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nicklloydnow · 2 months ago

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“With Trump’s victory, the left reached its zero point.

Before we plunge into platitudes about “Trump’s triumph,” we should note some important details. First, that Trump didn’t get more votes than he did in the 2020 election—it was Kamala Harris who lost some 10 million votes compared to Joe Biden last time around. So it isn’t so much that “Trump won big” as it is Harris who lost big. It follows that all leftist critics of Trump should begin with radical self-criticism.

We must dispense with the racial-essentialist cant that came to dominate progressivism in recent decades. Trump’s victory should leave little room for the tendency to valorize certain groups based on their skin color. Among the points to be noted here, there is the unpleasant fact that immigrants, especially from Latin countries, are almost inherently conservative: They come to the United States not to change it, but to succeed in the system. Or as Todd McGowan has put it: “They want to create a better life for themselves and their family, not to better their social order.”

By the same token, we must reject the notion that Harris lost because she is a nonwhite woman. No, Harris lost because Trump stood for politics and political contestation, while she stood for nonpolitics or antipolitics. She took many progressive stances, on health care, abortion, and more. However, Trump and his partisans repeatedly made clear, “extreme” statements, while Harris exceeded in avoiding difficult choices, offering empty rhetoric. In this respect, Harris is similar to Britain’s Keir Starmer, who just happened to have the great good fortune of going up against an unpopular incumbent party that had been in power for a decade and a half. Like Starmer, Harris avoided taking a clear stance on the Gaza war, thus losing support not only from hard-line Zionists, but also Muslim imams and community leaders.

What Democrats failed to learn from Trump is that, in a political battle, “extremism” works. In her concession speech, Harris said: “To the young people who are watching, it is OK to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be OK.” No, everything is not going to be OK. We should not trust that future history will somehow restore balance or harmony. With Trump’s victory, the trend that elevated the new populist right in many European countries reaches its climax.

(…)

Here again, we should begin with a critique of Trump’s opponents. The philosopher Boris Buden rejects the predominant interpretation that sees the rise of the new right-populism as a regression to quasi-religious fanaticism caused by the failure of modernization. For Buden, religion as a political force is instead an effect of the post-political disintegration of society, of the dissolution of traditional mechanisms that guaranteed stable communal links: Fundamentalist religion—of the kind that fuels part of Trump’s base (even as he abandons its social-conservative commitments)—is not only political, it is politics itself, i.e., it sustains the space for politics.

Even more poignantly, it is no longer just a social phenomenon, but the very texture of society, so that in a way society itself becomes a religious phenomenon. It is thus no longer possible to distinguish the purely spiritual aspect of religion from its politicization: In a post-political universe, religion is the predominant space in which antagonistic passions return. What happened recently in the guise of religious fundamentalism is thus not the return of religion in politics, but simply the return of the political as such. So the true question is: Why did the political—in the radical secular sense, the great achievement of European modernity—lose its formative power?

(…)

Here, ideology enters the scene—not just ideology in the sense of ideas and guiding principles, but ideology in a more basic sense of how political discourse functions as a social link. Aaron Schuster has observed that Trump is “an overpresent leader whose authority is based on his own will and who openly disdains knowledge—it is this rebellious, anti-systemic theater that serves as the point of identification for the people.” This is why Trump’s serial insults and outright lies—not to mention the fact that he is a convicted criminal—work for him: His ideological triumph resides in the fact that his followers experience their obedience to him as a form of subversive resistance.

Here we should mobilize the Freudian notion of the “theft of enjoyment”: an Other’s enjoyment inaccessible to us (as woman’s enjoyment is for men, or another ethnic group’s enjoyment is for our group), or our rightful enjoyment stolen from us by an Other or threatened by an Other. Russel Sbriglia noticed that the “theft of enjoyment” played a crucial role when Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: What happened on Jan. 6 wasn’t a coup attempt, but a carnival, previously the model for progressive protest movements, suddenly appropriated by the right. The idea that carnivals represent a subversion of the status quo not only in their form and atmosphere (theatrical performances, humorous chants), but also in their non-centralized organization, is deeply problematic: Is capitalist social reality itself not already carnivalesque? Was the Kristallnacht of 1938 not a carnival if there ever was one? Furthermore, is “carnival” not also the name for the obscene underside of power, from gang rapes to mass lynchings? Let us not forget that Michail Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais written in the 1930s, as a direct reply to the carnival of the Stalinist purges.

