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Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right
Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right
Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right
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Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right

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Are Donald Trump's irrationality, cruelty, and bombast symptoms of his personality? Is the chaos surrounding him a sign of his incompetence? Are his populism, illiberalism and nationalism just cynical appeals to existing feelings of abandonment, resentment and rage?

Lawrence Grossberg shows that the truth is bigger and more frightening. Locating Trumpism in the long struggle among traditional conservatism, the new right and the reactionary right, he suggests that the chaos is far more significant and strategic ... and dangerous. Taking the arguments of the reactionary right seriously, he projects a possible, nightmarish future: a cultural nationalism governed by a popular corporatocracy.

He lays bare how contemporary political struggles are being shaped by a changing national landscape of moods and feelings, marked by a growing absolutism of judgement and belief, and new forms of anxiety, alienation and narcissism.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherPluto Press
Release dateJan 20, 2018
ISBN9781786802705
Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right

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    Under the Cover of Chaos - Lawrence Grossberg

    Preface

    These are dark times and getting darker every day. It never lets up. Significant time has passed since Trump’s presidential victory and many people are still in disbelief, asking how did this happen? What does it mean? His presidency has not calmed things down; rather, it has augmented people’s uncertainty and anxiety. And this is true not only in the United States. I know that many people around the world are concerned, in deeply visceral ways, about Trump; in each place, the political content and emotional valences of that concern are shaped by their own social context, the distributions of hope and possibility, and the forms of closure and constraint. Still, I want to talk about the U.S., which has once again become, quite literally perhaps, the belly of the beast. There is a real crisis. After all, the political culture and practice of governance is already a disaster, apparently rising to new levels of incompetence, deception, dishonesty, cruelty and greed, a deeply inhumane practice of governance. The combination of a bombastic, egotistical president, Republican control of Congress, and a conservative majority Supreme Court promises devastating consequences for democracy, global stability and peace, environmental recovery, sane economic policies, political freedoms, healthcare, cultural diversity, social justice and the social safety nets that are increasingly necessary.

    In the U.S., many who oppose Trump and the Republican agenda are panicked; some of them run around like Chicken Little, screaming it’s the end of the world.1 Others try to find a way to shut out the increasingly absurd realities, but you can’t escape it, no matter how hard you try. Politics has once again become the lingua franca of everyday life, and has come to define the mood of the country. Psychologists and pundits offer advice about how to cope with it, and the complex emotions it is soliciting. There is a sense of suspense—as everyone (whatever political position they may occupy) waits for the next shoe to drop. But the suspense is always accompanied by other emotions: fear and anxiety, certainly, but also anger and shock, and often, no small amount of laughter, all wrapped up in a bundle of panic. Even so, there are inevitably different responses, with different valences, to the present situation. But none of these, even from those who choose active resistance, seem able to create an aura or even much of a glimmer of hope.

    For some, there is a kind of political despair. We are on the road to fascism or at least totalitarianism, and we are offered all sorts of warnings from history. We argue about whether it is 1984, or Brave New World, or A Handmaid’s Tale. (I prefer Robocop or perhaps the city of Qarth in Game of Thrones.) Or perhaps we have finally reached the final stage of the capitalist victory over democracy and social welfare—the apotheosis of greed.

    For others, the situation is even worse, undercutting the very possibility of political reflection and reaction. We are amazed by how low Trump’s campaign was willing to go to win.2 Trump’s election (and even his nomination) may even be evidence that the nation is no longer capable of self-government. And the continuing allegiance of his supporters simply exacerbates and legitimates one’s sense of hopelessness. There are many allusions to the difficulty of keeping one’s sanity, of maintaining one’s equilibrium. Nothing seems to make sense. The world seems to be falling into chaos.3

    There has also been an exhilarating explosion of vital and diverse forms of organizing and expressing resistance, even if it all feels rather drained of hope: so many marches, protests, petitions, efforts to defeat one piece of legislation or another, endless emails and fundraising requests, and millions upon millions of dollars spent on local elections turned into national referendums on Trump. A proliferation of organizations, media and campaigns—so many that it is hard to know what they are and to remember which ones one supports.

    And yet, paradoxically, at the same time, people continue to live their normal lives, carrying on their business as usual to varying degrees, albeit increasingly living out an intensification of partisan sentiments. One might hope that we could find a more measured response to this contradiction between panic and normalcy and more effective forms of both opposition and popular exhortation.

