Trump’s erratic presidency is a manifestation, not the cause, of democratic decay. The unfolding political crisis will outlast him. So must the resistance.

Jerome Roos: It’s been a year since Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States of America — and we’re already exhausted. Exhausted by the endless stream of sexist and racist bigotry pouring out of his hideous face and Twitter feed. Exhausted by the rapid succession of 24-hour scandals, one outrage sweeping another from the headlines before the immensity of the previous one has even begun to properly sink in.

Exhausted by the immature personal grudges and individual fallings-out that are constantly played out in public amidst the gratuitous threats of nuclear annihilation. Exhausted by the gas-lighting narcissism, the power-hungry egotism and the self-aggrandizing vanity of a multi-billionaire businessman who has never known anything but public adulation for his inherited wealth. Exhausted, frankly, by the very realization — recurring on a daily basis — that this man-child’s maniacal delusions have actually been confirmed, insofar as he himself is concerned, by his election to the most powerful office in the world.

Nevertheless, amidst the storm of chaos that Donald Trump has unleashed upon the world, it becomes ever more necessary to take some distance from the headlines and reflect upon the broader meaning of the past year in American and global politics. For me personally, three observations stand out.

1) The limits of Trump’s “declarative politics”

When Trump was first elected, many warned of his authoritarian ambitions and the threat of incipient fascism in America. In left-liberal circles, in particular, comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini were rife. There was always some merit to these concerns, as white supremacists clearly felt emboldened by Trump’s “America first” rhetoric, and the brazen response of various alt-right and neo-Nazi groups has had far-reaching, even lethal consequences. But if his first year in office has confirmed anything, it is that Trump — while certainly a vile and dangerous racist who revels in hate speech against historically oppressed groups — was always far more interested in promoting himself than in a disciplined ideological commitment to a cause external to his own self-advancement.

In fact, what stands out is Trump’s almost utter incapacity to move beyond what I call a narrow declarative politics — a superficial form of national-populism that panders to prevalent xenophobic and anti-establishment sentiment but relies almost entirely on discursive interventions, while making little systematic attempt to transform electoral promises or everyday bluster into tangible policy outcomes or new power configurations. In saying this, I certainly do not mean to downplay the material consequences of Trump’s reactionary rhetoric or the disastrous policies he did manage to push through over the past year. But the fact that the president celebrated the first anniversary of his tenure amidst a government shutdown, even as his party controls both houses, is indicative of the isolated and relatively powerless position in which he finds himself.

On the election trail, Trump repeatedly promised to “drain the swamp” and rid Washington of “special interests.” His erstwhile chief strategist, the now-estranged Steve Bannon, even vowed to “deconstruct the administrative state.” Instead of presenting a rupture with the status quo, however, Trump has actually presided over its radicalization. Behind the scenes, the real power center in his administration continues to lie with Wall Street and Big Oil — just as it did under previous Republican and Democratic presidents. Far from descending into national-socialism, the United States remains governed by the same belligerent billionaire class that thrived under Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and Obama —always  pursuing further tax cuts and financial deregulation.

This is not to say that nothing has changed. As I argued after the elections, Trump’s victory speaks to a profound legitimation crisis of the neoliberal establishment, and to a broader incapacity of the United States to reproduce its hegemonic role in the liberal world order it created in the wake of World War II. Domestically, the elite consensus that cemented the politics of both major parties over the past four decades — especially around the issue of trade liberalization — is under severe attack from within, and internationally US power is clearly on the wane. Trump represents a desperate attempt to reverse the latter process by shattering the former consensus: countering America’s decline by reasserting control over its national borders and replacing the liberal internationalism of the Clintons and Obamas with a new white nationalism.

Clearly, the consequences of this reversal have been most keenly felt by migrants, who rightly fear being deported by the new administration. Yet, without defending Trump, it is important to point out that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers actually deported fewer people in 2017 than they did under Obama in 2016. So far, the domestic political implications of Trump’s “populist” earthquake have therefore been more limited than is generally acknowledged. It is mostly Trump’s declarations — his impulsive tweets and offensive statements — that defy the established liberal order; when it comes to the material constitution of US politics, the center still holds.

