Every election generates its questions. Generally these questions are an attempt to answer the question, what happened? The way this question is asked and then answered is often not very helpful. The pundit class have a predilection for framing electoral results as symbols in a broad search for meaning. Such explanations tend towards expressive causality as the entire election expresses a historical moment, and the soul of a nation. Thus we are told that Obama's election was the beginning of a new post-racial America, that Harris' lost is the end of identity politics, and that we are all in Trumpland now. A difference of a few million votes in a few different key states is translated into the expression of a new zeitgeist. Such expressive explanations are generally not very useful, especially when we are talking about voting which is actually the actions of millions of different people across different classes states, classes, races, and so on. If anything is overdetermined (and I would argue that everything is, but that is a different, and more speculative point), then elections definitely are overdetermined. My response to all of the various answers to why Trump beat Harris, everything from Harris' failure to distance herself from Biden's support for genocide in Gaza to Trump's appeal to racism and misogyny is to say "yes" to all of them. They are all factors, and all played a role in different degrees and different places.
The question of what happened is one question, and it drives a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking from the pundit class, but a far more pertinent question is what happens next. What will Trump's second term look like. This is especially pressing since Trump does not know or care about the norms and limits that have restricted past presidents, and despite the fact that he is open about this, and about the what he plans, there does seem to be a gap between what he says he will do and what its effects are. To put it bluntly, and risk returning to the overdetermined questions above, it is hard to imagine that the voters citing economic concerns such as inflation as one of their reasons for voting for Trump willingly and knowingly signed up for the economic chaos that tariffs and mass deportations will almost certainly involve. Cheap labor overseas and cheap labor at home are the twin pillars of our imperial mode of living (to use Kohei Saito's phrase) and it is hard to imagine people motivated by inflation and, to use the cliche, cheaper eggs voting for an increase in the cost of consumer goods and a disruption to the cheap labor that is fundamental to agricultural production.
This does not stop Trump and company from presenting both of these plans according to an economic logic of self interest. During the vice president debate J.D. Vance argued that mass deportations would bring down the cost of housing as if it was undocumented workers and not private equity firms that were buying up single family homes. (As an aside I would say that when mass deportation is presented as a solution to a economic problem like the cost of living it would seem to be difficult to maintain the idea that there are "legitimate economic concerns" underlying Trump's appeal.) I imagine that one could present tariffs as an attempt to restore American industrial production to its past glory, to replace foreign made iphones and televisions with those made in the USA. Restoring the nation, the jobs, and the families of the fifties. Which sounds great until one is aware of how long it would take to build up such productive capacity in a nation that has spent decades outsourcing it. One could selectively and cruelly present both of these proposals according to an economic logic of individual self-interest arguing they will create jobs. That does not change the fact that mass deportation will probably have its most immediate economic effects in the cost of food not rent and tariffs will drive up the cost of living well beyond the current rate of inflation.
One can take some reassurance that even as the rest of the checks and balances of American society, from the media to the judicial, collapse, that economic self-interest will prove to be the ultimate check to a such a nativist and nationalist project of isolation and ethnic cleansing. I tried to reassure myself that this would have to be the case. Such reassurances would have perhaps worked if I had not been reading Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization . One of Seymour's fundamental arguments is that if we are to make sense of the present we must think beyond self-interest, must imagine politics and even economics to be governed by different affects and different motivations than what is generally considered to be self-interest. As Seymour writes,
"What is self-interest anyway? According to Albert O. Hirschmann, the concept of 'interest' first gained ground among liberal philosophers like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, as an alternative to the rival concept of the 'passions.' The purpose of this shift was to help neutralize the potentially disruptive passions of the masses, who were becoming political actors in their own right. The easiest way to do with was to arouse one set of passions against another; that is, against lust and ambition, one should incite greed and avarice. To make this seem less scandalous, they re-described avarice as 'self-interest." And self-interest, it was thought would incentivize people to behave prudently and in conformity with morality and law. This is how liberal philosophers thought people ought to be governed, not how people really behaved. But, taken seriously, the concept of 'interest' could never be reduced to greed or avarice. To have an interest in anything is to find one's attention and desire riveted to it, as we might be absorbed by a distant war, or the fate of an endangered species despite its having no bearings on our income. We are passionate animals. Passion, as Karl Marx wrote, is our 'essential force.' To understand what's happening today, we must return to the passions."
Along these lines Seymour argues we must expand both our sense of the economy and politics. The economy has to be expanded beyond utility maximizing calculation to include the experiences and realities of class and work. As Seymour writes with respect to the latter:
"Work, for most of humanity, means working for others, in conditions one doesn't choose, in which precarity of rights and survival leaves one exposed to coercion and humiliation. Nor has all this effort ever been extracted from all employees on equal terms. Employees need not depend on de jure segregation as they once did, but they prefer a segregated labour market in which certain groups of workers (women, migrants, ethnic minorities) 'naturally' come cheap and flexible. The rewards of all this productivity are prodigious, but of course, the biggest rewards accrue to owners and managers of capital. Shorn of all euphemism, work is exploitation. "
I completely agree with the centrality attached to work, and have even written recently about the role the racial division of labor played in the recent US presidential campaign. For Seymour thinking about economics means thinking about class and not interest, thinking of how economic relations are lived as experiences of domination and precarity, and how these experiences fuel desires not so much for individual advantage but collective ressentiment.
Seymour's survey of the different forms of Disaster Nationalism from the US to India and Israel show to what leaders have offered people not so much an improvement of their interests but targets for their passions, providing constant enemies for hatred, mockery, and revenge. Disaster Nationalism is as much of a mutation of the online entertainment apparatus, a transformation of the spectacle into a constant game of hatred and revenge. It is a dark prospect, and Seymour's chapters on India under Modi and the Philippines under Duterte offer a horrifying vision of a future in which authoritarian takeovers of state power are fueled by a spectacle of cruelty in the streets. To frame this as an answer the perennial question, why do people fight for their servitude as if it was salvation? The answer is that servitude can be fun so long as others have it worse and you get to participate in their subjection (or at least get to watch).
I keep coming back to two questions after reading this book. The first, and most immediate, one is what will happen when the proposed hardship of Trump's disaster of nationalism comes to the US. Will people gladly tighten their belts in the name of making America great again? Or, to be more honest, will people accept the decline of real wages so long as the wages of whiteness are restored? Will some people put up with suffering so long as they know others are suffering more? Or will interest reign as people demand the pleasures of cheap consumer goods over the pleasures of spectacles of suffering and revenge? It is hard to say which will come to pass, or, more to the point, the answer is probably both in different populations and varying degrees. The future offers us contradictions and tensions: everything is overdetermined after all. This brings me to the second, larger question, we know what a politics of interest looks like, we have lived under it for all of our lives. As we see its failures, and see a revived nationalist right expand to include the passions of suffering and ressentiment as part of its politics, we can ask the question as towhat does an affective politics of liberation look like? What are the joys that we can create? What does a revolutionary politics look like that takes seriously the passions as well as the interests?
No comments:
Post a Comment