Rasmussen - Trumps Counter-Revolution

The rise of Donald Trump and his regime has produced an abundance of analysis, much of it merely ideological. But Marx cautioned us that it is not the job of a workers movement to inquire into the thinking of capitalists, but to inquire into their power. Mikkel Bolt takes up this challenge with this important inquiry into what W.E.B. Dubois anticipated in his concept of democratic despotism a cross-class white alliance, allied with ethnocentric fascism around the globe. Bolt asks us to consider the potentiality of an emergent communist counter-power the very one that provoked this fascist turn.

Stefano Harney, co-author of The Undercommons

A lucid, clear-eyed analysis of the morbid spectacle of Trumps racist counterrevolution. Mikkel Bolt proposes to add to the rubble of the neoliberal order by demolishing the political form of capitalism democracy itself as it slides into fascism. Welcome to life in the postcolony.

Iain Boal, co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War

Trump is the symptom but of what? Mikkel Bolts provocative answer is of democracy, that is, of democracy under conditions of capitalism and white supremacy. With this original intervention, Bolt rejects the conventional wisdom that makes democracy the cure for all that ails it. He challenges any and all concerned about the politics of Trump to consider what his victory tells us about democracy.

Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon

First published by Zero Books, 2018

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Text copyright: Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen 2017

ISBN: 978 1 78904 018 0

978 1 78904 019 7 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934827

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

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Also by the author

After the Great Refusal

Essays on Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties

Zero Books, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-78535-758-9

The purpose of this small book is twofold. Firstly, it analyzes the meaning of Trump as a late-capitalist fascism that solves the economic crisis by returning to an imagined idea of a national community through protectionism and nationalist measures. Secondly, it criticizes the opposition between Trump and democracy that has been a staple of liberal discourse since Trumps election. Trump is a problem, but the solution is not to defend a dysfunctional parliamentary national democracy. Instead, I suggest that Trump is the symptom of fundamental problems in a shrinking capitalist economy that is unable to integrate its proletarians.

The book has four parts. In the first, I analyze Trumps election as a protest against neoliberal globalization and its different policies of outsourcing, deregulation, privatization and cuts in welfare. The financial crisis of 2008 made visible this 30-year-long development and called it into question, but without formulating any real alternatives to the status quo. Instead, the crisis, the bailout of the banks, and the ensuing cuts and foreclosures resulted in a dramatic rise in discontent that manifested itself in a rise in nationalism. In Europe, Brexit is one example of this development. Trump is an American response. Trump channels the abandoned white working-classs discontent and is promising a national solution to the crisis. His plan is to turn around the continued drop in the global economy though protectionism, deregulation and public investments.

Trumps election is thus a protest against neoliberal globalization. But Trump is also a protest against the protests. Trump is to be understood as a response to an emerging rejection, not only of the current regime of accumulation but also of capitalism as a mode of production. The Arab revolutions, the square occupation movement and Black Lives Matter constitute the coming into being of a new global protest movement. I argue that Trump is the ultra-nationalist response to these protests. An attempt to derail them and prevent them from articulating an alternative. In that sense, Trump is a counter-revolutionary solution, where protests against the last 3 decades of internationalization and deregulation and the last 10 years of austerity politics is steered in a fascist direction with ideas of a chosen people led by a strong leader. Make America great again.

In the second part of the book I show how Trump is the final confirmation of the transformation of politics into image politics. Political messages and campaigns are not just put into images but emerge as genuine image events. Trump understands this and his crazy Twitter comments against the lying and dishonest media, weak politicians and so-called judges use codes from the pop-cultural industries and transform them into a political programme. It does therefore not make sense to try and prove that Trump is lying or contradicting himself. His politics is a virtual politics that is purposefully self-contradictory, silly and violent.

We are confronted with a strange disruption in slow motion, in which former certainties dissolve, but without being replaced by new ones. The ideological dominance of the neoliberal order has been broken, but the local elites have not been able to come up with something new and have great difficulties adapting to the new situation. Trump is a temporary solution that simultaneously promises to continue the neoliberal programme, but also increases neoliberalisms racist solutions, thereby giving them an explicitly fascist dimension. The programme is the re-establishment of a fictive former greatness, where the white male reigned unchallenged. Trumps racism, misogyny and Islamophobia are the ingredients of a postmodern fascism that uses systematic lies and attacks on the mainstream press, ultra-nationalism and the mobilization of an outraged white petty bourgeoisie.

In the third section, I analyze Trumps inauguration speech on 20 January 2017. In his speech, Trump narrates a story about the decline of the USA. The political elite has allowed huge masses of migrants to enter the country. But Trump will set things straight and restore order. Trump is the strong leader that will build a great wall and kick out the foreigners. It is not the USA Trump talks about, but America. Make America great again. America is an imaginary community that does not include the people that make up the United States, but all the real Americans, meaning the white Americans. Trump promises to hand back power to its righteous owners. He employs several historical references from discourses of social-Darwinist whiteness, in which the white capitalist class and the white working class are the only genuine Americans. Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are not part of this community. Trump is constantly talking about all the things that threaten his imagined America and that he is ready to implement radical new solutions to protect it.