US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty

by Lance Selfa

  “Huey Long, had he lived,” wrote John Gunther in Inside U.S.A. (1947), “might very well have brought Fascism to America.” Is Trump giving good-ole-boy fascism a second chance?

  Like Gunther’s Long, he’s also “an engaging monster,” as well as “a lying demagogue, a prodigious self-seeker, vulgar, loose… a master of political abuse.” Likewise, he has “made every promise to the underpossessed,” appearing “a savior, a disinterested messiah.”

  But the great Kingfish actually made good on most of his pledges to the plain folk of Louisiana. He did bring them “cargo” in the form of public services and entitlements. He built hospitals and public housing, abolished the poll tax, and made textbooks free. Trump and his billionaire cabinet, on the other hand, are more likely to reduce access to healthcare, increase voter suppression, and privatize public education.36 “Fascism,” if that’s our future lot, will not “come in disguised as socialism,” as Gunther predicted (and Sinclair Lewis before him), but as a neo-Roman orgy of greed.37

  This analysis has focused on only one part of the puzzle of the heartland: the old industrial and coal counties, now in decline for two generations. It is hardly a comprehensive account. The regional portrait, for example, might look considerably different if we took the perspective of the larger public-sector and health-industry workforces. Moreover, the story of the Rust Belt is in many ways the old political news; the major novelty of the last election was the politicization of the downward mobility of young college graduates, especially those from working-class and immigrant families. Trumpism, whatever its temporary successes, cannot unify millennials’ economic distress with that of older, white workers because it interposes geriatric white privilege as the touchstone of all of its policies. The Sanders movement, in contrast, has shown that heartland discontent can be brought under the canopy of a “democratic socialism” that reignites New Deal hopes for fundamental economic rights and the civil rights movement’s goals of equality and social justice. The real opportunity for transformational political change (“critical realignment” in a now archaic vocabulary) belongs to the Sandernistas, but only to the extent that they remain rebels against the neoliberal Democratic establishment and support the resistance in the streets.

  Trump’s election has unleashed a legitimation crisis of the first order and the majority of Americans who opposed him have only two credible political rally points: the Sanders movement and the ex-president and his coterie. While our hopes and energies should be invested in the first, it would be foolish to underestimate the second. With Hillary’s descent into hell, there is no successor to Obama. The only world-class political figure left on the American scene, he will become even more formidable out of office, particularly as his presidency becomes heavily burnished with nostalgia. (Most will forget that the current debacle, beginning with the rout of Democrats in 2010, bears the signature of a president who pardoned Wall Street while deporting 2.5 million immigrants.) Chicago is likely to become the capital of a government in exile with the Obamas directing efforts to reinvigorate the Democratic Party and centrist politics without ceding power to the left. (If this dual power scenario seems fanciful, one should recall the precedent of Teddy Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill during the Taft years.) Those who believe that the Progressive Caucus now holds the balance of power within the Democratic Party may be rudely disenchanted when Obama again picks up the lance on behalf of the party’s elites.

  Meanwhile, Trump, augur of fascism or not, seems destined to be the American Macbeth, sowing brutal chaos throughout the dark highlands of the Potomac. The political and social war that is now inevitable in the United States could shape the character of the rest of the century, especially since it is synchronized with similar eruptions across the European Union and the collapse of left-populist rule in South America. As Trump’s spiritual godfather, Pat Buchanan, recently gloated, “The forces of nationalism and populism have been unleashed all over the West and all over the world. There is no going back.”38 Hair-raising global scenarios are only too easy to imagine. One could envision, for instance, an angry, foundering Trump regime that represses protest and incites late 1960s-like revolts in US cities, while futilely trying to reconcile its contradictory economic policies and promises. The ensuing geo-economic turmoil might prompt Europeans to invite China to take increasing monetary and financial leadership within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) bloc. The year 2016, in this scenario, would mark the end of the American Century. Alternately, Beijing might be unwilling or unable to arrest a world downturn or prevent a partial unraveling of transnational production chains. It might pivot from the Pacific toward Eurasia. In that case, 2016 might be remembered as the birthday of deglobalization and a world more recognizably like the 1930s than the 2000s.

  CHOOSING OR REFUSING TO TAKE SIDES IN AN ERA OF RIGHT-WING POPULISM

  Neil Davidson

  Two events during 2016—the UK referendum on membership in the European Union (EU) and the US presidential election—raised the question of whether or not socialists should take sides in situations where there are two alternatives, both opposed, in different ways, to working-class interests. The most obvious answer would be to abstain from the vote, argue against both options, and make the case for a socialist alternative capable of forcing its way onto the ballot in the future. But if one of the existing alternatives represents the politics of the populist hard right, as it did in both these cases, can socialists avoid supporting the other, however unpalatable doing so might be?