The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values, of a kind) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others and violating all rules of good manners) says a great deal about our predicament. What kind of world do we live in in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect traditional values from the triumph of total permissiveness? Or as Alenka Zupančič put it, Trump isn’t a relic of the old moral-majority conservativism—rather, he is the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms, contradictions, and inner limitations.

Adrian Johnston has proposed “a complementary twist on Jacques Lacan’s dictum according to which ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’: The return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression.” Is this not also a concise definition of the figure of Trump? As Freud said about perversion, in it, everything that was repressed, all repressed content, comes out in all its obscenity. But this return of the repressed only strengthens the repression. And this is also why there is nothing liberating in Trump’s obscenities: They merely strengthen social oppression and mystification. Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: To put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.

How to account for the strange fact that Trump, lewd and the very opposite of Christian decency, can function as the chosen hero of the Christian conservatives? The explanation one usually hears is that, while Christian conservatives are well aware of the problematic character of Trump’s personality, they have resolved to ignore his seedy dimension, since what really matters to them is Trump’s agenda, especially his anti-abortion stance (though he played it down this time around). But are things as simple as that? What if the very duality of Trump’s personality—his ostensible support for traditional morality accompanied by personal lewdness and vulgarities—is precisely what makes him attractive to Christian conservatives? What if they secretly identify with this very duality? This, however, doesn’t mean that we should take too seriously the images that abound in our media of a typical Trumpian as an obscene fanatic. No, the vast majority of Trump voters are ordinary people who appear decent and talk in a normal, rational way. It is as if they externalize their madness and obscenity in Trump.

(…)

This coming-open of the obscene background of our ideological space in no way means that the time of mystification is over, that now ideology openly displays its cards. On the contrary, when obscenity penetrates the public scene, ideological mystification is at its strongest: The true political, economic, and ideological stakes are more invisible than ever. Public obscenity is always sustained by a concealed moralism. Its practitioners secretly believe they are fighting for a cause, and it is at this level that they should be attacked.

Recall the sheer number of times that liberal media outlets crowed that Trump was finally caught with pants down, that he had finally committed a public suicide (mocking POWs, boasting about pussy-grabbing, etc.). Arrogant liberal commentators were shocked at how their continuous attacks on Trump’s vulgar outbursts didn’t hurt him at all, but maybe even enhanced his popular appeal. They missed how identification works: We as a rule identify with the other’s weaknesses, not only or even not principally with his strengths. So the more Trump’s limitations were mocked, the more ordinary people identified with him and perceived attacks on him as condescending attacks on themselves.

The subliminal message to ordinary people of Trump’s vulgarities was: I am one of you! This, while ordinary Trump supporters felt constantly humiliated by the liberal elite’s patronizing attitude towards them. Or as Alenka Zupančič put it succinctly: “The extremely poor do the fighting for the extremely rich, as it was clear in the election of Trump. And the left does little else than scold and insult them.” Indeed, the left does what is even worse: It patronizingly “understands” the confusion and blindness of the poor. This left-liberal arrogance explodes at its purest in the political-comedy shows anchored by the likes of Jon Stewart and John Oliver.

(…)

The problem isn’t that Trump is a clown. The problem is that there is a program behind his provocations, a method in his madness. Trump’s (and others’) vulgar obscenities are part of their populist strategy to sell this program to ordinary people, a program that—in the long term, at least—works against ordinary people: lower taxes for the rich, shoddier health care and diminished bargaining power for workers. Unfortunately, people are ready to swallow many things if these are presented to them through obscene laughter and false solidarity.

The ultimate irony of Trump’s project is that MAGA effectively amounts to its opposite: Make the United States another local superpower interacting on equal footing with other new local superpowers (Russia, India, China). An EU diplomat was right to point out that, with Trump’s victory, Europe should no longer act as Washington’s “fragile little sister.” Will Europe find the strength to oppose MAGA with something that could be called MEGA—make Europe great again—by resuscitating its radical emancipatory legacy?

The lesson of Trump’s victory is the opposite of what many liberal leftists advocated: Whatever remains of the left should get rid of its fear that it will lose centrist voters if they are perceived as too “extreme.” The left should clearly distinguish itself from the “progressive” liberal center and its corporate-friendly woke-ism. To do this brings its own risks, of course: The state itself might be divided between three or more factions, with no big governing coalition capable of taking form. However, taking this risk is the only way forward.

