Who is Donald Trump? Or, perhaps more appropriately, the question should be what is Donald Trump? That is to say, what does his emergence as an American political phenomenon signify on the symbolic level?
There is not a straightforward answer. How could the alliance between a Manhattan billionaire, a twenty-first century Reality Television star, and a fragmented assemblage of displaced workers throughout the American Rust Belt be straightforward? Yet, nevertheless, this is precisely what happened — one of the many asymmetrical pieces that came to form the 2016 election puzzle — so to deliver the forty-fifth Presidency to Donald Trump.
One cannot help but scratch one’s head at such an absurd situation. In many respects Donald Trump is representative of the very forces — the exponential breakdown of local culture and local sensibility by the global media apparatus; the continuous expansion of global capitalism in the forms of outsourcing, privatization, and deregulation; the ongoing consolidation of political and economic power into the hands of a supranational global oligarchy10 — that have directly led to the socioeconomic displacement of the very same American workers that he mobilized into his core political base; not to mention exacerbating the pervasive sense of cultural impotence that has attracted a new generation of white nationalists into our political discourse.11
In other words, Donald Trump, and strangely enough, has helped to create the very conditions for his populist inspired socioeconomic and political critiques to be taken seriously: he is a perfect representation of what his politics is said to struggle against.
Throughout his writing contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek has made use of the Gospel line “for they know not what they do,”12 as a way to explain how ideology functions. Ideology is usually regarded in most political commentary as an adherence to a set of clearly discernible beliefs or sociopolitical axioms, as in having an ideological fidelity to Nazism or Soviet communism. But for Zizek, one also follows ideology when they do not even realize it: ideology is a collective pattern of thinking and doing that has become so part and parcel to everyday experience that it fades into the background and thus appears as the naturalized frame of one’s experience. Meaning, the most powerful ideology occurs when we are not even conscious of believing in it or acting it out in our lives.
With that there was something profoundly ideological following Trump’s victory when his two sons — Donald Jr. and Eric, now the principals of the Trump business empire — announced that they were planning on opening a chain of hotels in what many have now referred to as “Trump-land.” Or, what was once simply known as middle America:
Trump Hotels, the brand run by President Donald Trump’s two sons, has announced that it will start a new mid-scale brand.
The chain will be called American IDEA, and will debut with three properties in the Mississippi Delta area - in Cleveland, Clarksdale and Greenville. The company says it has already signed the agreements, and that the concept will be “rooted in local history and neighborly service” …
“We look forward to leveraging our expertise and experience across the various segments of the hotel business and bringing our trademark hospitality to many more guests, owners and markets across the nation,” says Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger.
The announcement was made during the 39th Annual NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference, a time when many real estate deals are hatched.13
What we see in the above passage is more complex than what may appear upon first glance: not simply that of a shameless and opportunistic power grab by the two Trump sons; a direct leveraging of their father’s Presidential victory into the demographic area most associated with his core political base. What we also see in the above passage is the very same ideological mechanism that drove displaced blue-collar voters toward Trump in the first place.
Although Trump was sometimes correct in pointing out throughout his campaign the profound injustice that workers and small farmers have experienced throughout much of America from the cumulative effects of neoliberal globalization14 — the closing and outsourcing of American productive factories to the Third World for the purpose of reducing labor costs and evading regulations, the ongoing disintegration of the American middle and working class, the rhetorical hypocrisy and economic collusion of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the mainstream media to the detriment of ordinary Americans — what he was not able to articulate in any coherent way was the other side of the very same neoliberal coin: like the multinational corporations like Walmart that have moved in and radically transformed the communal fabric of thousands of small towns throughout America to their own detriment.15 In other words, in Trump’s very remedial view of cause and effect, the continual outsourcing of American jobs throughout these regions as the result of free trade deals and globalization is unacceptable; a direct affront to the stability and dignity of the American worker. Yet when these same socioeconomic forces come to small town America heralding the promise of “jobs”16 in the form of a Walmart, in the innumerable national chain retail stores or restaurants you now see on the side of any American highway or strip mall, or as in the new brand of hotels now in development by the Trump Corporation, it is rather seen as “investment in America” and a beneficial development.
