Trumpism: New Bottles, Old Wine

History is messy. Those who expect a storybook cast of clear characters or a narrative that can be readily reduced to academic generalities are disappointed at even the most simple event. When right-wing protestors wielding Blue Lives Matter flags breach a police line and invade the State Capitol in Washington D.C., even the most subtle scholar is reduced to confusion. If you want a literary logic of the events of the 6th, your best place to look may well be farce. As Mike Davis mentioned, the images from the storming of the building had more in common with Dalì and Buñuel than any kind of realism.

In isolation, events like those at the end of 2020 and the start of 2021 look to be totally singular; without any obvious pattern or logic. There are, however, dim outlines of the causal forces that made them possible. While we can’t discount the total specificity of this or that incident, we can start to ask about the field of relationships from which they emerged. In this case, the broad web of social connections is what we might, with a little care, call “Trumpism.” This very specific brand of republican reactionism is unique to the last decade, but has its origins in a much deeper and longer narrative. It is up to us to determine what this phenomenon is, and how it can make things that were once unthinkable into established facts of history.

So what is Trumpism? For liberal pundits like Paul Krugman it is a product of the GOP’s pursuit of lower taxes, which has led to it becoming dominated by “madmen and thugs”. He gives this thuggery the provisional name of “fascism.” Commentators like Krugman like to urge that they don’t use such a word lightly right before misusing it completely. In this case he is not examining the social forces that underlie American reactionism, but identifying the personal fascism of Trump. The ex-president is, according to an article for NY Times, "an authoritarian willing to use violence to achieve his racial nationalist goals”, and these goals are shared by “some of his supporters.”

Fascism is a loose term for liberal thinkers; its scope is wide enough to encompass populists, ethno-nationalists, and sometimes socialists. What the focus on the personal intentions of someone like Trump (who may, in certain senses, embody the figure of the “Great Man” or the Führerprinzip underlying the functioning mythology of fascism) is missing however, is the political and historical specificity of fascism. As Charlie Post pointed out contra certain liberal Trump critics before the 2016 election, 20th century fascism emerged as the political vehicle of the interests of a very select group of people: the petite bourgeois business owners and farmers. In Italy the manganello, or club, was the instrument by which this class forced the organised workers back into the field or the store. The threat of violence, then, was for fascism a means of class rule.

“The CEOs that form part of the managerial elite, voted, listened to and turned out for Trump”

In certain important ways, Trumpism reflects this bourgeois class orientation. Many of the journalists who went to the January 6th rally expecting to find the notorious “white working class” that supposedly constitutes Trump’s base actually found people of a decidedly bourgeois position. CEOs, children of supreme court judges, real estate agents, actors, influencers, salesmen all turned up to “Save America” alongside recognisably “working-class” individuals. Associate Professor of American Policy at USYD Brendan O’Connor has in fact noted that "Trump didn't earn his largest share of votes among the poorest whites in America, but among those in the 'middle class." It was these folks who turned up in the biggest numbers at the rally, and raised the spectre of violence as a means to political ends.

What is different about Trumpism is the class mythology that underlies it. Michael Lind, a reformed neo-con whose work has become influential among some conservatives, has pointed to the existence of a “New Class War”. He contends in his article of the same name that neoliberal democrats and republicans reject the existence of class in “meritocratic” capitalism, with “the exception of barriers to individual upward mobility that still exist because of racism, misogyny, and homophobia.” They tend to see the Trump phenomenon in personal terms of his supporters’ personal racism and chauvinism, without examining class interests that might underlie their gravitation towards authoritarianism.

Against this trend, Lind tries to recover the class politics at the heart of American society. Interestingly, his view has become a touchstone for the supposedly “Trumpist” camp of the GOP. To understand the resurgence of class analysis amongst Republicans, then, we can look at the unique narrative that Lind provides of American capitalism. For him, the “developed” world is split into two major classes - the workers in primary and secondary industries and the “managerial elite.” The latter are CEOs, business and financial service experts, and workers in the broader “knowledge economy.” They pursue their “interests” through the domination of the public sector by corporate lobbying and the pursuit of trade treaties. They also seek to divide and rule the workers, and concentrate power and wealth in their own hands.

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Lind’s narrative is effectively a Marxist one, which has simply bracketed capitalists and replaced them by “salaried” and “fee-earning” professionals who run companies for the capitalists. Apart from this modification, the dynamics of Lind’s history match on to Marx’s demonstration of the capitalist class’ tendency towards centralising production, and the Leninist thesis of imperialist concentration. Lind’s solution to this, however, is a “cross-class” compromise which keeps the managerial class intact, but gives some concessions to the workers and sets up institutions of liberal-democratic “countervailing power.” In absence of this, he warns about a continuing cycle of “populism” seeking to capture the interests of the workers.

It’s a nice story, and one that the Tom Cottons and Marco Rubio of the GOP love to exploit to argue for their party’s working-class credentials. The only issue is, Trumpism is not just a medium for the expression of an underclass’ anger. As mentioned above, the CEOs that form part of the “managerial elite” voted, listened to and turned out for Trump. On the day of the riots, Charlie Kirk announced via Twitter that he had sent 80 buses of bourgeois waffen-TP J-Crew Nazis to the event (a tweet he promptly removed). It seems that Trumpism was more complicated than the “language of the unheard” and more what Katie Donough calls the “long-brewing anti-democratic fever dream of the Koch Brothers and DeVos family getting a boost from Tom who sells stereo systems in Wantagh."

