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

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This logic of expansion and conquest undoubtedly changes the relationship between humans and their environment. In this context, the “debate” over climate change actually becomes a matter of human survival. Those who entertain climate change as a question at all have already, maybe unknowingly, chosen a side. The fact is that climate change will create more refugees and forced human migrations; it will lead to the murder of environmental activists around the world and start new resource wars; it will spread disease and destabilize everything in its path — and more. Unless capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for natural resources and the fossil fuel combustion that powers it is abandoned, the Earth will be forced to do away with humans cancerously plundering the carbon energy it has stored over millions of years of natural history.

What is most unfortunate is that capitalism, which has multi-layered discriminations encoded within it — racism, sexism, classism, and so on — affects how thoroughly people are capable of bracing for the damages wrought by climate change. Though nature is indiscriminate in its wrath, the sustained ability to protect oneself from rising temperatures and natural disasters is a privilege not all can afford. Those who are already harmed under the pitiless whims of capital are doubly hurt by the lack of protection afforded to them for life in an increasingly turbulent environment. The Global South is much more likely to feel the brunt of climate change, despite contributing much less to causing it. But even in the world’s wealthiest nations, the poor and working classes are much more vulnerable to ecological devastation.

If the people who understand the gravity of the situation want this state of affairs to cease, then the system of capitalism and the egregious consumption of the so-called First World itself must cease. That which puts all of us at risk cannot be tolerated. The vast satisfactions in wealth hoarded by a few does not outweigh the needs of the many suffering the consequences every day, as the Earth deals with malignant human behavior. The systemic drive towards excess that is pushing the planet’s carrying capacity to the brink must be brought to a halt throughout the world, but especially in the empire that exemplifies excess best: the United States of America.

The Myth of “The Nanny State”

Ever since Donald Trump became president, crisis and disarray have been regular in an extraordinary sense. Not that the United States hasn’t always been this way; it has been for many of those oppressed within this society. But the dramatic events unfolding today have been very confronting for those who are only now realizing that progress — or the things that represent it symbolically — can be done away with overnight.

In the midst of an onslaught of draconian far-right legislation, the liberal establishment has failed to muster a convincing rebuff. This is due in part to complicity in the shift towards the right, and in part due to a more general crisis of confidence within liberalism. But what is also failing today is the state itself. At a time when environmental, social and economic crises are running out of control amid authoritarian overreach, the state seems to be in a moment of purposeful neglect and disarray. This is leading people to take the response to the confluence of crises into their own hands, raising the question of the state’s raison d’être to begin with.

When former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he said that President Trump’s choices for his cabinet would be aimed at “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon suggested that the primary goal should be to limit the regulatory agencies and bureaucratic entities getting in the way of the administration’s self-styled economic nationalism. “The way the progressive left runs,” Bannon went on to say, “is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.” Years before this, in 2013, he had already told a writer for the Daily Beast that “I’m a Leninist … Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Without overemphasizing the irony and jocular misleadingness of the latter self-comparison, Bannon does raise a key question for the far right: what’s the use in a state? While such a question could potentially be put to progressive use in some hands, it is definitely dangerous in these. For the right, the question of the state’s usefulness is answered by the assertion of dominance and the infliction of violence — something that is clearly distressing for those of us resisting oppression. But at the same time, right-wing propaganda and talking points also depict the state as a “nanny state,” or an overprotective manifestation of liberal charity. Clearly, this characterization is as stale as it is untrue. The very idea that liberalism itself is charitable is a blatant falsification, yet the far right continues to disseminate this myth in its unending desire to maximize the state’s fascistic potential while depriving it of its limited welfare functions.

Austerity measures — something the world has become all too familiar with in recent years —provide us with the brutal confirmation that we never actually needed to dispel the far right’s propagandistic falsehoods. As governments around the world cut back on services, regulations and agencies that are meant to benefit social welfare and the public good, the trope of overzealous liberal government is shown to be untrue. Austerity threatens to undermine the very things that are supposed to make societies peaceable. But as consistently seems to happen in a world dominated by capitalism, those who are most vulnerable bear the brunt.

Dismantling Progress and Protection

In 2016, Oxfam announced that world’s 62 richest billionaires held as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. In 2017, this number decreased significantly to just eight people because new information came to light showing that poverty in China and India are much worse than previously thought, widening the gap between the ultra-wealthy elite and the bottom 50 percent. While this information is certainly beyond troubling, capitalism largely continues its path of destruction without being disturbed itself.