  Faced with the xenophobia and outright racism, which respectively dominated and constituted the Leave and Donald Trump campaigns, sections of the left in both countries argued that, whatever problems there may be with the EU as an institution or with Hillary Clinton as a candidate, a vote to remain within the former and to elect the latter was “the lesser of two evils.” The same argument has already been raised in advance of the 2017 French presidential elections, where the Thatcherite François Fillon of the Republicans has been proclaimed the lesser evil compared to Marine Le Pen of the Front National, just as Jacques Chirac was the lesser evil in the runoff against Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, in 2002. In some respects, these are more plausible cases than those of the United Kingdom and United States since, unlike Nigel Farage or Trump, the Le Pens are actual fascists.

  France is unlikely to be the last place where the left is faced with this type of choice, which indicates the urgency with which the left needs to establish an independent position. Before addressing the concrete question of on what basis we should make such choices, I want to explore the roots and nature of what is usually regarded as “the greater evil”: the populist right, in both its fascist and non-fascist variants.1

  Neoliberalism’s Crisis

  But first, it is perhaps worth briefly discussing why it has become—temporarily at least—the main alternative to the current orthodoxies of capitalist governance. The economic crash of 2007 was at one and the same time a general crisis of capitalism comparable to those of 1873, 1929, and 1973, and a crisis of a particular form of capitalist organization we have come to know as neoliberalism. But the latter has occurred at a particular phase in its history, that of “social” neoliberalism, which emerged after 1989, first within the EU, then in the administrations of Bill Clinton in the United States (from 1992) and of Tony Blair in the UK (from 1997). Perhaps the greatest ideological success of social neoliberalism was to turn the categories of “left” and “right” to essentially cultural concepts. When everyone—or at least, everyone who mattered—came to accept neoliberal economics, then the only terrain on which debate was permissible was that of identity: the so-called culture wars. So, to be on the left was, for example, to be in favor of gay marriage and migration, and to be on the right was to oppose them: the legitimacy of capitalism was never in doubt on either side.

  In reality, what had happened was that right-wing politics—that is, politics openly supportive of the capitalist system—had effec
tively split in two, or perhaps returned to the classic pre-socialist “conservative” versus “liberal” division of the nineteenth century, with both sides supporting the same economic model, but the latter being more willing to accept rights for what were usually (and in the case of women, inaccurately) referred to as “minorities.” To be clear: the problem with the latter position is not, as Mark Lilla and others are arguing, that the Democrats became obsessed with identity at the expense of economics, but that their policies did nothing to stop the oppression of these groups, in particular their working-class members, since, under the Obama administration in which Hillary Clinton served, women continued to be sexually assaulted with impunity, people of color continued to be incarcerated, and migrants continued to be deported in record numbers.2

  Two changes have taken place since 2007, both associated with shifts in the position of a faction within the conservative wing of the ruling class—the populist hard right. One is that it has also adopted a politics of identity, in this case a majoritarian identity based on that most pernicious of invented categories, “the white working class,” whose interests have supposedly been sacrificed to those of the minority populations. However, perhaps realizing that the plight of unemployed coal miners in Pennsylvania is hard to blame on government handouts supposedly being showered on Black lesbians in North Carolina, it has also adopted another position, which is to—rhetorically at least—abandon many neoliberal shibboleths and argue for protectionism and government investment in infrastructure.

  Ironically, it was under Bill Clinton, rather than Reagan or Bush the First, that the United States finally abandoned protectionism, which had been used to protect the steel industry during the 1980s. But this simply added to the case for Democrats having abandoned workers to the ravages of the market. Now, whether Trump is serious about implementing his economic policies is still unclear, and he may not even know himself; but what is perhaps more interesting is not only that a break with neoliberalism is being articulated within the ruling class, but that many of the proposals associated with it would actually be detrimental to US capitalism, which is one of the reasons why so many capitalists were opposed to his candidacy.

  Contesting Lesser-Evilism and Right-Wing Populism

  One consequence of these changes is that previous arguments against choosing the lesser evil have to be revised, although not, I will argue, the stance itself. The classic discussion is generally thought to be a much-reprinted piece by Hal Draper, first published in 1967.3 The context was the presidential election of the following year, in which it was expected that the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, would stand for the Democrats against an as yet unknown Republican candidate. As it turned out, Johnson refused to stand and Hubert Humphrey ultimately won the Democratic nomination, only to lose the presidency to Richard Nixon. Johnson had, of course, been the lesser evil against Barry Goldwater in 1964, although, as Draper pointed out, the former subsequently unleashed far greater violence against the Vietnamese than the latter had ever contemplated—and was able to get away with it precisely because he knew that most of the left were paralyzed by their fear of the greater evil. But, although Draper was primarily concerned with the United States, he did examine the most extreme example possible in order to demonstrate where the lesser-evil argument could lead: the rise of Nazism in Germany.

