Donald Trump is going to win: This is
why Hillary Clinton can’t defeat what Trump represents
People are rising up against neoliberal
globalization. Trump represents capital, but also understands this
reality
Anis Shivani
The
neofascist reaction, the force behind Trump, has come about because of
the extreme disembeddedness of the economy from social relations. The
neoliberal economy has become
pure abstraction; as has the
market, as has the state, there is no reality to any of these things the
way we have classically understood them. Americans, like people
everywhere rising up against neoliberal globalization (in Britain, for
example, this takes the form of Brexit, or exit from the European
Union), want a return of social relations, or embeddedness, to the
economy.
The Trump alliance desires to
remake the world in their own image, just as the class representing
neoliberal globalization has insisted on doing so. The difference
couldn’t be starker. Capitalism today is placeless, locationless,
nameless, faceless, while Trump is talking about hauling corporations
back to where they belong, in their home countries, fix them in place by
means of rewards and retribution, like one handles a recalcitrant
child.
Trump is a businessman, while Mitt Romney was a businessman
too, yet I predict victory for the former while the latter obviously
lost miserably. What is the difference? While Trump “builds” things
(literal buildings), in places like Manhattan and Atlantic City, places
one can recognize and identify with, and while Trump’s entire life has
been orchestrated around building luxury and ostentatiousness, again
things one can tangibly grasp and hold on to (the Trump steaks!), Romney
is the personification of a placeless corporation, making his quarter
billion dollars from consulting, i.e., representing economic abstraction
at its purest, serving as a high priest of the transnational capitalist
class.
No one can visualize the boardroom Romney sat in, as head of Bain Capital, but, via
The Apprentice,
everyone has seen, for more than a decade, what Trump’s boardroom looks
like, and what it takes to be a “winner” in the real economy. What was
that façade behind the collapse of fictitious corporations like Enron in
the early 2000s? Trump supposedly pulled the veil off.
In the
present election, Hillary Clinton represents precisely the same
disembodiedness as Romney, for example because of her association with
the Clinton Foundation. Where did the business of the state, while she
was secretary of state, stop, and where did the business of global
philanthropy (just another name for global business), begin, and who can
possibly tell the difference? The maneuverings of the Clinton
Foundation, in the popular imagination, are as arcane as the colossal
daily transactions on the world’s financial exchanges.
Everything
about Clinton—and this becomes all the more marked when she takes on the
(false) mantle of speaking for the underclass, with whom she bears no
mental or physical resemblance—reeks of the easy mobility of the global
rentier class. Their efficacy cannot be accounted for, not through the
kind of democratic process that is unfolding before our eyes as a
remnant of the American founding imagination, her whole sphere of
movement is pure abstraction.
In this election, abstraction will
clearly lose, and corporeality, even if—or particularly if—gross and
vulgar and rising from the repressed, will undoubtedly win. A business
tycoon who vigorously inserted himself in the imaginations of the
dispossessed as the foremost exponent of birtherism surely cannot be
entirely beholden to the polite elites, can he? Trump is capital, but he
is not capital, he is of us but also not of us in the way that the
working class desires elevation from their rootedness, still strongly
identified with place and time, not outside it. After all, he posed the
elemental question,
Where were you born?
Though he is in
fact the libertine (certainly not Clinton, who is libertinism’s
antithesis), he will be able to tar her with being permissive to an
extreme degree—an “enabler,” as the current jargon has it, for her
husband’s proclivities, for example. It has nothing to do with misogyny.
It has everything to do with the kind of vocabulary that must
substitute for people’s real emotions, their fears and desires, in the
face of an abstract market that presumes to rule out everything but the
“rational” utility-maximizing motive.
For the market to exist, as
classical economics would have it, there must be free buyers and
sellers, competitive prices, a marketplace that remains fixed and
transparent, and none of these elements exist anymore in the neoliberal
economy, which seeks to stamp out the last vestiges of resistance in the
most forgotten parts of the world. In fact, the market has created—in
the ghost towns of the American Midwest, for example—a kind of
sub-Saharan desolation, in the heartland of the country, all the better
to identify the completeness of its project in the “successful” coastal
cities. Trump is a messenger from the most successful of these cities,
and his very jet-setting presence, in the middle of empty landscapes,
provides an imaginary access point.
Darkness in the human soul is
not utility-maximizing, therefore someone has to stand in for the
opposite of what the market establishes as the universal solvent, and
that someone, in this election, happens to be Hillary Clinton; which
makes her unelectable. She will not, in fact, be able to discover, as
she hasn’t so far, anything like an authentic voice which can prove to
the electorate that she is not that dark force the market cannot account
for. But note the irony: by discrediting Clinton in this manner, the
losers in the global economy are actually articulating yet another form
for the decisive articulateness of the market after all!
The
population across the board does not see the abstractions of the
transnational capitalist class being able to solve a problem like ISIS,
which represents a crisis of authority. Wasn’t al-Qaeda defeated? Didn’t
we get Osama bin Laden’s head? Then what is this lingering distaste
called ISIS? Forms of darkness are easily substitutable, thus Hillary
(whose synecdoche is Benghazi, or secret emails) becomes unable to speak
the truth, the more she tries.