A slew of hurricanes hitting the Caribbean in 2017 made the world pause to consider the dangers of climate chaos. Many of the conversations that took place as a result of the back-to-back destruction wrought by hurricanes Irma, Jose and Maria focused on the threat of a disturbed environment. Under President Trump, these threats are only further exacerbated. As someone who campaigned on rejuvenating the coal industry and who has actively worked to transform climate denialist sentiments into government policy, Trump is one of the worst presidents anyone could hope for at a time of pressing climate disaster. With regard to the aforementioned “deconstruction” of the regulatory state that Banon spoke of, Trump accomplished major strides at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Under the regressive guidance of Scott Pruitt, a long-time fossil fuel defender, the EPA has seen absurd government moves to destabilize the very purposes of the agency itself in favor of corporate interests.

Pruitt built his career off of suing the EPA as attorney general for the state of Oklahoma. Under Trump, he can now secure his ultimate favor to corporate interests by dismantling the state agency altogether. Everything is up for grabs and the agency has become increasingly secretive about its agenda. The New York Times reported complaints of career EPA employees working under Pruitt, explaining that “they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is,” as well as doors being “frequently locked.” It has even been said that “employees have to have an escort to gain entrance” to Mr. Pruitt’s quarters, as well as some being told not bring cell phones or take notes in meetings. The Washington Post recently reported that the EPA spent almost $25,000.00 to soundproof his work area. For a state agency tasked with protecting the environment, the actions being carried out sound more in line with that of federal law enforcement or intelligence at the FBI or CIA.

The example of Pruitt is one of many hinting at an increasingly restructured state, in which right-wing corporate forces that once fought regulation now become the regulator themselves, showing how the will of capital will always fulfill itself in this system. At the same time, as the trifecta of terrible storms hit the Caribbean and the Southern US coastline, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) displayed a similar lack of social concern. In response to the lackluster response of the authorities, local communities were left to fend for themselves, with only a few celebrity figures tasking themselves with taking action. At a very emotional press conference, Mayor Carmen Cruz of San Juan compared the neglect taking place to genocide and shed tears demanding more help for US citizens in Puerto Rico: “we are dying here. And I cannot fathom the thought that the greatest nation in the world cannot figure out logistics for a small island of 100 miles by 35 miles long.”

A U.S. flag hangs in front of a burning structure in Black Forest, Colo., June 12, 2013. The structure was among 360 homes that were destroyed in the first two days of the fire, which had spread to 15,000 acres by June 13. The Black Forest Fire started June 11, 2013, northeast of Colorado Springs, Colo., burning scores of homes and forcing large-scale evacuations. The Colorado National Guard and U.S. Air Force Reserve assisted in firefighting efforts. (DoD photo by Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, U.S. Air Force/Released)

Citizenship, expectation and failure

The emphasis on Puerto Ricans during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the other storms often gives special attention to their Americanness. Despite the fact that the entire Caribbean was hit, the question is why US citizens would be neglected in this way. The logic of American exceptionalism should render everyone within the nation’s borders and territories — or colonies — special due to their citizenship within the bounds of empire. But as Zoé Samudzi and I argued in our essay for ROAR Magazine, “The Anarchism Of Blackness,” some US citizens, particularly those of us who are Black, are actually considered extra-state entities.

Though not all Puerto Ricans are Black, from Flint to San Juan we have seen that when certain geographies are associated with Blackness or the non-white Other, their citizenship can always be called into question. As Zoé and I wrote:

Due to this extra-state location, Blackness is, in so many ways, anarchistic. African-Americans, as an ethno-social identity comprised of descendants from enslaved Africans, have innovated new cultures and social organizations much like anarchism would require us to do outside of state structures.

Now, as Puerto Ricans have worked excruciatingly hard with the assistance of other people throughout the US to pick up the slack of the Trump administration, we can see the emerging contours of an anarchistic response brought about by the climate crisis. In the shadow of Hurricane Katrina and Flint, we have had it proven to us one too many times that the white supremacist state does not care about us. The consistent need to crowdfund and organize to fill in the gaps of the lackluster response of federal agencies for the richest nation in the world must call into question the very purposes of the state itself.

Trump’s proposed military budget of $700 billion is more than enough to end poverty in the US, make college free, or provide everyone with universal health care — let alone quickly fix the problems in places like Flint, Puerto Rico, and so on. Instead, people are left to fend for themselves, begging the state to carry out the functions it is supposedly obliged to carry out while depending on celebrities and liberal oligarchs to give like the rest of us. This is clearly absurd, given the endless wealth of the state and the gap between the rich and the poor.