But this is the type of disconnected logic and ideological blindness that now defines contemporary American politics, a collective blindness that always produces the very same question for each major party to grapple with: how do we mitigate, through ideology and partisan political rhetoric, the most problematic features of twenty-first century global capitalism; how do we gloss over the profound inconsistencies and antagonisms that now define the functioning of the global economy in order to produce a coherent world view for our frustrated political base?
In many ways we seem to be at a dead end here. There are no clear political solutions as to how we move forward in the present era of a global capitalism that has now become fully synchronistic with the power, algorithmic intelligence, and sheer speed of networked technologies. From the result of this novel dynamic, social and political life has all but lost contact with its public dimension. Now thoroughly privatized within the coordinates of a corporate logic, the production of our shared knowledge, our culture, and even our most personal and most intimate relationships are in the process of being lost to the demands of shareholder value, technological efficiency, and bottom lines. We are now hyper-connected, but as a result we have lost our autonomy and our ability to be emphatic; to listen to each other’s struggles and respond with dignity, clarity, and vision.17
In this very context, what Trump may in fact bear witness to is an emergent political paradox: the seeming impossibility of bringing forth a new kind of politics in the present moment that can effectively respond to the growing friction that is now revealing itself in no uncertain terms across the planet: continued neoliberal globalization or Donald Trump’s brand of nationalist-populism.18
The election of Donald Trump does not only demonstrate the fact of a profound crisis that directly mirrors the overall state of American political life (or even the fact of the long-gestating crisis regarding the core principals of neoliberal globalization that have exploded to the surface with his bombastic and ungrounded critiques). What the election of Donald Trump may truly signify is a crisis of humanity, an unfolding and exponentially intensifying crisis of our shared future together on Planet Earth, and with that, the importance of thinking a new kind of politics that can emerge into both theory and practice.
I have divided what follows into three parts:
1.The transformation of global capitalism. The ongoing mutation of global capitalism that has been occurring throughout Western economies since the 1980s is what we could characterize as being a shift from industrial capitalism to postindustrial capitalism; from Fordism to post-Fordism; from a national economy defined by productive technologies rooted in time and place (as in the factory or office building located in a particular town) to the emergence of a global economy defined by the proliferation of digital technologies,19 the ascendancy of unregulated and internationalized financial markets, and de-centered media content produced and accessed by individualized cognitive professionals.20 Among the numerous deleterious effects this transformation has brought forth, perhaps the most harrowing is how our public spaces and personal relationships have become increasingly mediated by the combined forces of digital surveillance and a corporate logic: mass privatization is now the unquestioned norm across the majority of our public and personal spaces. Under these conditions our social life — as in our interpersonal relationships, our local cultures, and most certainly our collective psychological health — becomes exponentially deprived of its autonomy, vitality, and even sanity.21 We have been forced to progressively migrate our experiences to the virtual sphere (as in the social medias for example) while abandoning the flesh of our bodies and the reality of our surroundings: our capacity for empathy and sensitivity becomes exponentially foreclosed within these socioeconomic conditions. And, perhaps emblematic of this mass migration of humanity to the virtual realm is the phenomenon of Reality Television and the symbolism of none other than Donald Trump.
2.The discourses of Donald Trump. It is interesting to take note of how Donald Trump, in his very person, in many ways signifies the very opposite of his political project. That is to say, how can the politics of a billionaire real estate developer and global media personality be symmetrical with the politics of displaced American workers, farmers, and the ever growing middle-class casualties of neoliberalism?22 In a simplistic way, Donald Trump’s political project directly appealed to the making of a nostalgic return to the days when hard-working men labored in set 9-5 shifts, when nuclear families sat down for a shared meal every Sunday evening, and when Old Glory flew proudly outside of every white picket fence. For the contemporary American citizen to whom this nostalgic appeal was directly addressed — the countless middle- and working-class Americans who desperately wanted to enact that very same return that Donald Trump spoke to — there was, in their worldview, a singular cultural figure standing in the way: the coastal liberal elite. Or, to put it another way: Manhattan billionaires like Donald Trump. In other words, the politics articulated by Donald Trump — a vague populism with little intellectual foundation or historical context — has very little in common with either his personal biography or history as an American business mogul.
