<nettime> John Harris: Liberals can’t hope to beat Trump until they truly understand him (Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to: 
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/30/liberals-donald-trump-rightwing-populists
(bwo Evel with thanks)


Liberals can’t hope to beat Trump until they truly understand him
Rightwing populists are operating according to different rules. If 
everything is a circus, who cares about bread?


This week brought a fascinating spectacle indeed: Donald Trump telling 
the unvarnished truth. The occasion was a joint press conference with 
the stoic-looking president of Finland, three days after Hurricane 
Harvey made landfall and Trump simultaneously announced his pardon of 
Joe Arpaio – the notorious former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, 
who was facing a possible jail sentence for defying a court order to 
stop racially profiling Latino people. Up popped the White House 
correspondent for Fox News with a couple of simple questions: why had 
Trump done it, and what was his response to those people who insisted he 
was wrong?

There was no reference here to the announcement’s odorous timing, but 
that was the point Trump chose to address. “In the middle of a 
hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings 
would be far higher than they would be normally,” he said. In other 
words, with Houston succumbing to historic suffering and damage and 
people glued to their TVs, he saw the perfect opportunity to drop yet 
another symbolic stunt: a shameful act by any normal political standards 
– but one that he, being Trump, saw fit to boast about.

We all know the daily drill by now: wake up, check phone, boggle at 
whatever new outrage Trump has perpetrated. We know too that whereas his 
presidency once threatened to follow a halfway substantial agenda – 
America First economics, a withdrawal from commitments abroad, the 
fabled wall – in any practical terms it has now swerved into a swamp of 
confusion and incoherence.

From banning trans people from the US armed forces to America’s 
withdrawal from the Paris climate change accords, his policy 
announcements have plenty of real-world consequences. But they seem 
chiefly chosen for the extent to which they play up the US’s howling 
cultural divisions – while the hourly blasts on Twitter compound the 
sense of an administration running on rhetoric and symbolism rather than 
any prospect of concrete achievement.

Viewed from one perspective, all this might suggest desperation and 
failure. But look at it in a slightly different way, and Trump’s 
approach might just as well point towards political success. Forty years 
of what some people call neoliberalism have long since scaled down most 
people’s expectations of what government can achieve; for most people, 
politics has tended to resemble a distant game, replete with both 
irrelevance and tedium, which leaves 99% of lives untouched. In that 
context, even if he achieves next to nothing, the spectacle of a 
president endlessly provoking the liberal establishment, speaking to the 
prejudices of his electoral base, and putting on the mother of all 
political shows, has an undeniable appeal – to the point that a second 
Trump term might be a more realistic prospect than many would like to 
think.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker, a fascinating article on Trump 
supporters in Grand Junction, Colorado – “a rural place with problems 
that have traditionally been associated with urban areas”, where Trump 
took nearly 65% of the vote – made all this explicit. Before the 
election, voters there had tended to see Trump’s stunts and provocations 
as proof of the combative qualities he would bring to an imagined 
reinvention of America and its economy. Now, his daily antics were 
seemingly close to being the whole point.

“The calculus seemed to have shifted: Trump’s negative qualities, which 
once had been described as a means to an end, now had value of their 
own,” writes Peter Hessler, a rare example of a writer who pushes beyond 
liberal loathing of the president into the reasons why so many people 
support him. “The point wasn’t necessarily to get things done; it was to 
retaliate against the media and other enemies. The assumption has always 
been that, while emotional appeal might have mattered during the 
campaign, the practical impact of a Trump presidency would prove more 
important. Liberals claimed that Trump would fail because his policies 
would hurt the people who had voted for him. But the lack of legislative 
accomplishment seems only to make supporters take more satisfaction in 
Trump’s behaviour.”

As evidenced by Blair or Berlusconi, or any number of pre-Trump US 
presidents, much of politics has long been about performance and 
provocation, and the frequent imperative to distract the public from 
awkward realities. Now the Trump experience suggests a new, surreal era 
with two key elements. First, as evidenced by credible academic studies, 
many voters’ recognition of his lies does not seem to weaken their 
support for him. Second, Trump suggests that what might have once been 
maligned as smoke and mirrors can define the entirety of politics – and, 
crucially, government – while the increasingly untenable Anglo-American 
model of capitalism grinds on. Our public discourse is increasingly 
founded on confrontation, personality cults and dopamine hits. And if 
everything is a circus, who cares about the bread?
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Trump is not the only example. On this side of the Atlantic, Brexit was 
sold to many who voted for it not as a specified set of outcomes but an 
infectious feeling, laced with the sense of sticking it to a rotten 
establishment. And for all the exposure of the leave campaign’s serial 
lies, the lack of a public backlash is remarkable. As they entered this 
year’s general election, Theresa May and her allies had almost nothing 
to say about the economy or society, but campaigned instead on a mess of 
stuff relating to her supposed character, the idea that she was about to 
stick it to the French and Germans, and the kind of loathing of 
left-liberal politics embodied by all those front pages of the Daily 
Mail. The fact that the Tories were so wrong-footed by a Labour offered 
some hope, but a substance-free Conservative campaign still attracted 
the party’s highest share of the vote since 1983.

On both left and right, meanwhile, the bigger cultural-political picture 
is not exactly encouraging. The dread term “post-truth” barely begins to 
describe what’s going on. Overheated commentary increasingly takes 
precedence over old-fashioned journalism. The symbolic seems more 
important than the practical, so that it is more fashionable to argue 
over, say, statues we should or should not take down than to think hard 
about the condition of society, and how a whole array of massive issues 
– deepening inequalities, ageing, automation, you name it – might be 
dealt with.

Social media are dissolving the connection between everyday experience 
and political argument to the point that the latter often seems to take 
place in its own self-sealed universe, purely as an ever more hysterical 
kind of entertainment. And from that, no end of awful political 
consequences could follow.

Certainly, Trump will not be the last leader to so brazenly leave 
reality behind. We have a whole lexicon – rhetoric, presentation, “spin” 
– for the supposedly ephemeral aspects of politics, as if beneath them 
lurks the noble stuff to which we can somehow return. But what if it has 
gone, and there is no way of getting it back?


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