Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The second Trump election was surprisingly similar to the first one. When I look through the above piece that I wrote eight years ago, it seems to me that virtually everything I said there still applies.
The Democratic Party did not seem to learn anything from their first loss to Trump. They managed to narrowly defeat him in 2020 (not too hard a task, considering that the country was in economic chaos and hundreds of thousands of people had needlessly died due to Trump’s clueless nonresponse to the Covid crisis) and we heard a lot about how Biden was “the most progressive president since FDR.” But the Biden programs that were held up for praise were a hodgepodge of patchwork tweaks that few voters were even aware of.
One thing that would have caught everyone’s attention would have been a long-overdue hefty minimum-wage increase. Such an increase is supported by large majorities everywhere in the country, including in red states. But the Democrats not only failed to pass such a raise, they never even brought it to a vote (which would have forced the Republican politicians to face the anger of their constituents if they were on record as voting against it). Such a simple and obvious action would have displeased the Democrats’ wealthy donors, so it was considered “unrealistic” and taken off the table on day one of Biden’s administration.
That’s just one example. Similar things could be said about many other issues the Democrats failed to deal with, or dealt with ineptly. As Bernie Sanders put it:
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. . . . Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power? Probably not.”
The one significant new factor, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, may or may not have had a decisive effect on the election results, but it definitely had a dampening effect on the morale of the campaign. It’s hard to be wholeheartedly enthusiastic when your own party fails to so much as call for a ceasefire, let alone when it continues to actively funnel billions of dollars of additional armaments to a government that is cold-bloodedly murdering tens of thousands of civilians and destroying the homes and infrastructure of two million more.
Many other factors have been evoked to account for the loss — the widespread misogyny that makes it more difficult for people to imagine a woman president (especially a black woman); the fact that due to post-Covid inflation it was a very anti-incumbent year in elections all over the world; the fact that Biden’s pathetic Attorney General, Merrick Garland, waited nearly two years before to appointing a special council to investigate Trump’s complicity in the January 6 insurrection; the fact that the world’s richest man spent $44 billion to buy the world’s most extensive political discussion platform and remodeled it to favor Trump; the fact that many people seem to be psychologically predisposed to rally to authoritarian leaders (the phenomenon that Wilhelm Reich examined in The Mass Psychology of Fascism). Others have noted various flaws in the Democratic campaign, and there certainly were many. Without going into detail, it can be said that Kamala Harris’s campaign, like Hillary Clinton’s, mostly amounted to business as usual: “Defend the status quo! You have to vote for me because my opponent is even worse!”
Over and beyond all that, there has been an understandable astonishment that so many people could even dream of voting for such a repugnant and despicable person, regardless of how disappointed they may have been with the Democrats.
It seems to me that the main reason is pretty simple and obvious. Fox News and several other billionaire-financed mass media operations have been churning out reactionary propaganda 24/7 for decades with scarcely any meaningful competition. It’s hardly surprising that millions of people have been conditioned to hate liberals and liberal ideas, let alone radical ones. As the Nazis found, if you keep repeating the same lies over and over again, pounding the same messages into people’s heads day after day, a significant portion of them will end up believing them — especially if those messages cater to their frustrations and resentments, such as that some selected scapegoat is the cause of all their problems and that some magnificent leader will take care of everything for them.
More precisely, it’s not so much that they necessarily believe all those lies as that the constant repetition ends up obliterating any critical sense whatsoever, any sense of objective reality that might contradict their conditioned mindset. It doesn’t even have to always be the same lies; it may be more effective to saturate the public with ever-shifting lies. The point is to stir up constant turbulence, anxiety, fear, outrage, with no fixed ideology or program, so that the Leader becomes the only “reliable” reference point for his followers. Trump is such a pathological liar that he often lies even when there’s no reason to. He was on record for more than 30,000 documented lies during his first administration, and he hasn’t slowed down since then. Yet when his lies are pointed out, most of his supporters simply ignore them or shrug them off as “fake news.” Attempting to respond rationally to this kind of mass irrationality is itself irrational. Trump is not very bright, but he’s managed to learn one key lesson from one of his main models: “It matters little if our opponents mock us or insult us, if they represent us as clowns or criminals; the essential thing is that they talk about us, preoccupy themselves with us” (Hitler).