3.The resistance to Trump. What we should uncomfortably recognize about much of the widespread resistance to the Trump presidency is how it’s not an authentic resistance in the deepest sense of the word. On the contrary, what we can see in both the standard liberal-democratic resistance and the faux outrage of the American conservative23 to Donald Trump’s crude politics is rather that of a desperate attempt to re-establish the status quo. The re-establishment of the “status quo” being, essentially, a smooth return to the basic frame of neoliberal globalization whereby the trifecta of power between Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the global media can continue to operate smoothly in the absence of any disturbance from a populist inspired politician like Donald Trump. But what we often fail to see is that these are the very same conditions that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump, that these are the very same forces that opened the possibility whereby his politics could even be heard. This is not to say I don’t think we should resist the politics of Trump; we must, or else it seems that the future of our planet could be put in imminent danger. The question I will pose to conclude this book is what kind of resistance will it be? Will it be a resistance that opens up new ways to think about global society, the state of our interconnected humanity, and what novel ideas could potentially disclose a new kind of political vision for America and the world? Or, will it be a reactionary, pseudo-progressive resistance that simply seeks to reestablish the old status quo, the very same status quo that helped to give rise to the politics of Trump in the first place?
In many ways the entrance of Donald Trump onto the national political stage signifies a kind of culmination, and perhaps even a breaking point, to the proliferation of neoliberalism — the mass privatization, deregulation, outsourcing, and simulation — that has infected both American and planetary society since the 1980s. We, as both Americans and representations of humanity itself, have become psychologically and spiritually fragmented, torn apart by difference, and haunted by the spectral presence of information overload in the age of digital capitalism. Amidst this profound sociopolitical confusion, this interpersonal disconnection, and this regression to misogynist and racist outbursts, the figure of Donald Trump emerges as a symbolic figure bearing witness to the extent of our social fragmentation, personal loneliness, and cultural alienation:
This is why the social body has lost contact with its brain: the production of knowledge and technology is deployed in a privatized corporate space which is disconnected from the needs of society, and responds only to economic requirements of profit maximization. Disconnected from the body, the social brain becomes incapable of autonomy. Disconnected from the brain, the social body becomes incapable of strategy or empathy … The hyper-stimulated body is simultaneously alone and hyper-connected: the more it is connected, the more it is alone.24
I think one of the things we must clearly recognize at this stage is that there is no “going back to normal” after the electoral victory of Donald Trump; there is simply no possibility of returning to a national political climate in which the residue of his presence and rhetoric will not be felt. Like a life altering trauma experienced by the individual, the national life and political climate we once knew as Americans will never be the same again: it is only a collective and political healing that will suffice to remedy the profound damage that has been done. And in direct relation to this traumatic political intrusion there is simply no way to explain away this trauma — to displace the cause of Donald Trump’s rise to political power onto Trump himself, or by characterizing his supporters with categorical and inflammatory terms — without fully taking into account the socioeconomic, technological, and political factors that opened up the possibility for his politics to even be taken seriously: Donald Trump’s rise is directly symmetrical to the catastrophic failure of both major political parties to effectively respond to the growing complications produced by global capitalism, global technology, and global militarism over the past several decades. Voters gravitated to his style of “just telling it how it is” rhetoric as a referendum against the cold and formal discourses of technocratic specialization and politically correct language, a set of discourses that have fundamentally failed to produce a coherent political vision for American voters in the twenty-first century.
There is no real substantial positive content in the politics of Donald Trump; his ideology and political project does not signify anything new; they do not signify anything that attempts to bring forth any real legislative novelty. His entire politics can be regarded as an attempt to negate the cancerous growth of twenty-first century neoliberalism; and therefore, paradoxically, as an attempt to negate his very self.