The expectation that lower- and middle-income people will provide aid during crises with greater passion than the super-rich and state agencies, when we do not have nearly as much money as either of them, is absolutely and utterly ridiculous. But it is this utter ridiculousness that is the quintessence of contemporary capitalism. Though capital is unequally distributed, the burden of fixing whatever the problems of the day may be is all ours, while the elite shy away from ever having to pay as large a price as the cost of being poor in a capitalist society.

One of the most despicable examples of these injustices played out in California, where raging wildfires killed dozens of people in 2017, while inmates were being paid $2.00 per hour to risk their lives fighting the fires. Their confinement makes their labor hyper-exploitable and again flattens the burden of problems linked to natural disasters, while the elite who caused the problems remain unfazed in their chase to destroy the planet for profit. In Texas, inmates raised about $44,000 to aid those affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. After Hurricane Harvey, inmates remembered previous fundraising efforts and requested officials to restart a program that allows them to donate their commissary for relief purposes. After just one month, 6,663 inmates had donated $53,863 for Hurricane Harvey relief from the usually very small commissary accounts that they maintain (often $5.00 or less depending on the person).

Picking Up Where the State Falls Through

None of this is new. The Black Panthers focused much of their work around meeting the needs of the Black community that the capitalist state and market had failed to fulfill. Projects like the Free Breakfast Program and ambulance services give credence to the extensive history of this type of mutual aid. It was the Panthers who exposed the extensive sickle cell anemia epidemic in the Black community by carrying out the work that the state should have done.

The concept of “revolutionary intercommunalism,” theorized by Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, helped develop a strategy for structured community service programs also known as “survival programs.” These programs were meant to address the lack of helpful institutions and services in Black communities serving the needs of the people. The current situation demands proper respect given to its purpose. Intercommunalism focuses on and prioritizes Black self-determination outside of the state’s failures to adequately look after the needs of the Black community. The survival of underserved people is understood to be a part of the necessary politics of transformative change. Aside from the glitz of revolution that fuels popular depiction in the media, politics and culture, our current pre-revolutionary situation requires the everyday survival of those of us who would do the revolting in the first place. Intercommunalism pays respects to revolution as a process, and not merely an overnight reaction.

Across communities Black and all colors, we see a persistent need to address whatever shortcomings white supremacy delves out to us. It is not necessarily new for communities in the US dealing with white supremacy to support each other and build resistance from within. Starting our own services and building up each other is an everyday revolutionary politics of survival. However, what can and often does happen is that maintaining our own institutions within the bounds of capitalism becomes the objective when ending capitalism should be a necessary outcome. More than simply reacting to capitalism in anarchistic ways, we should be proactively working to overcome it by making our very models of resistance anti-capitalist. Depending on the likes of sympathetic capitalists and liberal elites is counterproductive in this respect. Instead of building ways to consistently respond to disaster, we must be proactive in ending the crisis of capitalism rather than solely attempting to counter it one day at a time.

A proactive pre-revolutionary situation will raise the consciousness of people to realize that they are already carrying out the radical politics they are often told to despise. Ahistorical liberal reimaginings of the past make tragedy into a necessary stepping stone for an empire that is learning at the expense of the oppressed. Real resistance positions people to build movements that undo the violence that oppression inflicts. We are not in need of excuses; we are in need of a better world. If we want that better world, we have to align our politics with a radical imagination, with sustainable everyday resistance and innovative strategy.

The task of making the planet a better place is a great task, but it is the only choice we have — lest we allow capitalism to destroy the carrying capacity of the one we currently inhabit. We can no longer afford to let crisis keep us entangled in this current state of disarray. Instead, we should charge our suffering to a system that must pay with its unacceptable existence.

Over 150 people worldwide have been murdered this year while defending the environment. This piece is in loving memory of those who have died and will die doing so. Thank you for all that you did for us.

William C. Anderson

William C. Anderson is a freelance writer. His work has been published by The Guardian, MTV and Pitchfork among others. Many of his writings can be found at TruthOut or at the Praxis Center for Kalamazoo College, where he is a contributing editor covering race, class and immigration. He is co-author of the forthcoming book As Black as Resistance (AK Press, 2018).

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #7: System Change.

Illustration by David Istvan

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