Well good god, it’s really happening isn’t it? The US presidential inauguration always has a momentous air about it — the handover from one elected monarch to another — but this time it’s the shift from one whole order of reality to another. Or back to another.
For four years the US and much of the world has endured and enjoyed a presidency that was all foreground, always in your face, an exhausting but enervating parade of chaos, given a keen edge by the fact that its perpetrator could have launched a new, all-involving war — nuclear or otherwise — something out of the reach of Rodrigo Duterte or Viktor Orban.
And many thought there’d be four more of it as well, as we cruised towards an election with the Democrats determined to elevate anyone to the nomination — the late Phil Spector, a ficus plant — other than Bernie Sanders, take another loss and wait for ’24.
The Democratic centre was “lucky” in that COVID-19 came along and put a hole in the burgeoning regional economies that were giving Trump reason to claim success — and lucky also that a million or so progressive activists had decided to commit to a “popular front” strategy, get behind “Sleepy” Joe Biden, knowing that it might well become a farce, and that if it did succeed, progressives and the left would get a raw deal in any case.
Trump managed to turn out the vote again in 2020; many of the Obama counties he won in 2016 he kept. But the progressives in 2020 got out the vote that Hillary couldn’t, and, er, swamped him.
If there was one galvanising event that created that popular front on the left, it was Trump’s reaction to the 2017 Charlottesville rally; that quintessentially American event, a fascist torchlight parade, using tiki torch barbecue crap from Home Depot for its aim at occult political effect. Storm of Steel meets Everybody Loves Raymond, making what might be the essence of the US: lethal kitsch.
Charlottesville was Trump’s moment to separate his purported post-party populism from conventional political forces. He failed to do so, whether because of his own residual racism — scion of a German slumlord family from New York — or because he was still under the sway of Steve Bannon and other ethnonationalists. Or both.
A more knowing populist would have either denounced, or more likely ridiculed, the Charlottesville mob, with their Europeanified obsessions, seeing black activism as a puppet show of the “international Jew”, blah blah.
Trump’s equivocation about “good people on both sides” turned him from possible maverick to conventional reactionary, deciding on “nothing to the right” of him.
Had he pursued a true post left-right populism, he would have demobilised and decomposed the left, leaving them to bitter internal stoushes about Bernie getting cheated again, third party challenges, etc. Charlottesville, and much that it stands for, put paid to that.
The Capitol incursion and Trump’s encouragement of it was a product of his obsessive focus on gaming the election results, but also the last stage by which bigly sections of his inchoate, post-social movement had become fused to conventional, hard right narratives and mythworlds, canonised by the gnostic, occult, revelatory Q.
The capacity to carve out a distinct gonzo populism, the freewheeling sort of thing he had run in the campaign, but in government, was most likely always beyond Trump.
That would have taken a keen eye for the sort of old politics to avoid, to find moments which confounded the categories, and left progressives flummoxed.
Instead, ironically, the president whose late consigliere turned out to be the founder of the MyPillow fortune, bore the impression of the last person who sat on him, again and again.
He could have committed to a massive regional manufacturing rebuilding program — iPhone factories in Ohio or something like — but a Republican Senate forestalled the possibility and he let them.
He talked isolationism, then let someone hire John Bolton for him. He swung from conventional anti-black racism to laws that started undoing the US’ race-gulag legacy, but only because Kim Kardashian came into the room.
Everything he said about what was happening in US politics sounded like he had just seen it announced on television, which he had. He proved Jerzy Kosinski half-prophetic in the novel Being There: that the US would eventually elect as president a man who was no more than a TV feedback loop, projector and projection of a nation’s fantasies of itself.
What Kosinski missed was what TV would become — not the endless Warholesque medium-cool soporific of the ’70s, but the angry, ecstatic carnivale in which public ego and id were to be dissolved, and from which Trump would emerge, cast in gold as a man of the people.
All he had to do for those people was get some factories back, in volume enough for full-time employment to kick back in in a visible way.
There’s no doubt that some of his policies did create economic uptick in places Democrats wouldn’t have got to — one reason why Trump’s black male vote went to close to 20% was, to put it crudely, he got janitors back to work — and he talked a big game about infrastructure and big projects.
