Donald Trump
Empire of Destruction: Mosul reveals Myth of Precision Bombing
By Tom Engelhardt | (Via Tomdispatch.com ) | – –
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a glorious dream of limited destruction combined with unlimited power and success. In reality, it would prove to be a nightmare of the first order.
If you want a single word to summarize American war-making in this last decade and a half, I would suggest rubble. It’s been a painfully apt term since September 11, 2001. In addition, to catch the essence of such war in this century, two new words might be useful: rubblize and rubblization. Let me explain what I mean.
In recent weeks, another major city in Iraq has officially been “liberated” (almost) from the militants of the Islamic State. However, the results of the U.S.-backed Iraqi military campaign to retake Mosul, that country’s second largest city, don’t fit any ordinary definition of triumph or victory. It began in October 2016 and, at nine months and counting, has been longer than the World War II battle of Stalingrad. Week after week, in street to street fighting, with U.S. airstrikes repeatedly called in on neighborhoods still filled with terrified Mosulites, unknown but potentially staggering numbers of civilians have died. More than a million people — yes, you read that figure correctly — were uprooted from their homes and major portions of the Western half of the city they fled, including its ancient historic sections, have been turned into rubble.
This should be the definition of victory as defeat, success as disaster. It’s also a pattern. It’s been the essential story of the American war on terror since, in the month after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush loosed American air power on Afghanistan. That first air campaign began what has increasingly come to look like the full-scale rubblization of significant parts of the Greater Middle East.
By not simply going after the crew who committed those attacks but deciding to take down the Taliban, occupy Afghanistan, and in 2003, invade Iraq, Bush’s administration opened the proverbial can of worms in that vast region. An imperial urge to overthrow Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, who had once been Washington’s guy in the Middle East only to become its mortal enemy (and who had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11), proved one of the fatal miscalculations of the imperial era.
So, too, did the deeply engrained fantasy of Bush administration officials that they controlled a high-tech, precision military that could project power in ways no other nation on the planet or in history ever had; a military that would be, in the president’s words, “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” With Iraq occupied and garrisoned (Korea-style) for generations to come, his top officials assumed that they would take down fundamentalist Iran (sound familiar?) and other hostile regimes in the region, creating a Pax Americana there. (Hence, the particular irony of the present Iranian ascendancy in Iraq.) In the pursuit of such fantasies of global power, the Bush administration, in effect, punched a devastating hole in the oil heartlands of the Middle East. In the pungent imagery of Abu Mussa, head of the Arab League at the time, the U.S. chose to drive straight through “the gates of hell.”
Rubblizing the Greater Middle East
In the 15-plus years since 9/11, parts of an expanding swathe of the planet — from Pakistan’s borderlands in South Asia to Libya in North Africa — were catastrophically unsettled. Tiny groups of Islamic terrorists multiplied exponentially into both local and transnational organizations, spreading across the region with the help of American “precision” warfare and the anger it stirred among helpless civilian populations. States began to totter or fail. Countries essentially collapsed, loosing a tide of refugees on the world, as year after year, the U.S. military, its Special Operations forces, and the CIA were increasingly deployed in one fashion or another in one country after another.
Though in case after case the results were visibly disastrous, like so many addicts, the three post-9/11 administrations in Washington seemed incapable of drawing the obvious conclusions and instead continued to do more of the same (with modest adjustments of one sort of another). The results, unsurprisingly enough, were similarly disappointing or disastrous.
Despite the doubts about such a form of global warfare that candidate Trump raised during the 2016 election campaign, the process has only escalated in the first months of his presidency. Washington, it seems, just can’t help itself in its drive to pursue this version of war in all its grim imprecision to its increasingly imprecise but predictably destructive conclusions. Worse yet, if the leading military and political figures in Washington have their way, none of this may end in our lifetime. (In recent years, for example, the Pentagon and those who channel its thoughts have begun speaking of a “generational approach” or a “generational struggle” in Afghanistan.)
If anything, so many years after it was launched, the war on terror shows every sign of continuing to expand and rubble is increasingly the name of the game. Here’s a very partial tally sheet on the subject:
In addition to Mosul, a number of Iraq’s other major cities and towns — including Ramadi and Fallujah — have also been reduced to rubble. Across the border in Syria, where a brutal civil war has been raging for six years, numerous cities and towns from Homs to parts of Aleppo have essentially been destroyed. Raqqa, the “capital” of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, is now under siege. (American Special Operations forces are already reportedly active inside its breached walls, working with allied Kurdish and Syrian rebel forces.) It, too, will be “liberated” sooner or later — that is to say, destroyed.
As in Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi, American planes have been striking ISIS positions in the urban heart of Raqqa and killing civilians, evidently in sizeable numbers, while rubblizing parts of the city. And such activities have in recent years only been spreading. In distant Libya, for instance, the city of Sirte is in ruins after a similar struggle involving local forces, American air power, and ISIS militants. In Yemen, for the last two years the Saudis have been conducting a never-ending air campaign (with American support), significantly aimed at the civilian population; they have, that is, been rubblizing that country, while paving the way for a devastating famine and a horrific cholera epidemic that can’t be checked, given the condition of that impoverished, embattled land.
Only recently, this sort of destruction has spread for the first time beyond the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. In late May, on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, local Muslim rebels identified with ISIS took Marawi City. Since they moved in, much of its population of 200,000 has been displaced and almost two months later they still hold parts of the city, while engaged in Mosul-style urban warfare with the Filipino military (backed by U.S. Special Operations advisers). In the process, the area has reportedly suffered Mosul-style rubblization.
In most of these rubblized cities and the regions around them, even when “victory” is declared, worse yet is in sight. In Iraq, for instance, with the “caliphate” of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi now being dismantled, ISIS remains a genuinely threatening guerilla force, the Sunni and Shiite communities (including armed Shiite militias) show little sign of coming together, and in the north of the country the Kurds are threatening to declare an independent state. So fighting of various sorts is essentially guaranteed and the possibility of Iraq turning into a full-scale failed state or several devastated mini-states remains all too real, even as the Trump administration is reportedly pushing Congress for permission to construct and occupy new “temporary” military bases and other facilities in the country (and in neighboring Syria).
Worse yet, across the Greater Middle East, “reconstruction” is basically not even a concept. There’s simply no money for it. Oil prices remain deeply depressed and, from Libya and Yemen to Iraq and Syria, countries are either too poor or too divided to begin the reconstruction of much of anything. Nor — and this is a given — will Donald Trump’s America be launching the war-on-terror equivalent of a Marshall Plan for the region. And even if it did, the record of the post-9/11 years already shows that the highly militarized American version of “reconstruction” or “nation building” via crony warrior corporations in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been one of the great scams of our time. (More American taxpayer dollars have been poured into reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan alone than went into the whole of the Marshall Plan and it’s painfully obvious how effective that proved to be.)
