PERRY ANDERSON
PASSING THE BATON
The US election
of 2016, confounding general expectations, has attracted a wide range of
readings. Yet while significant further data are sure to come, sufficient
figures are available for a preliminary assessment. What are the relevant
bottom-lines? The first is voter participation. Overall turnout jumped 5.4 per
cent in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, the major increase this century. A small
further flicker upwards—1.4 per cent—followed when Obama won in 2008, cancelled
with a 2.2 per cent drop when he was re-elected in 2012. This year turnout fell
once again, by about 0.3 per cent. Increasing partisan polarization, in other
words, has not been accompanied by any real electoral mobilization.
In the Electoral
College, the scale of Trump’s victory was larger than that of Kennedy in 1960,
Nixon in 1968, Carter in 1976, and Bush Jr in both 2000 and 2004. In that sense
it was not a close result. But as widely noted, it was the achievement of a
tiny net margin of 77,744 votes in three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and
Wisconsin, that produced it. Against this slither, Clinton lost the election
with a lead in the popular vote—2.87 million—larger than that of Kennedy, Nixon
I, Carter or Bush Jr I when each won the Presidency. Discrepancies between
voter choice and electoral upshot are no rarity in capitalist
democracies—regularly on display in Britain or Japan, more drastically of late
in Italy; the current American case, reversing a 2.1 per cent margin between
the two candidates, as a product of a federal system, is in no way an outlier.
Taken by itself, the difference in the popular vote is arguably not much less
misleading than Trump’s sweep in the Electoral College, since in a money-driven
system, Clinton paid twice as much as Trump to obtain her votes, getting far less
for her expenditure per dollar. This was in good part because she wasted so
much time buttering up wealthy backers and flooding air-time in states like
California and Illinois which she was bound to win anyway, piling up useless
margins there, while Trump was concentrating on four or five decisive rustbelt
states, by the end ignoring the big states—Texas, Georgia etc.—where he was
safe, which could probably have generated equally pointless surpluses. [1]
2
The sociological
detail of the vote probably still contains some surprises. It is clear,
nevertheless, that Clinton failed to corner the full crop of millennial, black
and Latino voters she was counting on, while Trump squeezed an extra slice of
white workers into his camp. But it is important not to lose sight of the
forest for the trees. The big structural fact is how evenly the electorate
remains divided, with small shifts in turnout or preference making the
difference in end-result. What was unusual in 2016 is that both candidates were
thoroughly disliked by large numbers of those who voted for them—the Democrats
could probably have won with Biden or Warren against Trump, the Republicans inflicted
a bigger defeat on Clinton with Kasich or Rubio. Striking in the balance of
distaste for each party’s standard-bearer is that distrust of Clinton went
deeper than of Trump: independents who held their noses at both divided heavily
against her. [2] So it is a
mistake to over-interpret the result as a political earthquake. Ronald
Brownstein’s diagnosis of a close but deep cleavage in the party system—as
opposed to either an at once wide and deep gulf, as in the time of McKinley
or FDR, or a close but
shallow division, as in the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy—stands confirmed. [3]
3
Mike Davis has
long perceptively spot-lit the tightening Republican grip on state-level
politics, and this time pointed to the displacement of the party’s wealthiest
backers—overwhelmingly Trump-averse—from its Presidential candidate to the
funding of its Congressional and gubernatorial races. [4] With eerie
dollar-per-vote accuracy, the result in 2016 was to mirror all but perfectly
Clinton’s advantage in the Presidential vote—Republicans taking the House with
a margin of slightly over 3 million (since only a third of the Senate was up
for grabs, its contests yielded no national total). This still reflected only a
51.3 per cent majority of ballots cast, in line with the even balance of
electoral forces overall, albeit one that suggests a Republican candidate other
than Trump might have defeated Clinton even more decisively. Consistent,
however, ever since Dole took the Senate in hand back in 1993, has been the
much greater discipline and dedication of Republican cadres, forming something
closer to what was once the European model of a political party than anything
the bedraggled Democrats have been able to muster: an achievement all the more
remarkable in a period when of the two parties, it is the Republicans who have
become more ideologically divided. Moreover, as Davis has again underlined,
dominance at state-level, unlike at Presidential level, is self-consolidating,
as the ratchet effect of re-districting by state legislatures locks in partisan
advantages for a long run. The current effect of this organizational
superiority has been to give the Republicans control of the Presidency, Senate
and House—though not the filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate Obama
enjoyed in 2009–10.
Looking at the
2016 results as a whole, for executive and legislature alike, it would be
logical to conclude that Republican capture of the White House was always
likely, if in the event the outcome was bent by a double, self-cancelling
contingency: a GOP candidate
of unprecedented background and character, performing worse than a regular
would have done, narrowly overcoming a compromised and incompetent Democratic
candidate, falling still shorter of a normal baseline. That equation ignores,
however, the large supervenient factor of an outgoing President basking in
levels of popularity rivalling Reagan’s, and—unlike Reagan—campaigning ardently
for his former colleague and successor-to-be. Why did this famous vote-getter
not tip the scales? Obama’s support was unstinting, and ought in theory to have
been decisive. Yet it was unavailing. Even in the black community, not enough
were moved to go to the polls. That does not mean Obama’s contribution to the
result was nil. The country that elected Trump was the one he had ruled for
eight years, and which, according to virtually unanimous mainstream opinion,
had been fortunate in possessing such a leader. What, by the end, did the sum
of his Presidency then look like?