The great symbolic failure was a purported $10 billion deal with Foxconn to bring a huge manufacturing hub to Wisconsin, with $3 billion of tax breaks thrown in. That sort of project would have taken enormous focus to stay on track. But like a Trumpian anti-miracle “it just drifted away”, generating fewer than 500 jobs.
Had he been able to deliver on that, Trump would have done a 2016 redux: lost the popular vote, won the electoral college in the rust-belt. Instead, as traditional Republicans cut regulations, cut regional services, cut taxes to pay for them, boosted military spending, Trump, having demobilised his own base, remobilised progressives, with the hard right politics being used by Republicans to fill the gap in their own support.
The result is more or less alchemical — in a puff of sulphur, the minority QAnon movement became a mass force, offering the redemption of America in fantasy that was now agreed to be beyond the reach of the real.
But that wasn’t enough for the people he needed for the next stage of the rust-belt revolution, which would have seen the Republicans break, then own, the old Democratic “blue wall”.
All of it really happened. But it is remembered like — unique American phrase — a fever dream, all an era’s obsessions crowded together.
It will take months, years to untangle them, while at the same time contending with whatever they produce last.
As Donald John Trump winds up his era with the most sustained administrative work he has done to date — hand-signing 100 pardons — it’s worth remembering something about every outburst of American right-wing populism.
From Reagan to Fox News to Dubya to the Tea Party to Trump, the last one has always been more rational than what comes next.
After a brief respite, get ready for that feeling again: good god, is this really happening?
“From Reagan to Fox News to Dubya to the Tea Party to Trump, the last one has always been more rational than what comes next.”
Scary, but entirely accurate. Trump’s got held back by his incompetence and insufferable narcism. America’s foes, internal and external, will definitely have learnt how easy it is to break America. The next wannabe dictator who is somewhat competent will be worse.
Terrifying final words there, and pretty well what’s in store. As the pundits are predicting: the next oligarch the GOP vomits up is likely to have an ideology AND, heaven forbid, a brain. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Exactly. Right now Pompeo obviously wants to run, and he fitrs your description. There are plenty more indications Trump was just a stepping stone to worse things. Biden’s win is just a dead-cat bounce for the old order. The Supreme Court is stacked decisively against him. The Dems have only scraped into a 50-50 split in the Senate thanks to Trump sabotaging the Republicans in Georgia. The Dems lost seats in the House of Reps. They will likely lose control of the House and Senate in the mid terms, so they have two years at most before complete gridlock returns, and the resulting political shambles makes it almost impossible they will retain the presidency in 2024. Maybe decisive radical action in these first two years could salvage something, but Biden has spent all his long career building compromise and consensus, which means he will be as useless as Obama was in similar circumstances.
There’s a chilling piece in The Atlantic about the ideas of Peter Turchin, under the heading The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse. We might soon be remembering Trump’s era as the good old days.
I don’t know. I’m a bit more of an optimist, in that I see the Republican party engaging a such a vicious civil war, that it will be largely unelectable for at least a couple of election cycles. And there’s also probably going to be plenty of expelled Trumpists, who will want to form their own party, and effectively split the right wing vote.
I think your view would be fair enough if this was only about conventional politics and elections. The “vicious civil war” you mention is, in that context, your hyperbolic metaphor for a split betwen factions with the usual electoral consequences arising from disunity.
That’s entirely inadequate for the present. The “vicious civil war” might be literally that if things go really badly. Even if that is avoided, there’s very little chance the coming upheavals will be limited to the Republican party. There will be further insurrectionary activity and it is totally unclear who will emerge leading it, how much damage it will do and how far it will succeed. It will have a big influence on any elections by intimidation of both candidates and voters. It already does – some Republicans in the House say they voted against Trump’s impeachment for fear their families would be killed.
The GOP producing a leader with a brain? Can’t recall it wanting to or doing so ( with the exceptions of Lincoln and Eisenhower) in the past – nothing comes from nothing – fingers crossed.
But he/she will need to have their own reality TV show for the population to notice them.
To quote the great American philosopher Yogi Berra, the future ain’t what it used to be.
