Anti democratic politics of Trump and Hillary Clinton
Solly Rakgomo | Friday June 24, 2016 17:58
Even the liberal scribes find common ground with the conservatives in denouncing Trump as a tyrant who represents a loud echo if not a strong register of a fascist past. While such condemnations contain a shred of truth, they only scratch the surface of the conditions that have produced the existing political landscape. Such arguments too often ignore the latent authoritarian and anti-democratic forces that have a long legacy in US politics and society.
Unfortunately, recognising that the United States is about to tip over the edge into the abyss of authoritarianism is not enough. There is a need to understand the context -- historical, cultural, political and economic that has created this moment in US society in which fascism becomes an endpoint.
Trump is only symptomatic of the problem, and condemning him exclusively does nothing to contain it. Moreover, such arguments often ignore the fact that Hillary Clinton is the underside of the new neoliberal oligarchy, which indulges some progressive issues but is heavily indebted ideologically and politically to a criminogenic culture of finance, racism and war. Put differently, she represents a less obscene, less in-your-face form of authoritarianism, hardly a viable alternative to Trump. In these type of politics language has also been transformed to produce and legitimate a culture of forgetting that relishes in a flight from responsibility. Capitalism, racism, consumerism and patriarchy feed off each other and are mobilised largely through a notion of common sense, which while being contested as a site of ideological struggle shows little sign of losing its power as a pedagogical force. As a result, we are living through an ongoing crisis of democracy in which both the agents and institutions necessary for such social order are being dismantled at an accelerating rate in the face of a massive assault by predatory capitalism, even while there is growing resistance to the impending authoritarianism. It gets worse.
We live in a moment of political change in which democratic public spheres are disappearing before our eyes, language is turned into a weapon and ideology is transformed into an act of hate, fear, racism and destruction, all of which is informed by a dark history of political intolerance and ethnic cleansing. The war on democracy has produced both widespread misery and suffering and finds its ideological counterpart in a culture of cruelty that has become normalised.
In the age of Trump, anticipation no longer imagines a better world but seems mired in a dystopian dread, mimicking the restlessness, chaos and uncertainty that precedes a historical moment no longer able to deal with its horrors and on the verge of a terrible catastrophe. We now live in a time in which mainstream politics sheds its ideals and falls prey to choices that resemble a stacked deck of cards and mimic the values of an authoritarian society. All the while politics is being hollowed out as lawlessness and misdirected rage, while a loss of faith in electoral politics has given rise to a right-wing populism that is more than willing to dispense with democracy itself.
Demands to support Hillary Clinton as a lesser evil compared to Trump refuse to acknowledge that such mandates keep existing relations of power intact. Such actions represent more than a hollowing out of politics as they represent a refusal of the affirmative nature of political struggle. They also represent the surrender of any hope of moving beyond the enveloping fog of authoritarianism and a broken political system. Put bluntly, such choices sabotage any real hope for developing new politics and a radical democracy.
These limited choices (two party system) also undermine the need to develop a broader vision of struggle, a comprehensive democratic politics and the need to engage multiple publics in the quest to rethink the political terrain outside of a neoliberal notion of the future. At issue here is the moral blight that permeates the United States: a politics of the lowest expectations, one saturated in lies, deceptions and acts of bad faith.
Historical memory is saturated with the lies of mainstream politicians like Trump and Hilary Clinton. The list is too lengthy to develop but extends from the falsehoods that led to the Vietnam War to the lies that produced the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, which have left 1.3 million dead. The politics of lying by these politicians and their intellectual collaborators fuelled a regressive neoliberal war on poverty and crime that morphed into a racist war on the poor.
In addition, during the Obama administration, the politics of hope quickly became a politics without hope, functioning to legitimate and accelerate a flight from social responsibility that provided a blank check for Obama’s refusal to prosecute government officials who engaged in egregious acts of torture, to conduct immoral drone attacks, to expand the nuclear arsenal and to display a cold indifference to the criminal environment of Wall Street. All of this adds up to a notion of politics partly driven by a culture of ignorance and lying that has surpassed previous historical eras, marking an entry into what Olivia Ward calls a “ post –universe politics.” In this instance, the politics of performance denigrates language and shamelessly indulges a culture in which the truth is sacrificed to shouting, dirty tricks and spin doctors.
We now are approaching a moment in US history in which truth is either viewed as a liability or ignored; at the same time, lies become more plausible, Lying is now the currency of mainstream politicians (especially Clinton) and finds its counterpart in talk radios, cable television and the mainstream media.
Under such conditions, referentiality and truth disappear along with contexts, causes, evidence and informed judgement. A manufactured ignorance and the terrifying power and infusion of money in politics and society have corrupted democratic principles and civic life. A combination of arrogance, power and deceit among the financial elite is exemplified by Donald Trump and Clinton. Desperation among many segments of the American public has become personal, furthering a generalised anger ripe for right-wing populism or worse. One consequence is that xenophobia and economic insecurity couple with ignorance and a collective rage to breed the conditions for symbolic and real violence, as we have seen at many Trump rallies. When language is emptied of any substance and politics loses its ability to hold power accountable, the stage is set for a social order that allows poor minorities to continue to be objects of domestic terrorism, and provides a cover for corporate and political criminals to ravage the earth and loot the public treasury.
In the age of these two contesting politicians (Trump and Clinton), truth becomes the enemy of governance and politics tips over into a deadly malignancy.
One thing about the political impasse facing the American and global public is that it finds itself in a historical moment in which language is losing its potential for imagining the unimaginable, confronting words, images and power relations that are in the service of violence, hatred and racism.
This is the moment in which meaning slips into slogans, thought is emptied of substance and ideas descend into platitudes and sound bites.
This is an instant in which the only choices are between political narratives that represent the hard and soft versions of authoritarianism -- narratives that embrace neo-fascism on the one side (Trump) and a warmongering neoliberal worldview on the other (Hillary Clinton).