4
The impact of
Obama’s tenure can be looked at in three ways: as an agency of change at home;
as a force of intervention abroad; and as a style of rule at large. Taking the
first, what is the balance-sheet? Economically, a budgetary stimulus relayed by
abundant quantitative easing and record-low interest rates pulled the US out of recession, gradually reducing official
unemployment and generating weak—but still better than any European or
Japanese—growth. Banks were bailed out, no reliefs extended to under-water
mortgages, criminal executives left unpunished, and the workforce participation
ratio sank still further, while the top 1 per cent of the population became
proportionately even richer. Since there was no change at the Fed, and this
course was already set in the last phase of the Bush Administration, not a
great deal in this crisis-management was distinctive under Obama. By and large
a defensive holding operation, it left the underlying impasse of the regime of
accumulation in place since the eighties—declining productivity growth,
long-term wage stagnation, deepening inequality, regional
de-industrialization—essentially unaltered. [5]
Socially, the
principal legislative achievement of the Presidency was the Affordable Care
Act, which extended medical coverage to about 20 million Americans, while
leaving larger numbers—28 million—still uninsured. The limits of this
improvement, and the opaque complexity of its machinery, have meant that what
ought to have been the Democrats’ main claim to social progress won so little
popular support that it was shunned by many, perhaps most, of their candidates
for office in 2016. Minorities benefited most from the Act, but a third even of
them reported a negative experience of it. Among working-class whites, fewer
than one out of eight had a positive opinion of its impact. [6] The parameters
of the distribution of health-care changed more than those of national income.
But a market-driven system unique in the West, bloated in costs and meagre in
coverage, remains structurally unaltered. Under it, also unique in the West,
mortality rates among working-class whites—‘despair deaths’ from drugs or
suicide, typically under conditions of financial pressure—have continued to
rise.
Ecologically,
unable to pass a market-friendly sale of licences to pollute through Congress,
Obama fell back on a patchwork of executive regulation, to little effect, and a
climate change accord in Paris that, like its predecessor at Kyoto, lacks an
enforcement mechanism. Unable, too—like Bush—to get immigration reform through
Congress, he sought by executive fiat to suspend expulsion of one past cohort
of minors, a move blocked in the judiciary, while deporting some 2.5 million
other illegals from the country, more than any other President in history.
Racially, was there any significant improvement in conditions of Afro-American
life? Certainly not in treatment by the police: black riots in response to
shootings marked Obama’s tenure, not his predecessor’s. Economically, towards
the end of his spell in office, the net wealth of median white households was
thirteen times that of black, and nearly half of black assets had vanished.[7] Did Black Lives
Matter receive anything more than grudging expressions of sympathy from the
White House? Delegates were told to be thankful for the privilege of an
audience: after all, he reminded them, ‘you are sitting in the Oval Office,
speaking to the President of the United States’. [8]
The contrast
with Same Sex Marriage speaks for itself. There the Obama White House was
flood-lit in rainbow colours, with much talk of historic progress, for a far
smaller, but on average much richer, minority of the population, in a cause
that (vide likewise Hollande or Cameron) is economically and
socially costless, involving no loss to anyone. [9] As for civil
rights in any wider sense, Obama presided over the largest domestic (and, of
course, foreign) surveillance programme in history, granted immunity to
torturers while meting out savage punishment to whistle-blowers, eradicated
Americans abroad without due process, and made a mockery of the War Powers Act.
Constitutionally, the legislature was by-passed with a mass ofultra vires directives,
even legal friends of the Administration complaining of Obama’s way with
presidential powers. [10]
5
Admirers of Obama
excuse the domestic failure of his Presidency to represent anything like an
‘audacity of hope’ on the grounds of Republican obstruction in Congress.
Abroad, the executive is essentially untrammelled. Predictably enough, like
most of his predecessors since 1945—Johnson and Reagan were the
exceptions—Obama was more consequential as a guardian of empire overseas than
as agent of change at home, though it would be difficult to guess this from the
tenor of liberal and most left discussion of it in the United States. [11] There his record
falls into two major departments—operations in the Muslim world, and dealings
with Russia and China (with Europe and Japan as respective helpmeets).
In the Muslim
world, Obama inherited two declared wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and two
undeclared wars, in Pakistan and Somalia. By the end of his second mandate, he
had added three more. Of those he inherited, in Iraq Bush had signed an
agreement with Maliki for withdrawal of all US troops by the end of December 2011. Three years
later, as the deadline neared, the Obama Administration sought to revise this
for continued stationing of an American military force in the country, but was
unable to secure the immunity for its soldiers from criminal prosecution in
Iraq on which it insisted. So withdrawal had to go ahead, only to be reversed
two years later when Obama removed Maliki, dispatching bombers, missiles and—in
undisclosed numbers—ground troops for a second war, this time against the ISIS threat to his replacement in Baghdad. In
Afghanistan, Obama had trebled the size of the American army of occupation by
the end of his first term, and by the end of his second, installed a Made-in-USAgovernment like its counterpart in Baghdad, to be
protected indefinitely by a force of praetorians from the Pentagon. In
Pakistan, Obama escalated military strikes with a steep increase in the use of
drone missiles to wipe out targets deemed hostile, with predictable civilian
loss of life, while whisking CIA staff wanted for murder out of the country. In
Somalia, where another customized government was set up, covert commando and
drone strikes, assisted by a secretCIA base in Mogadishu, are routine, while AFRICOM has extended American military implantation
across the continent, to some 49 out of 55 African countries.
