Anti-Politics and the Plague of Disorientation: Welcome to the Age of Trump

What happens to language when it is reduced to a vehicle for violence? What does it take for a society to strip language of its emancipatory power and reduce it, as Mengiste states, to “a rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible, then vomited out in images and words that we cannot ignore though we have tried”? What does it mean to define language as a tool — rather than a weapon of domination — in the service of economic and political justice? What institutions do we need to sustain and create to make sure that in the face of the unspeakable we can resist and hold power accountable? Language is part of public memory, informed, in part, by “traces” that allow oppressed people to narrate themselves as part of a broad collective struggle, as we see happening with the Black Lives Matter movement, among other emerging social movements. That is, suppressed histories of violence become visible in such stories and form part of a genealogy that puts current acts of violence in perspective. For instance, capital punishment is framed within the historical context of slavery, lynchings and the emerging violence of a police state.

Domination in the Age of Trump

The hate-filled, xenophobic and racist dialectic among language, images and the stories produced in the age of Trump constitutes one of the most pernicious forms of domination because it takes as its object subjectivity itself: This dialectic empties subjectivity of any sense of critical agency, turning people into spectators, customers and consumers. Identities have become commodities, and agency an object of struggle by the advertising and the corporate elite. After 50 years of a neoliberal culture of taking, unbridled individualism, militaristic violence and a self-righteous indifference to the common good, the demands of citizenship have not merely weakened, but they have been practically obliterated. In their book Babel, Zygmunt Bauman and Ezio Mauro speak to the denigration of politics and citizen rights in an age of generalized rage and emerging right-wing populism. They write:

The “culture of taking,” divorced from all rights-duties of giving and of contributing positively, is not merely a reduction of citizenship relations to a bare minimum: it is actually perfectly instrumental to a populist and charismatic simplification of politics and leadership, or rather a post-modern interpretation of a right-wing tradition, in which the leader is the demiurge who can work out public issues by himself, freeing citi­zens from the burden of their general civic duties, and leaving them to the solitary sovereignty of their privacy, spurring them to participate not in national political events but in single outbursts of collective emotional reaction, triggered by the oversimplification of love and hate on which populism feeds.

The fusion of culture, power and politics has produced a society marked by a flight from political and social responsibility. In an age in which five or six corporations dominate the media landscape and produce the stories that shape our lives, the democratic fabric of trust evaporates, public virtues give way to a predatory form of casino capitalism and thought is limited to a culture of the immediate. Politics is now performance, a kind of anti-politics wedded to the spectacle.

As Mark Danner points out in The New York Review of Books, much of Trump’s success and image stems from his highly successful role on The Apprentice as “the business magus, the grand vizier of capitalism, the wise man of the boardroom, a living confection whose every step and word bespoke gravitas and experience and power and authority and … money. Endless amounts of money.” Not only did The Apprentice at its height in 2004 have an audience of 20.7 million, catapulting Trump into reality TV stardom, but Trump’s fame played a large role in attracting 24 million people to tune in and watch him in his initial debate with a host of largely unheard of Republican politicians.

Corporate media love Donald Trump. He is the perfect embodiment of the spectacle that drives up their ratings. Danner observes that Trump is “a ratings extravaganza” capable of delivering “audiences as no other candidate ever has or could.” A point that is well taken given “that the networks have lavished upon him $2 billion worth of airtime.” According to Danner, Trump’s willingness to embrace ignorance over critical reasoning offers him an opportunity not to “let ‘political correctness’ prevent him [from] making sexist and bigoted remarks, … [while reveling in and reinforcing] his fans’ euphoric enjoyment of their hero’s reveling in the pleasures of free speech,” and his addiction to lying as an established part of the anti-politics of performance and showmanship.

Beyond a “Lesser of Two Evils” Political Framework

The American left and progressives have no future if they cannot imagine a new language that moves beyond the dead-end politics of the two-party system and explores how to build a broad-based social movement to challenge it. One fruitful beginning would be to confront the fact that our society is burdened not only by the violence of neoliberalism but also by the myth that capitalism and democracy are the same thing. Capitalism cannot rectify wage stagnation among large segments of the population, the growing destruction of the ecosystem, the defunding of public and higher education, the decline in life expectancy among the poor and middle classes, police violence against Black youth, the rise of the punishing state, the role of money in corrupting politics, and the widening gap in income and wealth between the very rich and everyone else.

If some elements of the left and progressives are to shift the terms of the debate that shape US politics, they will also have to challenge much of what passes for neoliberal common sense. That means challenging the anti-government rhetoric and the notion that citizens are simply consumers, that freedom is largely defined through self-interest and that the market should govern all of social life. It means challenging the celebration of the possessive individual and atomized self, and debunking the claim that inequality is intrinsic to society, among others. And this is just a beginning.

When the discourse of politics amounts to a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we enter a world in which the language of fundamental, radical, democratic, social and economic change disappears. What liberals and others trapped in a lesser-of-two-evils politics forget is that elections no longer capture the popular imagination, because they are rigged and driven by the wealth of the financial elite. Elections bear no relationship to real change and offer instead the mirage or swindle of real choice. Moreover, changing governments results in very little real change when it comes to the concentration of power and the decimation of the commons and public good. At the same time, politicians in the age of reality TV embody Neil Postman’s statement in Amusing Ourselves to Death that “cosmetics has replaced ideology” and has helped to usher in the age of authoritarianism. Power hides in the dictates of common sense and wields destruction and misery through the “innocent criminals” who produce austerity policies and delight in a global social order dominated by precarity, fear, anxiety and isolation.