💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › crimethinc-after-the-election-the-reaction.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:18:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: After the Election, the Reaction Author: CrimethInc. Date: October 24, 2016 Language: en Topics: Elections, US, Trump Source: Retrieved on 3rd December 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2016/10/24/feature-after-the-election-the-reaction
The final Presidential debate of 2016 was a gala event in Las Vegas
pitting a reality TV star against the latest representative of a
political dynasty. It was set up as a symbolic clash between business
and politics, with the roles cast so convincingly that it was really
possible to imagine the two categories to be at odds. The antagonism of
the candidates was still more believable because everyone shares it:
these are the most unpopular Presidential candidates in history, at a
time when both business and politics have lost their credibility. But
these are our choices—right?
“Just remember, you are not a participant here,” the Fox News anchor
reminded us. “At the end of the debate, you can applaud all you want,
but in the meantime, silence, please—blessed silence.”
A cursory reading of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is enough to
decipher this scene. Trump is the harbinger of the apocalypse, yes, but
the apocalypse is not on the horizon. It’s here.
“Armageddon has been in effect,” as Public Enemy put it in 1988. “Go get
a late pass.”
The Trump threat serves to distract us from what is already happening.
“I don’t want to rip families apart,” Clinton insists, in reference to
immigration policy, when the administration she serves under Obama has
deported over 2.5 million people—as many as all the US presidents of the
20^(th) century put together. Mothers of the Movement promote Clinton as
the candidate to curb racist policing—when police murders of black and
brown people have only escalated since she got into office, and the most
liberal politicians and prosecutors have failed to challenge the
impunity of the police. Trump is dubbed the first demagogue of the
Anthropocene—but does any candidate in the election have a realistic
proposal to halt catastrophic climate change?
The same good cop/bad cop routine is playing out all around the globe.
Explicitly leftist parties like Syriza and Brazil’s Workers Party have
implemented the same policies they accused their right-wing counterparts
of pursuing. Today, the only remaining justification for continuing to
support Syriza, the Workers Party, or Clinton goes something like this:
“If the left doesn’t screw us, the right will!” If the left doesn’t
privatize water—if the left doesn’t militarize the police—if the left
doesn’t expand the prison-industrial complex—if the left doesn’t silence
dissent…
This strategy has served to cover a steady bipartisan drift to the right
for at least half a century. If Clinton now has a shot of winning even
Texas, that just shows how Republican her platform is.
There’s a flip side to this, too: if the left doesn’t rise in revolt,
the right will. Outraged at the prevailing political class, Donald
Trump’s constituency seems primed to reject the legitimacy of the
electoral process. Mind you, they’re not calling for a black bloc at the
inauguration or marching around with a banner reading “WHOEVER THEY VOTE
FOR, WE ARE UNGOVERNABLE” yet, but if things continue in this direction,
renegade Republicans will be understood as the chief adversaries of the
ruling order.
“If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate—we will have
a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience and the
government will no longer be the government.”
-Trump adviser Roger Stone
When revolutionary movements fail, reactionaries adapt their tactical
and rhetorical innovations. This should come as no surprise: practically
every aspect of our lives, from the buildings we live in to the music we
listen to, represents the appropriation of ordinary people’s efforts and
innovations.
The social movements of 2011—the Arab Spring, the movement of the
squares in Spain and Greece, Occupy, and subsequent uprisings from the
Balkans to Hong Kong—ran aground as a consequence of violent state
repression and their own built-in limits before they could pose a
significant threat to globalized capitalism and the governments that
oversee it. Since the end of 2013, we’ve seen right-wing efforts seizing
the initiative where these movements failed, reframing the causes of
popular suffering and the objectives of revolt in their own terms.
First, nationalists and fascists used the Occupy model to topple the
Ukrainian government. Then, in Brazil, some of the momentum of an
autonomist movement against a neoliberal leftist government carried over
into reactionary unrest that brought millions to the streets. Rather
than a left social movement like Occupy, Germany produced Pegida.
Meanwhile, racists around Europe attempted to appropriate feminist
themes to smear migrants and Muslims. Others are doing the same thing
with gay rights, while atheist discourse has become a breeding ground
for Islamophobia. Nationalists are hailing the Brexit vote as a triumph
of direct democracy, with the German and Dutch far-right parties
Alternative fĂĽr Deutschland and Partij voor de Vrijheid promising
regular referendums as a plank in their platforms.
This trend reached the United States with the runaway candidacy of
Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign appropriated the language of the
anti-globalization movement, right down to the rhetoric of “fair trade”
rather than “free trade” and the allegation that a global financial
elite is benefitting at the expense of working people.
It is instructive that the narratives of a movement founded by radicals
and anarchists could serve a nationalist billionaire in his Presidential
bid: at the least, it reveals the ways that those narratives were
vulnerable to cooptation all along. Indeed, there has long been a
far-right opposition to globalized capitalism, which Trump embraced more
and more openly as his campaign proceeded. Fascism was originally
modeled on left-wing movements: it was a way to channel rightful
indignation about class inequalities into violence directed down the
social hierarchy, rather than revolt that could threaten it. As in the
1920s, so today: the price of revolutionary failure is reactionary
momentum.
Clinton protests too much when she claims that Trump is besmirching the
legacy of democracy in the United States by threatening to reject the
results of the upcoming election. Didn’t the US actively orchestrate
coups to overthrow democratically elected governments in Brazil, Chile,
Guatemala, Iran, and the Congo, to name a few? The interplay between
elections and states of exception in which ordinary political processes
are suspended has always been central to democratic governance. It’s the
exception that proves the rule.