This crude, old-fashioned style of propagandistic bombardment still works, but it’s now something of an exception. As modern society has become increasingly “spectacularized,” the forms of conditioning have become more complex, more subtle, and more all-pervading:
“Spectacular domination has succeeded in raising an entire generation molded to its laws. . . . The spectacle makes sure that people are unaware of what is happening, or at least that they quickly forget whatever they may have become aware of. . . . The flow of images carries everything before it, and it is always someone else who controls this simplified digest of the perceptible world, who decides where the flow will lead, who programs the rhythm of what is shown into an endless series of arbitrary surprises that leaves no time for reflection, isolating whatever is presented from its context, its past, its intentions, and its consequences. (Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle)”
In the digital era this development has become increasingly evident, but it is usually understood only superficially — as if for some obscure reason people had simply become increasingly addicted to media. The “spectacle” as Debord uses the term is not just a matter of images on television or computers; it’s a way of understanding the social system in which we find ourselves:
“”The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. . . . The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply. . . . The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. . . . The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally occupying social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity. (The Society of the Spectacle)”
It’s not just the Trump voters; we’re all living in this same commodified and spectacularized world. A world in which everything has been reduced to dollars and cents; in which we are alienated from our activities, from our environment, and from each other; in which real life is replaced by mass-produced fantasies and illusions; in which phony divisions are publicized and real divisions are disguised.
As the Occupy movement famously noted, the real division in this society is not between Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives, but between the 1% who actually own and control virtually everything and the other 99% of the population. (That’s just a handy slogan: the actual figures are more like 0.01% and 99.99%. There are an additional two or three percent who have considerable wealth and manage to live in pseudo-luxury, but they are far from exerting any serious power over the system as a whole.) Such a tiny minority would be immediately overwhelmed if they had not managed to bamboozle a large portion of the population into identifying with them, or at least into taking their system for granted; and especially into being manipulated into blaming their problems on each other instead of looking at the system as a whole. In the United States, this tiny minority owns both major political parties and most of the media and is thus able to determine which political options are presented to the masses and which are not. There is of course some wiggle room. People are allowed to put forward alternative ideas, but those ideas are branded as “unrealistic” and largely ignored. The two parties may present significantly different policies, but never anything that would challenge the basic setup. The bottom line is to preserve the existing economic system, in which the vast majority of people are caught in an unending rat race, working to pay for the commodities they need or have been conditioned to desire, while retaining the illusion that their manipulated votes for a few selected representatives every few years amount to “democracy.”
The latest result of this pseudo-democratic spectacle is that after more than a year of nonstop campaign blather, costing billions of dollars and monopolizing people’s attention all over the world, 77 million people in a supposedly modern and literate country have chosen to reelect a sick and desperate little man who has already been convicted of multiple felonies and indicted for many more (including for treason); a vicious man who has openly threatened to take vengeance on virtually anyone who isn’t totally in his camp; a vain man who has surrounded himself by fawning toadies even less likely to restrain him than the ones in his previous administration; a man with such delusions of grandeur that he never admits a mistake — with one notable exception: he has said that during his first term he made the mistake of being too nice.
As I said eight years ago (addressing an imagined Republican politician):
“Your party was already heading toward a civil war between its mutually contradictory components (financial elite, tea party, neocons, libertarians, religious reactionaries, and the few remaining moderates). To those general divisions are now added the antagonisms between the new Leader and those who oppose him. Bush at least had sense enough to know that he was an incompetent figurehead, and gladly let Cheney and Rove run things. Trump thinks he’s a genius, and anyone who doesn’t agree will be added to his already very large enemies list. . . . And this whole show is so public. Obama’s smooth, genial persona enabled him to get away with war crimes, massive deportations, and all sorts of corporate compromises (not a single criminal banker prosecuted) with few people paying attention and fewer still protesting. This will not be the case with President Ubu and his Clown Car administration. The whole world will be watching, and every detail will be scrutinized and debated. It’s going to look as ugly as it is in reality, and you’re going to be forever tarred by the association. You’re no longer in the Republican Party, you’re in the Trump Party. You bought it, you own it.”
