by Elissa Marder

I think it would be a real mistake to imagine that we are now entering “life after Trump.” Although Trump’s presidency did rupture something in American life by ushering in a scary new day for American fascism, the roots of Trumpism took hold long before Trump took office, and the impact of the Trump-effect is far from over. The Trump era has taken us dramatically and I suspect irrevocably Beyond the Reality Principle.  The possibility of “life after Trump” would need to be an actual reckoning with the painful realities that face us (climate change, the enduring legacy of slavery, the carceral system, poverty) rather than a nostalgic wishful hope that we can simply return to the way things supposedly were “before.” Joe Biden won the election not by being Biden but by not being Trump. The idea that Biden could simply “make America a democracy again” is itself a fantasy that invests in some of the very same myths about American political life that Trump exploited for his own populist, racist, and fascist ends. Trump not only violated political norms, institutions, science, facts, and trust but was rewarded for doing so by the Republican leadership and by more than 72 million American voters.

We need to take up the challenge of understanding why Trump’s assault on the reality principle was so effective and so appealing to so many. Why—after more than four years of his abhorrent rhetoric and political tactics, has political resistance to him—from both the left and the more traditional right—been so feeble? 72 million US citizens voted for Trump. Some of those people fully embrace his toxic rhetoric and his warped world view. Others claim to have made a rational decision to vote for him by pointing to his economic policies or his support for American businesses. In fact, however, given his blatant and triumphant disregard for the truth, facts, the constitution, and the rule of law, one could not vote for Trump without also voting against the reality principle. Every vote for Trump was also a vote against truth.

In this domain, the opposite of truth is not a lie, but a wish. Trump peddles magical thinking and weaponizes Freudian dream logic. Unlike most other fascist leaders, he doesn’t give a damn about politics, policy, or ideology. He doesn’t believe in anything other than his own perverse infantile fantasy of phallic infallibility. But what we must work to understand is how and why his grandiose and simplistic pronouncements touched so many people so very deeply.

Denial is his super-power. His refusal—or inability—to respect any prohibition, restriction, or limitation of his own will-to-power apparently enthralled his admirers. His seemingly unlimited capacity to demand that the world bend to his infantile view of it inspired his followers to join him on the path beyond the reality principle. He made those people feel that he recognized their distress and that he—and he alone—could make it go away. Most of his promises were absurd: Mexico will pay for the wall; the coronavirus will vanish by Easter. But it is as if the very absurdity of these promises only further cemented his power. He dared to express impossible wishes. Trump’s grip on his own fantasy is like a twisted reversal of the Lacanian dictum not to give way on one’s desire. He never ever concedes to the reality principle. It is through the prism of this denial that he touched so many. We must take the measure of the despair, anxiety, shame, helplessness, and fear that underlies a vote for Trump. 72 million people voted for him because he promised them a way of escaping, denying, or avoiding some aspect of reality that had indeed become unbearable. There is an important truth to be reckoned with here: what if those people needed his absurd promises precisely because certain aspects of reality have become unthinkable and hence unbearable. The omnipresent specter of climate change and global warming, for example, cannot be processed by individual psyches because there is little—if anything—that individual people can do to stop the devastation that hovers on the horizon. Quotidian survival requires that we deny the magnitude of that devastation. In the case of climate change, denial of reality only accelerates and exacerbates the very reality that it aims to deny. The thread that connects all of Trump’s supporters (whether they are white supremacists, white collar capitalists or workers in obsolete industries) is a need to ward off acceptance of a loss that is disavowed because it is felt to be unbearable. Trump apparently relieved people of the responsibility and the burden of facing reality. His utterances are both absolutely (and impossibly) performative and completely unreal. His shamelessness absolves people of their shame.

Trumpism not only altered the terms of American political discourse by undermining truth, facts, science, expertise, precedent, norms, decency, and trust but he also waged an assault on reality itself.  We need to understand how he transformed his own personal denial of reality into a collective fantasy that effectively altered the political landscape. His denial of reality did in fact create a new reality. It is this new reality—the reality of “fake news” and “alternate facts”—that has become the hallucinatory norm.

Everything Trump says is literally incredible. “Like you wouldn’t believe” is one of his favorite phrases. One doesn’t need to have a psychoanalytic sensibility to appreciate the double-edged dreamlike duplicity of this expression. Meant as a variation of one of his standard hyperboles (everything he touches can only be the greatest, biggest, the most tremendous, etc.) the expression “like you wouldn’t believe” openly avows that the reality being hyped requires an act of belief precisely because it is unbelievable: it is beyond the reality principle.

Trump deploys reversal as a political tool. He contests every bit of reality that threatens to expose his lies and misdeeds as “fake news” and then disseminates his own false counterclaims via social media and conservative TV. Over time, the infusion of so much noise (flooding the zone with shit as his aide Steve Bannon famously put it) has transformed the public sphere into a vertiginous hall of mirrors. All news is potentially “fake news” so there is no news. The internet is the perfect delivery device for disinformation. It soaks up distorted wish fulfillments and amplifies them through endless replication.

As in a dream, there is no negation on the internet. Disinformation is always already viral: viral communications cannot be destroyed, negated, or contained. They can only be refuted by the presentation of “evidence” that comes from a reality that has no bearing whatsoever on the life of what transpires in the viral dreamscape.

Trump is not merely an aberration of American political life; he is also a symptom of it. He reflects at us the image of what we have become and exposes the wishfulness and the denial in those (like me) who still harbor sentimental fantasies about the checks and balances that supposedly guarantee democratic institutions, the court system, and the rule of law.  Over the past weeks, it has become a commonplace for people to observe that this election “stress-tested” the electoral process and that “the guard rails” have held.  But from what I saw, we just got lucky. The disaster may not have been averted, merely postponed.

So now we find ourselves in an odd limbo. We have moved so far Beyond the Reality Principle during the Trump years that it is difficult to imagine a possible return to what intellectuals now quaintly refer to as the norms of political life. Personally, I don’t think that there can be a return to a world before Trump. That world no longer exists, if indeed it ever did. Instead, we need to invent another relation to reality; one that is neither bound to “cruel optimism” (to invoke Lauren Berlant’s felicitous phrase) nor paralyzed by the necessity of recognizing the limits of personal and state sovereignty.

As far as I’m concerned, this post-election season has been like a bad dream from which we have yet to awaken. This last and most recent phase is like the dream-within-the-dream when you dream that the nightmare is over but it’s not. Because none of the things that we have seen go down in the last month should be thinkable or possible. So just because the worst possible outcome didn’t fully materialize doesn’t in fact mean that the threat is not real and ongoing. The world that awaits us demands that we traverse that fantasy and awaken to the challenges of imagining a different and more livable new reality.

by Julia Chan

Thanksgiving, 2019: thousands joined in a rally to express their “gratitude” to Donald Trump. Waving the Stars and Stripes, they held up posters of Trump, photoshopped with a well-toned body and boxer gloves to symbolize the president’s fighting spirit. This took place in my home city of Hong Kong, organized by some of the most committed pro-democracy activists who braved tear gas, batons, rubber bullets, and often real bullets as they protested Beijing’s increasingly oppressive regime. This year, after resistance of all kinds has been suppressed by a new national security law directly imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), these activists continued to root for Trump in twitter campaigns and on YouTube channels. There, they would reiterate almost verbatim the bogus conspiracy theories of voter fraud, Biden’s collusion with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and COVID-19’s origins in a Chinese laboratory.

