Re: <nettime> What is the meaning of Trump's victory?

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 11/14/2016 06:17 PM, Angela Mitropoulos wrote:

> With all due respect, the myopia in this discussion is breathtaking.
> If the explanation of declining social solidarity were true, then
> why was it white people who overwhelmingly voted for Trump? Why
> isn't fascism's constituency made up of those who are poor rather
> than those who are white (irrespective of income)? etc.

For my part, I never said that class can be separated from race. I think 
the European colonization of the world made racism a structural part of 
the so-called Western societies. Living in the US, one sees racism at 
work every day, and every struggle against it is important, as so many 
people of all colors, ages and confessions have recognized by supporting 
Black Lives Matter. However, in the wake of Trump's election, if one 
says that all the people who elected him are racist at their very core, 
then the situation becomes fatal: because not only are the racist 
politicians holding power with all its levers, but their supporters are 
in a majority over huge swathes of the territory. To essentialize all of 
Trump's supporters as racist, allowing them no other significant 
motivations, is bad politics. It abandons every other form of 
intervention at a time when the accusation of racism is something its 
targets are glorying in.

Here is what I think. Human beings do not have an unalterable core. They 
are aspirational as well as traditional, and under capitalism most 
people aspire to so-called economic success. Changes in class privilege 
are extremely dangerous for the Euro-capitalist societies, because they 
make sheer "whiteness" with all its historical ills into the most 
attractive identity that increasingly desperate people can claim 
(http://nyti.ms/2eYYg72). Desperate is not a figure of speech: in rural 
areas on the US, the death rate has actually *gone up* for whites 
without a college education since 1999. That's not the trend for any 
other group. The early deaths are mostly attributed to opioid use, which 
typically begins with prescription drugs and ends with heroin 
(http://wapo.st/1PhmUwO). This about lives gone wrong, loss, emptiness, 
meaninglessness, as so many testimonies and studies explain. The 
intertwining of race and class and failed economic policy begins to get 
at it, but there would also be major questions to ask about what's 
promoted as the good life, how society traps people into "cruel 
optimism" where what we want is what hurts us, and so on.

To be sure, privilege is unjust, and an across-the-board change in class 
positions leading to greater equality would be a good thing. Instead in 
the US we have extremes of both wealth and poverty in the cities; while 
the decline of old manufacturing centers and especially of rural areas 
is ignored when not scorned. Trump addressed small-town people in 
situations of decline and despair, mingling vague economic promises with 
an explicitly racist claim to the benefits of whiteness. Clearly the 
mainsteam Democrats failed to address those people with any more 
substantive promise, much less any action over the last 25 years. One of 
the practical questions right now is how to do that, without in any way 
condoning or accepting the undeniable racism that is empowering a former 
fringe.

I brought Polanyi into this discussion because of his core concept, that 
fascism emerges from a society's attempts to protect itself against the 
ravages of capitalism: a self-protective dynamic that can end in 
situations far more damaging than the initial one that provoked it. I 
fail to see the myopia in the reference. To suggest as you do, Angela, 
that those who quote Polanyi want to return to neofeudalism is more on 
the order of an insult than an argument, just like your earlier idea 
that the Occupiers and those who participated in the 
counter-globalization movement are now leaning toward the alt-right. 
Well, whatever, intellectuals get irritated with other intellectuals, 
that's neither new nor interesting. I'd rather hear your proposals, what 
you think can be done to change the current politics of resentment that 
is spinning out of control.

best, Brian

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