2) The complicity of the liberal #resistance

This brings me to the second and closely related observation: the extent to which the shallow “resistance” of the liberal establishment has actually played into the hands of the far right. Just as Trump’s defiance operates mostly at the discursive level, so the Democratic Party leadership has done little to move beyond superficial declarations of indignation. When it comes to actual policy measures, leading Democrats have repeatedly enabled the Republicans to pursue their reactionary agenda — most recently voting along with their GOP counterparts to further extend the president’s vast surveillance authority. As Glenn Greenwald astutely pointed out in The Intercept, “the same Democrats who denounce Trump as a lawless treasonous authoritarian just voted to give him vast warrantless spying powers.” So much for the #resistance.

Moreover, by focusing almost all of their attention on Trump as a person, wilfully overlooking their own responsibility for shaping the systemic political and economic conditions that brought him to power, centrist Democrats have entirely missed the bigger story: the fact that no one really trusts them anymore to solve the country’s most pressing problems. As I noted right after the elections, Trump did not win because he was popular — Hillary lost because she was extremely unpopular. What has been most astonishing over the past year has been the Democrats’ outright refusal to recognize this most basic fact. Instead of looking inwards for answers and assuming part of the blame for Trump’s rise to power, the best they could come up with was to reinvent a set of Cold War scare stories about Russian interference in US political life.

Interestingly, the liberal opposition has thereby chosen to operate its #resistance strategy almost entirely on the terrain of right-wing politics, using the president’s “national treason” and “mental incompetence ”— rather than his overt sexism, racism and classism — as the primary prongs in their attempt to push him from office. By drawing the battle lines this way, the Democratic establishment is already shaping the terms of debate for the post-Trump era: instead of laying the groundwork for a wider assault on patriarchy, white supremacy and the concentrated power of the billionaire class, the liberal elite aims to present Trump as a mere aberration within a broader legal and political framework of otherwise fair, sound and functional political institutions.

The liberal media, for its part, has been happy to play along with this game. Once identified by Steve Bannon as the authentic “opposition party,” major centrist broadcasters and newspapers like CNN and the New York Times are certainly trying their best to discredit the president — but their obsessive preoccupation with his personal life and his outrageous public statements belies a similar short attention span as Trump’s. The media’s constantly renewed sense of indignation is simply being absorbed into the giant spectacle that Trump himself continues to feed; the media simply responds, always on the back foot, to the latest Twitter outrage. Almost every other day a new scandal hits the headlines — in the past two weeks alone we have gone from “a bigger nuclear button” to allegations of advanced dementia, from “shithole countries” to hush money for porn stars — but none of these stories seem to stick for longer than 48 hours before the media collectively piles in on the next big distraction.

The result is that Trump and his liberal opposition end up holding each other up in perfect suspension — both effectively paralyzed by the inflexible and increasingly ossified institutions of representative democracy, and both exceedingly frustrated by their relative impotence and failure to advance in their stated objectives. It is always Groundhog Day at the White House. Stuck in a political deadlock of sorts, it is precisely the relative powerlessness of the president and his liberal opposition that perpetuates the overwhelming sense of crisis. The same mutual “impotence” will also make for a particularly dangerous situation in the years ahead— for despite the institutional stalemate in which he finds himself, Trump still has that “bigger nuclear button” on his desk.

3) The enduring nature of the political crisis

This finally brings me to the third observation, which is that Trump is not the cause but a consequence of the broader democratic crisis in which American politics—and, indeed, politics around the world—currently finds itself. Surely his presidency will accelerate and intensify the contradictions at work here, but the roots of the present calamity run much deeper and will outlast the sitting president by years, if not decades. Trump, in short, is not just a dysfunctional aberration within an otherwise functional political order, nor does he alone constitute an existential threat to the survival of American democracy. Rather, he is a morbid symptom of a system entering into an advanced state of decay.

It follows that the opposition to the president and his reactionary brand of far-right national populism cannot limit itself to the same level of declarative politics at which Trump himself operates. The shallow #resistance rhetoric of the centrist Democratic establishment will prove wholly incapable of redressing the broader systemic crisis. Even if Trump is unseated from office, either through impeachment or in the 2020 elections, the same popular discontents that brought him to power will continue to fester and eat away at the perceived legitimacy of the old political elites and representative institutions. To respond convincingly to these dynamics of democratic decay will require a degree of social, political and economic transformation that no mainstream politician in the country is willing to publicly countenance at this point.