No, these Trump supporters are not older white males with no college education, a low income, or diagnosed with the “authoritarian syndrome.” They are intelligent, politically engaged, and idealistic university students and young professionals who demonstrated admirable courage in their pursuit of the very same liberal values and practices that Trumpism seeks to destroy in the American society. Commentators have pointed out how Trump’s “tough-on-China” posturing has won wide support across Asia: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, even among liberal groups within the PRC itself.^[1] Others, more attuned to the city’s decade-long struggles for democratic self-determination, have noted the movement’s worrying turn to the right. For the more radical activists, Trump’s “America First” policy and MAGA slogan chime well with their separatist localist agenda, which often takes the form of animosity towards mainland Chinese tourists and immigrants, blamed for taking up social spaces and resources.

These observers may well be right, but they do not explain what is fundamentally a paradox: how can one be pro-Trump and anti-authoritarian at the same time? Does not one cancel out the other? Is it not more logical that we should seek our allies among fellow-victims of police brutality and arbitrary state power, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, rather than pin our hopes on a capricious would-be dictator who claims to be “a friend” of Xi Jingping? After all, as Trump’s “Executive Order on Hong Kong Normalization” inadvertently revealed, the US State Department had been providing regular training and sale of military equipment to the Hong Kong Police Force throughout the year-long protests, up till July 2020 when the presidential executive order terminated that connection.^[2] While the HK protests and BLM remain divergent in their ultimate demands—few in Hong Kong have experienced, let alone understand, systemic racism, and most American citizens have little idea of what it is like to have their basic liberties snatched from them overnight—there is still much common ground in our collective resistance.

And yet, apart from a few attempts at building international solidarity and sharing protest tactics, many Hong Kongers turn to the far right, seeking support from the likes of Mike Pompeo and Marco Rubio instead. We need something more than a moral censure here. What the Trump supporters in Hong Kong have shown is a small nation’s desperation for survival, but more fundamentally, the failure of American liberalism itself. Although right-wing factions in the United States have a long history of co-opting resistance movements in foreign countries to further American imperial power, ironically, they were often the sole defender of those facing dire suppression. In the case of Hong Kong, except for Nancy Pelosi, few Democrats have ever spoken out about the city’s continued struggles against Beijing authoritarian domination. Unwilling to jeopardize their trade relations with the PRC, American liberals have proved themselves questionable allies. Despite their high-sounding ideals and the usual moral outrage they express at Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions at home, they remain deaf to others’ call for international solidarity and mutual support.

Few pro-trump liberals are deluded enough to believe the incumbent president holds any genuine goodwill for Hong Kongers. Like in many small Asian countries, we rely on the simple tactic of playing one imperial power against another. On his visit to the Berlin Wall, Joshua Wong (the face, though by no means the leader, of the movement) hailed Hong Kong as the “new West Berlin,” the battleground for a “new Cold War” between the US and The PRC.^[3] Prompted by the G20 Summit that coincided with the height of the protests last year, activists developed an “international front” dedicated to lobbying Western sanctions on Hong Kong, if not on the PRC itself, for the latter’s infringement of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which promised to secure the autonomy, basic rights, and liberal institutions of the former colony.

In the United States, these efforts culminated in the bipartisan Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (HKHRDA), passed almost unanimously in the both the Congress and the Senate, and which incidentally Trump at first refused to sign. True to its new-Cold-War metaphor, the HKHRDA is largely a nuclear option. It stipulates that the Secretary of State will make an annual report on the city’s autonomy and civil liberties. Should the region’s “One Country Two System” constitutional principle continue to erode, the US would revoke Hong Kong’s special status that offered unique privileges, unavailable to the rest of China, in areas such as trade, immigration, technology transfer, and intellectual exchanges. The HKHRDA would jeopardize Hong Kong’s position as a global financial hub; but given that Hong Kong funnels more than three quarters of the PRC’s yearly foreign investments, it will also cause indirect but substantial damage to China’s economy. Threatening mutually assured destruction, the bill was meant as a deterrent to slow down Beijing’s increasingly blatant interference. It was on the very next day after Trump reluctantly signed the bill, on 27 November 2019, that the Thanksgiving rally took place.

This time, though, the script did not play out like the last Cold War. Barely half a year later, the PRC responded to the bluff by putting in place a national security law criminalizing vaguely defined acts of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces, bypassing the local legislature altogether. The US officially removed Hong Kong’s special status and imposed sanctions on several pro-Beijing officials on 14 July 2020, but the sanction itself now meant little. Within days after the national security law came into effect, protest slogans and songs were outlawed. Students were arrested for displaying even blank placards. Materials deemed sensitive or controversial, from the Tiananmen Square Massacre to discussions of the separation of powers, are removed from textbooks. Judges are routinely harassed, as are activists and journalists. In a recent case, a TV producer was arrested for her news program that reported possible collusions between the police and the pro-Beijing groups responsible for a mob attack on civilians. Popularly elected pro-democracy legislators were “disqualified” and removed from their posts. Meanwhile, on the pretext of COVID-19, the government suspended further elections. For the first time since the end of colonial rule, opposition is completely absent in the city’s legislature.

Our future is beyond dystopian. It is no wonder that much of the movement drew inspirations from The Hunger Games movie trilogy. Chanting the main character’s line “If we burn, you burn with us” as their slogan (or laam chau in Cantonese), many welcomed the US sanctions as the long-overdue justice and vindication of their injured, jailed, and dead comrades. Their support—or worse, admiration—for Trump originates from frustrations with Hong Kong’s own powerlessness as a nation, with fighting for some twenty years what is invariably a losing battle. Many view Trump’s America as the only counterweight to the re-colonizing forces of Beijing, who apparently will stop at nothing short of total domination. Thus, in a problematic twist, even as Hong Kongers lament and struggle against the rapid erosion of the rule of law and other liberal institutions at home, they also celebrate Trump’s disregard for institutional protocols and political traditions as the very qualities necessary to hold the PRC in check. For though Obama’s “pivot to East Asia” strategy in 2011 turned American focus back onto the Asian-Pacific region, it was the Trump administration that produced the country’s most aggressive containment measures directed at the PRC. For many in Hong Kong, Trump’s antics on issues such as the trade war, the expulsion of state-owned companies like Huawei and TikTok, and the closure of the PRC embassy in Houston, offer almost a vicarious pleasure and sense of power.

