https://overland.org.au/2016/08/trump-fascism-putin-and-wikileaks-the-anatomy-of-a-liberal-nervous-breakdown/
Trump, fascism, Putin and Wikileaks: the anatomy of a liberal nervous
breakdown
By Olivier Jutel
8.Aug.16
Most presidential election cycles are dispiriting for the Left. As the
official campaign begins, however, the hangover of a Sanders-induced
optimism has added to this despair.
America is about to choose a president from the two most unpopular
politicians in modern history. The Democrats have chided the Left and
the 'Bernie or Bust' crowd for still not being 'with her' in the
existential struggle against fascism. But it is worth considering how
liberalism's anti-fascism covers a libidinal lack. That is, an inability
to define or, in Lacanian terms, 'enjoy' their political identity but
through this fascist threat. Liberals are clearly not principled
anti-fascists, the geopolitical compromises are too numerous to count,
and there is an obvious cynical PR/fundraising logic to the fascist
threat: 'Can you spare $5 to defeat fascism?' However, liberals are
emotionally invested in the idea that they are the ones who can beat
back the scourge of fascism. They construct anti-fascism as a class
project but self-identify as the class of elites and experts that
fascism uses to obfuscate actual class struggle.
Trump's fascism may lack the militancy of brown- and blackshirts
organised against socialist forces but he masters its rhetorical
indeterminacy. His acceptance howl at the Republican National Convention
was interspersed with appeals to the working class, denunciations of
corporate political influence, free-trade deals, and interventionist
foreign policy in Iraq and Libya. With Trump opportunistically
left-flanking Hillary on trade and militarism, the liberal media and
political class has been oscillating between catching the vapours and
declaring American liberalism an unbridled success. In the face of a
volatile populist electorate the Democrats have chosen Reagan-esque
optimism and the refrain that 'America is already great', the liberal
equivalent of 'Jeb!'
This inability of liberals to understand the necessity of antagonism in
politics and Trump's mastery of psycho-political warfare could cost
Hillary Clinton this election. While Trump's own combustibility is
overshadowing the entire campaign, it is far too close for liberals to
convincingly argue that they are a bulwark against fascism. The polls
and the electorate have been extremely volatile; the great wonk oracle
Nate Silver has gone from declaring Trump an impossibility for the
nomination to having a 40 per cent chance in the general. If Clinton
limps to the finish line, liberals will undoubtedly draw all the wrong
conclusions about their anti-fascism and the vigor of technocratic
centrist politics.
What has been remarkable about the liberal political commentariat's
reaction to Trump's outrages and Bernie Sanders' successes has been its
collective nature. Sanders' social-democratic candidacy elicited horror
as the progressive parallel to the Trump movement in the liberal nerve
centers of Vox, Politico and Slate. The uniformity of this reaction in
the liberal media and millennial online journalism spheres has been most
perplexing as the Sanders campaign was objectively an extraordinary
story. Thomas Frank convincingly advances the notion in his new book
that American liberals function as a class, not in objective economic
terms but in the devotion of professionals to the meritocracy. These are
the people whose hearts bleed for diversity in boardrooms and Hollywood
blockbusters, who believe entrepreneurs should get student loan debt
forgiveness and that equality will be achieved through inner city youths
learning how to code or attending a free performance of Hamilton. In
constructing progressive politics as the combination of affect and
technocracy, as opposed to ideology, struggle and justice, the rebellion
of the Sanders youth and the surging fascism of Trump both represent the
grubby politics of street fighting.
The release by Wikileaks of the Democratic National Convention's
internal emails has been a devastating blow to the liberal notions of
process, merit and consensus. It has triggered wild deflections within
the commentariat and the political class, filling columns and airtime
with Glenn Beck-style conspiracies involving fascists, Russians and
socialist useful idiots. The emails demonstrate what was self-evident to
any impartial observer of the Democratic primary process: that faced
with an insurgent social democratic outsider, neoliberal party officials
closed ranks and conspired to undermine Sanders' campaign, relying on a
pliant media to accomplish this task. For a party convinced of its own
progressive bona fides and who spent the campaign scolding Sanders
supporters as cranks or entitled 'bros' silencing women and people of
colour, this is surely an intolerable hypocrisy. Yet in the face of this
corruption, liberals cling to their sense of merit and technocratic,
process-oriented superiority.
To understand how this contradiction is overcome we have turn to
psychoanalysis and the notion of fetishist disavowal. Liberals know very
well that their process is corrupt, that they are incapable of defeating
fascism, but nevertheless 'Putin!' As Žižek puts it, fetishism shields
us from trauma, so the hacker logic of the big reveal will not persuade
liberals to abandon their position but find an agent who is responsible
for our loss of enjoyment. If Trump ascends to the presidency or lays
the groundwork for an even fouler creature in 2020, it won't be because
liberals have kneecapped themselves through their venality, lack of
vision or mocking the youth as hopelessly naive, it will be the work of
a network of corrupting agents. It is easier to assume that Trump is a
foreign agent than confront the fact that he is squarely within the
tradition of American politics and preying on the Democrats' class
treachery. This also nicely augments the Democrat blackmail that the
left has to support Clinton to defeat not only fascism but also Putin's
evil empire.
