Attention, attention must be finally paid…
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
“Once upon a time there was a place called Amerikkka…” a ’60s veteran says in a ’90s Doonesbury cartoon, passing the torch to his kinder, gentler successors (“You threw Molotov cocktails? Wasn’t that dangerous?”).
The current situation in the United States recalls the crazy switched polarities of the era. For a decade or so, from the mid-1960s onwards, American radical movements sought to destabilise the legitimacy of US government. On one hand millions were gathered in great protests; on the other thousands of bombs, literally thousands, were set off in recruiting stations, post offices, university computer centres and more.
Yet none of this came close to shaking the pillars of US government. Over the same post-war period, the French republic collapsed into near-dictatorship, civil war and revolution between 1958 and 1968. The “years of lead” in Italy produced, in 1979-80, the de facto coup the radical left had hoped would spark revolution (it didn’t). The UK, fighting a war in its Irish statelet, came close to general strike and overthrow in the early 1970s. Even Canada had the Quebec uprising, and we had the 1975 coup.
Only the US ploughed on, every four years, its baroquely complex electoral system somehow held in place.
Now, in not much more than a fortnight, Donald Trump has achieved what no one in the US has been capable of since the Civil War. Like a demonic version of backwoods Lincoln, wielding the axe as he thinks about union, Trump has banged a wedge into the side of the American political edifice and levered away at it until the cracks began to spread.
The incessant repetition via Twitter of charges of voter fraud with no evidence has taken on a religious character, fusing with Trump’s pseudo-messianic position within American Christianity.
The conversion was instant: the old-right stance — of taking pride in the electoral process as a continuity with the founding fathers — was easily reversed. It’s the very complexity of the voting process that is now targeted as suspect, the discourse of the elites. Both the election truthers staging their street theatre rallies, and elites on the right, grouped around journals such as The Federalist, are now reverse-engineering a notion of Trump as inevitable.
He couldn’t have lost the election, they say — an argument initially made on approval ratings, achievements, economic indicators, and then simply asserted. The lawsuits then become nothing more than the thankless duty of patriots to discover the truth, the opposite of egoism.
The more Trump’s opponents mock his petulance, childishness, destructiveness, the more his followers see him as long-suffering, selfless and their embodiment. Hence the complex myth of QAnon (even if its seeding is as a hoax, which seems likely) — that Trump was working a long con with Mueller to smoke out a world-encompassing elite paedophile ring.
The stolen election can be bolted onto the Q myth effortlessly, reinforcing each other. Of course, in doing so, the Trump movement — or, by now, the outfit, I guess — loses some of its hinterland, the fervent supporters who voted for the “businessman” who can solve problems created by politicians.
But he’ll only lose some of them. The others will be converted. Challenged to jump one way or the other, they will choose again what they chose earlier: the world of concrete myth, bold assertion, against the intersection of institutional power and moral dominance which characterises the progressive movement.
In this process the hugely improbable charge that Obama was a communist has been attached to Joe Biden, a five-decade rep of the Delaware credit and chemicals industries, a man moved to pioneer occasional reforms, but who has never really thought there was anything wrong with America.
The radical argument of the ’60s left — that the two parties were one, whose leader remodelled their face from time to time as a tribute to a conned public’s residual desire for change — has become the right’s, lumping in the ever-growing Democrat party/progressive movement with the shrinking mainstream/business Republican remnant.
Long gone is the Tea Party’s Americanism, which fused constitutionalism, small government, free market economics and Christian conservative tradition — a set of values which the Tea Party presented as all essential and complementary to each other. But this is the sort of abstract reasoning that the MAGA army portrays as elite talk.
For many, there is no economy in an abstract sense — no one talks of Trump’s most significant act, appointing a low interest advocate as head of the Federal Reserve, which appears to have produced sharp economic growth in non-coastal areas. There would be no framework within which to speak of it.
Ditto with foreign policy. How would those who portrayed Obama as a traitor even begin to frame Trump’s foreign non-policy, in which giveaways, dictator crushes and old fashioned coups alternate weekly? There is simply no way to assimilate Trump and his base’s beliefs with any framework derived from what we have called “politics”.
Will it last? The “million MAGA march” of the past weekend suggested a sufficiently large and creative subculture to carry on as a movement, not crushed but nourished by Biden’s eventual official victory. What could it mutate into, if it survives, in some sort of dialogue with Trump himself, operating from within a Republican party remodeled in his image?