More clear-sighted critics would point out that in instigating its own destruction, economically at the hands of the US and politically by Beijing, Hong Kong has only turned itself into a bargaining chip for Trump. Yet this is exactly why the Cold War rhetoric remains attractive despite its obvious obsolescence. The idea of a new Cold War offers a familiar narrative in which Hong Kong can again find its strategic role. After all, as the chess piece in the great game between Western democracies and communism, this quintessential neoliberal city did not just survive but prospered.^[4] Hong Kong touted its free market economy not only as the “gateway” into communist China’s otherwise inaccessible pool of consumers, natural resources, and labor, but also as a guarantor of political and cultural freedom. The city’s pride in its economic success is entwined with its other identity as the enclave for dissenters and refugees from the dark, oppressive government of the CCP. When the “One Country, Two System” structure was proposed in the late 1980s, it was tacitly understood, or at least hoped, that Hong Kong would function as the model liberal democratic “open society,” whose path China would follow by gradually opening up its economy.

The development of the PRC under Xi Jingping has proved that the ideological binarism of the Cold War no longer holds: capitalism can work hand in glove with authoritarianism. In Hong Kong, the so-called “red capital” has been in fact one of the major vectors of suppression. It includes installing CCP staff in the governance structure of corporations, forcing companies to fire their employees for posting Facebook comments in support of the protest, and squeezing out local publishing houses and booksellers to stifle dissenting publications. Throughout Asia, US economic and military hegemony has been understood as the guarantor of security and protection, especially from the PRC as an emergent power. In recent decades, however, American business interests in China have silenced most governments in Western countries—particularly the United States and Britain—on issues ranging from the mass incarceration of human rights lawyers within the PRC to Xi’s dubious claims over the South China Sea.

As the global narrative of American liberalism collapses, we are left with few alternative discursive tools to defend the city’s shrinking political space. In practice, the protests last year and the Umbrella Movement in 2014 have sparked remarkably innovative forms of mutual aid and community building. For example, with the help of mobile apps that map and promote pro-democracy small businesses, a newly emerged “yellow economic circle” seriously challenged the monopoly of pro-establishment chain stores and corporations. Even today, the steady flow of politically like-minded customers continues to help struggling restaurant and shop owners survive the economic impact of COVID-19. Others have sponsored the daily expenses of the frontline protesters through crowdfunding, decentralized online chatgroups, and personal networks. It is a misconception that Hong Kong’s democratic movement is largely a middle-class affair.[5] Supporters cut across all age groups and all sectors of society—from pilots to construction workers to housewives to high school students to the unemployed—who share strong convictions in voluntarism and reciprocal care. These initiatives that seek to reshape Hong Kong’s socio-economic life find no coherent expression in international advocacy. Neither the Western media nor we seem able to move away from the binary of East and West, totalitarianism and freedom, Hong Kong as a “typical Chinese city” and the crown colony of the glorious past.

Hong Kongers’ pragmatic calculations of pitting US imperialism against Chinese domination are no doubt selfish. There is among us a willful ignorance of the realities of American life in the last four years. To believe that Hong Kong people’s experience of oppression is unique, to refuse to see that the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers under the Trump administration is of the same kind as the treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, is perhaps the greatest weakness of the city’s courageous and creative resistance movement. At the same time, we might also reflect whether we are asking too much of these young protesters, whose physical and psychological trauma from months of police brutality and harassment is often beyond the comprehension of onlookers. For those on the front line, looking to America for protection is as much a matter of personal survival as the survival of Hong Kong. As I write, Joshua Wong is facing his fourth jail sentence (13 months for inciting unlawful assembly) since 2016 and was held in solitary confinement with lights on around the clock during custody. His fellow-activist, Agnes Chow, nicknamed “the real Mulan,” will spend her twenty-fourth birthday in prison. Nor is the regime targeting only opposition leaders. Between June 2019 and November 2020, more than 10,000 people were arrested. Over 2300 of them have been charged and over 500 sentenced to jail, some for as long as six years. A handful of dissidents have managed to find political asylum in Germany, Britain, and Taiwan. In contrast, when four student protesters arrived at the US Consulate General seeking refuge late October this year (their friend had been apprehended and taken away before he could even reach the Consulate gates), they were simply asked to leave.

Contrary to the wishes of the HK Trump supporters, then, the enemy of my enemy is not really my friend. It should have been a clear warning sign when Trump threatened to send in the National Guards to suppress the Black Lives Matter protests this summer—an uncanny reminder to many of both the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 and the more recent experience of police violence against protesters at home. At times, however, it seems that Hong Kong people are left with impossible choices. Between Trump and a Biden administration that still imagines that Xi Jingping’s the PRC can be persuaded to play by “international norms” through trade and without any rigorous engagement, it is understandable that they chose the former.[6] In the city’s lonely and futile fight against the CCP, Hong Kong people are not merely racist, or misguided, or selfishly opportunistic to wish for a US government that would at least claim to hold the PRC responsible for its flagrant violation of human rights. The paradoxical idea of a Pro-Trump liberal in Hong Kong is an instance not of the global rise of the right, but the inadequacies of American liberal politics and imagination that we in Asia have adopted as norm and model.

[1]. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/democracy-activists-who-love-trump/616891/

[2]. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidents-executive-order-hong-kong-normalization/

[3]. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-germany/my-town-is-the-new-cold-wars-berlin-hong-kong-activist-joshua-wong-idUSKCN1VU0X4

[4]. Priscilla Roberts and John M. Carroll, eds, Hong Kong in the Cold War (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016).

[5] Though the political situation in Hong Kong has changed dramatically, Matthew Torne’s 2014 documentary Lessons in Dissent remains an excellent portrayal of grassroot and left-wing pro-democracy activists.

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/us/politics/biden-china.html

by Hortense Spillers

It is simply incredible, and had I not experienced it in the flesh, rather than in dreams, (where this stuff belongs), I would not believe any description of life in the United States since 2016. The character of these years, first of all, as if a spectacle unfolding elsewhere and detached from any language or gesture or principle of reality that I recognize and honor, will eventually find its narrators and historians, but the latter will live in another season of time and purpose from my own and my generation’s. In other words, this conjuncture not only marks an inflection point, but lays hold, I believe, of a whole new political grammar that must be grasped, not because we do not know the words, or the rules of syntax—we know them all too well—but because we can no longer fathom the uses to which they’re put, nor can we easily imagine the human personality who would be compelled by such uses. I do not comprehend: the so-called right wing in my country, QAnon, the 73 million Americans (a considerable number of them women), who voted for Donald Trump, Donald Trump himself, the plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of the state of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, the Fox News Network and its creator, Rupert Murdoch and whatever unspeakable animus or anguish that must drive this project, the antipathy toward masks, the rage at public officials in their effort to protect local populations from covid-19 infection,  and the vicious oversupply of partisanship, as expressed by the GOP. This drive-thru of complaint does not exhaust the list, which, collectively multiplied, would soar toward infinity, but it gets us to the right ballpark.

