The Weirdness of Post-Modern America; Or How Donald Trump Can Exist

        George Carlin once said: "When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat." and that one observation by Carlin was worth all the famous Tocqueville quotes about America combined. I was very stunned and surprised by new data  about rising mortality among the white population (especially the uneducated and middle aged) that surfaced recently but perhaps nothing surprised me more than the lack of reaction to it on social media and in the nation's media generally. I found a surprisingly good run-down of the data on mic.com but not surprisingly, the article was posted to the "policy" section of their website and not their blasé--and more popular, "Identities" section. You'd think an issue affecting the majority population of the US population might count as an "identities" issue. But for identity politics to maintain its cosmic solidity and balance being white, straight, or male must not be counted as a valid identity--otherwise the point of a politics of identity is meaningless for a variety of reasons. But that is not to say that a white christian identity politics does not arise, it does and sometimes with a vengeance within the Republican party.

     Increases in mortality are rare outside of war-time and famine and the only time I can recall a mortality spike this dramatic in a developed country outside of war was in post-Soviet Russia during the "shock treatment" of the 90s. There are certain similarities and obvious differences. In both cases, opioids and alcohol took a savage toll on society, especially on men. Some have tried to argue away the effects of shock therapy on Russia's population and ascribe it solely to an increase in alcohol consumption, as if millions of homeless and jobless workers and a loss in general security for the whole population had nothing to do with the mortality spike or the increase in alcohol consumption itself. Since possible economic causes of this spike are never addressed such as the effects of work stress/pain and poverty upon health, I suspect we will try to attempt to explain this phenomenon away  in a similar manner. As if a large portion of the population commit suicide, drink and drug themselves to death in good times and as if that situation has nothing to do with the economic situation.
Russian people would never buy that for a second and some Russians even talked about putting the ultra-capitalist reformers on trial for "genocide" (a mostly useless term in general, but not designed to apply in a case like this). But America is the land where the phrase misattributed to PT Barnum "There's a sucker born every minute." was coined. And Americans inhabit an alternate universe on par with anything imagined by Orwell or Huxley--whose works American writers frequently reach for because of their own failure of imagination to comprehend the conditions around them. And it is not entirely their fault, the American education system, media, and the generally unspoken rules of conduct and social interaction seem to be a giant machine oriented toward the purpose of crushing creativity, cultural sophistication, and frank expression.

      In a nation where "racism" and "whiteness" supposedly rules over everything-- even America's loudly worshiped and intertwined religious icons of capitalism and vehement anti-communism (again supposedly), the lack of reaction to this trend is strange to see. The liberal intelligentsia did not have much to say, for that matter neither did most mainstream conservatives. In any ordinary country, if prominent scientists had shown that there was a spike in mortality among the majority of the population then a national emergency would be declared and parliament and other government bodies would do whatever they could to solve the problem. Not in America. And that's partially due to rapaciousness of the American oligarchy and partially due to the inability of liberals and conservatives to think in class terms. Liberals have given it up altogether, especially not that there aren't any bomb-throwing anarchists or communist parties conducting street marches or weapons training for the coming revolution. Conservatives reach for it instinctively to draw class hatred towards the liberal elite and the democratic party but shirk immediately when it touches the religious icons of capitalism and anti-communism. As Thomas Frank argued in his famous book What's The Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America the Democratic Party is the party of the 10%; or, the party of upper-middle class college-educated urban/suburban professionals.

      For the Democrats the opportunity might exist to reconstitute Social Democracy on a multi-racial basis subordinate to finance capital but the magic key, if it exists, has not been found. Pretty soon the question of whether classes exist or, to put it differently, whether it matters, in America must arise in such discussions. And for modern liberals it is much easier to call for an end to privilege in racial or gender matters then to broach the question of whether economic privilege exists. Now the question arises are there classes in White America or is every member of White America part of a ruling class dominating non-white America? To anyone who accuses me of being uncharitable, I am only formulating what is implicit in much of the argument in today's Identity polemics. Marxists know that  even White America is a class society, and a surprisingly brutal one given the resources it has at hand; and deep down so do the identity politics folks.

