historical precedent for a revolutionary movement being transformed into a doctrine rationalizing oppression.  It should not be forgotten that Christianity, beginning as a messianic movement of slaves revolting against their oppressors, was in the next three centuries transformed into the state religion of the Roman Empire.

One of the consequences of the bastardization of Marx at the hands of Stalinism has been the reaction against Marx from the rebellious generation of the 60’s who were disgusted by Stalinist scholasticism and conflated that with the ideas of Marx.  The New Left embodied these contradictions between a revolutionary impulse and theoretical confusion. But the New Left’s adoption of what it considered a left alternative to Marx ran aground on the wreck of the protest movements of the 1960s.  Nevertheless, those impulses from the 1960’s, while theoretically misplaced, at least had an emancipatory goal, a new world free of exploitation.  The same cannot be said for some of the mutations of 1960’s era radicalism that we see today.  These take the form of an identity politics hostile to the working class, a revival of ethnic nationalism and an overarching conviction that nothing fundamental can be done about capitalism. 

Many of these retrograde tendencies were on display at a celebration of Marx’s 200^th Birthday at the Goethe Institute in New York.  The Goethe Institute is sponsored by the German government and is the organization tasked with publicizing German culture internationally.  While it is a positive development that Marx is no longer ignored by official German cultural institutions, he cannot be so easily assimilated.

Unlike other icons of German culture such as Goethe and Schiller, Marx was a revolutionary whose heritage cannot be reconciled with the agencies of a bourgeois state. It is hardly surprising therefore that none of the speakers at the Goethe Institute panel on Marx had anything to say that would have been remotely recognizable by Marx had he dropped in. One panelist, a retired law professor claimed that the best examples of the socialist experiment in recent years could be found in the “Global South”. She mentioned in that connection Allende’s tenure in Chile before he was murdered by a CIA inspired coup, as well as certain attempts to institute “African socialism” by some of the nationalist leaders of Africa such as Julius Nyerere. This panelist did not seem very curious about why these experiments failed, while at the same time being dismissive of the far larger and longer experiment in socialism, the Russian Revolution, which she considered something primarily of interest to “white people”.  Another panelist, a graduate student in feminist studies, barely concealed her hostility to Marx and Marxism as she went into a long diatribe on ‘gendered economics’.  To his credit another member of the panel, the Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh, tried to gently correct the muddle introduced by the feminist student that we must start with gender as a primary category in all theorizing about society. He pointed out that you cannot start with gender until you have determined where gender lives. In other words, gender has a historical context and you cannot conceive of the emancipation of women without theorizing what an emancipated society looks like. But this was a minor note in a largely confused symposium in which the ideas of Marx were for the most part either ignored or conflated in an eclectic manner with all sorts of other notions that Marx would not have recognized as his own. Nevertheless, the fact that the Goethe Institute staged a celebration of Marx’s 200^th birthday does indicate a recognition that Marx can no longer be ignored or dismissed as an alien presence.

It has not always been the case. The fortunes of Marx’s legacy in his native country has waxed and waned depending on the political climate.  In the latter years of the 19^th century when the Social Democratic Party of Germany was the largest socialist party in the world and commanded millions of devoted followers, it was a common practice for workers who passed away to be buried with a copy of the Communist Manifesto in their coffin.  And during the years of the Weimar Republic Berlin boasted of a street named after Marx. On the other hand, during the Nazi era, Marx’s connection to German culture was completely eviscerated.  He became a prototypical “dirty Jew” in Nazi propaganda and therefore an alien presence in the German soil seeking to destroy its greatness. A tract of Nazi propaganda published in 1944 for the Hitler Youth stated,

Remember how Karl Marx falsified the German conception of socialism as a natural order of life, based deeply in German blood, and turned into the phantom of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This doctrine so deeply mirrored the nature of its Jewish inventor that the world knew only to connect it to his name: “Marxism.” [3]

In the post-war years Marx was lionized in East Germany, particularly in films. (Until the release of Raoul Peck’s ‘The Young Marx’ earlier this year, practically the only films that dealt with Marx or his ideas were produced in East Germany.) This served the interests of the Stalinist regime in the East who tried to legitimize their rule at the same time as they suppressed any dissent to their repressive regime. On the other hand, in West Germany during the Cold War years, Marx was ignored and marginalized.  This only began to change with the rise of the student movement in Germany in the 1960’s. [4]