    What binds these responses together is their fixation on the figure of Trump and his presidency, which appears to be a singular—and singularly frightening—event. After all, he is a paranoid, narcissist, racist, misogynist, xenophobe, nationalist, isolationist, nepotist, anti-globalist, pro-global corporatist, ignorant, dissembling, and incompetent billionaire (?) claiming to speak for real Americans. He constructs the media/press not only as his enemy, but as the enemy of the nation, thereby justifying his own efforts to silence and exclude media coverage, but also his not-so-subtle endorsement of violence against journalists. He constantly draws a picture of American carnage, of American decline, even of America as a dark and dangerous place, with little connection to reality. And then he offers empty promises of making America great again, without ever telling us how that is to be measured or accomplished. He is a demagogue, a con artist, the worst sort of emotional predator. He does not appear to understand or care about the Constitution or how government works.

    All of this is true, but it does not necessarily tell us how to respond, or how to make sense of what’s going on. In fact, this fixation and the panic organized around it may be part of the problem, as it becomes, oxymoronically, a normal, everyday obsession and an ordinary taken-for-granted reality. I have seen many friends (as well as the media) compulsively keeping meticulous records of his lies and absurd claims. I have heard compassionate and intelligent critics demonizing Trump (and the Republicans) with the same kind of absolute negation and hatred that the Tea Parties normalized in their vision of Obama as the devil and liberals as anti-white authoritarians. Such actions out of panic, resulting in demonization and a rush to visions of the enemy as beyond comprehension, redemption or compromise, are, I believe, not the best starting point, however understandable. Panic begets more panic and in the end, it is dysfunctional. I have no doubt that there are similarities between Trump’s administration and forms of fascism and totalitarianism, but I do not think they are sufficient yet to warrant the conclusion that Trump is a fascist, or that we are becoming fascist, for many of the practices identified are common to many forms of demagoguery, authoritarianism and populism. Besides, I have heard this too many times before: many leftists were certain that G.W. Bush was a fascist as well. In fact, I will argue, much of what Trump is doing simply continues—albeit also inflates—practices that have become the norm of U.S. politics during the past forty or more years. No doubt Trump is and will continue to be a terrible president. While, at the time of writing, he seems incapable of even forcing the Republican Congressional majority to bend to his will and his demands (e.g., Obamacare, tax cuts, relations with Russia), he continues to operate, often under the radar, to attack all sorts of regulations and regulatory agencies, to defund education and science, and to disrupt the already dangerously small stabilities of international relations. But the U.S. has had more than a few truly bad presidents. And no doubt, we should be afraid of the damage he will do (even beyond the damage already done by various New Right regimes), but we should also remember that we were right to be afraid after the electoral victories of Reagan and Bush, to take only the most recent examples.

    On the other hand, wonderful and important as the many acts and organizations of resistance, opposition and alternatives may be, the impact of these important energies has been questionable, and they have been largely unable to transform despair and anger into hope, or opposition into unity. It is disheartening, I must admit, seeing the liberal/left embroiled in many of the same internal debates about tactics that have defined its fragmentation for fifty years: class vs. identity, movement vs. party, horizontal vs. vertical, local vs. national, symbolic vs. disruptive vs. pragmatic, etc. It is even more disheartening that there is so little real discussion around possible disagreements about tactical effectiveness, or long-term strategizing. Too often, the opposition to Trump is simply appropriating and proliferating tactics that, one might think, have proven to be ineffective over the past decades—and certainly more recently. I do not deny the value of collective action, and the importance of constructing a sense of community, collective empowerment and moral reassurance. But surely that is the beginning and not the end of political engagement.

    Political commentator Molly Ivins famously said, Vote, write, work, march, sue, organize, fight, struggle—whatever it takes to secure the blessings of liberty. I have no doubt that many people, including Trump supporters, would agree wholeheartedly. That may be a symptom of the fact that we are in something of a transitional moment, in which the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born. But what Ivins did not include (and what I think some elements on the right have also understood or at least used to understand) is the vital need to think, study, investigate, analyze, understand. Every political campaign involves four kinds of problems: messaging, visioning, strategizing and theorizing (or if you prefer, diagnosing or critically analyzing what’s going on). Each of these is involved in the effort to tell different and better stories, but the progressive opposition often seems completely focused on the first two and not very concerned with the latter.4 In the present moment, resistance is not enough! Even offering alternative visions will not do it. If progressives are to change the vectors of historical change, we will need strategies that get the nation from where it is to where we want it to be, and that means knowing a great deal more than we do about where the country—and the various constituencies across various dimensions—actually is.

