People are rising up against
neoliberal globalization. Trump represents capital, but also understands this
reality
The neofascist reaction, the
force behind Trump, has come about because of the extreme disembeddedness of
the economy from social relations. The neoliberal economy has become pure
abstraction; as has the market, as has the state, there is no reality to any of
these things the way we have classically understood them. Americans, like
people everywhere rising up against neoliberal globalization (in Britain, for
example, this takes the form of Brexit, or exit from the European Union), want
a return of social relations, or embeddedness, to the economy.
The Trump alliance desires to
remake the world in their own image, just as the class representing neoliberal
globalization has insisted on doing so. The difference couldn’t be starker.
Capitalism today is placeless, locationless, nameless, faceless, while Trump is
talking about hauling corporations back to where they belong, in their home
countries, fix them in place by means of rewards and retribution, like one
handles a recalcitrant child.
Trump is a businessman, while
Mitt Romney was a businessman too, yet I predict victory for the former while
the latter obviously lost miserably. What is the difference? While Trump
“builds” things (literal buildings), in places like Manhattan and Atlantic
City, places one can recognize and identify with, and while Trump’s entire life
has been orchestrated around building luxury and ostentatiousness, again things
one can tangibly grasp and hold on to (the Trump steaks!), Romney is the
personification of a placeless corporation, making his quarter billion dollars
from consulting, i.e., representing economic abstraction at its purest, serving
as a high priest of the transnational capitalist class.
No one can visualize the
boardroom Romney sat in, as head of Bain Capital, but, via The Apprentice,
everyone has seen, for more than a decade, what Trump’s boardroom looks like,
and what it takes to be a “winner” in the real economy. What was that façade
behind the collapse of fictitious corporations like Enron in the early 2000s?
Trump supposedly pulled the veil off.
In the present election, Hillary
Clinton represents precisely the same disembodiedness as Romney, for example
because of her association with the Clinton Foundation. Where did the business
of the state, while she was secretary of state, stop, and where did the
business of global philanthropy (just another name for global business), begin,
and who can possibly tell the difference? The maneuverings of the Clinton
Foundation, in the popular imagination, are as arcane as the colossal daily
transactions on the world’s financial exchanges.
Everything about Clinton—and
this becomes all the more marked when she takes on the (false) mantle of
speaking for the underclass, with whom she bears no mental or physical
resemblance—reeks of the easy mobility of the global rentier class. Their
efficacy cannot be accounted for, not through the kind of democratic process
that is unfolding before our eyes as a remnant of the American founding
imagination, her whole sphere of movement is pure abstraction.
In this election, abstraction
will clearly lose, and corporeality, even if—or particularly if—gross and
vulgar and rising from the repressed, will undoubtedly win. A business tycoon
who vigorously inserted himself in the imaginations of the dispossessed as the
foremost exponent of birtherism surely cannot be entirely beholden to the
polite elites, can he? Trump is capital, but he is not capital, he is of us but
also not of us in the way that the working class desires elevation from their
rootedness, still strongly identified with place and time, not outside it.
After all, he posed the elemental question, Where were you born?
Though he is in fact the
libertine (certainly not Clinton, who is libertinism’s antithesis), he will be
able to tar her with being permissive to an extreme degree—an “enabler,” as the
current jargon has it, for her husband’s proclivities, for example. It has
nothing to do with misogyny. It has everything to do with the kind of
vocabulary that must substitute for people’s real emotions, their fears and
desires, in the face of an abstract market that presumes to rule out everything
but the “rational” utility-maximizing motive.
For the market to exist, as
classical economics would have it, there must be free buyers and sellers,
competitive prices, a marketplace that remains fixed and transparent, and none
of these elements exist anymore in the neoliberal economy, which seeks to stamp
out the last vestiges of resistance in the most forgotten parts of the world.
In fact, the market has created—in the ghost towns of the American Midwest, for
example—a kind of sub-Saharan desolation, in the heartland of the country, all
the better to identify the completeness of its project in the “successful”
coastal cities. Trump is a messenger from the most successful of these cities,
and his very jet-setting presence, in the middle of empty landscapes, provides
an imaginary access point.
Darkness in the human soul is
not utility-maximizing, therefore someone has to stand in for the opposite of
what the market establishes as the universal solvent, and that someone, in this
election, happens to be Hillary Clinton; which makes her unelectable. She will
not, in fact, be able to discover, as she hasn’t so far, anything like an
authentic voice which can prove to the electorate that she is not that dark
force the market cannot account for. But note the irony: by discrediting
Clinton in this manner, the losers in the global economy are actually
articulating yet another form for the decisive articulateness of the market
after all!
The population across the
board does not see the abstractions of the transnational capitalist class being
able to solve a problem like ISIS, which represents a crisis of authority.
Wasn’t al-Qaeda defeated? Didn’t we get Osama bin Laden’s head? Then what is
this lingering distaste called ISIS? Forms of darkness are easily
substitutable, thus Hillary (whose synecdoche is Benghazi, or secret emails)
becomes unable to speak the truth, the more she tries.
