Morlock Elloi on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 01:53:51 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> Lacanian meets Trumpian


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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