Of course, as in Syria’s civil war, Washington is hardly responsible for all the destruction in the region. ISIS itself has been a remarkably destructive and brutal killing machine with its own impressive record of urban rubblization. And yet most of the destruction in the region was triggered, at least, by the militarized dreams and plans of the Bush administration, by its response to 9/11 (which ended up being something like Osama bin Laden’s dream scenario). Don’t forget that ISIS’s predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was a creature of the American invasion and occupation of that country and that ISIS itself was essentially formed in an American military prison camp in that country where its future caliph was confined.
And in case you think any lessons have been learned from all of this, think again. In the first months of the Trump administration, the U.S. has essentially decided on a new mini-surge of troops and air power in Afghanistan; deployed for the first time the largest non-nuclear weapon in its arsenal there; promised the Saudis more support in their war in Yemen; has increased its air strikes and special operations activities in Somalia; is preparing for a new U.S. military presence in Libya; increased U.S. forces and eased the rules for air strikes in civilian areas of Iraq and elsewhere; and sent U.S. special operators and other personnel in rising numbers into both Iraq and Syria.
No matter the president, the ante only seems to go up when it comes to the “war on terror,” a war of imprecision that has helped uproot record numbers of people on this planet, with the usual predictable results: the further spread of terror groups, the further destabilization of state structures, rising numbers of displaced and dead civilians, and the rubblization of expanding parts of the planet.
While no one would deny the destructive potential of great imperial powers historically, the American empire of destruction may be unique. At the height of its military strength in these years, it has been utterly incapable of translating that power advantage into anything but rubblization.
Living in the Rubble, a Short History of the Twenty-First Century
Let me speak personally here, since I live in the remarkably protected and peaceful heart of that empire of destruction and in the very city where it all began. What eternally puzzles me is the inability of those who run that imperial machinery to absorb what’s actually happened since 9/11 and draw any reasonable conclusions from it. After all, so much of what I’ve been describing seems, at this point, dismally predictable.
If anything, the “generational” nature of the war on terror and the way it became a permanent war of terror should by now seem too obvious for discussion. And yet, whatever he said on the campaign trail, President Trump promptly appointed to key positions the very generals who have long been immersed in fighting America’s wars across the Greater Middle East and are clearly ready to do more of the same. Why in the world anyone, even those generals, should imagine that such an approach could result in anything more “successful” is beyond me.
In many ways, rubblization has been at the heart of this whole process, starting with the 9/11 moment. After all, the very point of those attacks was to turn the symbols of American power — the Pentagon (military power); the World Trade Center (financial power); and the Capitol or some other Washington edifice (political power, as the hijacked plane that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania was undoubtedly heading there) — into so much rubble. In the process, thousands of innocent civilians were slaughtered.
In some ways, much of the rubblization of the Greater Middle East in recent years could be thought of as, however unconsciously, a campaign of vengeance for the horror and insult of the air assaults on that September morning in 2001, which pulverized the tallest towers of my hometown. Ever since, American war has, in a sense, involved paying Osama bin Laden back in kind, but on a staggering scale. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, a shocking but passing moment for Americans has become everyday life for whole populations and innocents have died in numbers that would add up to so many World Trade Centers piled atop each other.
The origins of TomDispatch, the website I run, also lie in the rubble. I was in New York City on that day. I experienced the shock of the attacks and the smell of those burning buildings. A friend of mine saw a hijacked plane hitting one of the towers and another biked into the smoke-filled area looking for his daughter. I went down to the site of the attacks with my own daughter within days and wandered the nearby streets, catching glimpses of those giant shards of destroyed buildings.
In the phrase of that moment, in the wake of 9/11, everything “changed” and, in a sense, indeed it did. I felt it. Who didn’t? I noted the sense of fear rising nationally and the repetitious ceremonies across the country in which Americans hailed themselves as the planet’s most exceptional victims, survivors, and (in the future) victors. In those post-9/11 weeks, I became increasingly aware of how a growing sense of shock and a desire for vengeance among the populace was freeing Bush administration officials (who had for years been dreaming about making the “lone superpower” omnipotent in a historically unprecedented way) to act more or less as they wished.
As for myself, I was overcome by a sense that the period to follow would be the worst of my life, far worse than the Vietnam era (the last time I had been truly mobilized politically). And of one thing I was certain: things would not go well. I had an urge to do something, though no idea what.
In early October 2001, the Bush administration unleashed its air power on Afghanistan, a campaign that, in a sense, would never end but simply spread across the Greater Middle East. (By now, the U.S. has launched repeated air strikes in at least seven countries in the region.) At that moment, someone emailed me an article by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan who had been in the U.S. for years but had continued to follow events in his country of birth.
His piece, which appeared at the website Counterpunch, would prove prescient indeed, especially since it had been written in mid-September, just days after 9/11. At that moment, as Ansary noted, Americans were already threatening — in a phrase adopted from the Vietnam War era — to bomb Afghanistan “back to the Stone Age.” What purpose, he wondered, could possibly be served by such a bombing campaign since, as he put it, “new bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs”? As he pointed out, Afghanistan, then largely ruled by the grim Taliban, had essentially been turned into rubble years before in the proxy war the Soviets and Americans fought there until the Red Army limped home in defeat in 1989. The rubble that was already Afghanistan would only increase in the brutal civil war that followed. And in the years before 2001, little had been rebuilt. So, as Ansary made clear, the U.S. was about to launch its air power for the first time in the twenty-first century against a country with nothing, a country of ruins and in ruins.
From such an act he predicted disaster. And so it would be. At the time, something about that image of air strikes on rubble stunned me, in part because it felt both horrifying and true, in part because it seemed such an ominous signal of what might lie in our future, and in part because nothing like it could then be found in the mainstream news or in any kind of debate about how to respond to 9/11 (of which there was essentially none). Impulsively, I emailed his piece out with a note of my own to friends and relatives, something I had never done before. That, as it turned out, would be the start of what became an ever-expanding no-name listserv and, a little more than a year later, TomDispatch.
A Plutocracy of the Rubble?
So the first word to fully catch my attention and set me in motion in the post-9/11 era was “rubble.” It’s sad that, almost 16 years later, Americans are still obsessively afraid for themselves, a fear that has helped fund and build a national security state of staggering dimensions. On the other hand, remarkably few of us have any sense of the endless 9/11-style experiences our military has so imprecisely delivered to the world. The bombs may be smart, but the acts couldn’t be dumber.
In this country, there is essentially no sense of responsibility for the spread of terrorism, the crumbling of states, the destruction of lives and livelihoods, the tidal flow of refugees, and the rubblization of some of the planet’s great cities. There’s no reasonable assessment of the true nature and effects of American warfare abroad: its imprecision, its idiocy, its destructiveness. In this peaceful land, it’s hard to imagine the true impact of the imprecision of war, American-style. Given the way things are going, it’s easy enough, however, to imagine the scenario of Tamim Ansari writ large in the Trump years and those to follow: Americans continuing to bomb the rubble they had such a hand in creating across the Greater Middle East.