We should not forget how inept and full of contradictions this whole farce is. Scarcely three weeks after the election, some of the billionaires who financed Trump have already expressed strong objections to his erratic policies that might rock the boat economically, and his proposed cabinet appointments are so laughably idiotic that even some Republican congressmen have been taken aback. It’s going to be increasingly difficult to distinguish the latest news from Saturday Night Live.
At the same time, we should bear in mind that some of this clowning may be intentional. His most outrageous nominations may function as lightning rods channeling anger and attention, making the replacement nominees seem more normal and acceptable.
If there’s one consoling thing in this situation, it’s realizing how many of us are together in this. Despite that huge swatch of red on the national election map, the total vote was virtually a tie; it’s only the electoral college and the overconcentration of liberal votes in big cities that makes the geographical result seem so overwhelming. 49-48 is not a “landslide” or a “mandate”; it’s not even a majority. More of the country is against him than with him, even if many of them didn’t vote (or were prevented from voting, or voted but didn’t have their vote counted). And even those who voted for him don’t all agree with all his policies (several red states simultaneously passed minimum-wage increases and abortion-access laws).
Some of the blue states are already attempting to “Trump-proof” themselves, implementing legal measures to protect immigrants, abortion access, environmental policies, etc. Sooner or later they will come into legal conflict with the federal government. The Democratic politicians will naturally tend to shy away from any overt illegality, but they may be forced into it by popular pressure. We already have sanctuary cities; will we have sanctuary states? California, New York, and the other blue states amount to half the nation’s economy, and their taxes have long been effectively subsidizing the red states in the rest of the country. It will be interesting to see how such a political-economic power struggle might play out if it comes to that. More likely, the politicians will waffle and people will take on projects that the state governments won’t — perhaps setting up “underground railroad” type networks to protect immigrants, for example.
There are so many possibilities that I have no idea where this situation will lead, and I doubt if anyone else does. Millions of people have been sharing all sorts of responses to the shock, discussing what went wrong and offering suggestions as to how best to respond, politically or personally. I’ve been impressed and encouraged by how thoughtful and pertinent many of them are. Some may be rather naïve, some may contradict each other, but I’m not too concerned about that. There’s room for all sorts of projects, big or small, and all sorts of tactics, moderate or radical. People will sort out which things work and which don’t.
I think my last three paragraphs remain pertinent:
“New movements of protest and resistance will develop during the coming weeks and months, responding to this bizarre and still very unpredictable new situation. At this point it’s hard to say what forms such movements will take, except to note that just about everyone seems to recognize that our number-one priority will be defending blacks, Latinos, Muslims, LGBTQs, and others most directly threatened by the new regime.
“But we will also need to defend ourselves. The first step in resisting this regime is to avoid getting too caught up with it — obsessively following the latest news about it and impulsively reacting to each new outrage. That kind of compulsive media consumption was part of what led to this situation in the first place. Let’s treat this clown show with the contempt it deserves and not forget the fundamental things that still apply — picking our battles, but also continuing to nourish the personal relations and creative activities that make life worthwhile in the first place. Otherwise, what will we be defending?
“Ultimately, as soon as we can recover our bearings, we’ll have to go back on the offensive. We were already going to have to face severe global crises during the coming decades. Maybe this disaster will shock us into coming together and addressing those crises sooner and more wholeheartedly than we would have otherwise, with fewer illusions about the capacity of the existing system to save us.”
The big difference is that it’s now eight years later. Humanity is running out of time, and the genius in charge for the next four years thinks that climate change is a hoax. As Greta Thunberg puts it, “Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.” But how are we going to stop them if we continue to accept the inevitability of an economic system that has made possible such an insane power imbalance in the first place?
This first appeared on Ken Knabb’s essential website Bureau of Public Secrets.
The post Trump’s Spectacular Comeback appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