Hegel wrote that through its repetition, a historical event asserts its necessity. When Napoleon lost in 1813 and was exiled to Elba, this defeat may have appeared as something contingent: With better military strategy, he might have won. But when he returned to power again and lost at Waterloo, it became clear that his time was over, that his defeat was grounded in a deeper historical necessity. The same goes for Trump: His first victory could still be attributed to tactical mistakes, but now that he has won again, it should become clear that Trumpian populism expresses a historical necessity.

A sad conclusion thus imposes itself. Many commentators expect that Trump’s reign will be marked by catastrophic events, but the worst option is that there will be no great shocks: Trump will try to finish the ongoing wars (not least by imposing a peace on Ukraine); the economy will remain stable and perhaps even thrive; tensions will be attenuated; life will go on…. However, a whole series of federal and local measures will continuously undermine the existing liberal-democratic social pact and change the basic texture that holds together the United States—unraveling what Hegel called Sittlichkeit, the set of unwritten customs and rules that underpin politeness, truthfulness, social solidarity, political rights, and so on. This new world will appear as a new normality, and in this sense, Trump’s second reign may well bring about the end of what was most precious in our civilization.”

“On Tuesday, American men showed that they weren’t buying what the Harris-Walz campaign was selling. Donald Trump, liberal America’s avatar of toxic masculinity, won male voters by a margin of 10 percentage points to 13 points, depending on the survey. Harris won women, but by a much smaller seven or eight points. Men without a college degree supported Trump by 22 points. White men supported him by 20 points to 23 points, again depending on the survey. And white men without a college degree, those the Harris campaign hoped would see themselves in “America’s coach,” favored Trump by an overwhelming 38 points to 40 points.

The most impressive gendered result of the election has to be the response of young men. According to The Wall Street Journal, men aged 18 to 29 supported Joe Biden in 2020 by 15 points. In 2024, they favored Donald Trump by 14 points, an astounding 29-point swing in a single election. CNN found a much smaller Trump lead among young men of two points, but even this is a significant transformation. Democrats long believed that young people were their electoral Superman, weakened only by the kryptonite of indifference. If they could get these young voters to the polls, victory would be assured. This election just cast those illusions onto the ash heap of history.

(…)

In the end, liberal women in the media had the better measure of Minnesota’s governor. Rebecca Traister lauded Walz as an example of the emergent “Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status.” Karrin Vasby Andersen praised Walz for “stepping back” and playing “contented second fiddle.” Alyce Collins acclaimed his “positive masculinity” for “showing more traditionally feminine traits” and “letting women take center stage.” Judy Berman echoed this in complimenting Walz’s “gentle form of masculinity.” Joy Reid dubbed it downright “21st century.” American women seemed to admire Walz’s masculinity far more so than did American men. Like those in 2016 who described Donald Trump as a poor man’s idea of a rich man, Walz proved to be a professional-managerial-class woman’s idea of a working-class man.

Already by mid-October, Team Harris was running low on joy. Democrats started playing hardball to close the gender gap with men. Barack Obama scolded black men in Pennsylvania for their lack of enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz campaign, explicitly accusing “the brothers” of misogyny. In Michigan, Michelle Obama tried to shame men with abortion rights, rebuking those considering a vote for Trump for treating women as “just baby-making vessels” and turning them into “collateral damage to your rage.” In the waning days of the campaign, the Democratic super PAC Progress Action Fund targeted young men with ad buys on social media warning them—in graphic terms—that their consumption of pornography and emergency contraception was at stake. Democrats were right to be worried. White men increased their vote for Trump at most by one percentage point. Black men added around 12 points, doubling their support from 2020. Hispanic men shifted to the right by anywhere from nine points to a shocking 17 points.

(…)

Americans might be consoled by the fact that, on the female side, the gender gap has actually shrunk over the Trump era. According to Pew Research analysis of validated voters, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a 15-point advantage among women in 2016, compared to 11 points for Biden in 2020. As noted earlier, current surveys for the 2024 race show Harris’s advantage among women down to seven or eight points. Men were also becoming less polarized over time. In 2016, Trump enjoyed an 11-point advantage among them, compared to two points in 2020. Some Democrats interpret the 2024 election’s return to 2016 levels among men as an undoubtable sign of misogyny. They would do better to instead see it as a reaction against those same Democrats’ attempts to scold, shame, denigrate, and manipulate men on the grounds of being men. Democrats don’t get to decide who is allowed to play gender politics; sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Turning the temperature down—way down—on gender politics will not only help Democrats in the future. It will help America as a whole.”

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