Empowered By His Contradictions: Trump is a populist demagogue, and like all such demagogues he is empowered by his contradictions. This very special kind of leader is required to dance not only with the people, but also with those individuals and institutions he has promised to protect the people from.
JANE KELSEY, in a recent post, identifies some of the more
important challenges posed for the Left by Donald Trump. His peculiar mix of
worker-friendly policies and corporate concessions. His willingness to advance
protectionism – along with a host of other ideas long-declared “verboten” by
neoliberal ideologues. His brazen rejection of globalism. His reaffirmation of
the citizen’s indissoluble duty of loyalty to the nation state – and vice
versa.
These contradictions are impossible to reconcile with either
old-school socialism, or its “Third Way” bastard offspring. They are, however,
entirely consistent with the logic of
populism. Trump is a populist demagogue, and like all such demagogues he
is empowered by his contradictions. This very special kind of leader is
required to dance not only with the people, but also with those individuals and
institutions he has promised to protect the people from.
These populist politicians typically arise in circumstances
of socio-political deadlock: reconciling in their own persons the
irreconcilable differences of contending social forces – and classes. What
these vast conglomerations of conflicting interests cannot achieve – having
lost all opportunity for strategic and/or tactical manoeuvre – is achieved in
the populist’s personality. A volatile mixture of ignorance and vanity which
permits the demagogue to believe in, as Lewis Carrol so memorably put it, “five
impossible things before breakfast” – and then tweet about them.
To rational men and women, the demagogic personality is a
standing affront to the complex art of politics. What they fail to understand
is that, under the conditions which give rise to populism, rationality has very
little political utility. In the populist moment: which is itself the product
of antagonistic social and political forces’ inability to compromise; it is
irrationality that makes the “politically impossible” possible.
Because the average man or woman finds it relatively easy to
hold two contradictory notions in their heads, believing in both, they are not
in the least perturbed by a leader who is constantly demonstrating his ability
to do the same. Indeed, they are likely to feel more comfortable living under
such a leader than they are under someone who is constantly requiring them to
choose one or the other.
This celebration of ignorance, along with the constant and
wilful distortion of the truth, goes hand-in-hand with the demagogue’s
acceptance and promotion of irreconcilable ideas. And, once again, he or she is
rewarded for doing so by the endorsement of a significant minority of the
electorate. Politicians who make voters aware of their intellectual
shortcomings are seldom thanked for the experience. The demagogic ignoramus, on
the other hand; the master of that new school of performance art “populist
grotesque”; by demonstrating his or her solidarity with the average punter’s
lack of knowledge, is rewarded with their undying loyalty and affection.
None of this should strike an old Marxist like Jane Kelsey
as in any way surprising. In what is indisputably his greatest piece of
political journalism, The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Karl Marx explains in riveting detail the way
in which Napoleon’s nephew – a politician with more than a little in common
with Donald Trump – set about seizing control of the French state:
“Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’
belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to
them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he
bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees:
‘inquiry into paternity is forbidden’ After a twenty-year vagabondage and a
series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes
Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it
coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.”
Americans are not all that comfortable with historical
tradition, but they are particularly admiring of the extremely wealthy and
entertainers – both of whom they imbue with almost supernatural powers. In
Donald Trump they were confronted with a wealthy entertainer who wanted to be
President of the United States. In this “The Donald” went one better than “The
Gipper”. Ronald Reagan was only a B-grade movie star, Trump is a billionaire.
In his person the broken white American working-class glimpsed the possibility
of recovery. Not simply because they judged his promise to run America the way he
ran his business empire as unlikely to produce a worse result than the
nightmare in which they were currently enmeshed, but because Trump held out the
additional promise of telling their supposed “friends” in the Democratic Party,
the despised liberal elites: “You’re fired!”
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 12 October 2018.
