Donald Trump is presiding over an America that is sinking into ever deeper crises that are political, material and moral in equal measure. The oft-noted ‘new normal’ appears to know no depths, boundaries or limits, as Trump uses the bully pulpit to manipulate, intimidate and bludgeon his way through his term of office, particularly as the first national electoral test of his leadership nears.
The race card and illiberal populist authoritarianism, bordering on fascism and encouraging the most backward forces and instincts, is his preferred strategy. Yet, he accepts no responsibility for any negative effects of his violent, fascistic rhetoric against all those he deems to be ‘enemies of the people’, of ‘true’ America, the America he wants to return to a mythical golden age in which minorities and immigrants ‘knew their place’, and the ‘white man’ reigned supreme.
Now, with 14 mail bombs and the largest ever single killing of Jews in America, a few days ahead of the November 2018 elections, Trump and his media machine, fuelled by almost daily political rallies, symbolise and represent a nation at war with itself, from top to bottom.
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This is beginning to resemble a civil war in which there appears no middle ground as Trump attempts to remake American identity by demonising all those people and ideas that he deems to be un-American.
The latest and most lethal attacks by right wing extremist supporters of the fascistic rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration are fuelled by the latter’s incendiary speeches and tweets. The alleged mail bomber’s van was covered in slogans straight from the Trump playbook; the white supremacist who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue condemned on social media his victims as supporting “invaders” from Latin America because they provided charitable donations to struggling refugees fleeing violence.
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump pay their respects at a makeshift memorial outside the Tree of Life synagogue in the wake of a shooting where 11 people were killed and six people were wounded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 30, 2018. Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
The billionaire George Soros is painted the face of a Jewish-led globalism and cosmopolitanism while Barack Obama is the ‘foreigner’ who sold America. Hillary Clinton is the puppet of Wall Street and white liberals who mobilise minorities and immigrants – hand them the country on a plate – in elections. They have sold America to the highest bidder. Everyone is ripping off America and the true Americans – those who look much like the people who attend Trump’s rallies.
Deeply personalised, racialised and misogynistic, popular ire at the political establishment for growing social and economic crises, inequality, and the waging of foreign wars, is being turned away from its fundamental sources towards minority workers in a deadly game of divide and rule politics. For all his attacks on Clinton’s Wall St links, President Trump has championed trillion dollar tax breaks to the richest 1% in America and stripped away regulation of corporate behaviour. And made millions for himself and his family businesses.
President Trump’s attacks on democracy and rule of law, admiration of nationalist-chauvinist ‘strongmen’ (Putin, Duterte, etc), and attacks on undocumented workers and their children, are the most significant test of American political democracy since the dark days of Japanese internment in World War II, the anti-communist McCarthyite 1950s and massive racist southern and FBI resistance to the civil rights movements of the 1960s.
Madeleine Albright’s recently published but deeply flawed book on fascism gets one thing right for places and times other than America today: that the rise of the extreme right, including fascists, is everywhere enabled and encouraged by wider political and economic elites. The extreme right needs more traditional conservative and centrist forces, worried by the rise of mass opposition and resistance to economic and political crises and the decline of elite authority, who believe they can ‘ride the tiger’ of extremism, shore up their power and continue to benefit materially.
Consider the Democratic party as it approaches the midterm elections. Contrary to the Trump machine’s attempts to paint it as socialist, supporter of immigrants and refugees, and un-American, the Democrats have shifted even further to the right since 2016. They have largely backed tax cuts for corporations, voted for massive military spending increases, have hardly mobilised to defend the rights of undocumented immigrants, and done nothing at all for workers across America striking at steel mills, warehouses, delivery depots, schools and hotels. The Democratic party is receiving more donations from big corporations than the Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, for example, has pledged tens of millions of dollars to the Democrats. How does it differ in its corporate ideology, agendas and funding from the Republicans?
In the upcoming elections, in the 30 most competitive districts, Democratic candidates are drawn from the ranks of serving or former FBI, CIA and military officers, most of whom argue that Trump must be opposed because he’s attacking the forces of law and order, is not taking seriously the Russian threat to the West, or is a Putin puppet who should be impeached. They demand increased internet and social media censorship to close down dissent on the basis that it is a foreign plot to undermine America, linked to the White House. They are funded by Big Money, wear their military service in unpopular foreign wars as a badge of honour and do not mention economic issues affecting most Americans.
Also read: In Deadly Attack on Jews in US, Gunman Kills 11 in Pittsburgh Synagogue
Identity politics is their favoured strategy to mobilise voters and donors, especially among more affluent sections of American society, those who benefit most directly from a politics that eschews discussion of declining mass living standards, and the growing profits and wealth of major corporations. A recent wealth report from Forbes indicated that the private wealth of America’s 680 billionaires topped $3 trillion, an increase over previous years. The US now has more billionaires than the next three countries – China, Germany and India – combined. At the same time, reports show that 40% of Americans do not have the cash to pay a $400 emergency expense.
Karl Marx summed it up well long ago: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
Therein lies the rub: the full machinery of corporate power, hitched to the power of the state, with two political parties almost identical in every way, fraudulent ‘tribunes of the people’. The parties play the tune of identity politics, obscuring class-based commonalities, the age old divide et impera.
And in this particular period, Trump plays the ‘outsider’, ‘man of the people’ card, charismatic man of destiny, claiming to transcend the normal, established parties or political styles.
As the Italian thinker and revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci, noted a century ago: “At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic “men of destiny”.”
Trump is, in his own mind, that self-styled man of destiny, come to Save the Nation, and return America to its true greatness and roots, and wipe out all foes, domestic or foreign, who have stolen America with the aid of un-Americans.
So far as he is concerned, America is at war and all else is collateral damage for which he bears no responsibility. And he is not even at the halfway mark of his first term of office.
Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London. His twitter handle is @USEmpire