Expanding this
arc of operations, Obama launched an all-out aerial attack in Libya to
overthrow the Gaddafi regime, plunging the country into such chaos that, five
years later, not even a standard play-set of marionettes could be assembled to
run the show. In Syria, he armed, trained and funded insurgents, relying on
Saudi Arabia and Qatar to furnish them with heavier weapons and more money, in
a bid to bring down the Assad regime, in the process fanning a civil war that
has left half a million dead and five million displaced, without succeeding in
dislodging his target. In Yemen, he supplied the weapons, guidance and
strategic cover for a Saudi-Emirati bombing campaign that has reduced the
country and its people to ruins, with a callousness that caused even his
habitual barkers at the New York Times to flinch.
Nowhere has what
Roger Hodge called ‘the mendacity of hope’ been more brazen than in these
actions, Obama promising that his Libyan blitz would be just humanitarian
assistance, ‘not regime change’, and that he was ‘proud of his decision’ not to
launch a similar blitz on Syria, from which he was stayed only by the
opposition of the British parliament and Congress. Elsewhere, arms and money
have flowed to an Egyptian regime little different from the Syrian, simply more
pro-Western; while Israel has received the largest military aid package in its
history. In the imperial repertoire, a preference for air war, proxies and
special forces rather than ground troops is no novelty: it was Nixon who
introduced the type of ‘Vietnamization’ under way in Kabul and elsewhere. None
of Obama’s seven wars have been won, in the sense of achieving a peace, though
also none have been lost (as yet: the upshots in Afghanistan and Syria remain
to be seen). One major success was registered. Concerted cyberwarfare, covert
assassination and economic strangulation forced the clerical rulers of Iran to
submit to an American diktat safeguarding the Israeli nuclear monopoly in the
Middle East, [12] even if this has
not been followed—as hoped—by cooperation from Teheran in putting an end to
Assad.
6
Inheriting the
arrival of a conciliatory Russian counterpart in Medvedev, and the second term
of the low-key Hu–Wen regime in China, how did Obama handle America’s relations
with its two former Cold War foes? After intervening in Kiev to set up a
government to US specifications,
he imposed sanctions on Moscow for responding with a recovery of the Crimea,
dragooning Europe behind him, and bringing Western relations with Moscow to a
post-Cold War low—so far with little to show for it, other than Russian
blow-back in Syria, signs of increasing unease in Europe, and a trillion dollar
‘modernization’ of the American nuclear arsenal to come. In the Far East, the Administration
worked to force out Yukio Hatoyama, the only Japanese premier to question theUS military grip on Okinawa, and sought to isolate
the PRC by
rounding up Japan, the ROK andASEAN for a Pacific trade pact excluding China, whose
commercial prospectus was always subordinate to its strategic purpose—seventeen
illustrious retired admirals, generals and former defense secretaries signing a
letter to Congress declaring it vital to ‘national security’. [13] The scheme fell
apart as Obama’s tenure petered out, leaving Washington–Beijing relations in
neutral at the end of it. In the dying months of his rule, when there was no
longer any political cost to him, diplomatic relations were restored with
Havana and a UN motion
condemning Israeli settlements awarded an abstention: departing gestures
designed to gild his memory, along with holding hands in Hiroshima and dancing
the tango in Buenos Aires. The embargo on Cuba and the US carceral base in Guantánamo remain.
7
Overall, Obama’s
performance in office looks like most American presidencies since Reagan, not
altering all that much at home while pressing ahead with imperial tasks
abroad—in effect, a largely conventional stewardship of neo-liberal capitalism
and military-diplomatic expansionism. No new direction for either society or
empire emerged under him. Obama’s rule was in this sense essentially stand-pat:
business as usual. On another plane, however, his tenure was innovative. For he
is the first celebrity President—that is, a politician whose very appearance
was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic
nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and
mellifluous, sufficed for that. Catapulted into the White House on colour
charisma and economic crisis, and commanding the first congressional
supermajority since Carter, Obama in office continued to be an accomplished
vote-winner and champion money-raiser. But celebrity is not leadership, and is
not transferrable. The personality it projects allows no diffusion. Of its
nature, it requires a certain isolation. Obama, relishing his aura and aware of
the risks of diluting it, made little attempt to mobilize the populace who cast
their ballots for him, and reserved the largesse showered on him by big money
for further acclamation at the polls. What mattered was his personal
popularity. His party hardly counted, and his policies had little political
carry-through.