But…I do not want to claim for
a minute that Trump can represent anything other than the further strengthening
of neoliberal capitalism, both domestically and globally. He can only represent
a further intensification, as would be true of anyone else. The total
globalization of the market—our greatest of myths today, the one all-powerful
entity to which all, state, civil society, and individual, have completely
bent—is unstoppable. The flat earth posited by Tom Friedman in the 1990s will
end up erasing all local distinctiveness, the end goal of neoliberalism. While
Trump represents the desire for national regeneration—as is true of any
neofascist movement—this is not possible in the twenty-first century, because
the state as we have known it has ended, as has the market in the conventional
understanding.
In the end, Trump cannot take
charge, because no one can take charge. Capital today serves nothing other than
capital itself. In the current post-democratic, post-“capitalism” era, the
myths of regeneration propounded by Trump serve as convenient fictions, as
capital well knows, and is therefore little disturbed by.
Nonetheless, Trump has brought
to the surface the leftover mobs of American society, the residual
unemployable, the “losers” constituting perhaps a third of society, who were
never acknowledged as such during the past many cycles of political ups and
downs, but who are now forcing the successful two-thirds to face up to the
fictions of the market.
When Trump’s masses see
Clinton tacking to the middle—as she undoubtedly will, rather than go for the
surefire path to victory by heading left, by picking Bernie Sanders for
example—the more they will detest it, which will push her only further in their
direction, not in the direction that can bring victory. Clinton, because of her
disembodied identity in the placeless global economy, cannot make a movement
toward the direction of reality, because the equations would falter, the math
would be off, the logic would be unsustainable. And that is the contradiction
that the country can easily see, that is the exposed front of the abstract
market that will bring about its supposed reckoning in the form of Clinton’s
defeat.
But the reckoning, again, will
be pure fiction. Trump is not a fascist father figure, he is not the second
coming of Mussolini, he is the new virtual figure who is as real as reality
television, which is even more recessive and vanishing compared to Ronald
Reagan’s Hollywood fictions. The field of action in which Trump specialized for
a long time before the nation, as dress rehearsal for the current (and final)
role, was one where, at least to outward appearances, the presence of surplus
capital was acknowledged and taken for granted, and aspirants competed to know
more about it and to desperately work on its behalf.
With the ascension of Trump,
an entire country of apprentices wants to get a handle on surplus capital by
bringing the state back in, but as I said before, this is impossible because
the pre-neoliberal state is gone, it has been reduced to the market, it is the
market. Again, capital serves only capital, though Trump’s followers wish to
see him create a split whereby they can enter the picture, forcibly, though
even they perhaps know that Trump, as president, cannot sue evanescent
corporations, or other realities of the market, even if suing is a tendency
that comes naturally to him.
To take the logic one step
further, the myth of the market—or the way “government” is run today—cannot
acknowledge one thing and one thing only: death. If you compete (whether in
Trump’s boardroom or on the “level playing field” he wants to bring about in
America by excluding illegal competitors, whether undocumented aliens or
Chinese currency manipulators or unwanted Mexican goods), you win. (Of course,
this only strengthens the myth of the market, but that is something that will
be evident to the populace once Trump is in power; they want a localized,
responsive, non-idle market, but the market is beyond the need to accommodate
itself in those ways.)
But to get back to death,
Trump’s campaign has been successful so far, and will surely be victorious in
the end, because he is the only one who has brought death back into the
discourse.
The only people identified
with death today on the global scene—the only people not part of the market and
not able to be part of it—are terrorists, undocumented immigrants, the homeless
and the mentally ill, those who have no claims to success in the market.
Trump’s people want to make sure—from the purest feeling of shame known to
politics—that they are not of the unchosen ones, they want to enforce a radical
separation between their kind of shame, which they think is unwarranted, by
excluding illegal competition, by constructing literal walls to keep out the
death-dealers, by overruling the transnational party elites who have sold them
out.
Trump is vocally identifying
the death aura, prodding the working class to confront the other, which is as
alienated and excluded as itself, but which the working class likes to imagine
is the irreconcilable other. By forcing this confrontation he has put himself
in the winner’s seat.
Let us note the rise of
suicide among white working-class men and women, of all ages. This—like the
other deals in death that the market fails to name—is an assertion of
independence from the market.
Let us note too the power of
the transgender rights movement (after the relative normalization of the
presence of AIDS, and also of same-sex marriage) to prompt ferocious emotions
amongst the excluded; this movement has become a substitute for the power of
death—sexual death—to terrify us. They would rather be terrified by something
they can do something about, knowing that the market wants to assimilate this
form of gender-bending, identity-shifting, unlocalizable personality triumph.
Again, Trump is virtual but not virtual, he is of TV but not of TV, functioning
more as an ambassador from TV than an actor or role-player in that world—which
makes him uniquely equipped, in the eyes of his supporters, for taking on the
kinds of death-dealers that they think mess up the market against their
parochial interests.