And yet distant imperial wars do have a way of coming home, and not just in the form of new surveillance techniques, or drones flying over “the homeland,” or the full-scale militarization of police forces. Without those disastrous, never-ending wars, I suspect that the election of Donald Trump would have been unlikely. And while he will not loose such “precision” warfare on the homeland itself, his project (and that of the congressional Republicans) — from health care to the environment — is visibly aimed at rubblizing American society. If he were capable, he would certainly create a plutocracy of the rubble in a world where ruins are increasingly the norm.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: There’s no way I can thank you enough for your remarkable response to my recent summer appeal for funds to keep TomDispatch rolling along. You are simply the best! If any of you meant to send in a few dollars but forgot, check out our donation page. I’m 73 years old today and still going reasonably strong. That is, I suppose, a miracle of sorts. I’m planning to take the weekend off, so the next TD post will appear on Tuesday, July 25th. In the meantime, I’m expecting TomDispatch to accompany me not just into my 74th year, but my 75th as well thanks to the continuing generosity of all of you! Tom]
Via Tomdispatch.com
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Related video added by Juan Cole:
Trump hands Putin gift, cancels Support for Syrian Rebels
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous at WaPo report that Trump cancelled the CIA program to support the remnants of the Free Syrian Army a month ago. The decision was made in a meeting of Trump with CIA director Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser H. R. McMasters, and came just before Trump met (twice) with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg on the sidelines of the G20 summit.
Ever since Russia intervened in Syria in fall of 2015, its Aerospace forces have given support to the Syrian Arab Army in a bid to roll back and defeat the armed opposition, especially in the northwest of the country. The totalitarian regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Baath Party, has a key vulnerability. The capital is in the south of the country and is supplied by the port of Latakia in the northwest. If the rebels could cut Latakia off from Damascus or could just take Latakia, they could starve the capital of arms and staples and overthrow the regime.
The Russians forestalled any such scenario by pushing Nusra and other militants out of Latakia province, forcing them out of Hama, Homs and East Aleppo, and bottling them up in the rural backwater of Idlib province.
Still, the Syrian Arab Army is small and stretched thin. The small and not very important CIA program was enough to keep some of the rebel groups going in ways that proved an irritant to the Baath government and to Russian strategic planners. They would much prefer that the US stopped supporting the rebels in any way. For one thing, withdrawal of Washington’s backing would be a huge blow to the flagging morale of the opposition.
Trump campaigned on handing Syria over to Russia, and at least with regard to the country’s northwest and deep south, he has followed through.
The cancellation of the CIA program does not affect the Department of Defense effort in the northeast of Syria, which has formed the Syrian Democratic Forces, mainly leftist Kurds fighting ISIL.
Al-Akhbar (leftist, Beirut) wonders if this move will have an effect on the rivalry between US-backed rebels in the southeast near the Jordanian border where the US has a small base. That base is aimed at ISIL to its north but also at Iran and Iranian logistics for supplying Hizbullah. It could be that US troops will now be evacuated from this southeast pocket which would be a victory for Iran more than for Russia.
The Central Intelligence Agency was ordered to begin the program in 2013 by President Barack Obama. It involved vetting opposition guerrilla groups to make sure they did not have links to al-Qaeda or ISIL. The CIA identified some 40 such groups. It appears to have sent them money and light arms through Saudi Arabia’s ministry of intelligence. As a result, probably some groups, like the Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam), were included in the vetted category even though their discourse was that of Salafi holy warriors who desired to wipe out the Alawite Shiites. Saudi Arabia follows the militantly puritan Wahhabi form of Islam that hates Shiites the way the devil hates holy water. Having the Saudis be the pass-through for the CIA aid thus allowed Salafi extremists to receive some of it. Other groups appear to have been Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, whom the Saudis could not have been eager to help. (The Saudis like fundamentalist Salafis but hate fundamentalist Muslim Brethren with a passion).
Although these groups were “vetted” for contacts with al-Qaeda, some of them occasionally formed battlefield alliances with the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
Many of these remnants of the Free Syrian Army appear to have been small and to have controlled two valleys and a hill each. The most effective fighters in the opposition continued to be extremists, whether Nusra or its forrmal ally, the Freemen of the Levant.
The Free Syrian Army and the more radical groups have in any case been decisively defeated, with Russian help. The only reason given for continued US backing of a lost cause was to maintain some leverage to force Bashar al-Assad from office. But al-Assad won’t be forced out as long as he has Iranian and Russian support, so that wasn’t going to happen. The US program was just prolonging the violence in some northern provinces.
The Syrian regime appears to hope that without lukewarm US backing for some of the rebels, the civil war will died down quickly. They are misreading the situation and blaming the victim. But for the moment, they have won.
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Related video:
WaPo: “Trump is shutting down a secret CIA program in Syria”
Post Truth by Matthew D’Ancona and Post-Truth by Evan Davis review – is this really a new era of politics?
Lying as the norm has been with us for a while. Is the idea of post-truth another example of liberals understanding people wrongly?
“In practice,” Evan Davis writes, “we evidently are quite happy to believe untruths.” Davis is stating what is, perhaps, the most indisputable fact regarding what has been trumpeted as the rise of a new kind of “post-truth” politics. Shrewdly, he describes the belief that we a living in a post-truth era as “an expression of frustration and anguish from a liberal class discombobulated by the political disruptions of 2016”. A catch-all term used by today’s liberals to describe upheavals that confounded their most basic beliefs, “post-truth” politics is like “populism” in implying that these unexpected shifts occurred because reason had been subverted. Duped by demagogues deploying new information technologies, voters disregarded argument and evidence in favour of manipulated emotion and fake news. The idea of truth was lost in a morass of relativism, and the politicians who controlled government for decades were abruptly dislodged from power.
It’s an appealingly simple tale, which many liberals are more than happy to believe. But if we have entered a post-truth era, when did this epoch begin? Matthew d’Ancona is highly specific as to the date: “2016 was the year that definitively launched the era of ‘Post-Truth’.” We have inhabited this new world for not much more than a year, but its dominant characteristic is all too clear. There has been “a crash in the value of truth, comparable to the collapse of a currency or a stock”. It’s not that politicians lie more than they did in the past. “Political lies, spin and falsehood are emphatically not the same as Post-Truth. What is new is not the mendacity of politicians but the public’s response to it. Lying is regarded as the norm, even in democracies.” But if there is such a thing as the post-truth era, it didn’t start last year with Brexit and Trump. It began with the Iraq war, which D’Ancona barely mentions. More than any other single event, it was this stupendous exercise in disinformation and denial that convinced the public that indifference to truth had become the norm in politics.
Morbid symptoms in the history of class now
Unlikely working-class hero or charismatic man of destiny?
The following is the text of a presentation I gave last week, as part of the Sydney Historical Research Network seminar series “History Now”. The week’s topic was “The History of Class Now”. It was originally posted at An Integral State.
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If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer “leading” [or directive: dirigente] but only “dominant”, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
— Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Q3 §34 (1930).
Interregnum originally meant the period between when one monarch dies, and another takes the throne. As Zygmunt Bauman notes, Gramsci gave the term a broader meaning, referring to the socio-political-legal order. One way in which this can be understood is a period where one arrangement of hegemony is waning, but prior to the emergence of another.