The left, for its part, if it ever gains power, will encounter many of the same challenges and limitations that Trump and his white-nationalist minions are currently running in to: from a hostile media and entrenched party bureaucracy to inflated popular expectations and the rigor mortis of existing institutions. Moving from a politics of opposition to a real movement that can withstand the counter-attacks of capital, the far right and the neoliberal establishment to abolish the present state of things will require a level of political organization and strategic thinking on a scale far beyond anything currently found on the left—even among the well-intentioned camp of Bernie Sanders supporters.

There are therefore important lessons to be drawn from the experience of the past year. The declarative politics of left-populism, with its emphasis on discourse and its grand promises of a reinvigorated social-democratic politics, will likely falter in the absence of a broader campaign to rebuild popular power from below. Socialism, even in its innocent Nordic garden variety, cannot simply be declared into existence after wresting the decaying institutions of liberal democracy from Trump’s tiny hands. To chart an emancipatory way out of the current standoff between the authoritarian neoliberal establishment and an authoritarian nationalist president will require a much more extensive commitment towards mobilizing popular mass movements, countering political fragmentation and instituting new forms of radical democracy from below.

I contend that the crisis we are living through is of a general and structural nature. The social, political and economic institutions that underpinned the postwar world order, enabling the triumph of global capitalism and the consolidation of liberal democracy, are now in a process of decomposition. It would be very dangerous to reduce these world-historical developments to the inanities of a single person, no matter how vile or threatening they may be. Trump’s erratic presidency is a manifestation, not the cause, of the wider democratic decay that has accompanied the neoliberal turn of the past four decades. The unfolding political crisis will outlast him. So must the resistance.

Originally published in ROAR Magazine

Photo by IoSonoUnaFotoCamera

The post The dangers of focusing all our attention on Donald Trump appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In fact Michael Arnovitz (“Thinking About Hillary — A Plea for Reason,” The Policy, June 12) comes right out and says that, because the Right and Left criticize Clinton for opposite, mutually inconsistent reasons, her critics must be wrong — presumably meaning that splitting the difference between them puts her in the Baby Bear position at the exact center, which is “just right.”

The problem is that But in fact the positions taken by those two parties are neither mutually exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. And the great majority of issues they agree on — the fundamental structural assumptions of corporate capitalism and American global hegemony — never become visible as “issues” at all because they’re not in dispute.

The “two sides” reflect the range of acceptable disagreement within a ruling class that shares most of its interests and assumptions in common. In fact even bringing up the concept of a ruling class, or of the basic structure of our system as reflecting the interests of that ruling class, is enough to make Chris Matthews clutch his pearls over “tinfoil hats.”

So that means both “centrism” and “extremism” are defined entirely in terms of the status quo. A centrist is one who implicitly accepts the normality and legitimacy of the existing system and its power structures. Any radical structural critique that looks into the role of class interest, race or gender privilege or the exercise of unaccountable power in its creation, is “extremist.”

“Moderates” are defined entirely in terms of how closely they adhere to a system regarded as normal, natural and inevitable in its fundamental nature, and “extremists” by how far they deviate from it.

Any “reform” that involves tinkering around the edges of a power structure without fundamentally changing it, and can be implemented by the same classes of people who are running the present system, will be classified as “moderate.” Any proposal that involves changing the fundamental power-structure and disempowering the current ruling class is “radical.”

Radical structural analysis refuses to treat the existing state of things as something that’s “just that way,” or “what most people want.” It sees the exercise of power for what it is — being in the interest of some at the expense of others. And it is therefore labeled “extremist” by the “centrists” who hold power.

Some of the most ardent centrists — like the smarmy Chris Matthews — dismiss any such radical structural critiques as “conspiracy theories.” On a late 2010 episode of the Matthews show, a guest who opposed the new TSA scanners and associated peep-or-grope regime claimed that the scanners were actually ineffective and mentioned that a number of high-ranking Homeland Security officials had stock in the company that made them. Matthews was near-apoplectic in denouncing this “conspiracy theory” — despite his own 30-second spots on MSNBC quoting Eisenhower on the Military-Industrial Complex.

So we wind up with a policy-making elite who limit themselves to a set of alternatives ranging from M to N, governed by what C. Wright Mills called “Crackpot Realism.” As Buckminster Fuller put it: They’re trying to solve problems with the same level of thinking that created those problems. Ivan Illich described such people’s approach as “attempting to solve a crisis by escalation.”