Whatever else Trump’s legacy, the US has well and truly lost its claim to the being the great moral authority of the ‘free world’. It wasn’t just Trump that caused this loss, it was the mendacity of senior Republicans like McDonnell and Graham, the stupidity/gullibility of the 74 million Americans who continued to back Trump in 2020 despite 400,000 COVID dead and his demonstrable incompetence, and the cupidity/immorality of the Fox News edifice which was the glue that held everything together.
I can’t see the US ever fully reclaiming its moral standing in the world. Who, in future, will hear the words “Shining light on the hill” without snorting under their breath, “Hogwash!”?
the US lost its “moral standing” with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The “…US has well and truly lost its claim to the being the great moral authority of the ‘free world’… (or) ever fully reclaiming its moral standing in the world.”.
Sorry, I must have missed that Golden Age – perhaps washing my hair or raising children?
One could make a claim that such an ideal began with Monroe (an educated dude : his essays and speeches were excellent) but even Monroe could not maintain it.
Woddie Wilson trails only by a nose but the candidates from Truman onwards represented only the lower orders.
A day or two ago, on another thread, I quipped re Monroe’s Hemispheric Doctrine – “you gotta hemisphere, we’re interested in it!”.
In 1823, President James Monroe announced that the Western Hemisphere was closed to any future European colonization and that the United States would regard any intrusion by other European powers as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.
Hemispheric Imaginings. The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire.by G Murphy
The imperialism aside (gunboat diplomacy has never failed) there was return to the the Westphalia principles. The Monroe Doctrine became de facto international law except for the odd lapse here and there. It is not too different to the policy of the PRC today.
You write “the Westphalia principles” as if they were ‘a good thing‘.
I’m currently reading James Scott’s “Against the Grain” of which I wonder only why it took so long.
However I do recommend his earlier “Seeing Like a State“.
If we can get above the contemporary woke, Agni, the principles bought peace although not initially. Increasingly intervals of peace corresponded with diminished international meddling.
Ho hum. History will repeat for those who ignore it. I will take a look at Scott.
“……although not initially?!?!…..”
Can we practice some basic ‘stats’, E.?
‘Not peace’, from go to current woe/whoa!
Karen Armstrong, by no means the first, undermines the assumption that “all” wars were about religion in her “Battle for God”.
Yet, the Thirty Years’ War did commence as a religious war and concluded as a religious war but transformed itself frequently over the 30 year interval to 1648. Allegiances changed motivated much more for political than for religious reasons.
On the one hand there were few years, during the 17th century, where are scrap will not in existence but most, post 1650, were relatively minor. The hostilities may have lasted some years but the engagements
were few and I include the Anglo-Dutch wars to 1674 that had an ‘official’ duration of 22 years. The Franco-Spanish war (1648-59)
and the Franco-Dutch war (1672 – 1678) did have significant casulaties however.
From the Glorious Revolution (1688 and something of a misnomer) matters settled down; at least for the Christians but less so for the brothers. The next major engagement was the Seven Years’ War or, arguably, the “first” world war of 1756-63) Germany was an ally to England then and at Waterloo. In fact had it not been for Bonaparte’s dithering which permitted Blucher to arrive at the field (to support Wellington) the world may well have been a very different place today. The South Island of NZ may well have come to be an isle of France.
The twists and turns of history!
Now that you mention it, Pence does bear (sic!) a striking resemblance to Boo Boo though, like Boot in SCOOP, he at least had the intellect, not to say moral courage, to occasionally say to Yogi “Up to a point, Lord Copper“.
Unlike Pence who, hopefully, will now retire to his personal Gilead with Mother and never again intrude upon the public sphere.
Generally like yar work, Agni, but what “public sphere”?
Ever showing his face again?
Maybe tomorrow when I open up Crikey, Trump won’t be headline news. Then on Friday, and through next week, and then for the weeks after that. I’m so fatigued with Trump dominating the newscycle that it’ll be a welcome relief if we can just get back to all the other ways in which the world is screwed up, so that we have revel in how little power we have to do anything about it. As it once was, so shall it be again.
Once Trump is gone, and the myriad of “Trump’s legacy” op-eds dies down, I might even start reading the NYT’s opinion section again.
The first year or so were fascinating, waking up every morning and wondering “What fresh lunacy has he unleashed overnight?”.
It became old, fast.
Very fast.
“scion of a German slumlord family from New York” priceless!
Change one word and you’ve got Javanka