The result was a
debacle at each mid-term election. By the end of his rule, Obama’s personal
approval ratings were touching 60 per cent, while the Democratic Party had lost
close to 1,000 seats in legislatures across the country, was down to 18
governorships and 12 state houses out of 50, and in public opinion the
Affordable Care Act was more albatross than catnip. Celebrity dazzled, but
didn’t convert. To keep it intact, Obama shunned press conferences where he
might be challenged, preferring instead to commune with obsequious talk-show
hosts, confide to a circle of chosen sycophants in print (Goldberg, Remnick,
Wenner and company—see box overleaf) and surround himself with star-dust from
the pop charts on state occasions. In this universe, the most important
official in the White House became Obama’s ghost-writer, the first in American
history to be promoted straight from boiler-plate to bombardier as Deputy
National Security Advisor.
8
With the end of his
Presidency in sight, homages came thick and fast across the media. Leading the
field, the New York Times published a series of six extended
encomia, lavish visuals of the President adorning each—‘The Regulator’, ‘The
Threat to the Planet’, ‘Fractured World Tested the Hope of a Young President’,
‘Finding His Voice on Race’, ‘The Health-Care Revolution’, ‘A Changed
Man’—followed by full-dress Sunday Review treatment of ‘The
Obama Years’, topped off with an affecting study of ‘How Reading Nourished
Obama in Office’. [14] Little of
empirical substance was to be found in any of these. Their most significant
contribution, signalled in the title of the third, was to add to the standard
case that Obama had been frustrated from still greater achievements at home by
obstruction in Congress, the claim that noble aims abroad had likewise been
thwarted by the recalcitrance of a backward and barbarous world, incapable of
living up to his enlightened objectives. [15] But for the most
part, in keeping with the style of the ruler himself, the emphasis of a tidal
wave of threnodies fell elsewhere. Logically, their leitmotif was simply the
luminous sheen of the person, rather than anything he actually did. In the
words of a Nobelist in the Financial Times—but the refrain, without
its proviso, was all but universal—‘The man has a lot of class’, even if ‘he
may not have been a very effective president’. [16] An extended
symposium in the New Republic—professors from Princeton and
Harvard, writers from the Nation and Brookings—gives the note.
A sample:
Question: What did he do that’s going to
survive?
JAFFE (Nation):
That’s such a hard question. After Trump, I think we’re going to look back at
Obama and be like, ‘Oh, this was such a decent human being in the White House.’
JAFFE: Right! Even
the people who are the angriest at Obama post pictures of him and his family on
Facebook and go: ‘Look at how great they are.’
All of you have studied Obama closely over the years,
and several of you are historians. Which presidents will history compare him
to?
SULLIVAN (formerly New
Republic): My heart has gone out to him so many times. I get emotional just
thinking about what they did to this man. What a beautiful American. [Begins
to choke up] . . . He means what America means, what it can mean—the
dignity, the fusion of the races. He has a great temperament and great
pragmatism, and he has great Midwestern decency. I’m in awe of this man. God
bless him. I mean it. Thank you, Mr President.
How much responsibility do you think that he himself
bears for creating the conditions that allowed Trump to get elected?
PAINTER (Princeton):
I don’t think it has anything to do with him personally, except that he’s a
black man. The election of Trump was a gut-level response to what many
Americans interpreted as an insult eight years ago, and have been seething
against ever since. The only way you can see Trump as somehow Obama’s fault is
Obama’s very being. It’s ontological.
GORDON-REED: I agree with
Nell. There’s nothing he could’ve done in this climate other than be somebody
else. [17]
9
It was just such
a presidency that paved the way for another celebrity to capture the White
House, paying still less attention to the party that was a vehicle for getting
him there. Obama’s share of responsibility in Trump’s path to victory was not,
of course, confined to this. It was he who made Clinton’s wife his Secretary of
State, without any need to do so other than to gratify the couple and their
wealthy establishment backers, and he who appointed the DNC which laboured to ensure she was the Democratic
candidate to succeed him. The notoriously damaged and unpopular second Clinton
was his choice, foisted on primary voters reluctant from the beginning to
accept her, and shielded by his Department of Justice from the penal consequences
visited on the humblest of leakers in his Administration, unlike her acting for
public-spirited reasons, not arrogant personal privilege. Finally and
decisively, of course, it was his insensibility to growing popular
distress—white and black—and collusion with the financial and commercial order
responsible for it that created the conditions of a vehement political revolt
against the establishment of which he had become so prized an ornament. [18] Hopes that Obama
would bring transformation with any ounce of audacity were always illusory.
Fears that Trump will bring disaster with tons of bigotry and brutality may be
more realistic, though they could prove exaggerated too. One thing, however, is
clear: productive resistance to the second can have no truck with the cult of
the first, which requires cold demolition.
A BOUQUET OF O-SCHLOCK
‘A leader of rare talents,
anointed with his nation’s dreams.’