But…I do not want to claim for a
minute that Trump can represent anything other than the further
strengthening of neoliberal capitalism, both domestically and globally.
He can only represent a further intensification, as would be true of
anyone else. The total globalization of the market—our greatest of myths
today, the one all-powerful entity to which all, state, civil society,
and individual, have completely bent—is unstoppable. The flat earth
posited by Tom Friedman in the 1990s will end up erasing all local
distinctiveness, the end goal of neoliberalism. While Trump represents
the desire for national regeneration—as is true of any neofascist
movement—this is not possible in the twenty-first century, because the
state as we have known it has ended, as has the market in the
conventional understanding.
In the end, Trump cannot take charge, because
no one
can take charge. Capital today serves nothing other than capital
itself. In the current post-democratic, post-“capitalism” era, the myths
of regeneration propounded by Trump serve as convenient fictions, as
capital well knows, and is therefore little disturbed by.
Nonetheless,
Trump has brought to the surface the leftover mobs of American society,
the residual unemployable, the “losers” constituting perhaps a third of
society, who were never acknowledged as such during the past many
cycles of political ups and downs, but who are now forcing the
successful two-thirds to face up to the fictions of the market.
When
Trump’s masses see Clinton tacking to the middle—as she undoubtedly
will, rather than go for the surefire path to victory by heading left,
by picking Bernie Sanders for example—the more they will detest it,
which will push her only further in their direction, not in the
direction that can bring victory. Clinton, because of her disembodied
identity in the placeless global economy, cannot make a movement toward
the direction of reality, because the equations would falter, the math
would be off, the logic would be unsustainable. And that is the
contradiction that the country can easily see, that is the exposed front
of the abstract market that will bring about its supposed reckoning in
the form of Clinton’s defeat.
But the reckoning, again, will be pure fiction.
Trump is not a fascist father figure, he is not the second coming of
Mussolini, he is the new virtual figure who is as real as reality
television, which is even more recessive and vanishing compared to
Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood fictions. The field of action in which Trump
specialized for a long time before the nation, as dress rehearsal for
the current (and final) role, was one where, at least to outward
appearances, the presence of surplus capital was acknowledged and taken
for granted, and aspirants competed to know more about it and to
desperately work on its behalf.
With the ascension of Trump, an
entire country of apprentices wants to get a handle on surplus capital
by bringing the state back in, but as I said before, this is impossible
because the pre-neoliberal state is gone, it has been reduced to the
market, it
is the market. Again, capital serves only capital,
though Trump’s followers wish to see him create a split whereby they can
enter the picture, forcibly, though even they perhaps know that Trump,
as president, cannot sue evanescent corporations, or other realities of
the market, even if suing is a tendency that comes naturally to him.
To
take the logic one step further, the myth of the market—or the way
“government” is run today—cannot acknowledge one thing and one thing
only: death. If you compete (whether in Trump’s boardroom or on the
“level playing field” he wants to bring about in America by excluding
illegal competitors, whether undocumented aliens or Chinese currency
manipulators or unwanted Mexican goods), you win. (Of course, this only
strengthens the myth of the market, but that is something that will be
evident to the populace once Trump is in power; they want a localized,
responsive, non-idle market, but the market is beyond the need to
accommodate itself in those ways.)
But to get back to death,
Trump’s campaign has been successful so far, and will surely be
victorious in the end, because he is the only one who has brought death
back into the discourse.
The only people identified with death
today on the global scene—the only people not part of the market and not
able to be part of it—are terrorists, undocumented immigrants, the
homeless and the mentally ill, those who have no claims to success in
the market. Trump’s people want to make sure—from the purest feeling of
shame known to politics—that they are not of the unchosen ones, they
want to enforce a radical separation between their kind of shame, which
they think is unwarranted, by excluding illegal competition, by
constructing literal walls to keep out the death-dealers, by overruling
the transnational party elites who have sold them out.
Trump is
vocally identifying the death aura, prodding the working class to
confront the other, which is as alienated and excluded as itself, but
which the working class likes to imagine is the irreconcilable other. By
forcing this confrontation he has put himself in the winner’s seat.
Let
us note the rise of suicide among white working-class men and women, of
all ages. This—like the other deals in death that the market fails to
name—is an assertion of independence from the market.
Let us note
too the power of the transgender rights movement (after the relative
normalization of the presence of AIDS, and also of same-sex marriage) to
prompt ferocious emotions amongst the excluded; this movement has
become a substitute for the power of death—sexual death—to terrify us.
They would rather be terrified by something they can do something about,
knowing that the market wants to assimilate this form of
gender-bending, identity-shifting, unlocalizable personality triumph.
Again, Trump is virtual but not virtual, he is of TV but not of TV,
functioning more as an ambassador from TV than an actor or role-player
in that world—which makes him uniquely equipped, in the eyes of his
supporters, for taking on the kinds of death-dealers that they think
mess up the market against their parochial interests.
