By Mark Featherstone
Like many people I have spent the last four or five days
trying to make sense of the result of the American election. In thinking
through the fantastical result I found myself asking two inter-related
questions. My first question was, how could Trump win, when Clinton appeared a
racing certainty up to the very day of the election. My second question
concerned what a Trump presidency would mean for America, but also the global
consensus that had existed around the neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy since at
least the late 1980s. In answering these two inter-connected questions, I would
suggest that first, too many pollsters and experts were caught under the spell
of history, where what normally happens will continue to happen, and under-estimated
the deep disconnect between vast numbers of people and the social, political,
and economic system which has governed their lives for so long. In short, and I
would suggest the same problem was behind the Brexit decision, the election result
reflected the fact that people no longer believe
in the model of capitalism that has governed from Thatcher and Reagan, through
Clinton, Bush, and Blair, up to Obama and Cameron. In this way the problem with
Clinton was that she came to represent
the death of the system, the figure who emerged to defend what was no longer
really defensible, and has in a way already passed over into history.
But if this lack of belief, or what the French writer
Bernard Stiegler calls dis-belief, explains the how of Trump, what about the what
of Trump? What does Trump mean for
the future? I think that the answer to this (related) question of the what of Trump is that he will probably
accelerate the revolutionary change taking place across the western world. Under
conditions where the neoliberal consensus no longer holds, I think the answer
to this second question is, therefore, that Trump will effectively mean the end
of the kind of globalisation we have lived with certainly since the end of the
Cold War. From my point of view, Trump can only signal further division, the end of consensus,
and the end of coherence, even if the kind of coherence which has ruled since
the fall of the Berlin Wall has been one characterised by inequality and
division. In this respect, we might wonder whether it is possible to say that
Trump will be a force for good? Anything is possible (herein resides the
utopian potential of Trump articulated by Slavoj Zizek), but my sense is that
the problem with the vision of change he articulated throughout his campaign is
that it was quite clearly premised on escape from the neoliberal consensus
through violence against and destruction of others. Against the global
capitalist system, then, Trump imagines a state of war, whether this is inter-
or intra-state, which is precisely the opposite of what needs to occur.
Inequalities, divisions, and exploitation need to decrease in a coordinated
manner, rather than increase in the name of some radical nationalist attempt to
escape from the violence of globalisation. The danger of the latter approach is
that it will lead to ever more violence, ever more war, and that the only way
out of this will be through some kind of apocalyptic event that will result in the
emergence of a more just society based on the imperative to survive. This
apocalyptic scenario is, in a sense, where Zizek’s view leads.
In light of this reading of the hopelessness of Trump’s
vision of the future, which is clearly self-evident to those who have
criticised him for his racism, sexism, and violent bullying of everybody who
opposes him, it is surprising that the question of the what of Trump has become the
question of the last few days. But it seems to me that the powerful attraction
of this question comes from a general dis-belief that Trump could ever follow
through on his violent promises. Surely he could not really build a wall
between America and Mexico or ban Muslims from entering the land of the free? Surely
this vision of America, which resembles something Philip K. Dick might have
imagined in his paranoid science fiction, could never really happen? Of course,
the problem with taking this line – he could never really follow through on what he said –
is that it runs counter to Trump’s very appeal. Why vote Trump? Vote for Trump
because he says exactly what he thinks, regardless of how violent or
exclusionary. Trump says whatever is on his mind. Even though analysis of the
presidential debates found that a good deal of what he said was untrue, there
is a sense in which Trump’s appeal resides in his willingness to tell people
straight. Against the post-politics of Clinton, which were clearly based upon
the Blair / Bush model of political communication, where one says one thing (we
want equality blah blah blah), does something completely different, and the
spins the difference so that nothing effectively means anything, what is new
about Trump’s model of politics is that it appears absolutely naïve. There is
no cynicism, where there is a hidden disconnect between words, thoughts, and
behaviour - which is, I think, what made Clinton appear so absolutely
untrustworthy - because nobody could cynically calculate to win an election on
the basis of so much racism, sexism, and general abuse.
In this respect Trump appears entirely naïve and
attractive to those who have grown weary of the same old story, but it is also,
I would suggest, this radical naivety, where he says exactly what he thinks,
that has led to the absolute uncertainty around his programme of action. The
very fact of his naivety, what we might call the terror of Trump, means that he
is entirely unbearable and has to become unbelievable. There must be something
else? The question of Trump that emerged very quickly after the election was,
therefore, whether the Trump who won the election would be replaced by a new,
more moderate, Trump who will govern and effectively tow the party line. In
this vision the old order, where we rubbed along in our inequality, division,
and barely sublimated hatred will continue into the future.