—Economist, 22 December 2016
—Economist, 22 December 2016
Jeffery
Goldberg, ex-prison guard of the Israeli Defence Force, in his 17,000 word,
multiple colour-photo hymn to the President, ‘The Obama Doctrine. How He’s Shaped
the World’, The Atlantic, August 2016, ‘informed by our recent
series of conversations, which took place in the Oval Office; over lunch in his
dining room; aboard Air Force One; and in Kuala Lumpur during his most recent
visit to Asia’:
He has a tragic realist’s understanding of sin,
cowardice, and corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes
human behaviour . . . who will hand to his successor a set of tools an
accomplished assassin would envy . . . And yet he consistently, and with
apparent sincerity, professes optimism that the world is bending toward justice
. . . ‘I am very much the internationalist’, Obama said in a later
conversation. ‘And I am also an idealist insofar as I believe that we should be
promoting values, like democracy and human rights and norms and values, because
not only do they serve our interests the more people adopt values that we
share—in the same way that, economically, if people adopt rule of law and
property rights and so forth, that is to our advantage—but because it makes the
world a better place.’
David Remnick,
ex-chronicler of Russia’s days of freedom under Yeltsin and Gaidar, in The
New Yorker, 28 November 2016:
On the way out of the pavilion, Obama signed a few
books, posed for some pictures, and seemed distinctly pleased with the way
things were going. ‘I’m like Mick Jagger’, he said. ‘I’m old, I’m grey, but
people still turn out.’ In the car, riding back to the Charlotte airport, Obama
slumped in his seat and read a few e-mails on his phone. Then he brought up a
video of the White House Halloween party . . . He never loses his capacity to
be the scholar of his own predicament, a gently quizzical ethnographer of his
own country, of its best and worst qualities . . . Here was the hopeful vision
of diversity and dignity that Obama had made his own.
Jan Wenner,
ex-ditcher of Hunter S. Thompson, in Rolling Stone, 26 November
2016:
Rolling Stone has had a wonderful relationship
with Obama over the years. I first met him at the beginning of his 2008 campaign, when
he came up to my office for dinner. We backed him when he was up and when he
was down. He viewed Rolling Stone readers as part of his base. A year ago, we
went to Alaska with him and toured the melting glaciers. With extraordinary pride,
we watched him ride the wave of history . . . I had hoped to look back on what
he had achieved over eight years and the issues that mattered the most to him
and to the readers of Rolling Stone, hear his advice for Hillary and about the
road ahead. It was to be the ‘exit interview’, his tenth cover for Rolling
Stone, our fourth interview together.
Ta-Nehisi
Coates, James Baldwin of the blogosphere, The Atlantic,
January–February 2017:
On this crisp October night, everything felt
inevitable and grand. There was a slight wind. It had been in the 80s for much
of that week. Now, as the sun set, the season remembered its name. Women
shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their
suit coats. But when Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a
sleeveless number, she seemed as invulnerable as ever. Cellphones were
confiscated to prevent surreptitious recordings from leaking out . . . The
Obamas are social with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. They hosted Chance the Rapper and
Frank Ocean at a state dinner, and last year invited Swizz Beatz, Busta Rhymes,
and Ludacris, among others, to discuss criminal-justice reform and other
initiatives.
Michiko
Kakutani, literary arbiter of the newspaper of record, The New York
Times, 16 January 2017:
There is a clear, shining line connecting Lincoln and
King, and President Obama . . . It’s a vision of America as an unfinished
project—a continuing, more-than-two-century journey to make the promises of the
Declaration of Independence real for everyone—rooted both in Scripture and the
possibility of redemption, and a more existential belief that we can
continually remake ourselves . . . He had lunch last week with five novelists
he admires—Dave Eggers, Mr Whitehead, Zadie Smith, Mr Diaz and Barbara
Kingsolver. He not only talked with them about the political and media
landscape, but also talked shop, asking how their book tours were going and
remarking that he liked to write first drafts, long hand, on yellow legal pads.
10
Trump’s victory
belongs, as generally noted, to a widespread pattern of populist reactions
against the neo-liberal order regnant in the West since the eighties. Erupting
later than in the Old World, the American outbreak—like the European—produced
two versions, one on the right headed by Trump, the other on the left by
Sanders. As for the most part in Europe too, the former has proved more
powerful than the latter. [19] Distinctive in
the US case is
the scale of the success of an uninhibited populism of the right. In the
last EU-wide election,
the three highest scores of any anti-establishment party were around 25 per
cent of the electorate, while across Western Europe, the average figure in
national elections for all such—right and left—forces combined is about 15 per
cent. So far only one such movement, Syriza, has ever formed a government,
thanks to an artificial electoral premium, only to become an orthodox
establishment party overnight. Trump’s 46.5 per cent is a different order of
magnitude. Acquired without any organizational build-up, it was possible
because—unlike any comparable phenomenon in Europe—it was achieved through the
capture of one of the two establishment parties themselves by an outsider to
both of them. Trump was an independent in the mould of Ross Perot in 1992,
seizing control of the Republican Party in a manner like that of a commercial
take-over, deploying a rhetoric that was anathema to its traditional leadership
and alien to its organizational cadre. But once he had gained its nomination,
he reaped the advantages of entrenched partisan polarization and Republican
discipline to scoop a victory still inconceivable in Europe.