There are times when I fear to know what I think—in fact, I can’t even write it down in my diary here lately—and even resist its echoes from the minds of others; could it be some modicum of hold-over, atavistic superstition (fit candidate for Totem and Taboo?), that if you speak its name and conjure it up, it is embodied and becomes true? But by contrast, naming it also socializes it, as Kenneth Burke conjectured decades ago, perhaps disallows its sting and, therefore, propitiates and exorcizes it; in our time, Shoshana Zuboff, in her remarkable study of “surveillance capitalism,” argues that the “unprecedented” must be named and only by doing so do we move toward the mobilization of “new forms of collaborative action: the crucial friction that reasserts the primacy of a flourishing human future as the foundation of our information civilization. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so” (21; emphasis Zuboff). This fear of one’s own words is occurring in the context of surveillance capitalism, but the latter is not our primary concern here; what we’re fearing in the country at this moment, however, is precisely the alienation bred by what Zuboff calls the “unprecedented.” We are 16 days past the longest presidential election in our history, one of the most dangerous and contentious, and at this writing, the current president of the United States, who lost the election by 306 electoral votes that represent approximately 80 million Americans, has not conceded, but launched instead a systematic and unprecedented campaign to stay in office—essentially, the staging of what has been called an “auto-coup”—and the sole question that knots the stomach (as it has the entire tenure of his term of office) is what do Americans do now. Wishing for the moon, or some other planet, will not help! But facing what must be faced entails danger precisely because our circumstance today has no precedent and thus no name.

Starting with the presidency itself, this current iteration bears no resemblance to any single instance of modern American political history that I can think of, however inadequate the person of the president has been from time to time. I would go so far as to say that Americans these four years have not had a president at all, but, rather, a place holder, or one might even say president-for-lack-of-a-better-word. The Trump term of office has exposed the sheer fragility of a constitutional democratic order, which must rely on the power and force of an idea; the unwritten agreement between its stake-holders, its citizens, and those who govern them, about what constitutes political reality; the consent of the governed, and the consonance of values among all the principals—the governed and the governing. One of the most disturbing features of these years has been precisely the dramatic reminder that these elements of cohesion are neither imprescriptible, nor written in the stars. What we now realize with renewed poignancy is that their orchestration has never evinced perfect balance and harmony, but enough of the latter has played throughout all the darkness and disharmony that hope in American democratic possibility has never felt displaced. One had rather “forgotten”—and it is the lapse that a degree of comfort breeds—that these arrangements are exactly so and as such can come undone. This marked unraveling of an inadvertent inattentiveness is nowhere more palpable than in the loud intrusion of the persona of the presidency into the everyday life of the citizen—his violent abuse of the powers of office as a constant feature of the twenty-four hour news cycle. The indefatigable storm and stress of conflict and the rupture of routine coming from the Commander-in-Chief himself broke in on everyday life with such persistence that the stunning outbreak of sickness and death in the closing months of the term seems somehow fitting as the fatal, indelible mark of years that we will remember as a colossal civic blunder–or was it?

The question is occasioned by a shadow of doubt that would suggest that Donald Trump, for all the disarray and nausea that he inspires, did not spring up in a vacuum. The ground of his emergence was actually seeded at least decades ago, not only in quite obvious instances like “the scoundrel time” of the McCarthy era, closely followed by the Nixon presidency and the apodictic rise of the partisan “consultant” and “strategist,” with their endless “dirty tricks” and pliable morality, but also the less obvious deviations of the Reagan White House and its seductions: Recall that the “southern strategy,” the deliberate appeal to states’ rights and anti-black sentiment, sits at the very heart of Republican politics as a counterweight to the Civil Rights Movement, an outcome that Lyndon Johnson, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Bill the following year, presciently understood avant la lettre. Reagan launched his bid for the Oval Office in 1980 from Philadelphia, Mississippi, an active locus of civil rights struggle and the murder of the trio of young activists, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in the summer of 1964. As Republican “dirty trickster,” Lee Atwater, understood, one didn’t have to utter “nigger” umpteen times in order to drive home his point, and I should think that an appearance in Neshoba County, Mississippi, less than two decades later by a leading Republican contender, would speak as eloquently as a racial epithet, if not more so, for all its subtlety, just as the “Willie Horton” ad of Bush the Elder’s presidential run said all it needed to say a little less than a decade later. Bush’s appointing a staunch conservative to the United States Supreme Court in the fall of 1991 to assume the seat of Thurgood Marshall, a pioneer in the legal struggle for black rights, remains, to my mind, one of the most hateful acts of cynical mockery and outright racist antipathy of the late twentieth century. By the time the presidency enters the new millennium, riding the wave of constitutional “originalism,” a true fraud of American democratic order, as I see it, the outline of Republican misrule and its propensity for authoritarian charms has evolved into a repertoire of dubious practices that operate under the color of law. Against this backdrop of dishonor and injustice, everywhere supported by a scaffold of lies and millions upon millions of revanchist dollars, the awful story of the U.S. Senate’s brazen mistreatment of Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland at the tail end of the Obama presidency opens wide the gates of hell for any old embodiment to stroll through, and it did.

Looking around the room, then, for a single, definitive point-of-departure simply will not do; there are several. For one thing, the country’s media sources, especially the major networks and cable companies of the television industry, advanced the persona of Donald Trump to a degree of visibility and significance that it might never have achieved beyond “The Apprentice” reality-tv series and the tabloid reputation of a local Manhattan “playboy,” known for the “prenuptial agreement” and the noisy, sophomoric changing of wives. In other words, systematic media attention, from the launch of Trump’s presidential campaign to the present moment, not only afforded him critical, free advertising, but also put him before the public auditory as a kind of necessity. As of 2015 and the famous escalator descent, no gesture of his, from silly tweets to golf outings, has failed to be repeated and amplified in a sickening, ubiquitous loop—as late as this Thanksgiving, well after the November presidential election and Joe Biden’s victory, CNN, for example, has still persisted in covering his ridiculous ravings about “massive voter fraud,” the “theft” of the vote, and how, in time, the “evidence” would be revealed, if only a court that would treat him fairly could be found, somewhere. The Thanksgiving newscast and the endless repetition of programs like it simply extend post-election angst, feed the unrelenting outrage of Trump’s most ardent supporters, and do nothing to heal the dangerous rifts that now sit athwart the body politic. But televisual logic, as though detached from human choice and thinking, proceeds on autopilot in the pursuit of top ratings and advertising dollars. Exactly what debt of sociality is owed to the public by various media constitutes not only a critical inquiry concerning cultural production and its widest distributive patterns—in other words, how their dissemination and content participate in processes of educating—but it is also the nexus that is denied: a breach falls between them with media and their decisive commercial interests on one side and the public and its stake in bildung and literacy on the other, as never the twain meets. What accounts for this unconscionable refusal and its perdurability, generation in, generation out? And can a direct line be drawn between our incomplete intellectual meditations and mediations and the excess of gullibility that has captured sectors of the American public?