A good example of the latter is urban planners, who attempt to solve the traffic congestion caused by car-centered monoculture development by building new freeways and bypasses — which simply generate more traffic to and from the new suburbs and strip malls that grow up at every cloverleaf along the new subsidized highways. Or the American national security state, which deals with terrorism (the product of blowback from previous imperial intervention) through new interventions which generate even more terrorism.

Although centrists see themselves as the “adults in the room,” who see what must be done and don’t draw back from doing it, they also pride themselves on being the “real” humanitarians and idealists. To quote Michael Lofgren:

The benefit of crackpot realism is that the ordinary prudence of advocating avoidance of war can be depicted either as sloppy and unrealistic sentimentalism or as the irresponsible avoidance of the burdens and duties of a superpower in a dangerous world. In its refined form, crackpot realism wears the camouflage of idealism: military invasions are really aimed at humanitarian rescue, spreading democracy, or peacekeeping. In those cases, the crackpot realist can even affect a morally censorious tone: How can any serious person be in favor of letting Saddam Hussein remain president of Iraq? Or Bashir al Assad in Syria? Or whoever the Hitler du jour might be.

Centrism is utterly unself-critical, insofar as it ignores its own status as a component in a legitimizing ideology. Any system of power includes a cultural reproduction apparatus that tends to create the kinds of “human resources” who accept as normal and given the structure of power under which they live.

As part of a legitimizing ideology, centrist Horseshoe Theory is guilty of — as @NerbieDansers, a friend on Twitter, pointed out — “constant erasure of violence for which the reasonable, moderate center is responsible”; instead it “turns violence into a function of mere distance from a mythic peaceful center.” The system represented by the center is not simply “responsible” for violence; massive levels of violence have been, and are, entailed in establishing and maintaining the system of power that centrists recognize as normal.

The present system is not some natural or inevitable fact of nature that “just happened,” because it makes the most sense to do things that way. It is a thing with a beginning, a history — and (with apologies to Marx) it’s a history written in letters of blood and fire. As I have written elsewhere:

Bear in mind that the corporate-state power structure didn’t come about naturally or spontaneously.  It came about through conscious, massive application of political power over the past 150 years.

From the Gilded Age on, the state intervened massively in the market to create a society dominated by giant, centralized organizations like government agencies and corporations, and later by centralized state education, large universities, and nonprofit foundations. When this state-created and state-subsidized centralized industrial economy became plagued with chronic excess capacity and underconsumption, the state turned toward policies to keep it going.  This included a domestic economy centered on federal spending to absorb surplus capital through such massive state spending projects as the Interstate Highway System, a military-industrial complex that ate up huge amounts of surplus industrial output, and a foreign policy aimed at forcibly incorporating the markets and resources of the entire planet as a sink for surplus capital and output.

At the time the system was being imposed by the state, there was large-scale resistance by a general population that didn’t accept it as normal.  From the 1870s through WWI, a major part of the population refused to accept as normal a situation in which they worked as wage labors for large authoritarian hierarchies.  Movements such as the farm populist movement and the Knights of Labor amounted to near-insurrections, and such measures as the post-Haymarket repression and Cleveland’s suppression of the Pullman Strike constituted counter-revolution.

After the insurrection was defeated, the white-collar bureaucrats controlling corporate and state hierarchies adopted an educational system aimed at processing people who accepted the structure of power as normal.  The official public education movement, advocates of “100% Americanism,” and the like, aimed at creating “human resources” who were “adjusted” to accept authoritarianism and hierarchy as normal, and to “comply” with any orders coming from an apparatchik behind a desk — whether in a classroom, factory, or government office.

But we don’t have to look at history to see how much violence is at the heart of the system that these “reasonable centrists” take for granted. The system requires massive ongoing violence for its preservation. Just pick up a copy of William Blum’s KILLING HOPE and look at the United States’ post-WWII record of invading countries, overthrowing governments, backing military coups and sponsoring death squads. And the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has prevailed for the past few decades has been defined around the legitimacy of such intervention. Even so-called “liberals” share the consensus that, as Chomsky put it, “America owns the world.”

The “reasonable centrists,” for their part, are typically shameless apologists for this consensus and the bloody intervention it promotes. The current news is full of examples of what garbage human beings these “adults in the room” really are.