Could that involve, for example, regional occupations and local secessions, the full refusal of legitimacy, encouraged by Trump in some peekaboo fashion? How far into police and armed forces would the “2020 myth” run — such as would make enforcement of the law a real political problem for state and federal authorities?
The right has hitherto always folded when that crisis moment came — in the south’s resistance to school integration in the 1950s, for example — in part because of an unwillingness to damage US projection of world hegemony. But that has gone now. The Trumpists seek an America restored, beyond space and time, something to be achieved by the elite simulacrum foisted upon them.
Already in the news one can see signs that regional agents are taking advantage of US disarray, from Turkey’s sudden push for a two-state split on Cyprus, a new Israeli settlement building surge, the victorious Bolivian left’s heavy push-back against the US-supported right.
Would there be the possibility of a global “Christmas surprise”, something really big which relies on the fact that the US has two presidents — something from China or India, serving its own ends and further establishing the American century as decisively over?
Should that occur, Trump will have ensured his place in history as a significant president, someone who undermined the foundations of Amerikkka from within and without.
The whole long, strange trip from the ’60s leading to the last Weatherman in the White House, his greatness achieved not in the four years after he won the presidency but in the four weeks after it was lost to him, and in the endless, exhausting days to come.
Attention, attention must be finally paid.
I used to wonder about how could so many seemingly “normal” people be swept up in the hysteria of Hitelr’s rantings and hate speech in the 30’s. After seeing Trump over the past few years, including the insanity of the past couple of weeks, i’m less unsure about how such a phenomena can take root and spread.
Edward Bernays had moved from Austria to the US, prior to writing “Crystallising Public Opinion”, in 1923, and “Propaganda”, in 1928.
Post-Hitler in the ’30’s, he wrote “Public Relations”, in 1945, and “Engineering Consent”, in 1955.
In his 1965 biography, Bernays claimed Goebbels had read and used the 2 books he’d written in the 1920’s.
British documentary film maker Adam Curtis has an excellent three part BBC series ‘Century of the Self’ featuring (Freud’s nephew) Bernays and how in the US, then elsewhere, corporate marketing focus groups, polling/measuring and PR migrated to politics.
Example was how decades ago Howard’s or LNP’s pollsters conducted focus groups to find (or present?) immigration and refugees as an issue looking for a solution e.g. a proxy white Australia policy; this has clouded and/or dominated monocultural media and politics in Australia ever since.
Result? Compromised media, MPs/parties and policy making while divisive issues such as immigration, population growth, refugees, LGBT, women’s rights etc. are promoted but backgrounded by (or allow) scepticism towards climate science, renewables, unions, environmental protections, diverse media or ABC/SBS and the Asian century.
Australia still has another generation to shake off this old baggage or nativist attitudes that are constantly reinforced, following the US…. and UK….
Our ABC really has to push back and make a short series about Edward Bernays, his influence has spread across the world , it has a symbiotic relationship with everything from cornflakes to politics. There are some excellent references in “Century of the self”, this information desperately needs to be aired.
Courtesy of relentless LNP political attacks and deep budget cuts, the ABC don’t have money for doing anything much. There is a crying need for programs to inform the populace on all sorts of ugly social, political and economic policies being enforced here and across the world, but given our government practices a lot of them, they definitely don’t want critiques of same getting an airing on Aunty.
Frankly, I doubt if anyone gives a rat’s.. anymore. Thirty years ago it had a product but nowadays it engages in click bait (just look at the “just in” captions) as well as any of them. I wish to see it being wound up or purchased by a prominent Australian family.
As an alternative one could marshal the masses for a $21 per week contribution (from $7 per week in the 90s)
The government has lost the confidence of the people. It will be necessary to elect a new people.
Great piece GR (as usual).
You don’t I think come back as a projectable democratic power after a man as manifestly odious and incompetent as Trump still gets 70 million of your franchise’s vote. Off the back of a serial fiasco of an Administration like that, lead by as unconvincing a flim-flam dud as ever hustled, against that sort of infection and death rate from a preventable health crisis that even third world nations can manage safely. The Covid catastrophe that will truly derail the US over winter and into the start of Biden’s one-term hospital pass will really drive home all the worst ‘learned wisdoms’ of Trumpism: that governments are a threat (especially under Democrat Presidents), that elite expertise can’t or doesn’t want to save you, that any media that doesn’t tell you what you already (want to) know is lying, and that the non-American world is the source of all impurity that one is, frankly, yes: much better off without, Donald. So it’s every decent, noble true patriot and citizen, every pure of heart community, every self-made man and woman and nation…for themselves.