This moves us away from the territory of Italian fascism and German Nazism. These were genuinely petit-bourgeois movements before being manipulated or forced into a gesture of compromise with the haute bourgeoisie, in order to take state power or maintain it. In fact, the situation resembles more closely another historical phenomenon, in which a powerful figure sought a limited coalition with a struggling group in society in order to maintain his own class’ supremacy.

This was the rule of Louis Bonaparte, as analysed in Marx’s famous article on the aforementioned’s Eighteenth Brumaire. In this most quotable of Marx’s extended writings, he notes that, while Bonaparte sought to guarantee the autonomy and executive authority of the state, “the state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small peasants." Through his manipulation of the peasantry, Bonaparte was able to secure a huge purchase on political power in France.

“It now seems that this ‘monster’ is coming home to roost, among the capitol hill rioters, there were many who claimed they just wanted to be “listened to”

There were two things that enabled Bonaparte’s co-optation of the small peasantry. On the one hand, there was the general 1848 atmosphere of fear generated by working class militancy in the minds of the other classes. Bonaparte was able to turn this atmosphere against the very bourgeois defenders of order by promoting the equation of any demand for democracy with chaos. In this situation "bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement, in the name of property, of family, of religion and of order."

It doesn’t take a stretch to see the outline of a similar pattern in 2020/2021. The genuinely working-class and mass uprisings of the BLM movement targeted private property. In response, many bourgeois commentators condemned the “means” while claiming to agree with the ends. The petite bourgeoisie, protected from the working class by the minimal condition of property-ownership, was militated against the “terrorists” and then transformed into agents of “order.” In their own protest, they did not break private property, but the conspicuously “public” monuments of a supposedly decrepit political order. They destroyed, again, “[i]n the name of property, of family, of religion and of order.”

The reason Bonaparte turned to the small peasantry as his tool of restoring order and founding his power, however, was more concrete. The French peasantry constituted a class only in one sense of the word. They shared similar “economic conditions of existence.” Despite this, they had “no unity, no national union and no political organisation" and thus did not act as a class. They were a class, for want of a better term, in-itself and not for-itself. They were divided politically into a “progressive” and “reactionary” section; and it was the latter that Bonaparte mobilised.

The petite bourgeoisie in America are, for entirely different reasons, similarly dislocated. They may share similar conditions of existence, but they are prevented from operating in concert by a fairly rigorous attempt to wipe class out of the American political consciousness. Their trenchant and cultivated individualism, which has its basis in the character of their work (business ownership and professional labour) receives its abstract confirmation in the basically libertarian character of American political culture. Their desire for order, then, is often confounded by their attempt to maintain individual liberty. Thus, at the capitol siege, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags were flown alongside “Blue Lives Matter” flags, while interviewees claimed they were just “awaiting orders” from some nebulous leadership.

It is this lack of class-consciousness that Trump and his bourgeois backers rely upon. That they could funnel such a large segment of the population into support of a government whose policy platform ended up being a recap of Bush-era neoconservatism is perhaps confirmation of their suspicion. It is clear that, despite the anti-elite rhetoric, the individual members of the reactionary lower-middle classes are more willing to identify with their big bourgeois cousins than the working-class BLM protestors.

This is not surprising after several decades of the courting of the petite bourgeoisie by both sides of bourgeois politics. Republicans first turned to this task under Nixon, who frightened many from the lower sections of the middle class (and sections of the upper-working class) into conservatism by raising the spectre of “crime” and instability. The civil-rights and working-class activists of the 1960s, then, became a point of “negative identification.” The American petite bourgeoisie aligned itself with the forces of “order” and voted for whoever provided the most authoritarian response to crime, be it Reagan or Clinton.

It now seems that this ‘monster’ is coming home to roost. Among the capitol hill rioters, there were many who claimed they just wanted to be “listened to.” Others were shocked by the police violence turned against their “patriotic” movement. Many were arrested on returning to their home states. What the militants learned was the fact that their interests can be pursued beyond official channels. As Kwame Ture famously mentioned, right-wing extra-state violence is the beginning of a class consciousness that we should both take seriously and prepare to contest.

Trumpism, then, is a product of the collaboration between the haute and petite bourgeoisie which has been developing since the 1970s. The contradictory trends and contrasting interests in the MAGA camp will inevitably grow into tensions as they did in earlier forms of class-collaboration politics (or “corporativism”). At the moment, however, the contours of the Trumpist phenomenon are undefined. The militancy of the last six months represents the flexing of the muscles of an “emergent formation”; one which is yet to properly determine its political orientation and limits. As Raymond Williams mentions, emergent movements act before they are defined; and often can only be made sense of in the language that is ready to hand. Thus many rioters at the capitol called the siege a “1776”, and one woman described it as a “revolution.” In a neat irony, it was in the discussion of Bonapartism that Marx mentioned the tendency of historical events to repeat themselves “first as tragedy, then as farce.”

The scale of danger in the American situation is still unclear; but what is immediately apparent is the rising threat of popular violence as a basic condition of politics in America. This was the same condition that predominated in Italy and Germany in the interwar period, and which led eventually to a construction of institutional fascism. The left in America must not only organise, but prepare to meet the challenge of Rightist violence in the coming years. And given a similar development in Australian politics, we must maintain a vigilance of our own.