Although we are not in a period of unravelling or reordering that is similar to that on which Gramsci focussed—that might rival the Risorgimento in Italy or the upheavals around and following WWI—there is a profound historical shift taking place, and part of this is the collapse of the era of mass politics. By mass politics I mean the era that started at the end of the 19th Century and saw the formation of mass-based political parties, and the construction of mass-based trade unions, and which persisted for most of the 20th century.
Peter Mair, in his posthumously published Ruling the Void, surveyed the state of politics across the European Union and concluded that across a wealth of empirical data—voter turnout, party allegiance, electoral volatility, party membership, and membership of civil society organisations such as trade unions—there has been an unmistakable trend towards popular disengagement from politics. In advanced capitalist countries fewer citizens are voting and engaging with political parties, voting patterns are increasingly volatile, and distrust of political elites is on the rise. Citizens are less partisan with respect to traditional political parties, and although recent economic chaos has accelerated these processes of decline, the phenomenon long predates the current era of austerity. Some scholars, including myself, term this phenomenon “anti-politics”. And in many ways anti-politics predates the neoliberal period in general, although the phenomenon has accelerated in that period.
It is useful to conceive of anti-politics as having two distinct but related expressions or forms. Firstly, there is the prevailing popular mood of detachment from, and hostility to, politicians, parties and the political process—including radical forms of politics. This expresses itself in short-lived bursts of protest, electoral volatility and political crisis, but tends to dissipate if not given direction. Secondly, there are political projects from across the ideological spectrum that trade on an appeal to this mood for their own political ends.
This mood is has been leveraged in the United States by figures like Donald Trump, who successfully campaigned for the Presidency against the entire political establishment after staging what was (in effect) a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, against the wishes of most of its elite members and donors. A similar mood expressed itself in the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union, where voters rejected the stance shared by the vast majority of the country’s political class and mainstream media (see Inglehart and Norris, 2016).
On the Left parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain have related to this sentiment, mobilising widespread disenchantment with politicians and the political process into new formations promising to “do” politics fundamentally differently. In the case of Spain, Podemos was an anti-mainstream party of the Left built on a wave of anti-political sentiment in the 15-M or Indignados movement. A key slogan of Podemos was “No nos representan” (“they don’t represent us”). In a brief burst of national popularity, the comedian and activist Russell Brand was a progressive expression of this sentiment in the UK. It is also expressed in less ideologically coherent populist formations like Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy.
A key question to ask over the coming period, is what might we glean from these morbid symptoms in terms of the history of the ruling and working classes now? The working class is disorganised as a social and political force, and it no longer recognises those who purport to lead it—be that the traditional social democratic and labour parties or the trade unions.
This is not say class is absent, or that the class does not still act. While there have been relatively few workplace struggles and strikes, both here and in places like the US, struggle and antagonism persists. As Tithi Bhattacharya of Purdue University argued on social media:
The working class does not just go away and concede to the relentless attacks from capitalists. The relative decline in workplace organizing has meant that struggle has erupted outside of the point of production: for water in Ireland and Cochabamba, for land in Standing Rock, for reproductive justice in Poland, the right to live in Black lives matter struggle. These are all class struggles waged by working class people.
At the same time, we see expressions of class antagonism that are not organised, not clearly articulated, or progressive—most particularly in the election of a candidate like Trump. Trump was the most unpopular presidential candidate ever elected (since regular polling began), but he was elected despite the fact that many voters don’t like him. It is important to ask how and why that situation came about, and particularly to move beyond explanations that focus on facts directly related to Trump himself.
Neoliberalism has fundamentally altered society, and was a project not simply of parties and politicians of the right. Labour’s involvement in the construction of neoliberalism—most particularly in Australia, but also internationally—is surely also a contributing factor to why social democratic and Labourist parties — and the trade unions that underpinned their mass support—have been unable to recover support in recent years.
The decay of the old political order has not only led to new political projects seeking to leverage anti-political sentiment for their own ends, nor simply to the beginnings of new social movements directly challenging the primacy political rule in late capitalism. It has also led to a hostile reaction by those involved in the practice of politics. Such reactions have insisted that the problems of politics are the product either of faulty political elites or a pathological public, or some combination of the two.
For example, significant words have been spent on identifying Trump as being personally unfit (the wrong kind of person) to be at the head of the world’s most powerful democracy. More specifically, criticism of Trump has been aimed not just at his character, but in terms of psychopathology—that he is an extreme narcissist, or even a psychopath, who must not be allowed access to the nuclear codes. These attacks have extended to his supporters, who have been portrayed as “angry” and “driven by hate”, harbouring all kinds of personal pathologies (such as female voters, who were labelled as having “internalised misogyny” for failing to vote for Clinton). This was most famously highlighted in Hillary Clinton’s claim that Trump’s voters were “desperates” and “deplorables”. Pseudoscientific explanations claiming that Trump-voters’ brains were wired for authoritarianism, or so beaten down by marginal social existences that they were lashing out irrationally, were also widely reported.
Similarly, in the case of the Brexit vote, the result was blamed on selfish, bigoted, older, white, uneducated working class voters who had failed to comprehend what the experts were telling them — voters who had “stolen the futures” of a whole generation of young people. In the UK, this identification of white working class voters as the “cause” of unwelcome electoral results has led to a quasi-anthropological search for these fabled creatures in their natural habitats—once again marking their otherness from rational cosmopolitan European elites.
I would argue this is a pathologisation of politics. The effect of pathologisation is to render political breakdown as inexplicable in rational terms, and to situate a failing political order as one that must be saved from the illness afflicting it—even if that means limiting access of certain individuals from participation on the basis that they are the pathogen undermining the system. This line of thinking has been constructed in more sophisticated form by a series of theorists intent on further intensifying the withdrawal of the political class to the safe haven of the state, which Mair described with such alacrity.
For example, in What is Populism?, Jan-Werner Müller lumps a wide range of political actors under the rubric of “populism”, which he characterises as a dangerous deformation of democracy under the guise of imposing the popular will on the operations of the state. Like many other theorists he favours checks and balances outside voters’ control to impose limits on majoritarian incursions on minority rights. Taking things to greater extremes are the widely-quoted prescriptions of thinkers like Fareed Zakaria whose “constitutional liberalism” would see the ideals of classical liberalism and the rule of law upheld contra ”illiberal democracies” which rest on majority rule. David Van Reybrouck argued elections should be scrapped in favour of having curated samples of citizens decide policy, and Jason Brennan is “against democracy” and wants to see it replaced by an “epistocracy” where less-informed voters are disenfranchised.
Such approaches ignore the dissolution of the social base of longstanding political arrangements, seeking instead to limit the involvement of the demos in democracy. That dissolution means politics cannot overcome its brittle relationship with civil society, facing increasing detachment, simply by extruding civil society from its operations. Rather, attempts to limit involvement will only bring greater antagonism from voters, and hence greater instability to the political class’s position.