The Goethe Institute forum, while indicating an attempt to come to terms with Marx, could not escape the broad intellectual climate of our time, which is still largely deaf to that great thinker.  In academia, Marx's scientific work, laying bare the mechanism of the capitalist mode of production, was all but ignored and rarely been taken seriously, even by left economists. For example, the Marxist geographer David Harvey wrote recently,

It is widely believed that Marx adapted the labour theory of value from Ricardo as a founding concept for his studies of capital accumulation.  Since the labour theory of value has been generally discredited, it is then often authoritatively stated that Marx s theories are worthless. But nowhere, in fact, did Marx declare his allegiance to the labour theory of value. [5]

While it may be surprising for an economist who considers himself a Marxist to dismiss one of the pillars of Marx’s understanding of capitalism, the labour theory of value, almost in passing, it is not unusual.  He is joined by many other economists and social scientists claiming to be Marxist or “post-Marxist”.

On the question of the whether the labour theory of value has been discredited, Paul Cockshott wrote a good response,

Harvey claims that the labour theory of value is generally discredited. But in what sense?

It is correct to say that the theory is not viewed with favour in economics departments, but that is for political reasons – the labour theory of value came, since Gray and Marx, came to be associated with socialism. Since academic economists, in general, did not want to be tainted with the socialist label they were at pains to distance themselves from the theory.

But none of them ever adduced any empirical evidence to refute it. It was socially discredited but not empirically refuted. [6]

Harvey has also objected to Marx's theory of the falling rate of profit. He wrote in 2014,

"...those who attribute the difficulties of contemporary capitalism to the tendency of the profit rate to fall are, judging by this evidence of labour participation, seriously mistaken. The conditions point to a vast increase and not a constriction in surplus value production and extraction."

Harvey was answered by Andrew Kliman writing in the blog New Left Project, 

Harvey’s chief complaint is that the LTFRP [the law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall] and the theory of crisis based on it are mono-causal: it ignores other causes of crisis as well as counteracting factors, and its current proponents typically present it in a way that ‘exclude[s] consideration of other possibilities’. I will argue that this is just a strawman. 

The real issue is not that anyone has advocated a mono-causal theory, but that Harvey is campaigning for what we might call an apousa-causal theory, one in which the LTFRP plays no role at all (apousa is Greek for ‘absent’). He is the one who is trying to exclude something from consideration. In light of his emphasis on capitalism’s ‘maelstrom of conflicting forces’ and its ‘multiple contradictions and crisis tendencies’, one might expect that he would urge us to consider all potential causes of crisis, excluding nothing. However, Harvey is not merely suggesting that other potential causes of crisis be considered alongside the LTFRP. He seems determined to consign it and the theory of crisis based on it to the dustbin of history. [7]

I select Harvey as an example not because I think he is a particularly bad interpreter of Marx, but because he is one of the most widely recognized Marxist economic theorists working today. He is in fact one of the few people who take the study of Marx’s Capital seriously and has made important academic contributions to its dissemination.  But he is typical of many of his colleagues in dismissing the theoretical heart of Capital.

Marx's theories were also vulgarized by many of his admirers who turned it into a doctrine of inevitable collapse.  This remains a popular, though completely misunderstood explanation of Marxism today.  

Marx's signature on a slip from the Reading Room of the British Museum where he worked on Capital.

I should add that the Marxian dialectic remains an enigma to even the devoted few who will defend Marx's economic theories. This is a topic about which I have written extensively. [8] Nor has there ever been an honest coming to terms by Marx's followers about the need to extend critical and dialectical thinking into areas that Marx barely touched. They forget that Marx’s original project called for 6 volumes and he was only able to complete the first volume of Capital.  And that was just Capital. Had he lived long enough he undoubtedly would have had something to say about other areas of life. But the fact that Marx never did develop his ideas on psychology or art in any systematic fashion has led some of his followers to proclaim that these topics are either unimportant or irrelevant. 