At Business Insider, Josh Barro (“Donald Trump  and the GOP’s crisis,” May 3) contrasts Trump to “adults in the room” like Jeb Bush. The first three of Trump’s deviations from the alleged moderate orthodoxies of the donor class that Barro mentions are “opposing free trade, promising to protect entitlements from cuts, [and] questioning the value of America’s commitment to military alliances.” The fourth, challenging the growing acceptance of transgender people, is common to most of the GOP. So in practice, the main differences the Republican “adults in the room” have with Trump are his rejection of neoliberal orthodoxy on the global political hegemony of the U.S. and the corporate order it enforces, not his godawful social views.

Neera Tanden — head of Center for American Progress, Hillary Clnton ally and Clinton appointee to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee — in 2013 stated on Twitter in regard to Syria that “while I don’t want to be the world’s policeman, an unpoliced world is dangerous. The US may be the only adult in the room left.”

Clinton herself, most centrists’ beau ideal of an adult in the room, associates herself with figures like Rahm Emanuel, who as head of the Democratic National Campaign Committee denied national party campaign funds in 2006 to candidates who opposed the Iraq war, and as Chicago mayor has run political cover for a police illegal detention site and promoted school charterization on the largest scale seen outside New Orleans. She voted to authorize Bush’s war in Iraq and regurgitated his lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” in order to maintain her future viability as a politican. As Obama’s Secretary of State, she was consistently the strongest voice in favor of military intervention as a tool of policy; she was the most influential voice behind Obama’s reluctant intervention in Libya, and to this day regrets that she did not persuade him to intervene in Syria full-scale. More recently she has not only defended Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity in Gaza, but promised to take America’s relationship with Netanyahu — not just Israel, but Netanyahu — to “the next level.”

Clinton recently devoted an entire speech (after praising her hosts, the American Legion — which started out as a right-wing paramilitary fighting Wobblies in the street) to smarmy self-congratulations that “the United States stands up to dictators” and promises to continue to maintain the world’s largest military to meet all the “threats” out there. This despite the fact that she actively encouraged a right-wing military coup in Honduras, and wears with pride the endorsement of her vacation buddy, war criminal Henry Kissinger, who was instrumental in Pinochet’s overthrow of Allende and the sweep of the entire South American continent by military dictatorships, as well as the invasion and genocide in East Timor.

As for all those “threats,” Clinton and Tanden share the same operating assumptions as Henry Kissinger and the rest of the bipartisan National Security establishment — a set of assumptions summarized by Chomsky’s statement quoted above that “the United States owns the world.” It is for the United States to unilaterally define what size military is sufficient for a given country’s “legitimate defensive needs,” while it defines its own “defensive” needs in terms of the ability to project offensive force anywhere in the world and successfully invade and defeat any other country. It is for the United States to unilaterally define “aggression” anywhere in the world, to define as a “threat” the capability to successfully defend against an American attack, and to define as “defense” encircling any such country, on the other side of the world, with offensive military bases.

The United States is the hegemonic power which upholds a global political, economic and military order established at the end of WWII, which exists to integrate the markets and natural resources of the Global South into the needs of Western corporate capital; and in the parlance of the U.S. National Security elite, any country which attempts to challenge that order by seceding from it is a “threat.”

In the name of upholding this global order against “threats,” the United States since WWII has invaded and/or overthrown the governments of more countries than any other empire in history, backed military coups and death squads, with a death toll of multiple millions.

This is what your “adults in the room” have done. They have constructed a system of power, first domestically and then globally, the main purpose of which is to extract surplus labor from us to feed the rentiers they represent. In enforcing this system of power, they have inflected megadeaths on the world, and have no compunctions against inflicting more. The “adults in the room” are monsters. It’s time to take away their plaything — the American state — which they have used to wreak this destruction and mayhem on the world, and to make sure nobody else ever wields it again.

Citations to this article:

• Carson, Kevin, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?”, Libertarian Alliance Blog, Sept. 15, 2016
• Carson, Kevin, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?”, The Gilmer Mirror, Sept. 15, 2016
• Carson, Kevin, “Why Are the ‘Adults in the Room’ So Awful?”, Augusta Free Press, Sept. 15, 2016

The post On Centrism: Why Are the “Adults in the Room” So Awful? appeared first on P2P Foundation.