Politics was once the way that class relations were expressed across society. Parties of Right and Left seemed to represent social class forces. Now the parties of Right and Left are the product of a disintegration—of a breakdown of the political order premised on the ever-increasing detachment of classes from their political representatives (and vice-versa).
More than ever historical analysis requires dealing with this empirical reality. It is now disorienting for scholars to read the situation of the classes off the activities of their (former) political representatives, or else one reads the pathology of politics—with its crazed partisan warfare—onto a society where class struggle is present but muted, fragmentary and quieter than it has been for perhaps more than a century.
When we write histories of class it is important not to eternalise transient arrangements from the past, even if they seemed the norm for most of the 20th century. The disconnect between the logics of society and politics need to be understood on their own terms, before their interaction is considered. This means returning to a materialist historical approach that refuses to allow the airy realm of politics—in all its present mess—to distort how we understand history. We are living in a period where too much analysis and historical writing reads society off politics, even though politics is dysfunctional.
Some look at politics and say that its form must say something about society, rather than asking what is wrong with politics itself. Or, alternatively, what is right and sensible and rational in people’s rejection of traditional political parties, politicians and trade unions who have failed them in this particular historical moment.
As a colleague remarked last week, if there was less of an easy resort to pop-psychology then perhaps we could move to a meaningful analysis of the present state of things. In response to this, and in terms of scholars writing the history of the classes now, I would make a plea for a return to materialism.
The post Morbid symptoms in the history of class now appeared first on Left Flank.
Trump, Bannon & ‘deconstructing the administrative state’
Donald Trump with Steve Bannon
When Donald Trump’s top two White House officials, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus, appeared together at the American Conservative Union’s CPAC conference the other day, Bannon (the big ideas member of the duo) outlined the top three priorities or “lines of work” of the administration:
The first is kind of national security and sovereignty and that’s your intelligence, the Defense Department, Homeland Security. The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism and that is Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Steven Mnuchin at Treasury, Lighthizer at — at Trade, Peter Navarro, Stephen Miller, these people that are rethinking how we’re gonna reconstruct the — our trade arrangements around the world. The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state. [Emphases added]
On the third line of work, which is the subject of this post, Bannon clarified that he meant regulations created by government agencies on behalf of a “progressive Left” that is unable to pass legislation. Bannon referred primarily to business regulations, but Trump’s latest Executive Order initiates a review of regulation across all the functions of government.
What does such radical-sounding language mean? Is it simply a repackaging of exhausted conservative demands for a “small state”? Is it just a partisan attack on left-wing regulation while keeping right-wing state activity safe? Or does it mean something more profound about how the state works? These explanations seem unlikely as Trump has repeatedly promised to defend social security and ensure universal access to healthcare, alongside expanding the military and injecting massive sums into infrastructure.
The concept of the administrative state is one that some conservative thinkers are promulgating as a critique of modern US “progressivism”, of which Barack Obama is a key exponent. Indeed, Obama introduced more regulations than either of his two predecessors (see graph below). Perhaps most feted among conservative thinkers on this question has been Michael Anton, now part of Trump’s senior national security staff. Before November he wrote a series of widely-discussed articles under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, at the Claremont Review of Books, to make the case that conservatives should support Trump despite the celebrity billionaire’s obvious flaws. See here for the original article and here, here and here for his responses to critics. At the heart of Decius’s line of argument was that Trump (consciously or unconsciously) was laying out a course of action that would save Constitutional government from its subordination to the unelected and unaccountable administrative state. Hillary Clinton’s election, meanwhile, would signal a point of no return in this process.
In broad outline, this conservative critique of the administrative state targets progressivism, which is usually seen as originating with President Woodrow Wilson, and which is defined as a political movement that sees the US Constitution as having reached the limits of its effectiveness so that social progress must now be implemented by technical experts (usually government bureaucrats under the direction of a progressive administration) unencumbered by legislative politics. Thus, under Obama a gridlocked Congress was repeatedly circumvented through court decisions and federal agency policies, regulations and guidelines to extend, redefine and even override existing legislation. In a sense, these conservative thinkers have developed a critique of the modern technocratic turn in politics — of which Obama was unquestionably a practitioner. While they locate it in an ideologically-driven “progressivist” politics, this blog would see technocracy as one way that the political class has dealt with its own declining authority (in the US most spectacularly reflected in declining trust in government, and especially the legislative branch; see Pew and Gallup opinion poll data below).
Trump laid out a similar argument regarding the Supreme Court, although in much less ideological terms, in his book Crippled America:
Candidates for political office always say they’re running on their record. Unfortunately, their records are made up of them talking about what they’re going to do, rather than them getting things done. Our nation’s capital has become the center of gridlock. It seems like these days most of the energy in Washington is being spent deciding whether we’re going to keep the government operating or not. No surprise there: Washington’s been running a going-out-of-business sale for a long time. It’s no wonder that our president and Congress have such low ratings in the polls. No wonder that we’ve lost our influence and the basic respect of both our allies and enemies throughout the world. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has decided in their infinite wisdom to fill the breach by making social policy rather than defending our most precious historic assets, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We have three branches of government, but the trunk of that tree is rotting away.
A controversial case of administrative state action that Trump has rescinded (at least temporarily) is Obama’s 2016 guidance to schools on non-discrimination against transgender kids (including how to manage restroom and locker room access). The guidance claims to rest on a series of court decisions and consequent federal policy statements that interpret anti-discrimination laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act (1972); see endnote 5 of the document for a list of the relevant cases and policies. These laws explicitly oppose discrimination on the basis of sex, but were later reinterpreted by the Supreme Court and federal agencies as opposing discrimination on the basis of gender stereotypes and, later still, gender identity. Thus, over time but with no change in the wording of the law, sex discrimination (i.e. based on biological sex) has morphed into gender identity discrimination (i.e. based on subjective identity).
It is an astounding administrative state solution to a real problem — discrimination against transgender people — that effectively undermines the sex-discrimination laws it rests on. Perhaps more astounding has been the almost complete silence of US feminists on how legal protection against sexism has been undercut by this dramatic reinterpretation of clearly-worded legislation based on well-understood definitions. My point in raising this is not to dismiss the pressing need to address discrimination against trans people, but to outline the problems with the route through which this happened, and the potentially damaging consequences for the interpretation of laws that were won because of mass social struggles for equal rights.
Despite liberal claims that Trump is trying to attack the courts and other parts of the state because he is an authoritarian and/or setting up a pathway to dictatorship, it is more plausible that something else is going on here. On school bathrooms, and other issues, he frequently says these must be dealt with by democratically-elected state legislatures. Similarly, while he publicly excoriated the 9th Circuit District Court for blocking his hard-line seven-country travel ban, he has not rushed to the Supreme Court (as Obama often did) to get that ruling overturned, and instead has gone back to drafting a new Executive Order that will account for the Court’s objections.
In addition, he has nominated Neil Gorsuch to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. While Gorsuch — like Scalia — is a conservative “originalist” (i.e. someone who interprets the Constitution based on what its authors would have intended at the time they originally wrote it), he is considerably more averse to administrative state meddling in civil matters than Scalia was. That is, he tends to uphold the Constitution and laws but is less favourable to regulatory impositions made outside the legislative process, as this perceptive article by CNBC’s Jake Novak points out.