  In the presidential elections of March and April 1932, both the Social Democratic Party and Centre Party had refused to stand their own candidates, but called on their members and supporters to vote for the incumbent, the independent but deeply conservative candidate Paul von Hindenburg, in an attempt to block the greater evil represented by Adolf Hitler. Once reelected with the help of the left, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor, in the misplaced expectation that he would be constrained by the responsibilities of office. Draper rather foreshortens the actual process, as Hitler was not appointed immediately, but the following January, on the grounds that the Nazis were the largest political party in the Reichstag. His central point, however, remains valid: support the lesser evil and you might well end up getting the greater evil too. Draper was careful to point out the extremity of the situation in Germany during the early 1930s, both in relation to the extent of the crisis and the nature of the Nazi program, but argued that if the lesser evil argument was wrong in these conditions, it was far more so in the relatively stable context of the USA in the late 1960s.

  Draper made two general points. First, the left has to create its own political alternative, or it will endlessly be faced with choices ultimately determined by defenders of capitalism. Second, even though serious differences remained between parties and candidates—such as had also existed between Hindenburg and Hitler—these were becoming less significant in practice: the increasing centrality of state intervention, ownership, and control after the crisis of 1929 meant that all political formations (other than those committed to the overthrow of capitalism) were effectively forced to follow the same core policies, whatever their beliefs or electoral rhetoric. The retreat of state capitalism in the West began after the return of economic crisis in 1973, but Draper’s argument was still relevant as the subsequent neoliberal era involved as great a convergence around economic policy as there had been between 1929 and 1973, albeit in the opposite direction.

  But, as I have suggested, since the onset of a further crisis in 2007, this agreement has begun to break down. In other words, anyone wanting to oppose arguments for supporting the lesser evil can no longer simply argue that supporting one alternative rather than another will lead to the same result: it would scarcely be credible to argue that it makes no difference whether the UK is in or out of the EU, or to claim that Clinton would have pursued the same foreign policy as Trump. But before turning to the alternative posed by the populist hard right, we need to understand the nature of political leadership under capitalism, which it seeks to command.

  The Political Incapacities of the Capitalist Ruling Class

  Under all precapitalist modes of production, exploitation took place visibly through the extraction of a literal surplus from the direct producers by the threat or reality of violence: economics and politics were “fused” in the power of the feudal lord or the tributary state. Under the capitalist mode of production, exploitation takes place invisibly in the process of production itself through the creation of surplus value over and above that required in reproducing the labor force. The late Ellen Wood identified a resulting “division of labor in which the two moments of capitalist exploitation—appropriation and coercion—are allocated separately to a ‘private’ appropriating class and a specialized ‘public’ coercive institution, the state: on the one hand, the ‘relatively autonomous’ state has a monopoly of coercive force; on the other hand, that force sustains a private ‘economic’ power which invests capitalist property with an authority to organize production itself.” Furthermore, unlike previous exploiting classes, capitalists exercise economic power without “the obligation to perform social, public functions”: “Capitalism is a system marked by the complete separation of private appropriation from public duties; and this means the development of a new sphere of power devoted completely to private rather than social purposes.”4

  The implications of this division for capitalists as a ruling class were noted by earliest social theorists to concern themselves with the emergent system. Since Adam Smith is—quite unfairly—treated as the patron saint of neoliberalism it may be worth reminding ourselves of his actual views on capitalists and the narrowness of their interests: “As their thoughts… are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candor (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter.”5 For the purposes of our discussion, the interest in this passage lies not in Smith’s still refreshingly candid views about the capacity of business inter
ests for deception and oppression, but their inability to see beyond their own immediate interests. This was one of the reasons why he also wrote (thinking of the East India Company): “The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever.”6

  Nearly a century later, in the 1860s, Smith’s greatest successor, Karl Marx, was able to point in Capital to the British Factory Acts as an example of how the state had to intervene to regulate the activities of capital in the face of initial opposition from the capitalists themselves: “It is evident that the British Parliament, which no one will reproach with being excessively endowed with genius, has been led by experience to the conclusion that a simple compulsory law is sufficient to enact away all the so-called impediments opposed by the nature of the process to the restriction and regulation of the working-day.”7 Reflecting on the entire legislative episode, Marx noted: “But for all that, capital never becomes reconciled to such changes—and this is admitted over and over again by its own representatives—except ‘under the pressure of a General Act of Parliament’ for the compulsory regulation of the hours of labor.”8

  The thesis concerning bourgeois incapacity was restricted not only to critics like Marx, but to supporters of capitalism and even of fascism. Carl Schmitt, for example, complained after the First World War that, unlike working-class ideologues, members of the bourgeoisie no longer understood the friend/enemy distinction, which was central to his concept of “the political”; the spirit of Hegel, he thought, had moved from Berlin to Moscow.9 Joseph Schumpeter argued a more general case during World War II. Yielding to no one in his admiration for the heroic entrepreneur, he nevertheless also noted that, with the possible exception of the United States, “the bourgeois class is ill-equipped to face the problems, both domestic and international, that normally have to be faced by a country of any importance”; the bourgeoisie needs “protection by some nonbourgeois group”; ultimately, “it needs a master.”10 Without the kind of constraints provided by this precapitalist framework, the more sober instincts of the bourgeois would be overcome by the impulse towards what Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”