11
In the Old
World, the principal reason why populism of the right typically outpaces
populism of the left is widespread fear of immigration; and the principal
reason why this has not carried it to power is greater fear of economic
retribution if the euro—detested as an instrument of austerity and loss of
sovereignty though it may be—were not just denounced, as it is by populisms of
the right and left alike, but actually discarded. In the UK alone, though nowhere near forming a government,
a populism of the right did achieve, in the referendum on British membership of
the EU, a score
exceeding even Trump’s. The victory of Brexit, Trump announced from the start,
was an inspiration for his own battle in the US. What light does it throw on the unexpected outcome
of the election in 2016? Fear of mass immigration was whipped up relentlessly
by the Leave campaign, as elsewhere in Europe. But in Britain too, xenophobia
on its own is by no means enough to outweigh fear of economic meltdown. If the
referendum on the EU had just
been a contest between these two fears, as the political establishment sought
to make it, Remain would have no doubt won by a handsome margin, as it did in
the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014.
Over-determining
the contest, however, were three further factors. After Maastricht, the British
political class declined the straitjacket of the euro, only to pursue a native
brand of neo-liberalism more drastic than any on the continent: first, the
financialized hubris of New Labour, plunging Britain into banking crisis before
any other country of Europe, then a Conservative-Liberal administration of a
draconian austerity without any endogenous equal in the EU. Economically, the results of this combination stand
alone. No other European country has been so dramatically polarized by region,
between a bubble-enclosed, high-income metropolis in London and the south-east,
and an impoverished, deindustrialized north and north-east: zones where voters
could feel they had little to lose in voting for Leave, a more abstract
prospect than ditching the euro, come what may to the City and foreign
investment. Fear counted for less than despair.
Under the
largely interchangeable Labour and Conservative regimes of the neo-liberal
period, voters at the bottom end of the income pyramid deserted the polls in
droves. But suddenly granted, for once, the chance of a real choice in a
national referendum, they returned to them in force, voter participation in
depressed regions jumping overnight, delivering their verdict on desolations of
both. At the same time, no less important in the result, came the historical
difference separating Britain from the continent. The country was not only for
centuries an empire dwarfing any European rival, but one that unlike France,
Germany, Italy or most of the rest of the continent, never suffered defeat,
invasion or occupation in either World War. So expropriation of local powers by
a bureaucracy in Belgium was bound to grate more severely than elsewhere: why
should a state that twice saw off the might of Berlin submit to petty meddling
from Luxemburg or Brussels? Issues of identity could more readily trump issues
of interest than in any other part of the EU. So the normal formula—fear of economic retribution
outweighs fear of alien immigration—failed to function as elsewhere, bent out
of shape by a combination of economic despair and national amour-propre.
In the United
States, to these were added the native factor of race, as distinct from, and
additional to, immigration. But otherwise, such were also the conditions in
which a Republican candidate abhorrent to mainstream bipartisan opinion, making
no attempt to conform to accepted codes of civil or political conduct, and
disliked by many of those who actually voted for him, could appeal to enough
disregarded rust-belt workers to win the Presidency. There as in Britain, faced
with a leap in the dark, in de-industrialized proletarian regions desperation
outweighed apprehension. There too, much more rawly and openly, immigrants were
denounced and barriers—physical as well as procedural—against them demanded.
Finally, and decisively, in this case empire was not a distant memory of the
past but a vivid attribute of the present and natural claim on the future, felt
as cast aside by those in power in the name of a globalization that spelt ruin
for ordinary people and humiliation for their country. [20] Make America
Great Again—prosperous in discarding the fetishes of free movement of goods and
labour, and victorious in ignoring the trammels and pieties of multilateralism:
Trump was not wrong to proclaim his triumph was Brexit writ large. But it was a
much more spectacular revolt, since it was not confined to a single—for most people,
entirely symbolic—issue, and was devoid of any layer of establishment
respectability or editorial blessing. There was no American Gove or Johnson,
nor any Daily Mail or Sun. Across the length and
breadth of the land, just two newspapers of any local significance endorsed
Trump. Neither was exactly a household name: the Las Vegas
Review-Journal in Nevada, which he lost, and the Florida
Times-Union, smaller than six other papers in a state that he won.
12
The Republican
Party that Trump commandeered was one already increasingly divided, as its
electoral base shifted downwards to white working-class voters, its
evangelicals rose up against moral and multi-cultural laxities, its tax
activists agitated for ever smaller government, and its financial and
industrial elites split along ideological and regional lines. This was the
landscape ofWhat’s the Matter with Kansas?, the Family Research Council,
the Tea Party, Koch and Adelson or latterly Mercer, alongside the Wall
Street Journal and the National Review, the Cato Institute
and Romney. The party had become a paradox: more externally disciplined than
the Democrats, yet more internally polarized. The toppling of its House leader
Eric Cantor, a die-hard foe of social expenditure of any kind, by an obscure
militant in his electoral district has had no Democratic counterpart; nor, on
the other hand, the capacity of evangelicals to rally en masseto a
creature as blatantly anomic as the lord of Miss Universe and the Taj Mahal
casino, not to speak of Hollywood videos and the like. Yet as a candidate,
Trump broke virtually every policy taboo of even this Republican diversity, let
alone of a mainstream consensus uniting both parties. On four issues, he defied
everyone who counted politically: denouncing bipartisan hostility to Russia and
dismissing NATO; repudiating
(not quite so complete) bipartisan commitment to free trade; talking up the
need for a massive infrastructure programme, implying deficitary spending
(anathema to fiscal conservatives); and abandoning any verbal decorum or
traditional circumlocution in calling for wholesale expulsion of illegal
immigrants and the building of a Great Wall to keep out further arrivals. The
anger with which this set of messages was met by neo-conservatives, the
intellectual cutting-edge of the Republican establishment, matched if it did
not actually exceed the outrage of Democrats, on both sides compounded by
loathing of its carrier, expectorated as a disgrace to the nation.