This seems to be how Trump’s anti-political positioning is playing out in the context of now running the executive branch: implementing the program he was elected on is taking precedence and the administrative state is being pared back. I’d argue the two things go together because being seen to deliver on his platform is vital to maintaining enough leverage against his political opponents to avoid being gridlocked himself. It seems clear that this path will set him on a collision course with his own side first, as their preoccupations are decidedly unlike his program, and because the Democrats are in meltdown over the election result which also put them in the minority in both houses of Congress.
Interesting in all this will be whether the more radical sections of the Left can see in Trump’s attack on the administrative state an opportunity to develop some clarity about the problem of the state more generally. Much Marxist thinking these days breaks from Marx’s insistence on replacing the state with an organisation of “freely associated producers” (or a “Commune”), and looks to retaining sections of the capitalist state, although under the control of workers or a “radical Left government”. The growing regulatory reach of state bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency is often celebrated without questioning the growth of technocratic rule.
At a lower level of state action, the Left has fallen in with many administrative state actions without being critical of the way these reflect a retreat from more democratic channels for winning policy change. The reaction to Trump’s action on the bathroom guidance is one example, seen by the Left as unquestionably regressive when in fact things are much more complicated. Similarly, while it is great that same-sex marriage is now legal across the US, there are convincing arguments that the Supreme Court had little legal basis on which to rest its power to institute such a change. The primary problem, of course, was the utter failure of US politicians to legislate for this even though it was patently clear that US society was ahead of them on the matter. Instead, they deferred to the unelected administrative state to do the job for them. The radical Left didn’t seem to pick up on the problem with decisions moving from parts of the state accountable to democratic processes (however limited) to those further from popular influence. Indeed, some improbably saw the decision as a victory for social movements that on any honest account are much weaker and less radical than those which, in the 1960s and 70s, found it much harder to win such rights.
As I alluded to in my last post, devaluation of even minimal direct popular influence over government has been widely accepted by progressives who lack the social base needed to enforce policies on the state. They have often been uncritical of actions by unelected state officials because they happen to align with left-wing policy preferences. Isolated within the Washington establishment, Trump will find it hard to avoid confrontations with the administrative state. If the Left misreads all his moves as merely reactionary and looks to the administrative state as a shortcut to defending progressive causes, it may well find itself supporting further devaluation of democracy in the name of anti-Trumpism.
***
You can catch me in a panel discussion on Trump, psychopathology and the resistance to his administration, on The Third Rail. Thanks to the host, Sera Mirzabegian, and fellow panellist Steven Glass for such a stimulating discussion.
The post Trump, Bannon & ‘deconstructing the administrative state’ appeared first on Left Flank.
Why better politics can’t make anti-politics go away
A recent think piece by Spiked!’s theoretical guru, Frank Furedi, is an attack on the idea that anti-politics is any kind of solution to the current breakdown in authority of the political system. It’s worth examining Furedi’s case because it aligns with anti-anti-politics arguments currently found on the Left in its softer and more radical variants. It is also worth dissecting to clarify what this blog means by anti-politics, and why attempts to renovate politics are likely to fail.
Furedi correctly notes that for increasing numbers of people the ways of looking at politics that dominated the 20th Century, tied up with party affiliations and traditional social group loyalties, no longer make any sense. Further, while this has been a long-run process, it is not until recently that responses utilised by political elites to manage this decline — for example the technocratic turn of the 1990s — have given way to a more serious popular response rather than the passivity of “TINA” (Margaret Thatcher’s infamous pronouncement that “there is no alternative”).
What is missing is any sense of why politics may have exhausted itself and failed to come up with sustainable new ideas for a revival. Given Furedi’s Marxist roots what is striking is the lack of a social explanation for the decline of the old political order, which was organised around rigid notions of class and nation and divided along a Left/Right continuum.
This comes through in Furedi’s critique of identity politics and the Left’s “cultural turn”. He agrees with how the social movements of the 1960s and 70s rejected some “Western” traditions; i.e. “worship of hierarchy, and patriarchal and paternalistic practices”. But he argues they threw the baby out with the bathwater by also attacking “values of loyalty, sovereignty, tolerance and liberty”. It is hard to know from his argument how one would choose which bits of these traditions to keep or eject, except for Furedi’s arbitrary lumping of the second list with the Enlightenment (itself somewhat arbitrary, given the mixed inheritance the Enlightenment bequeathed). Why are these values inherently better than the cultural or identity politics Left’s (alleged) dismissal of them?
While it is certainly true that cultural and identity politics were ways of dealing with the apparent loss of the political system as a place where one would engage to drive social change, it is not clear why an assertion of certain values is any kind of alternative to that loss.
Absent from Furedi is any sense about an anchor that might hook what is progressive and reactionary to something based in social reality.
Indeed, the values Furedi describes hark back to an illusion, the notion that in the past politics itself could drive fundamental social change in a positive sense. Such ideas were acutely criticised by Marx when the Enlightenment was still something of a going concern. Furedi’s “loyalty, sovereignty, tolerance and liberty” correspond closely with what the French revolutionaries called “the rights of man”, or what more recently are recognised as “civil rights”, at least on paper, in liberal democracies. Marx made a searing critique of the limits of such rights in his famous essay “On The Jewish Question”. In setting out the difference between merely “political emancipation” (emancipation in relation to the modern state) and “human emancipation” (genuine human freedom), Marx argued that the very basis for such rights was a society of competing self-interested individuals, which rested on the social basis of (bourgeois) private property, and which necessitated an alienation of individuals’ private lives from their lives as citizens (i.e. part of the political community):
None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves. (MECW 3: 164)
In effect Furedi is harking back to a world where Enlightenment values only got as far as the limits set by the antagonism between civil society and the state, itself underpinned by the antagonistic “war of all against all” in civil society.
It is this uncritical approach to the opposition between the social and political spheres in modern capitalist society that leads Furedi to attack anti-politics:
It is tempting to think that anti-politics offers a positive alternative to an exhausted, self-serving political establishment. In fact, it merely offers a negative critique of the status quo. Anti-politics is not directed at a particular party or interest but at the very idea of politics. Its premise is that politics as such is futile. It is sceptical of the capacity of citizens to achieve positive results through political mobilisation. It doesn’t only criticise politicians — it indirectly attacks representative democracy and the citizens who operate within it.
For Furedi it is not that there is a fundamental problem with politics but that “political clarity is lagging behind the demands of the [populist] moment” reflected in the UK vote for Brexit and the election of Trump. The problem with Trump is not so much that he is using anti-politics to leverage political power (an understandable product of the moment) but that he is too steeped in the failed politics of recent decades to renovate politics properly. Further, when Furedi contends that anti-politics “indirectly attacks representative democracy and the citizens who operate within it”, he is arguing that social change can only be properly carried out in one approved location — the very circumscribed sphere around the political state.
