Donald Trump is going to win: This is why Hillary Clinton can’t defeat what Trump represents Salon - By Anis Shivani
People are rising up against neoliberal globalization. Trump represents capital, but also understands this realityThe neofascist reaction, the force behind Trump, has come about because of the extreme disembeddedness of the economy from social relations. The neoliberal economy has become pure abstraction; as has the market, as has the state, there is no reality to any of these things the way we have classically understood them. Americans, like people everywhere rising up against neoliberal globalization (in Britain, for example, this takes the form of Brexit, or exit from the European Union), want a return of social relations, or embeddedness, to the economy.
The Trump alliance desires to remake the world in their own image, just as the class representing neoliberal globalization has insisted on doing so. The difference couldn’t be starker. Capitalism today is placeless, locationless, nameless, faceless, while Trump is talking about hauling corporations back to where they belong, in their home countries, fix them in place by means of rewards and retribution, like one handles a recalcitrant child.
Trump is a businessman, while Mitt Romney was a businessman too, yet I predict victory for the former while the latter obviously lost miserably. What is the difference? While Trump “builds” things (literal buildings), in places like Manhattan and Atlantic City, places one can recognize and identify with, and while Trump’s entire life has been orchestrated around building luxury and ostentatiousness, again things one can tangibly grasp and hold on to (the Trump steaks!), Romney is the personification of a placeless corporation, making his quarter billion dollars from consulting, i.e., representing economic abstraction at its purest, serving as a high priest of the transnational capitalist class...
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In this election, abstraction will clearly lose, and corporeality, even if—or particularly if—gross and vulgar and rising from the repressed, will undoubtedly win. A business tycoon who vigorously inserted himself in the imaginations of the dispossessed as the foremost exponent of birtherism surely cannot be entirely beholden to the polite elites, can he? Trump is capital, but he is not capital, he is of us but also not of us in the way that the working class desires elevation from their rootedness, still strongly identified with place and time, not outside it. After all, he posed the elemental question, Where were you born?
Though he is in fact the libertine (certainly not Clinton, who is libertinism’s antithesis), he will be able to tar her with being permissive to an extreme degree—an “enabler,” as the current jargon has it, for her husband’s proclivities, for example. It has nothing to do with misogyny. It has everything to do with the kind of vocabulary that must substitute for people’s real emotions, their fears and desires, in the face of an abstract market that presumes to rule out everything but the “rational” utility-maximizing motive.
For the market to exist, as classical economics would have it, there must be free buyers and sellers, competitive prices, a marketplace that remains fixed and transparent, and none of these elements exist anymore in the neoliberal economy, which seeks to stamp out the last vestiges of resistance in the most forgotten parts of the world. In fact, the market has created—in the ghost towns of the American Midwest, for example—a kind of sub-Saharan desolation, in the heartland of the country, all the better to identify the completeness of its project in the “successful” coastal cities. Trump is a messenger from the most successful of these cities, and his very jet-setting presence, in the middle of empty landscapes, provides an imaginary access point...
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The population across the board does not see the abstractions of the transnational capitalist class being able to solve a problem like ISIS, which represents a crisis of authority. Wasn’t al-Qaeda defeated? Didn’t we get Osama bin Laden’s head? Then what is this lingering distaste called ISIS? Forms of darkness are easily substitutable, thus Hillary (whose synecdoche is Benghazi, or secret emails) becomes unable to speak the truth, the more she tries.
But…I do not want to claim for a minute that Trump can represent anything other than the further strengthening of neoliberal capitalism, both domestically and globally. He can only represent a further intensification, as would be true of anyone else. The total globalization of the market—our greatest of myths today, the one all-powerful entity to which all, state, civil society, and individual, have completely bent—is unstoppable. The flat earth posited by Tom Friedman in the 1990s will end up erasing all local distinctiveness, the end goal of neoliberalism. While Trump represents the desire for national regeneration—as is true of any neofascist movement—this is not possible in the twenty-first century, because the state as we have known it has ended, as has the market in the conventional understanding...
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With the ascension of Trump, an entire country of apprentices wants to get a handle on surplus capital by bringing the state back in, but as I said before, this is impossible because the pre-neoliberal state is gone, it has been reduced to the market, it is the market. Again, capital serves only capital, though Trump’s followers wish to see him create a split whereby they can enter the picture, forcibly, though even they perhaps know that Trump, as president, cannot sue evanescent corporations, or other realities of the market, even if suing is a tendency that comes naturally to him.
To take the logic one step further, the myth of the market—or the way “government” is run today—cannot acknowledge one thing and one thing only: death. If you compete (whether in Trump’s boardroom or on the “level playing field” he wants to bring about in America by excluding illegal competitors, whether undocumented aliens or Chinese currency manipulators or unwanted Mexican goods), you win. (Of course, this only strengthens the myth of the market, but that is something that will be evident to the populace once Trump is in power; they want a localized, responsive, non-idle market, but the market is beyond the need to accommodate itself in those ways.)
But to get back to death, Trump’s campaign has been successful so far, and will surely be victorious in the end, because he is the only one who has brought death back into the discourse...
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/23/donald_trump_is_going_to_win_this_is_why_hillary_clinton_cant_defeat_what_trump_represents/Modified: Added 'snip' since the [
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