Perhaps the single most disturbing feature of the current conjuncture is the extent to which the Trump years have been enabled by the substantial and craven complicity of Republican politicians. Without the silent endorsement of a Republican-led Senate and well-placed Republican figures at every step along the way, much of what the country has been through might have been avoided; but how does the public respond to a political party that has degenerated—for all intents and purposes—into the behavior of a criminal gang, operating at the behest of a strong man? The U.S. Constitution does not necessarily offer guidance here, nor does it anticipate the deterioration among interlocutors of a dialogue that is predicated on the mental availability of the principals. The Biden years opening before us must navigate this bleak evacuated terrain, and not a single American will be able to escape the implications of the journey.

Works Cited

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future At the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs Hatchett Book Group, 2019; quotation at p.21.

by Margaret Ferguson

Throughout the long first months of the pandemic—from March to November 2020—I volunteered as a phonebanker for “Indivisible Yolo,” the local chapter of a national movement devoted to defeating Trump and electing Democrats up and down the ballot. We partnered with a group called “Sister District CA 3,” which focuses on electing progressives to state legislatures including those shaped by Republican gerrymandering efforts. I was able to devote quite a lot of time to this volunteer effort because I am retired from teaching and no longer have children at home.

The Indivisible movement began in an informal “grief counseling session”—a meeting of friends in Austin, Texas in November 2016 attended by two former congressional staffers, Leah Greenberg and her husband Ezra Levin, when they were in Austin for Thanksgiving.  Returning to their home in Washington, D.C., they and nearly three dozen thirty-something friends collaborated in an effort to turn their grief about the election into action. They composed a 23-page Google Doc handbook called “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda”; Levin tweeted a link to the document with this message: “Please share w/ your friends to help fight Trump’s racism, authoritarianism, & corruption on their home turf.”[1]

Adapting ideas drawn both from their own experiences with members of Congress and from tactics used by the Tea Party in its successful efforts to block Barack Obama’s agenda in 2010, the Indivisible guide went viral, and was shared by people with Twitter followings much larger than those of the document’s authors: among the amplifiers were Robert Reich, Jonathan Chait, George Takei, and Miranda July. Less than two months after its publication, more than 3,800 local groups called “Indivisibles” had formed to support the movement. It developed a website where the Guide was continuously updated in Spanish and English, and only a few weeks after Trump’s Inauguration, the fledgling movement became a 501(c) organization. Levin drily remarked that “The last thing the progressive ecosystem really needed was yet another nonprofit,” but in this case, the organization thrived.  The protests it organized at the local level have been credited with, among other things, making it hard—and eventually impossible—for the Republican party to pass a “replacement” for the Affordable Care Act.[2]

Different Indivisible groups have focused on different—and multiple–actions during the Trump era, frequently collaborating with other groups such as the Working Families Party and the Women’s March. What drew me to the local group in my Northern California town was its slogan of “Do the Work”—an alternative to watching TV news and wringing one’s hands—and the congenial community of activists it had created.  Like others, I was excited when we were able to rent office space near Interstate 80 in March as we geared up for work during the election year; many of us had written post cards since 2016 and had canvassed in person for Democrats in 2018, but in early March this past spring, we would finally have our own space for organizing.  I went to one meeting to be trained in texting potential voters, and I spent one Saturday morning cutting sheets of paper for postcards in the communal space. But then all organizing efforts had to move online as the virus swept through California and the lockdown began. The idea of not being able to knock on doors or set up registration tables—as we had done in 2018—at sites such as the Woodland Community College seemed incredible. One of my Indivisible friends, a woman with whom I had carpooled when our kids were in middle school and whose organizational skills I respected greatly because we had served as co-leaders of the garbage squad for our children’s high school graduation party, asked me if I would be willing to consider phonebanking. I said no.  I told her that I am much too much of an introvert to do that kind of work. Plus I hate it when strangers call me out of the blue, so how could I make calls to strangers myself?

My friend, a scientist at the University of California at Davis, suggested that I read some of the research on the effectiveness of different methods of communicating with potential voters. With the help of other Indivisible members, I did that work,  starting with the valuable article “Lessons on GOTV Experiments” published by Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy Studies, with further bibliography.  The authors give their highest mark of certainty—3 stars—to research studies finding that “personalized methods and messages work better” and that, after canvassing, with its face to face encounters, phone calls by humans (as opposed to robots) and also by volunteers (as opposed to paid operatives) are most effective. Though I’m still perplexed about what exactly the evidence is for this conclusion (exit polls? follow up calls?), I did come to believe that I should add phoning to the other things I was doing, namely postcarding and texting. The former action was boring but also satisfying: I found myself enjoying the mild challenges of fitting the words of a script into the allotted space and using different colored pens for my best grade-school handwriting efforts. But of course one never got any response to a postcard. Our campaigns were carefully chosen for maximum impact and I had really enjoyed writing cards with other volunteers before the pandemic forced us to write at home by ourselves. I had also enjoyed sending texts, which I learned to do for the Environmental Voters Project at the Indivisible-Sister District office just before it shut down. Texting brought a few positive responses including requests for further information; and it was incredibly fast: I could send 50 texts in less time than it took me to write one postcard. But most of the text responses told me just to STOP –or to do something bad to myself or to my mother, who is dead. I continued to text and write postcards, but I decided I should at least try to make phone calls too. Naively, I thought I could conquer my fear of calling strangers if I called as a member of a group of volunteers who shared information about best practices and stories about “memorable” calls—good and terrible—during Zoom meetings.

I’m deeply grateful that I was able to phonebank during meetings which included training on issues, tech support, and hosts who sent email reports after every session detailing the number of calls we had collectively made and which we reported (another small pleasure) in daily tallies—over 106,000 by November 3. But I never did get over my fear of phoning—a fear that became enmeshed with my larger and darker fear about the possibility of a Trump victory. My stomach tightened every time I lifted my cell phone for manual dialing sessions, and my stomach was even more upset when I attempted to use the “hub dialing” system that Indivisible and allied groups such as “Flip the West” considered to be the most efficient way of reaching potential voters. When you login to a hub-dialing system, a distant computer does the dialing for you and you get many fewer wrong numbers, busy signals, and disconnected phone lines than you do when you are dialing voters directly from a list supplied by a campaign. The downside of hub dialing, for me, is that the caller is not in charge of the timing of a connection; it could take many minutes (during which some supposedly calming piece of music would play again and again); or it could come just seconds after you had completed your previous call. This meant that there was no time for the psychic loin-girding I needed, and there was often not enough time to compose my face into the smile that experienced phone bankers recommend that callers wear (as it were) for every new connection. Voters can hear you smile, I was told. And although  each campaign we participated in gave us scripts that came up on our computer screen for us to follow as the call unfurled, we couldn’t follow the scripts slavishly. The voter’s tone of voice and specific concerns (including sometimes strong concerns about being contacted at all) shaped what we might say from the first seconds of the call through the farewell.

Our phonebanking team was supporting several Senate races, and I was particularly invested in Theresa Greenfield’s in Iowa. Her staff provided excellent (and frequently updated) scripts for both manual and hub dialing, and I learned enough about her positions to be able to engage in substantive conversations with some Iowa voters. I also learned a good deal about the progressive candidates our group was supporting in Georgia (Jasmine Clark for District 108) and in Arizona (Doug Ervin for State Senate and Judy Schwiebert for State House in Legislative District 20). Clark and Schwiebert won last week; Ervin alas did not, and has modeled adult behavior by conceding to his opponent. I hope he runs again.