Furedi’s argument thus connects with two positions increasingly present in left-wing discussion of the crisis of politics. The first, put by some left-wing social democrats and most of the Marxist Left, is that we need a politics that is sufficiently populist and mass-based to have wide appeal and provide the basis for taking state power. It is this view that leads to the interminable squabbles on the Left over exactly which points of unity and which lines of division are need to carve out the correct Left project — whether it be Owen Jones’s calls for a new Left populism to challenge the populism of the Right, or arguments by US Marxists about what kind of socialist organisation is needed in the era of Sanders and Trump. One might think that Greece’s disastrous Syriza experiment (see here, here and here for an obituary) would have chastened them, but one can always argue — as Furedi does in defence of his own version — that the lines of political recomposition were not the correct ones.
The second position, more common on the soft Left, is the demand that politics is properly limited to a narrow field of activity, that of “representative politics”. It could be seen in the Australian Left’s successful campaign to prevent a plebiscite on same-sex marriage, in part justified by the claim that civil rights should be the exclusive preserve of elected representatives and not the voting public. It can also be seen in critiques of the “new populism” (for example the widely-read arguments of Jan-Werner Mueller) which identify liberal democracy as needing to be narrowed down to electing representatives and having unelected sections of the state exert “checks and balances” to restrain the will of the majority, allegedly to protect minority interests. While Furedi would reject such a narrow a conception of politics, it seems clear this would only be because he wants to revive representative politics with mass participation whereas critics of the new populism are resigned to a lack of mass participation and so want to better insulate representative structures from the public. Furedi’s fellow Spiked! contributor Brendan O’Neill has fleshed out this aspect of argument in a more recent criticism of Trump, written in the form of an open letter to the US leader:
Your pose as the anti-politician, the man who hates the political class, is getting wearisome. It has crossed the line from criticism of the establishment, which is good, into a trashing of politics itself, of the very business of people getting together and talking and voting in order to make things happen. When will your anti-politics shift into a conviction that you alone should decide how things should be run? That’s the logical conclusion to anti-politics, whether it takes the form of demagoguery (you) or technocracy (Hillary).
As spiked argued in May last year, everyone who believes in the potential of politics to change society for the better should be worried about you being president. What we need now is not cynicism or a ‘saviour’: we need a real, democratic political culture that engages as many people as possible in a debate about the future. Stop sneering at politics; be a proper politician.
For all of Spiked!’s claims to stand for human freedom, this represents a warning against letting the political order break down too much; a defence of the political order against popular sentiments that go too far.
This blog has long maintained that today’s anti-political moment is the product of a breakdown in the social bases of the political order — its parties, institutions, associated organisations and practices. The era of mass politics that started to unravel in the last few decades of the 20th Century had provided the material basis for ideas that people’s social interests could be won within the political sphere (even if, for the most part, they couldn’t). With the decline of civil society organisations (e.g. trade unions, mass parties, civic associations) that provided a social weight to the activities of the political class, that appearance has increasingly broken down, making more obvious the detachment and antagonism between the public and its political representatives.
Three separate but related phenomena become more obvious in such a period. First, the general stance of detachment from and hostility to politics in civil society becomes more widespread and intense, affecting not just those with least to gain from the system but infecting the socially privileged also, who no longer see the system as functional or responsive. Second, politicians emerge who seek to leverage anti-political sentiment for their own political projects. Such players can come from various points along the ideological spectrum (from a right-wing Trump to a centrist Beppe Grillo in Italy to the left-wing Podemos in Spain) but, in the end, they can no more drive serious social change than could the old parties whose decline they take advantage of. Both the first and second phenomena are inescapable features of modern life because of the separation between civil society and state is a permanent feature of capitalism, even if modified during a past era of mass politics. But there is no question they are more prominent now in the wealthy liberal democracies than at any time in living memory.
Third, there is the possibility of social struggles that directly challenge politics itself, by challenging the state’s rule “over against” society. While these have been at best embryonic in recent times (Spain’s 15M movement the clearest example, for all its limitations), they might be considered the beginnings of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” that Marx and Engels described social revolution as being; that is, a “revolution against the state”.
Only the third phenomenon can be considered to point in a progressive direction, precisely because it is about society asserting itself against the existence of a separate political sphere. To fulfil their promise such struggles would also have to overcome the capitalist social relations that pit individuals in civil society against each other, but that is a discussion for another post.
Furedi argues: “The radical supporters of anti-politics overlook that the flipside of anti-politics is TINA — an acceptance of the world as it is. For without politics people are reduced to passive objects, shaped by fate.” He gives no sense that social forces are needed to profoundly change society, and that political activity underpinned by social passivity simply reproduces the current malaise. Hence he collapses into a tired and unconvincing call for a “battle of ideas” for the values he prefers. More bizarrely he claims that the dead weight of institutions like “schools, universities, popular culture, the media” is more powerful than the countercultural populist surge. Perhaps that argument would’ve rung true 30 years ago, but if the Brexit and Trump votes showed anything it was a lack of deference to the expertise and cultural authority of “schools, universities, popular culture, the media” that was in operation — a fact Furedi acknowledges but quickly forgets.
The problem is not the need for a battle of ideas to shape a better political culture all the better to involve the mass of people, but the need for social forces to move in their own interests — not to reinject the political sphere with some socially-relevant justification, but to end the existence of an alien political sphere altogether. When Furedi argues that people should once more feel that “being a citizen matters”, he is effectively enforcing what Marx called “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right”, where human freedom is reduced to merely political emancipation. This is a formula pitched at the development of a new political class, more sensitive and culturally attuned to the banal capitalist values of the masses it rules over.
It would be a tragedy if future social struggles ended up accepting such profoundly self-limiting strictures.
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What should the radical Left expect from a Trump presidency?
Getting straight to work
GUEST POST BY DAVID RYLANCE
So, what might we expect out of a Trump presidency?
For Trump to maintain his prime source of power, he will not only need to uphold his existing anti-political position — which only got him over the line; no more or less — but will have to augment and expand it. The quickest and most sure-fire way in which this will be dead on arrival is if he proceeds to act only as a rubber stamp for the GOP agenda. If he cedes his freedom of action in relation to them in this way, or is otherwise quickly corralled, those who are taking heart in his relative lack of popular approval will find themselves rewarded. If he ends up serving the GOP, rather than forcing the GOP to serve him (even where the two already agree ideologically), this will substantialise into a sharp, fatal withdrawal of his authority. An anti-Trump movement would thrive in such an environment because it would be pushing at an open door.
But if he doesn’t roll over and is not quickly contained, as I would forecast is more likely, what precisely might we expect out of him on core policy fronts? Here are some guesses as to possible developments on four of the key areas.
Healthcare
If Trump were to go ahead and force, as he says he will, the private insurance and pharmaceutical companies to lose their protected monopoly status in price negotiations and cross-state competition restrictions, and he isn’t simultaneously offering a universal state health care single-payer program as an alternative way for them to continue to make an assured (even if reduced) profit through the state, those companies will go into a massive crisis. Under ordinary circumstances, that would be enough to ensure those monopoly controls would be retained.