13
Once installed
as President, with no prior ties to the Republican party or political
experience of any sort, Trump was virtually bound to put together a government
at variance with most of what he said on the campaign trail, drawing on bankers
and businessmen, generals and a couple of politicos of right-wing stamp, to
produce a cabinet out of George Grosz. His few intimates lurk in the
background, within the White House or on the National Security Council. The
incompatibilities between Trump and the party he shanghaied have been on
display from the start. Before even their confirmation, his defence and foreign
ministers were publicly contradicting him on the need for a swift understanding
with Russia, the most incendiary of his themes, to which Washington as an imperial
hub is most sensitive. Further along, conflicts over tariffs, deficits,
health-care, are predictable. Immigration too, since unlike any European
country, the US is
historically a land of immigrants, where the kind of xenophobic backlash
swelling in the EU and UK is off-set by a powerful ideology of welcome for
newcomers, one that for equally historical reasons does not exist in Europe, as
integral to, rather than a problem for, national identity. Passionate
opposition to any all-out repression and expulsion of illegals has already
sparked demonstrations in the streets and blockage in the courts, causing
jumpiness in Republican ranks in Congress. The only domains in which there
would appear to be a frictionless overlap between the President and his party are
deregulation, where executive orders are already pouring forth, with
legislative repeal of Dodd–Franks to follow, and judicial appointments, where
unity over the Supreme Court is assured. Otherwise, even taxation, given talk
of border adjustment charges, is proving contentious.
Overlaying these
structural tensions, themselves disabling policy coherence, is the personal
style, impulsive and erratic, of the tyro at the helm of the state, spreading
disorder in the conduct of its affairs. To all appearances, an Ubu Roi has been
let loose in the White House. Nowhere more so, given virtually complete
executive leeway, than in dealings with the outside world. Looking forward to
the break-up of the EU, moving
the US embassy to
Jerusalem, tearing up the submission of Iran, threatening to upgrade relations
with Taiwan, hinting at termination of sanctions on Russia, publicly
browbeating Mexico—is there any rhyme or reason in such reckless trashing of
received Atlantic wisdom? Or is it, as every indication would suggest, all
random bluster, as easily retracted as vented? Plainly, it is too soon to say.
Could some reverse edition of Nixon’s embrace of Beijing to put pressure on
Moscow, an entente with Russia to squeeze China, so far the prime object of
Presidential ire, yet emerge from the morass of ongoing confusions? The speed
with which the security bureaucracy in Washington, with the press in full cry
behind it, has moved to discredit any prospect of such a diplomatic somersault
speaks for itself. Constitutionally, the power of the US Presidency in foreign affairs has few
legislative restraints. But its condition is hierarchical discipline in the
executive itself. Once this is freely breached, as in the encirclement of the
West Wing under way, autonomy contracts and policy tends to revert to
autopilot. The only reliable assumption is that American greatness requires the
American empire, for whatever occasional ends it sets itself and with whatever
tactical means necessary to pursue them. Institutional continuity will inevitably
enfold and undoubtedly enfeeble individual caprice.
14
Structural
contradictions and personal instabilities, lack of policy coherence and absence
of administrative competence, present obvious opportunities for a Democratic
opposition that may have lost formal control of all three branches of
government, but knows it possesses deep layers of loyalism in the federal
bureaucracy, won a popular majority in elections for the executive in six out
of the last seven contests, and could have taken the White House in 2016 with a
smidgeon more tactical intelligence. Aware of the need to close ranks and
reproduce something of Republican discipline, some in the party establishment
could see that it would be unwise to provoke its Sanders constituency with another
Clintonesque DNC, and were
prepared to throw convivial sops to it, as the endorsements of Keith Ellison, a
black Muslim, for chairman of the DNC by Senate majority leader Schumer and other
bigwigs showed. But too few to stop another Obama apparatchik, his Secretary
for Labour, being parachuted into the post. [21] A consolation
prize could still be graciously offered the loser: keeping those who disliked
the Clintons onboard with a modicum of gestures, while pulling up the party’s
organizational socks, is common sense for 2020. But given how narrowly the
party lost in 2016 even with such a deficient candidate, and how brittle the
incumbent regime looks, the same kind of common sense suggests that little more
need be changed. Assuming that in the interim Trump, unable to deliver better
jobs or faster growth, has stumbled all over the place, any half-way decent
standard-bearer of a traditional stamp should be able to romp home. Such, at
least, is the calculation of the Democratic establishment. Not all sympathizers
agree. It underestimated Trump once; for some, it risks doing so again.