The first campaign I joined involved manual dialing for California Congressman Josh Harder. He was running for re-election in the 10^th District, and his campaign was what veteran callers considered an easy one for neophytes. We were mostly calling registered Democrats and the script was good: it directed us to ask about what the Congressman could do for the constituent during the COVID pandemic before we asked the voter to support or volunteer for Harder. There was no request for money, to my great relief, and it turned out that a number of people I called did indeed have problems that they hoped the Congressman could solve. One man in his mid thirties (the information on the screen gave us the voter’s age and party affiliation) was having a terrible time getting a bank loan for his small business from the CARES Act. I got his email address, called Indivisible’s liaison with Harder’s office, laid out the problem, and learned that Harder, who had taught business at Modesto Junior College after working for a venture capital firm in San Francisco, would brainstorm with his staff about helping this constituent get a loan from a smaller (and evidently more flexible) bank. I called this voter back later in the day and he said he’d heard from Harder’s staff and had hope, for the first time in weeks, that he wouldn’t have to let his fifteen employees go.  People I called for Harder did hang up on me and a few swore at me for interrupting their day, but a goodly number of people I spoke to described problems to me that I then relayed to the Congressman’s staff. One woman, in her 80s, needed groceries delivered; another, much younger, wanted to be put in touch with other parents who were trying to home school their elementary school age children.  Some of the people I called didn’t support the Congressman at all or disagreed with his position on some issues, but if the voter didn’t hang up on me within the first ten seconds, we often had civil conversations; in many cases the person on the other end of the line thanked me. Josh Harder won his race on November 3.

The most rewarding phoning work I did during this long (and still unfinished) election season was for Reclaim our Vote, a non-partisan voting rights initiative founded by an African American woman, Andrea Miller, as part of the non profit organization “Center for Common Ground.” ROV collaborates with many other groups including Black Voters Matter, the Virginia Poor People’s Campaign, Mi Familia Vota, Religious Action Center for Reformed Judaism, and the American Ethical Union. ROV aims to counter the “[o]ngoing voter suppression and voter list purging [that] have been disenfranchising millions of eligible voters — especially voters of color.” As the organization explains on the page of its website that encourages new volunteers to join, the focus is on “voter suppression states” in the south. The campaigns, designed county by county, seek to “inform and mobilize voters of color to make sure they are registered and they know how to get a ballot and vote.”  Volunteers join a ranbow coalition and are welcomed from around the country. The training materials include an interactive video especially for introverts and note that shy people may be especially good at this work because it involves listening as much as speaking. The trainers gently remind middle class white people like me that not everyone shares the sense of time (and self importance) that regards phone calls from strangers as an annoying infringement of personal space. Dialing manually to people on the ROV lists was, for me, both satisfying and unnerving.  So many phones were disconnected, so many people simply didn’t answer, that I could and did make 30 calls in an hour with no human contacts at all.  (My Indivisible colleagues interpreted such sessions as “cleaning the phone lists” for the campaign.) The scripts were straightforwardly informational; this was not a “persuasion” campaign but an effort to help people who might want to vote do so as easily as possible during a pandemic in a state where they might have been dropped from the rolls even though they believed they were registered. We could and did direct them to websites that would tell them if they were registered or not, but the ROV scripts acknowledged that the person being called might not have access to a computer. In that case, we gave them phone numbers for their county’s Voter Registration office. I imagined that giving someone that information might lead simply to long waits and frustration. But in at least three cases where I made the call to the Registrar on behalf of someone I had talked with, the official picked up right away and was extremely helpful.  After talking to a young woman who wanted to vote but who didn’t know her polling place in Navajo County, Arizona, for instance, I spoke with an official who said she could get me that information if I had the would-be voter’s date of birth. I hadn’t thought to ask for that information. But then the official said she’d do some further research and get back to me.  She did, within fifteen minutes, telling me not only the address of the polling place but also suggesting that the voter could get a free ride from LYFT since the distance was substantial. I called the young woman back and we had a conversation—surprising but intense–about our mothers. Both of them had been ardent Democrats.

I often thought about my mother as I learned to do the work of phonebanking during these months of being isolated at home. She died in 2015, and the only good thing about that is that she didn’t have to know about Hillary Clinton’s loss of the presidency. I talked about Clinton with an 81 year-old voter in Georgia with whom I spoke on the last weekend before the election when our Indivisible group was having a 45 hour call marathon (7 a.m. to 8 p.m for 3 days) to oust President 45. The person I reached through the ROV list wanted to vote and had asked for an absentee ballot. It hadn’t come, or she didn’t think it had come, but she was pretty sure that she had requested it. She had voted for Hillary and she wanted to vote for Kamala and Biden. I asked her for her mailing address and had just taken it down when we got cut off (that happened not infrequently in my phoning experience). I was very upset about losing her voice.  I called the Registrar of her county (Cobb) and explained that I was calling on behalf of a voter who hadn’t recevied her absentee ballot.  The official, like the one from Navajo County with whom I’d spoken earlier, picked up right away and said she would try to help.  Again, I had failed to get a crucial piece of information—again, the voter’s birth date. Nonetheless, the official said she would track the voter down and she did, in short order; she called me back to say that there was no record of a request for an absentee ballot, but she would call the voter herself to tell her where she should go for early in-person voting or for voting on election day. I was moved by this official’s willingness to go above and beyond what I imagine her duties are; and I dearly hope that my elderly interlocutor was able to cast her ballot.

I’ll never know for sure (I lost her number when we got cut off).  But I do know that I’ll be volunteering for Indivisible Yolo, Sister District, and Reclaim our Vote again, attempting to participate in one form of the non-violent work of civil resistance that some scholars such as Erica Chenoweth—the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School—have recently been tracking and beginning to theorize.[3]  As part of the effort to reclaim our future, I’ll be calling this week for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia.  I fear that the road for them is uphill, but I have hope that by electing them from a state that has already turned blue because of massive grassroots efforts inspired in part by Stacey Abrams, voters will allow a genuinely progressive Democratic agenda to see the light of day, despite the current Administration’s efforts to keep that possibility shrouded in dusk.

[1]Charles Bethea, “The Crowdsourced Guide to Fighting Trump’s Agenda,” The New Yorker, December 26, 2016, retrieved 9 November 2020.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indivisible_movement and David Wiegel, “Left out of AHCA fight, Democrats let their grass roots lead — and win,” Washington Post, ch 24, 2017, retrieved November 9, 2020.