There is also the question of whether Marx’s early “humanist” writings can be reconciled with his “mature” scientific work.  I have always considered that debate something of an intellectual fraud. There is no question that as Marx matured his understanding deepened and he even reversed his ideas on a number of questions. But I think it is just as wrong to speak of some break between the early Marx and the later mature Marx, as if Marx stopped being a humanist in his mature years or that his scientific work was irreconcilable with his theory of alienation. That dichotomy was introduced by the work of the French ‘structuralist-Marxist’ Louis Althusser, who defended a “scientific” Marx shorn of the Hegelian dialectic. Althusser had his counterpart in the school of Marxist humanists, many of whom prospered in Yugoslavia, Poland and other Eastern European countries in the 1960’s. This group was looking for a source of opposition to Stalinist Scholasticism in the early writings of Marx. Unfortunately, they tended to identify the later writings of Marx with their Stalinist bastardization. These thinkers championed the early Marx’s writings on alienation which they viewed as completely divorced from his later “scientific” work and his theory of revolution.  Many of these defenders of Marxist humanism later embraced nationalism and anti-communism.

The topic was introduced tangentially at the Goethe Institute forum when one of the panelists proclaimed her allegiance to the “humanist” Marx and rejected the interpretation of Marx as “scientific”.  Had I had the opportunity I would have corrected her by pointing out that there is nothing inconsistent between humanism and science. The issue however is complicated by the common misconception that what Marx meant by ‘science’ was something like the positivist notion of science. [9]

Finally, the Marxian political project is resting on hard times.  The only mass political movements willing to identify with Marx are Stalinist parties representing the interests of tiny cliques of oligarchs.  The Soviet Union is gone as are all the deformed workers states of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.  Political movements that try to carry out the project envisioned by Marx are practically without exception tiny grouplets cut off from any mass movement.  And these groups tend to veer off into increasing bouts of sectarianism while others dissolve their Marxist principles into opportunist cheering of militancy.    

Nevertheless, Marx remains key to understanding the 21^st century. [10] Of course, Marx did not and could not have anticipated the complex paths and detours taken by history in the 135 years since his death.  Nor was Marx some kind of biblical prophet whose every prediction turned out be true. To be scientific is not the same as being infallible. It is necessary to supplement Marx with the work of other theoreticians, Lenin and Trotsky to be sure, but others as well, if one is to make sense of phenomena such as imperialism, the Soviet Union, fascism, the colonial revolution and the age of neo-liberal austerity. 

In the final analysis, it is impossible to understand our world today without resting on the shoulders of Marx.  That is the basic ground for any theory of political and social emancipation. 

 

May Day 2018 in Bangladesh. This worker is depicting the status of the working class still in chains.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44009621  

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/karl-marx-trier-unveils-statue-200th-birth-anniversary-2018-05-05/

[3] http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/weltparasit.htm

[4] https://www.viewpointmag.com/2014/05/21/internationalizing-marx-an-interview-with-jan-hoff/

[5] David Harvey. Marx’s refusal of the labour theory of value, 2018.

[6] https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2018/04/05/did-marx-have-a-labour-theory-of-value/#harveyref

[7]   http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/harvey_versus_marx_on_capitalisms_crises_part_1_getting_marx_wrong

[8] For instance, see my ‘Case study of the neglect of dialectics’,

http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2013/10/a-case-study-in-neglect-of-dialectics.html

Unfortunately, most of what I have written in this area is in the form of a polemic against one sectarian group and their abandonment of dialectics.  Nevertheless, I think there are some general lessons to be learned from those polemics for those with the patience to go through them.

[9]  See my essay Alienation and Revolution: A Defense of Marx’s Theory of Alienation,

http://permanent-revolution.org/essays/alienation_revolution.pdf

I have also written on this topic as part of an ongoing polemic against David North. See my defense of Marx’s theory of alienation in Chapter 6 of ‘Downward Spiral’, pages 155-159;

http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch06.pdf

[10] Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, someone with whom I have profound political differences, nevertheless  nicely  expressed the views of a new generation when he wrote in an essay titled, ‘Why the ideas of Karl Marx are relevant to the 21^st century’,

For many in my generation, the ideological underpinnings of capitalism have been undermined. That a higher percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 have a more favorable opinion of socialism than capitalism at least signals that the cold war era conflation of socialism with Stalinism no longer holds sway.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/karl-marx-relevant-21st-century

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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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