Is there another way to recover from this kind of democratic bipolar spiral once it’s begun, except…democratic catharsis? Which is, obviously, always undemocratic catharsis, of some or other brand. Maybe an opportunistic external threat of the kind GR raises – China, India, Russia – could snap most of the people out of it. The problem is though that the US has already had a contemporary 9/11. And that seemed to act more as a trigger than as an anti-psychotic. You get the feeling now that America can’t stop now until it really hurts itself. I can easily imagine a more coherent, credentialed and canny charismatic of the Trumpist-Republican School waltzing back into the WH in 2024, against either of the 84 year old white rich guy or his black female successor. Someone say like Representative Dan Crenshaw. We invariably tend to telescope modern history; forget that, on the historical scale of these fascist coups, taking Obama’s re-election as the most optimistic start point, we’re still only about half way between ‘Nation and Race’ and Wannsee.
It’s the usual acute, timely GR take. Alas, attention…won’t be paid.
Christ Jack give us a break. That was just as poor as Guy’s effort v
I fear you may be correct, Jack. What we are seeing in the US is the logical progression of Thatcher’s neoliberal vision: ‘there is no such thing as society’, bolted on to a nation state that has worshipped individualism so fanatically that it has treated any sort of communalist thinking (eg universal health insurance) as un-American and treasonous. Trumpism is just an ugly greasiness on the downhill road to anti-social hell.
The US has had 250 years to become a civilised society and failed miserably. There is nothing to suggest that reason or ethics or politics will change this. It took the horrors of WW2 to cure the Germans of their belief in Hitler, and I fear it will take a similar catastrophe to wake the yanks up.
Yes. We can attack Trump as all we like but the grim truth is that only 4-5% of the American population
…oops…(continues) …short of half of those interested enough in politics to vote at all saw him as democratically beyond the pale. And that is a hell of a sobering thing. An only slightly more palatable personality who seizes on the manic electoral leverage of Trumpism will waltz it in in 2024… unless Biden pulls off an economic and civic miracle. You can’t see it happening. Even an Obama made the divisions…more pronounced. And the necessary Covid rules will be a call out to every puritan-libertarian impulse. And SCOTUS 6-3, and the Hill disposed as it is, and bad people digging in, and good people deflated by the numbers, exhausted, and primed to disengage. Grim times Peter.
Oh gawd. ‘NOT democratically beyond the pale.‘ Soz…Like the poster above says, time I gave Crikey a break!
You need to revisit your 2nd para Peter as to what you intend by “civilised’.
Were, in your view, the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences civilised (that defined the world for the next 45 years) – a lot less ambitious than the plan by the N. Socialists
The inventions by Bell Labs (one example) have transformed the world. I think you will find that it is all about balance when undertaking an analysis of history.
Powerful nations always use their power in an uncivilised way towards other nations. By ‘civilised society’ I mean a sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare and for the overall common good and social cohesion within one’s own society. The US is just a collection of individuals who have been brain-washed into the sacredness of their own individuality, eg my right to own a gun matters more than all the kids who’ve been killed by too many guns around the place, it’s socialism to protect other people’s health with universal health insurance, etc.
Agreed – in the main – now that I know what you mean by civilised.
It’s never the vanguard of “democtratic catharsis” who emerge from the smoke & dust as winners but those sufficiently smart & amoral who stand well back egging them on.
Just like in kindie.
Indunn.
An example of “democratic catharsis” would be Trumps actions to “Drain the Swamp”. So who are the sufficiently smart and amoral egging him on in this case?
Your attempt at wisdom doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever.
Goodbye USA it was nice knowing you. The shine is now gone the leadership has dwindled to nothing and you are now almost an international nothing.
There will always be Hollywood. That’s all that matters to Australians.
I like the music…Most of it from the people referred to as Afro-American..
You might care to account for something like 6,000+ nuclear war heads, a signficant navy (even if a fair percentage of the crews suffer from diabetes (due to the junk food available on “crusers” and above) to say nothing of a productive capacity that is more than equal to that of Europe in total.
The place is not to be underestimaed by delusional reflections of FB et al or (to be fair) a Secretary of State running amok in Asia.