[3]For an account of Chenoweth’s contribution to the recent civil resistance work, see Andrew Marantz, “How to Stop a Power Grab,” The New Yorker, November 16, 2020; retrieved 15 November 2020. 

by Bruce Robbins

The period of intense anxiety that did not begin with Joe Biden’s undeclared electoral victory on November 3, 2020 and that has now (on November 15^th) been stretched to the breaking point by the incumbent’s refusal to concede and by fears that he is preparing a coup attempt—this is not the ideal sort of moment for humanist academics to weigh in about. On the whole, we tend to write on a slower and more reflective timescale. We wait for the dust to settle. At least I do. I talk about books for a living, most of them books that weren’t published yesterday. When big news is being announced hour by hour and even minute by minute, each item potentially big enough to alter the political landscape and even to make it unrecognizable, my impulse is to shut up and listen.

I will match my personal disgust for the incumbent with anyone’s, blow for blow, round for round, point for point. But the spectacle would not be edifying. About the 70,000,000 who voted for him despite knowing what they might not have known about him in 2016 but had ample chance to find out over the past four years, I am no longer willing to bend over backwards, as so many of us did four years ago, putting most of the blame on the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee for going to Wall Street instead of to Michigan and Wisconsin. Yes, that’s what they did, and odds are they’ll do it again, just as the pollsters will undercount the Trump voters of Michigan and Wisconsin again. Where racism and sexism and xenophobia are concerned, when those who are privileged by their whiteness and maleness and Americanness continue to translate equality as oppression, we are in for a very long haul.

Still, my own privilege has occasioned one small qualifying thought about the 70,000,000. I am cushioned both from the coronovirus and from its economic consequences: I can work from home, and my income has been unaffected.  I am not threatened with eviction. I do not own a small business that could very well go under for good. I am imagining, not having consulted such figures as are no doubt available, that a certain percentage of these Trump voters, and perhaps especially the slightly higher proportion of people of color who voted for him this time over last time, were inspired to do so by the pandemic. Not, of course, because they think Trump has dealt with it competently and responsibly, but because they have been rendered so economically desperate that they simply can’t take any more. Under those circumstances, I can conceive that Biden’s nuanced position on the pandemic would read simply as “lockdown” and Trump’s open-up-the-economy position would read as their only hope, in spite of the health risks to themselves and their loved ones. This thought helps me avoid falling into the “deplorables” trap, which this go-round has become harder to steer clear of.

While awaiting January 20^th and the vaccine, relatively optimistic about both, I read books, think about them, teach them remotely.

The June 2020 issue of Harper’s includes a letter written by Albert Camus in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of France. Camus, whose novel The Plague (1947) has been enjoying a large and easily understandable revival since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, says what he is called upon to say on behalf of the Resistance: “the only chance we have of improving our fate is to act, organize, and stay vigilant.” But the letter’s most striking words are “anguish” and “uncertainty.” For “we are watching history run its course, and know nothing about the intentions of those in charge.” You can see he feels that the intentions that matter, the intentions that dictate the course history will run, are the intentions of “those in charge,” not our intentions, and this is one reason for all the uncertainty and doubt, even about joining the Resistance. This also holds for the fictional plague-ridden Oran he was then inventing, which seen in retrospect takes some of its emotional too-bigness from the French occupation of Algeria (something Camus notoriously didn’t know what to do with) as well as the Nazis, and for that matter also from the historical plagues he was researching in order to write the novel. When the plague struck in the past, as he was learning, very little useful knowledge was available as to where it came from or what to do about it.

In today’s plague, however, useful knowledge is available. Actions and consequences have been pretty well aligned. Places whose leaders have done the right thing have reaped the benefits of their actions—a flattened curve, a drop in infections and mortality, the availability of equipment and hospital beds for when a next wave hits. Europe, where people got complacent and got hit by a second wave, is now locking down and already seeing the benefits of doing so. Places whose leaders haven’t done the right thing, like the US, have reaped the whirlwind, and will keep reaping it. To our vast surprise, history has made sense.

Is there a larger moral here? Acknowledging the absurdity or existential meaninglessness of things always makes you seem smart, and in a time of pandemic that disabused tone may even be inevitable. Who wants to sound dumb? But maybe intentions and consequences are not always mysteriously fated to misalign. Maybe the times demand that we read not just Camus, but H.G. Wells (see the NYRB July 23, 2020). Maybe we have underestimated the extent to which history, pace Camus, does after all have some meaningful outlines.

Camus is not wrong, on the other hand, when he suggests at the end of The Plague that plagues always come back. His plague is not just pre-modern, in the sense of being inexplicable; it is also metaphorical. It is inside all of us. That’s why it repeats and repeats, rendering history absurd. Wrong conclusion, but I am a little more inclined to forgive Camus for striking that “myth of Sisyphus” note even here, even about something as unfunny as a plague, because like many others I have also been re-reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and Atwood makes more sense of the return of the plague. People forget that the immediate cause of the Christian reactionary coup in The Handmaid’s Tale is another plague, a plague of infertility caused by environmental toxicity. From this environmental perspective, Atwood’s pre-coup past doesn’t look so very good after all. She allows us to feel a certain subtle ambivalence even toward the austerity of the post-coup present, despite its hypocrisies and its violent authoritarianism. These are signs of a novel’s greatness. Like the MaddAddam trilogy that followed it, The Handmaid’s Tale is a prep session for the future plagues that have to be expected, after the inevitable relief that will follow the arrival of a vaccine and having an adult in the White House, as long as we keep steamrolling biodiversity and, more generally, mistreating the planet as we have been in the bipartisan habit of mistreating it.

by Anthony Bogues

Chaos. Authoritarian political figures thrive on manipulating events creating grounds in which liberal normality seems to be one which invites disaster from which the authoritarian can intervene to steady the ship even if heads have to be cracked. But there is a twist to Trump’s political practice, authoritarian figure that he is, his political project now requires constant chaos. Not in order for him and his ruling regime to intervene with any steady hand rather it is about enacting permanent chaos as a tactic of rule first to erode the liberal state and establish the illiberal democratic project and then secondly to create the new political ground after his electoral defeat. Permanent chaos creates situations where the balance of social forces is in constant flux. In a period of crisis, it consolidates and energizes a section of the population that is committed to the authoritarian figure.

Trump has been defeated electorally but Trumpism has not been and there is in Trump’s political eyes the need to reorganize and give it a new lease on life. In enacting this kind of political activity, Trump’s narcissistic personality becomes a political force. Trumpism is a political configuration that is a mosaic of ideas and American political practice. At its foundation is the idea of exclusive  white citizenship based upon  an interpretation of the 1790 naturalization act, white patriarchy, the reinterpretation of some  Christian ideas (for example one Trump supporter proclaimed that  the election represented the partial victory of the Great Satan) as well as a long discursive American history in which conspiracy explains all  events. This mosaic  of ideas rests upon a notion of individual liberty rooted in self-possession untethered from  the social (which is why  the wearing of masks became  a political statement) unless it is an imagined community which can occasionally be called into being, hence  the  MAGA rallies and  their centrality  to the Trumpian project. Of course, that imagined community itself is based upon whiteness.