    The story I offer here comes from a sense of urgency and fear, but also a refusal of the paranoia and panic—and the rush to understanding—so common among the progressive opposition, as well as a refusal to make it all about Trump himself; it is a response to the shadow of even darker times yet to come. Thus, I want to slow down the ways we think and talk about what’s going on, because only if we think about how we think about the contemporary political context, can we avoid simply reasserting what we assume we already know, and relocating ourselves within an emotional or affective landscape of anxiety, panic and hatred, which may in fact be a significant part of the political culture we want to challenge.

    I want to tell one possible story here—perhaps the most nightmarish story I can imagine out of the present circumstances. And my urgency comes from my disappointment that the complicated, agonistic conversations one might have expected about what’s going on, have not really taken shape. So much has been written about what’s going on—and much of it is filled with insights, although much of it is banal and predictable—but there are few compelling stories and even fewer real efforts to collaboratively advance our collective understanding. It is disheartening to see that many people, including academics and journalists, seem all too ready to assume that they know not only how Trump’s electoral victory happened but what exactly is happening, i.e., what it means for the future. Rather than conversation, we have a cacophony of voices, too often defined by assumed positions and practices, and increasingly subjected to moral surveillance.

    What I offer here is not some starkly original interpretation, but an assembling of observations and ideas from all sorts of places that I have discovered along the way, to tell what I hope is a compelling and frightening story. I am not trying to provide the evidence that might persuade people that my story is right; my all-too-infrequent examples, data and anecdotes are meant to invite readers to provide their own supporting or dissenting realities. My hope is to begin constructing some common ground for the sort of diagnostic work and real political conversation that are the preconditions for figuring a way out of these dark times. We may fail, and such work may not be sufficient, but it is necessary. It will not bother me (well, maybe just a little) if my effort to assemble a different story fails. Failure is always an option; the question is, can one use it productively?

    _____________

    1. It is, of course, not just Trump. It is Trump and climate change, nuclear weapons, population growth, social hatred, etc.—and these problems presumably exist without Trump. But it is also Brexit, the decline of democracy, the increasingly dangerous tone of foreign relations, and even the U.N. talks about the worst humanitarian crisis since its founding.

    2. In the 1993 movie, The Pelican Brief, Supreme Court Justice Rosenberg says, It never ceases to amaze me what a man will do to get into the Oval Office.

    3. Keeping up with the list of inanities, contradictions, lies, inappropriate behaviors, etc. has become an obsession; the problem is, over time, it is easy to begin to normalize it, and take it for granted. See, e.g., David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson, Trump’s Lies, New York Times, June 23, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html?_r=0

    4. Chris Lundberg has pointed out to me that political messaging involves principle and policy. Increasingly, conservative Republicans foreground principles, often to the exclusion of policy details. Liberal Democrats increasingly start with policy, only arriving at principle as a defense of policy. But there is a second dimension: Republicans tend to state principles or goals in the simplest, most absolute forms (e.g., destroy Islamic terrorism), while Democrats tend to present the nuances or complexities of their principles (e.g., destroy Islamic terrorism but let’s remember that not all Muslims … and that we have contributed to the context … and there are consequences to our actions …). It is not that the latter are mistaken, but rather, that one must think about where and how complexity belongs, especially in rhetorical contexts. Messaging that foregrounds strong, simple principles lends itself to the sorts of affective politics that I will describe here. It is interesting to note that this difference—between emphasizing principle or policy, also characterizes in part the split between the Democratic Party and the movement left.

    PART I

    From Trump to the Conjuncture

    1

    The Terror and the Beast

    The most obvious and pervasive feature of Trump’s highly visible and almost entertaining (think of Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, a guilty pleasure if ever there was one) if also terrifying performance, is the normalization of a frenetic chaos and hyperactivism. His erratic control of the executive state apparatus, his constant policy shifts and contradictory statements, his various appointments and firings, have everyone not merely baffled but always uncertain as to what is going on. The sheer unpredictability of what he will do next, of how he will respond to any challenge or even question, heightens the fear and incomprehension. People seem to assume that this is a further sign of his dementia or incompetence, for surely, this cannot be his intention. And while I do not want to suggest that the chaos is his intention, we should take it more seriously, and think about whether there may not be some intentionality behind it, some

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