15
Where does this
scene leave the left that has emerged in the US since 2011, and expanded to dramatic effect in
the Sanders campaign of 2016? What is likely to be the impact on it of Trump’s
Presidency? In the first instance galvanizing, as resistance to the
Administration broadens and deepens, putting mass demonstrations and militant
actions back on the agenda, ensuring that the momentum of the Sanders
experience does not fade, and offering freer space for a radicalization of
political culture at large. Yet also ambiguous, since liberal opposition to the
Republican regime has already reached such a pitch of intensity that it
potentially renders all but invisible any demarcation from it by a left that
has only just emerged into daylight as a modest critical mass. The cultural
establishment of the country, beside itself with fury and disbelief at his
victory, assails Trump day-in, day-out with a violence without precedent since
Reconstruction. The Second Civil War was no more than a
figurative title for the partisan polarization traced in Brownstein’s fine book
of 2007. Mutatis mutandis, his subject was scarcely even a
Kansas–Nebraska. In the pages of the New York Times and its
consorts, the atmosphere of 2017 is closer to Harper’s Ferry. The hysteria of
the Krugmans and Friedmans, not to speak of the Brookses and Cohens, may be
mimicked but not outdone on the left. Trump serving as a common ogre, it risks
being drowned in the bien-pensant tide.
Still, the
galvanizing effect will be real. The particular question it poses is
organizational as much as ideological. The framework of the Sanders insurgency
was the Democratic Party, whose presidential nomination in the end it failed to
capture. Does Trump’s success in his parallel enterprise, from a position much
more extraneous and alien to Republican than Sanders to Democratic tradition,
offer a model for victory next time, with a better and more radical candidate,
and a stronger and more tested base? If a hostile take-over of one capitalist
party from the right was possible, could the same be done to the other from the
left? Couched in more roseate language, such has of course been the perennial
hope of the greater part of the American left since the New Deal. Today, the
hollowing out of the party form in the West makes abrupt twists of it, coming
out of the blue, look more realistic: witness the Corbyn phenomenon in Britain.
Critical, however, in the cases of both Sanders and Corbyn was the element of
surprise: the Democratic and Labour apparatuses were caught off-guard by a
radicalization neither they, nor anyone else, expected. In the US, the Democratic establishment will not be napping
next time. In its eyes, any significant shift to the left would compromise the
prospects of electoral revenge in 2020, and it will move to block it. In Jacobin,
Seth Ackerman has proposed a one foot in, one foot out strategy for avoiding
absorption or neutralization of radicals by the DNC: the creation of an independent socialist party at
once supporting better candidates and causes in Democratic ranks, and where
conditions are favourable, fielding its own candidates in Democratic primaries,
or simply running them as independents. [22] Whether such a
strategy—in effect, Sanders-plus—is compatible with any chance of speaking the
truth about the character of the Democratic Party, or must lead to the kind of
soft-soap euphemisms ruinous to any radical politics, is plainly open to
question.
16
There is a
further, obvious obstacle to reconfiguring the Democrats with even the weakest
‘social’ and hyphen before their name. Standing in the way of that is not only
the whole history of the party since the inception of the Cold War, and its
contemporary machinery of billionaire donors and fixers, but its principal
icon. Obama, still resident in Washington, will be active—behind the scenes or
from a cloud above them—in lending the party he neglected in office suitable
guidance and energy to ensure the Democrats remain a congenial, avowedly
middle-of-the-road vehicle for capital in 2020. He, not Trump, is likely to be
the leading impediment to any expansion of a Sanders-plus insurgency uniting
downwardly mobile millennials, hard-pressed workers and restive minorities on
any more radical and genuinely internationalist platform of a sort that would
merit the term left. Without keeping him steadily in its sights, there is small
chance of that. Not only because of the position he will continue to enjoy
within the party, but the legend that has accrued around him. The panegyrics of
his departure, combined with the execration of his successor, risk a political
padlock on anything better than what he supplied. The traditional reason always
given for left accommodation to the DP was that it was a lesser evil. With Trump
converted into evil of an unimaginable magnitude—fascism round the corner, if
not already in charge—the halo around Obama annuls the argument: this is good
against evil, pure and simple. How far this ideological effect reaches, and how
long it persists, are beyond current calculation. But certainly, penitent
nostalgia for a ruler criticized in power, now rued out of it, is liable to
afflict much of the left for some time.
The best
antidote to it can be found in a powerful retrospect of Obama’s career by Aziz
Rana inn+1, who writes:
At a moment when the country faced convulsive social
crises, and more and more of his supporters called for a fundamental
reconstruction of American institutions, Obama marshalled his personal story
and oratorical gifts to defend hollow tenets: the righteousness of American
primacy, the legitimacy of global market liberalism, the need for incremental
reform, the danger of large-scale structural overhaul. The
consequence—intensified by a virulent right—was that fundamental problems
continued to fester and became harder to ignore: mass incarceration and
structural racism, dramatic class disparities in power and opportunity,
interventionism abroad, and national-security abuses at home.
Obama’s domestic
reforms ‘all fell within the same philosophy that long informed the “American
century”: faith in markets and in technocratic and national security experts
(despite the repeated and catastrophic failures of all three), and suspicion of
politics formed through mass democratic mobilization’. In the end, ‘Obama’s
most remarkable accomplishment therefore was not the achievement of any
specific policy objective—the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the killing
of Osama bin Laden—but the way he infused an exhausted American centrism with
new energy and attractiveness, coating a familiar brand of American liberalism
with the sanctity and power