The Trump mantra that “We won but the election was rigged“ fits neatly within the realm of conspiracy theory and calls upon supporters to redouble their efforts the next time.  It prepares them for other moves to create chaos. The main purpose of this mantra is not to delegitimize an electoral result but to create the ground for a more protracted struggle based on chaos. The purpose is establish political obstacles for the Biden regime in an effort to unsettle it. There are other actions as well, ones which spell out the character of the Trump regime and the ways it deepens neoliberalism. Thus, for example there is a proposal to fast track a new set of regulations which would speed up lines in the poultry industry and another that would turn workers into independent contractors. All these are efforts to deregulate the liberal state under the guise of unbridled market freedom. We are into unknown political waters in American politics. While many of us focus on the unconventional ways in which the transition is proceeding or not, and fear a coup, Trump and his political friends are seeding the ground for a longer-term struggle in which they will politically further unsettle the American liberal state. So as we think about Trumpism and the current moment where what Stuart Hall calls “class democracies” attempt to stabilize themselves  to resume a liberal normal we must be careful  not to be carried away with the noise of the tweet, but pay attention to the overall Trumpian political project and how it might unfold in the near future.

by David Simpson

The phrase is James Carville’s. It slipped by without comment during an MSNBC interview just before the election results began to come in. Carville blustered that only “bedwetting Democrats” would doubt the upcoming Biden landslide, already in the bag. The remark is offensive in any number of ways, not least to those many people who suffer from incontinence. The posture of aggressive masculinism fits well with Carville’s dogged good-old-boy self-projection. A one-time Bill Clinton warhorse, Carville never appears on TV without a US Marine Corps cap or sweatshirt, sometimes both. Perhaps he has anxieties of other sorts than election results. Anyway, I felt like punching him out for suggesting that anyone with doubts about the election had to be some sort of psycho-physiological failure, a wimp. It brought back memories of “pointy-headed intellectuals.”

He was, of course, completely wrong. It was a very close election in a number of key states, notwithstanding Biden’s massive victory in the popular vote. But some seventy million people voted for Trump. If they are being fooled—and some surely are—then they have been fooled twice, and after relentless and seemingly unignorable evidence that Trump himself has proved completely deficient and deplorable in almost every way. Others, it must be assumed, are getting exactly what they want.

Like many of our sort, I have been depressed since the 2016 election, not least about the evidence that there is little if anything I can do to change things. I took some grim solace from looking back at Richard Hofstadter’s wonderful 1962 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which reminds us that Trump can be seen as just one more scoundrel in a tradition of con-men, self-merchandisers and reactionaries who have on a pretty regular basis captured popular support by denouncing expertise. But this is hardly consolation. Nor is it cheering to be made aware once again that the American tradition is one founded from the very first in an apparently intractable racism, and that every step away from it has been bitterly and violently contested by reassertions of white suprematism. Intellectuals have pointed this out over and over again, and are still doing so. It seems not to matter much to the march of history. Even charismatic leftist intellectuals like Chomsky and Said, known and listened to all over the rest of the world, get no exposure in the mainstream American media. There seem to be even fewer opportunities for most of us to contribute in a professional capacity, except in the classroom, to the redirection of a fundamentally unjust world.

And yet . . . giving in to the too-much-TV syndrome has brought me to the wonderful MSNBC daily show, The Reidout, where host Joy Reid has produced a whole string of superbly gifted and mostly black politicians and commentators, including the amazing Stacey Abrams, who seem to know exactly what is happening and why. They are the talk-shop wing of the Black Lives Matter movement, but some of them are also on the streets, and they leave little doubt that if the votes can be assembled there is a deep pool of talent, many of them women, standing ready to redirect national politics. A few already hold office. But can the votes be assembled? What will it take for a realignment large enough to put enough such persons into significant governmental power?

On good days I think that this may already be happening. Events in Georgia are hugely encouraging. The nonwhite vote, and especially the black vote, is going to be at the heart of any future for the left. But even in white majority Maine, one Green Party candidate for State Senate, Chloe Maxmin, won in a rural district that otherwise went for Republican Senator Susan Collins, attributing her own success to “deep canvassing,” talking at length to voters instead of just leaving leaflets at the door and ticking boxes. Would I know how to talk to “them,” getting beyond the Trump signs and American flags on the porches in search of some sort of common ground? Is Trump’s base dominantly made up of ugly white racists with a desire for violent acting-out? Are there seventy million of such people? I don’t even know what to say to the Evangelicals who make up a large segment of Trump’s base, or to the “hundred percenters” (as Hofstadter calls such types) who see no complexity whatsoever in their commitment to banning abortion. But I could perhaps find some common ground with those who want to pursue an isolationist foreign policy, even if my reasons for considering it have less to do with the exceptional sacredness of American lives than with the conviction that American interference has as or more often been malign than positive. And there is surely a discussion to be had about climate change, or about protectionism and free trade, even if it will not resolve the incremental loss of traditional manufacturing jobs.

The fact is, of course, that I don’t know any Trump voters; or, to wax Rumsfeldian, I don’t know whether I know any. I’ve had loud disagreements with my British relatives about Brexit, but I’ve known them forever, I grew up with them, and I know they won’t pull a gun. During the run up to the election, there were fewer signs in our suburban college-town neighborhood than I have ever seen before on similar occasions. People were keeping their heads down. My wife was spending hours on the phone banks but she was calling out of state—Georgia, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas and so on, on behalf of down-ballot progressives who seemed to have a chance. When one of her voters told her to fuck off, it was over the phone and a thousand miles away. Our town and our state are overwhelmingly Democrat, but I have to think that the parsimonious signage was both self-protective, a fear of Trump’s goon squads who were rumored to be in the area from time to time, and also a refusal to participate in a spectacle that had been so wholly adopted by the nasties: the honking, flag waving, paintballing convoys and assemblies that appeared on the national news.

One thing seems clear: we should not give much credence to those pundits and politicos who are intoning a reverence for “the American people” as driven by core values of decency and peaceable decision-making. At this point I don’t see a traditional coup in the offing; I don’t think Trump has the support of the military (though some police departments might well pull more triggers at his beck and call than they are pulling already). But I can imagine a subversion of the deeply troublesome and vulnerable electoral college vote by a cabal of state legislatures. Or a manufactured crisis of some kind, a Reichstag Fire event, between now and January 20^th. Nothing probable, perhaps, but definitely conceivable. Enough so to suggest that we must all be on maximum alert and be prepared at the very minimum to take to the streets. Another of Richard Hofstadter’s important contributions was a study of the paranoid style in American politics. But that does not mean they’re not out there. Indeed, the recent history of gerrymandering and of voter suppression stand as an examples of what amounts to a de facto coup by a thousand pseudo-legal cuts, one taking years to put into place.

Meanwhile, one of the besetting conditions of Covidworld is loneliness. More of us are spending more time without more others than before. Sociability itself, with the Trump rallies, has been captured by the right and celebrated as a rebuttal or rebuke of scientific expertise. At such a time, I am more grateful than ever for the spirit of the collective embodied in the boundary2 effort. Not in our name sounds so much better than just not in my name.