Donald Trump and the limits of populism

Political scientists, commentators, journalists tell us that we live in an age of renewed nationalist populism; that against the rational, geopolitical management of global economic agencies, conservative-reactionary political movements threaten to upset the conditions of economic and social progress with irrational encouragements of national interests, irrational because little more than veils for authoritarian bigotry, racism and the like, all doomed to failure by the course of History.

The irrationality of the assumptions underlying this alarmist, yet self-confident, discourse are themselves rarely examined.  And yet upon closer scrutiny, it reveals itself to be essentially ideological, serving only to defend a status quo that is in no obvious way morally or political superior to the populism it is so eager to condemn.

For example, Donald Trump’s order, upon taking office, to ban for 90 days nationals from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the United States has been decried as openly xenophobic (an order now suspended, possibly only temporarily,  by judicial intervention).  The official justification for the order, namely, national security, is patently absurd.  (The United States produces its own fair share of homegrown “terrorists”, nationals of many more predominantly muslim countries and non-muslim countries actively participate in “violent political activity” without their countries being targeted by the ban – e.g. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Morocco, Tunisia, France, Belgium, etc., and borders are porous and global, that is, should anyone seriously wish to strike at the interests of the United States, then they will probably find the means of entering the country, or because those interests are global, attack them anywhere that they can be found).  Excluding stupidity and irrationality as an explanation for the order then, Trump’s ban can be read instead as an indication of territories ripe for future U.S. military intervention, interventions that will only create further, and possibly vast, numbers of new refugees.  The ban is then preparatory, a kind of preventative measure, to counter future refugee-migrant flows to U.S. territory.

This is not to say that the ban is not racist after all.  On the contrary, it is to argue that it is profoundly racist, for it sets the stage for a potentially global war against a part of the world that Trump’s administration holds to be inhabited by contemptible peoples who are beyond the ken.  And it is to place Trump’s administration on the same level as Barack Obama’s.

A nostalgic halo seems to be settling over Obama’s years in the White House.  And yet, it was Obama’s administration that set records for migrant deportation (2.7 million between 2009 and 2016) and the incarceration of “illegal” migrants (in mostly private prisons). (libcom.org 16/01/2017)  State ordered extra-judicial killings, or State authorised murder (in countries with large muslim populations), mostly with drones, also exploded under Obama.  Between 2009 and the end of 2015, 473 strikes were launched, killing some 2,500 “terrorist combatants” and an undoubtedly larger number of innocent civilians. (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian 01/07/2017)  On what grounds then should Obama’s government be spared the label of racist?

It is too simple to merely describe Trump as a populist, or worse, a fascist, and Obama as a liberal.  The words become empty (and perhaps they already were) and only serve to call forth again and again ideological judgements about the irrationality versus rationality of political decisions and actions.  If populist movements and politicians affirm a more direct identification with “the people”, a people unified by a common national identity (however this is defined), what they are opposed to, be it “liberalism”, “socialism”, “globalisation”, etc., is equally defended in the name of the people, in the name of their interests and good.  Who then has it right?  Neither, of course.

What the indignant liberal fails to see before the likes of Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is that they are all part of the same game: developing and securing instruments and techniques of control that best capture the flows of capital and serve their hierarchical domination.  The liberal’s mistake is to think either that an unrestrained capitalism is the best guarantee of material well-being, when if it were in fact put into place, it would very likely destroy itself through its own excesses and/or that it must be imposed and managed by an enlightened elite, thereby belying any of its supposed democratic passions.  Whether in opposition or together, they amount to authoritarianism.

Capitalism needs order; it needs political authority capable of creating and maintaining the conditions necessary for economic appropriation-accumulation and for reducing and responding to the violent consequences of the same.

State power and domination would be impossible however without the multiplicity of oppressive hierarchies that structure and fracture capitalist societies: family, race, class, sex-gender-sexuality, ethnicity, age, and so on.  The two central mechanisms of capitalism, appropriation and exploitation, rest upon them.  The State alone would be incapable of assuring them, and thus it feeds and is fed by the various relations of power that mark State-Capitalist societies.

Equally, modern or contemporary State forms are capitalist – and herein lies the “nationalist-populists” failure.  Corporate-financial-consumer capitalism recognises borders with difficulty (even while it needs them) and thus any economic nationalism (whether it be of the right or the left), if seriously pursued, will strain against the the chords of capitalism and risk serious immediate material poverty for many.  And it is unlikely that a government flush with bankers and corporate executives, as Trump’s government is, will do anything of the kind.  Which in no way diminishes the violence that his government seems prepared to carry out against those who would stand opposed to “America’s greatness”.  But the violence was already there, before Trump, and it is the collective failure to see this that renders the Trumps of the world seemingly excessive, out of control, irrational.

Nationalist populism is not some strange political excrescence of a bygone age.  And nor does it sound the death knell of liberal globalisation.  It has always been present as a possible political expression within capitalism.  If it is to be opposed, it must first then be seen for what it is, not the enemy of liberalism, but its quarrelsome sibling, and both children of State domination and Capital expropriation.  It is the latter then that any serious opposition to populism must contest.  That is, anti-populism must be anti-Statist and anti-capitalist.  The alternative does not lie in a supposedly left-wing populism, as some are wont to defend today (embodied in the tepid social-democracy of Syriza or Podemos, or in the earlier South-American “21st socialism“), but in the proliferation of federated autonomous, horizontal, self-governed communities.

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