Why the sudden uncertainty about the identity of Trump,
then? The answer to the question of the emergence of the radical
undecideability of the new president, which effectively suggests that there is
more to Trump than meets the eye, is that it has very quickly become necessary
to fall back on the fiction of a moderate Trump in the name of finding a way to
absorb the terrible absurdity of the election result. This conservative vision
of Trump, where the absolute transparency of The Donald gives way to the idea of the schizoid political
manipulator, the ultimate Machiavellian player, found its ultimate form in the
comments of the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel who explained that the mainstream’s
problem with Trump is that it took him literally, but not seriously. In other
words, the mainstream believed everything he said and therefore imagined he was
an idiot who could not be taken seriously.
Against this, Thiel suggests that what we needed to do
was take Trump seriously, but not literally. In this way, we needed to
recognise his broad message concerning the anger, disenchantment, and general
hopelessness of America, but discount the specifics of his message – build
walls, ban Muslims and so on. There is, however, a serious problem with this
view, which casts Trump as perhaps the ultimate post-modern politician, which
is that it begs the question of exactly what Americans were voting for when
they voted from him, if they could not believe the content of the words that came out of his mouth? If what mattered
was the form of his language –
violence, anger, hopelessness and so on – then what was everything else?
Grandstanding? Babbling? In light of this, we would have to conclude that Trump
has no real programme, beyond a negative reaction to the system collapse of the
global social and economic order. What he does have, however, is what Freudian
psychoanalysts call drive, which is the nasty, violent, energy that keeps us
alive, and prepares us for the struggle to survive the state of nature, but which we must
sublimate (channel through reason) in order to live in social groups where we
have to recognise the humanity of other people in order to avoid the descent
into a state of open warfare where nobody wins. It seems to me that it is this
very basic code, which social and political theorists would understand in terms
of the Hobbesian social contract that has underpinned the way we think about
society since the birth of the modern age, that Trump undermines in his violent
rhetoric that pits Nixon’s silent majority (white America) against all others.
If this is the case, then, the problem of Thiel’s
position, which seeks to soften Trump, to rehabilitate him by suggesting that
he’s not really so bad, is that it distracts from the gravity of the threat
Trump poses. For Thiel Trump is a deeply ironic, we might say Derridean,
figure. In his view Trump’s absolutely transparency – he says exactly what he thinks
and what he wants – is a symbol of his infinite depths – which means that we have
no idea about his real programme. But I think that this is an illusion, the
illusion of depth, generated by the absolute self-identical nature of the
president elect. This is the real horror. The horror of a lack of depth. There really
is nothing more to see and if the programme set out in his presidential
campaign was violent, racist, sexist, abusive and ultimately unrealistic there
is no need to look for some deeper significance. As Doug Kellner explains in
his account of the rise of Trump, where he reads him through the Frankfurt
School’s critique of the Nazi personality, the president elect is probably
unpsychoanalysable, since his unconscious is already out there, unmediated by
social norms that modify normal behaviour. Reading Trump from a slightly different
perspective, Henry Giroux explains that we should not be surprised by the
result of the election. On the contrary, he tells us that America has the
president that it deserves, that Trump is a kind of symptom of a society
addicted to violence, that has hidden behind a liberal façade for too long, but
can no longer maintain the pretence. In this respect Trump is representative of the American
warfare state unleashed, free of the cynical liberal fantasy that conditioned
Obama’s America, but also, I would argue, the minimal belief in the value of
social norms and values that hold every society together.
The precise problem with the brand of dark utopianism we
find in Trump, which was also present in the vote to Brexit, is that it
revolves around an aggressive desire for change which ultimately has no
positive objective or narrative arc. Instead, the dynamism of the revolution is
purely negative and feeds off rage, and the hatred of this, that, and the other
out group who are perceived to have taken what we need. But what next? What
happens after the destruction of the old system? In the case of Brexit we know
that there was no positive vision, no plan, and that Farage, Johnson, and Gove quickly faded
into the background. While there is no doubt that the Leave campaign was, like
Trump’s election, successful because it spoke to people struggling in a
destroyed society that needs to be reformed, the problem of the politics of
negativity, the politics of escape from the failure of neoliberal globalisation
to meet human needs, is that they similarly have no positive vision for the future. In
this respect, they remain trapped within the negativity of the moment and the
dystopic atmosphere of the present, where we fear social, economic, and
ecological collapse and essentially realise the terrible future through the
political choices we make today. In my view Trump is, therefore, a symbol of
the triumph of a kind of childish politics, a politics of acting out and acting
up, when acting out and acting up are not really an option. On the contrary, we
need to come up with something more positive, more constructive, more inclusive
and ultimately more workable in terms of building a sustainable future for everybody, because today’s problems are global problems and they
cannot be solved by nationalist, protectionist, and unilateral solutions based
in a politics of confrontation and conflict.