In any case, Trump is not going to lead an insurrection. He’s more of a
weathervane than a whirlwind; his genius, such as it is, consists of
giving all the other bigoted narcissists in Middle America someone to
identify with. He doesn’t have what it takes to seize power.
So Clinton will be President. And then what?
This is not a good time to stand at the helm of the state. It didn’t
work out for Morsi or most of the other politicians who came to power in
the revolutions of 2011. Syriza was exalted throughout Europe when they
won the elections of 2015, but they burned up all their credibility as
soon as they took the reins. Only apathy, despair, and the threat of
even worse rulers—like Trump—currently shore up the positions of
unpopular leaders like Clinton.
In a nutshell, the double bind facing governments in globalized
capitalism is that open markets and austerity measures accelerate the
processes by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but
closed markets and state spending drive away investors and drain
resources. Consequently, people tend to blame individual governments for
economic woes that state structures can do precious little to solve. In
this context, the election cycle will likely produce alternating waves
of hope and disillusionment as long as the anarchist proposal to abolish
government and property remains unthinkable.
But if this is a bad time to hold power, it is a great time to be in the
opposition. For a burgeoning far right nationalist movement, a Clinton
presidency is good fortune: that’s four more years of the liberal left
taking the heat for whatever happens, four more years during which the
far right can claim to have a political program that would work if only
they could implement it. After the initial post-election disappointment
dissipates, this will be an ideal context for far-right recruiting.
Clinton looks unstoppable now, but that will change once Trump is out of
the picture. Who knows what other scandals have yet to break? The next
wave of right-wing momentum is bound to look rational and well mannered
by comparison with Donald Trump; while he has brought opprobrium on
himself, his strong personality has offered cover for others who share
his agenda. The next demagogues will have no trouble proclaiming all
manner of reactionary ideas, because Trump has shifted the window of
legitimate political discourse so far. Right-wing strategists are
doubtless discussing how to cast a slightly wider net; if they have any
sense, they will shift from old-fashioned white supremacist narratives
towards a nationalist discourse of law and order that could mobilize a
large number of people even in a demographically diverse US. And
although Trump isn’t prepared to orchestrate an uprising, he certainly
has helped set the stage for autonomous nationalist movements to come.
If all these pieces fall into place, then when Clinton inevitably fails
to solve the problems that originally drove people to support Trump and
Sanders, the far right will be in a much stronger position to build
street-level power and perhaps even make a grab for the state.
Don’t believe it? Consider what happened to Dilma Rousseff and the
Workers Party in Brazil.
Rousseff rode to office in 2011 on the coattails of Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva, one of the most popular politicians in Brazilian history—a left
icon who spent his time in office advancing a neoliberal agenda, taking
advantage of an influx of investment dollars to dampen the immediate
consequences on poor Brazilians. Powerful autonomous protest movements
erupted against Rousseff and the Workers Party in 2013, drawing mass
participation and achieving some temporary victories. At the peak of
these movements, many people with no previous protest experience or
radical politics poured into them; when the Brazilian government
outmaneuvered the autonomists by the usual combination of state
repression and cooptation, many of these new participants moved on to
right-wing mobilizations.
Like countless politicians, Rousseff was vulnerable to charges of
corruption. At first, the right-wing populist movement calling for her
impeachment—and in some cases the return of the military
dictatorship—seemed laughable enough, as reactionaries from the middle
class clumsily attempted to appropriate the organizational methods and
tactics of the autonomous movements. Then the movement gained momentum
in the streets, plunging Brazil into massive right-on-left violence. In
the end, Rousseff was impeached. Today, Brazil’s government is
controlled by the right wing.
For those who consider horizontal grassroots efforts the best hope for
social change, the most dismaying part of this story is that the
autonomous movements that seemed so strong in Brazil in 2013 have been
completely marginalized. The participants have been forced to choose
between sitting on the sidelines or mobilizing behind the Workers Party
they opposed three years ago.
To recap: a controversial female candidate inherits the Presidency from
a popular left leader amid charges of corruption, as reactionary
momentum gains steam in the wake of defeated autonomous movements. Sound
familiar?
In the context of a Clinton victory, the most significant danger is that
the entire political spectrum will be divided up between a statist
neoliberal left and an opportunistically antigovernment nationalist
right. Each of these adversaries needs the other; each will seek to
absorb those who fall outside this dichotomy or else push them into the
opposing camp.
If we don’t want to be marginalized the way our comrades in Brazil have
been, we have to debunk the idea that either nationalism or the state
could solve any of our problems, and organize to take on both the
authorities and their reactionary opposition. This means breaking with
the narratives of the left as well as the right. Otherwise, as the
Clinton administration inevitably fails to resolve the economic crises
of everyday life, more and more ordinary people will run into the arms
of the reactionaries—and as these reactionary movements gain steam, the
people who should be our comrades will respond in ways that shore up
neoliberal democracy. There has to be another way.
If it becomes impossible to talk about how the system is rigged or how
the corporate media is implicated without advancing the discourse of the
far-right—if NSA surveillance, drones, international finance, corporate
profiteering, and the subtle control exercised by social media
algorithms become understood as right-wing issues—then all prospects of
real liberation will be off the table for another generation or more.
Today, even Wikileaks is bolstering right-wing narratives; grassroots
outrage is assuming the form of reactionary populism. Anarchists and
other partisans of liberation will be sidelined by the popular
appropriation of our own tactics and slogans unless we get our bearings
quickly.
We have our work cut out for us.