The hysterical Russophobia that has gripped the Democrats, the policy
establishment and the liberal media is a form of fetishist disavowal and
a collective liberal nervous breakdown. American democracy is now said
to be fundamentally under threat, not from any internal corruption but
from Russian interference looking to install a puppet regime and subvert
the polls in November. This affair has elicited the usual shrieking
headlines from liberal HuffPo but the star of this oeuvre is Franklin
Foer who, when he could not find a brown paper bag to breathe into,
wrote a piece entitled 'The DNC Hack is Watergate, but Worse'. Foer,
whose analysis has been cited by the Clinton campaign, argues that the
hack reveals nothing of any news value. Apparently the public should not
be surprised about the DNC's attempts to Jew-bait Bernie Sanders but be
'appalled by the publication of this minutiae' for the benefit of a
foreign despot.
The New York Times has been running daily front-page articles around
Trump's ties to Russia and the efforts of Russian military intelligence
to intervene in the US elections. In the middle of the DNC Trump stole
the headlines with a comically flippant, and I dare say brilliant,
remark: 'Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the
30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing.' The Times credulously
reported that Trump was 'urging a foreign adversary to conduct
cyber-espionage'.
The psychodrama of the 2016 election is pitting the tortured liberal
class against the spectre that haunts them. When liberals expose
themselves as wracked by Trump's vulgarity and concerned about 'the
discourse', he is all too happy to feed these anxieties. Trump is
nothing if not a master of politics as libidinal warfare. While many of
his obscenities are well documented, I am partial to the time he taunted
Bill O'Reilly live on-air with Melania and Eric in the week that
O'Reilly lost a custody battle.
But what of the substance of the espionage claims? So far the basis for
claiming Russia is behind the hack rests on cybersecurity experts
contracted by the DNC -- Crowdstrike and FireEye. Yasha Levine, a
journalist on the national security tech beat and author of the
forthcoming Surveillance Valley, wrote to me that these 'independent'
experts are a 'direct extension of the US National Security State'. One
of these firms is bankrolled by the CIA's venture capital fund,
In-Q-Tel, and all are filled with former NatSec agents who pine for
their old lover/enemy. In these circles, Russia corresponds perfectly to
the liberal paranoid imaginary. Levine describes the policy
establishment as quite capable of Trump-style xenophobia 'building since
the Bush years ... [that] the Russians are evil, they are not to be
trusted, they are slippery and devious and are capable of anything.'
While tracing hacks to specific national and political actors or lulzy
cypherpunks is a notoriously difficult exercise, the New York Times has
reported, if misleadingly, that anonymous federal law officials are
certain of Russian involvement. The FBI and CIA have refused to
publically join this narrative and have acknowledged there is no
evidence of a Russian plot to install Trump. If the NSA has proof of a
Russian-directed hack, admitting to this publicly risks revealing how
deeply the US has penetrated Russia's networks. In other words, we are
talking about a routine incident of cyber espionage at worst. Yes, Trump
is of a certain 'type' and one imagines that he could get on well with
Putin, Berlusconi or even Erdogan, but this does not reveal anything
deeper. Julian Assange is prone to the 'enemy of my enemy' logic which
sees nominal leftists elevate Putin into a quasi anti-imperialist. But
this does not a security asset make.
Hillary Clinton's general election pivot is also instructive of a deeper
collective anxiety within the liberal, professional and political class.
The Clinton campaign has been tying itself in knots to reach out to the
'good' Republicans; that is, people who think 47 per cent of the
population are deadbeats, revere Charles Murray's vile race science and
are neocon architects of the Iraq War aghast at Trump's fascism. To
chase the good Republican unicorn, the DNC convention was turned into an
RNC convention with generals, military families, a September 11 night,
and supporters shouting down the peace movement with chants of 'U-S-A'.
This move has been effective in consolidating Clinton's support from the
likes of George Will, Meg Whitman and Michael Bloomberg, but it is not
likely to win her many actual Republican voters. People rightfully hate
these experts and welfare cases who have been nurtured in the fail-proof
environment of Washington, where resumes and pedigree ensure no one will
ever be held accountable for their egregious mistakes.
The liberal anti-fascism of Clinton has achieved a remarkable class
solidarity, not through genuine worker and populist platform that would
undercut Trump, but a solidarity of experts and the policy establishment
terrified for their jobs. Trump might be right for the wrong reasons but
it is incredibly instructive that he elicits horror in not being
reflexively committed to NATO's Article 5, supporting the
nationalist/fascist alliance in Ukraine, or lauding Putin's efforts in
Syria. The responsible policy in this case is supposed to be Clinton's
'no-fly zone' over Syria and refocusing the war on Assad, a brazen
escalation of tensions with Russia.
What is truly the greatest horror of Trump's fascism is that he will not
employ the best and brightest in his administration. Trump was very
clear about this in his first major foreign policy speech: 'We have to
have new people ... because many of the old people frankly don't know what
they're doing ... [They] have perfect resumes but very little to brag
about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies.' To
the Thomas Friedmanns of the world, such rhetoric is a call for
brownshirts to evict people of merit from their homes in Georgetown,
Vienna and Bethesda, and consign them to fly over country as penance.
The problem with the liberal stand against fascism is that it is not an
actual politics but a symptom of a libidinal deadlock. Hillary Clinton
and Donald Trump are not two sides of the same coin but libidinally
necessary for one another. The horror of Trump manages to create the
ultimate liberal fantasy of post-partisanship, consensus and respect for
the discourse. We are actually seeing a class solidarity of Washington
careerists, policy wonks, the national security state and the media.
This open solidarity of the experts and elite is precisely what animates
the fascist imaginary of the puppet masters undermining the American
people's natural order. Both obfuscate actual class antagonism, and
until liberalism can antagonistically define itself with a genuine left
conscience it will continue to be wracked by the fascist nightmare. For
now, it appears that liberals would rather fight on behalf of the good
Republicans than defeat fascism in a way that undermines their own
fantasies.
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