This, unlike that of a regular politician, is not Trump’s concern. The extent to which it becomes his concern is the extent to which he becomes just another politician. I suspect that Trump will propose what Obama didn’t. Basically, a competitive private health market operating across state lines, with a public option. The public option might be capped based on income and wealth, and largely function as a takeover of the Medicaid expansion.
If he gets this done, his popularity is liable to explode. He will have traversed existing ideological antagonisms and delivered an outcome that maintains expanded public coverage without negating the upper petit bourgeois and bourgeois wish to keep the private health insurance options alive. For now. The in-built crisis it will leave for the privates will, more likely than not, create a mess that the political class might even have no option left but to solve through a move to a universal single-payer.
Foreign policy
It’s too early to assess what Trump’s general direction is going to be on this front. So far as it goes, just as Obama’s independence in relation to factions of the political class (as well as his technocratic “resource-rational” mode of navigating the state) enabled him to administer the empire with an obliquely interventionist military distance, Trump is even more freed up from the push and pull of state interests when it comes to these questions.
Despite the stuff about his having his finger agitatedly on the button, I expect we are more like to see a softer touch in terms of “boots on the ground” military commitments, continuing the Obama years, but with perhaps an enhanced brutality in the conduct of the kind of surgical interventions which Obama signaturised with his drone empire. I would also speculate that the greatest likelihood of major conflict would evolve out of either a stratagem of his opposition for trying to assert greater direct state control over the Executive, or as an outcome of needing to find a solution to the debilitation of US capitalism’s functioning, which Trump’s own efforts to find a temporary fix to its stagnation might induce.
Economy
Right now, there seems to be a view forming that Trump is going to be a Bush II do-over, only megascale. But Bush II’s administration imposed its fiscal policy out of a combination of ideological indifference to the cost of tax cuts and an inability to force through the spending cuts he ideologically would’ve wanted to fund that, especially to Social Security. The “crisis of state debt” in the tax-cut regime, the corporate welfare system, and the paying of private companies to dispense what would otherwise be state services was always engineered to be the basis for claiming “we’re broke, we can’t afford welfare”, and to force the “exigencies” to pay for the spending.
Trump’s statements on the debt indicate he doesn’t care much ideologically about all that. In both directions, it seems: he doesn’t hold the view that the debt can no longer be expanded and he doesn’t have a fixation on hyper-ideologically shrinking the (social) state to pay back that debt.* On the contrary, his focus is much more on figuring out how to engineer a political situation in which creditors simply must accept whatever he does in terms of spending because the alternative to not accepting it is that they, too, will risk losing everything. In fact, I suspect this is part of why most of the political class is banking on Trump to be reined in by the GOP Congress and/or the state.
Meanwhile, prior to his recent remarks about printing money — which, as C. Derick Varn ironically noted, could almost be said to point in a Modern Monetary Theory direction — Trump caused controversy when, asked about how he would handle spending, he said: “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.” Or, in other words, though it was walked back tactically, it seems Trump is basically extending the “too big to fail” principle to the US state itself. I have no clue how that’s going to go, or if it even will go anywhere. I expect that Trump might be thinking of using the military spending he promises as a stealth stimulus and jobs program, as this will be politically untenable for the GOP to refuse. I also assume his efforts to try and act upon the trouble US capitalism is in could well bring on the crisis it’s meaning to escape. But that crisis might be military rather than economic, and might come after a Trump administration (under, say, a Democrat).
Social policy
I would wager that Trump’s susceptibility to being drawn to a programmatic reactionariness in respect to social policies will tend to find solid ground proportional to how much these can be captured by anti-Trump political positioning. Hence, the more that anti-discrimination units, gender and racial equality programs, state funded outreach activities and packages, the education system, and so on, become explicitly self-politicised in a singular “resistance” to Trump, the more they can expect Trump to be driven back toward the GOP agenda, and the more they can expect that agenda to be imposed by Trump not as orthodox GOP ideological fixations but as “pro-Trumpism” — as an assertion of his anti-political authority against a “special interest” captured political class. I think that the biggest problem with the “anti-normalisation” and “radicalisation” (more accurately, pro-polarisation) mind-set of the Left, in this regard, is refusal to recognise that the more it engages in associating these policy sectors, funds, and provisions closely with its activism as part of the political sphere, the less those very sectors, funds, and provisions can present themselves as too socially essential for Trump to safely attack.
Quietism is not being recommended here, but, rather, a deprioritisation of the purely political-class and activist-strata effort to “confront” Trump at an abstracted remove from any specific assaults on people’s interests as they emerge. Better to strategise an emphasis — whether it be, in more liberal and soft Left terms, through the media or state-internal channels, or, in more radical terms, through contentious acts of lawbreaking and disobedience — on exerting pressure on Trump in a way that undermines his anti-political authority, by driving home how ideological it would be to deprive people of that aid. Especially ordinary, non-political people. And, extra-especially, Trump voters themselves; not just the “white working class” ones — given that “Trump voters” is now taken by the Left as a virtual synonym for that social group — but, rather, that small-yet-extremely-conjuncturally-important group of non-whites, as well as women, who went for him, and who carry the authority of being able to, if their interests are attacked, speak as burned Trump supporters.
It would follow that the continuing anathematisation of and contempt towards said voters would need to be rethought. A truly radical strategy would demand a certain ideological de-cathexis about the assumed composition, “locked” affinities, and projected attachments of those who went for Trump, or didn’t feel moved enough by the ostensibly massive threat he posed to back Clinton. Greater focus on the so-called “depoliticised” public — not to ideologise them (i.e. “win them to Marxism”, “queer radicalism”, “feminism”, etc.) but to engage them in specific actions related to their direct self-interest on any given point, with the wider and broader political changes they undergo, if any, secondary to that — would seem to me to have the most strategic efficacy. This is so given there is no mass organised framework or institution-creating force grounded in mass social activity, and which might be able to bind people into a mass politically-structured project anew, let alone one so refined and purpose-fit it could respond to a project of deposing an incumbent purely on a left-political “wokeness” about his extra order of evil (no matter how qualified that putative wokeness is about the general evil out of which this particular evil has emerged.)
Though Trump has nothing like the popular base Obama did, the politically woke approach won’t fly any better than did the Tea Party’s frustrated efforts to catalyse a far-right driven anti-Obama social “rebellion” through their fixation on him as an extra order of evil over “norms” of prior presidencies. It will simply not be able to escape looking transparently ideological to the rest of society in the way that the Tea Party formation did outside its own ranks. And it would find itself equally as frustrated — just as incapable, even with those, outside the political sphere and its followers, who didn’t vote for Trump, didn’t vote at all, and who know there is nothing socially emancipatory to be gained from Trump, to achieve a mass purchase.
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* Though it remains to be seen what he might slash out of the state’s spending — not for purposes of “balancing the budget” but for instrumental reasons of maintaining a pledge on solvency through the ritual of cuts to “waste”, such as regulatory agencies, or “the superfluous”, such as arts funding.
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