       Then there is the question of what it actually means to be multi-cultural or "multi-racial" in America in 2016. In an interesting article written as far back as 1998 Eugene Volokh writes: "Asians aren't just white: They are lilly white. I first noticed this effect 10 years ago, where a friend of mine commented that the guests were all white.  I responded by mentioning about a dozen Asians; oh, she said, that's right, but you know what I mean. At a recent UCLA conference I attended, two speakers complained that everyone on the panel was white, without even realizing that one of the speakers was ethnically Chinese, and another was an Asian Indian with skin darker than that of many American blacks." This in itself is an interesting case of the weirdness of the distribution of power between groups in the United States; in the same country where mass panic gripped society a century ago about Asian immigration there is now a silent consensus that Asians or white, or maybe just white enough. Asian immigration to the United States in the 20th century has a great deal to do with the Cold War and America's military presence in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Migrants were often selected for admission due to anti-communist views, relative wealth, education, and skills, marriages to US soldiers etc or favored refugee status. The Asian immigration was usually not of the same type as the "coolies" or the poorest of the poor who often came to the US for the purposes of the most dangerous manual labor a century ago. Today, adherents of the Hindu religion have the highest per capita income beating out Judaism, Buddhism, and all branches of Christianity. This undoubtedly has a great deal to do with the brain drain of highly-skilled Indians from the upper-castes of Indian society to the United States; America, in many ways, reaps the rewards of this post-colonial harvest. "Whiteness" has a physical basis but more often than not in the United States it signifies loyalty to the American Empire and proximity to the bourgeois class dictatorship in the United States. After all, many "non-white" groups like Southern Europeans, the Irish, and Jews were later promoted to white status in the United States.

      There is no reason to think this won't reoccur or isn't occurring now; with a lot of the hoopla about the end of a white majority in the United States, few have considered the fact that when "Hispanic Whites" (and trust me, this wasn't just made up by the US government, there are plenty of them in Western states and elsewhere in Latin America) are included then the United States will retain a white majority well past 2050. In fact, the white population including hispanic whites will probably stay around 75-80%. Ironically, Middle Eastern immigrants had been able to integrate into the "white" population in the United States relatively seamlessly prior to 9/11.  Democrats who think in old terms, using static identity politics categories that are themselves almost 40 years old think the decline in a  traditional white majority hands them electoral hegemony for the foreseeable future. The democrats gave up on winning the vote of the white working class along time ago, and reasons that portion that votes for it will have no where else to go for the foreseeable future. But their biggest captive voter base is that of the "non-whites" who fear the return of the brutal old-fashioned "settler"-hegemony of the past.

      But that is a shell-game and when even Nazi prison gangs  begin to accept Latino members then you know something really is changing. And likewise, when I was attempting to get a handle on the size of the white prison population (statistics on this are actually hard to come by) I found it quite fascinating that according to BOP statistics 56% of their prisoners were white; there was no separate category for Latinos. My back of the envelope calculation, for anyone interested, based on incarceration per 100,000 is about 760,000 for non-Hispanic European whites--still larger than China's official prison population.  In the face of all this, what is the meaning of Donald Trump who is running the most revanchist (to liberal pundits) and fiery conservative campaign in recent history? It isn't exactly clear how a Trump presidency will shake out but we can offer some suggestions about what it is and why it can do well--despite claims that the a Trump victory is politically or demographically impossible.

      The "aggrieved white working class" thesis comes into play and the fact that if you do a search on white men in prison you get very few relevant articles of interest is telling.  As fashionable as it is to talk about intersectionality there is very little of it on matters of class and its unsurprising that the white working class feels excluded as what passes for the Left in the US has no genuine interest in their problems or in trying to build solidarity on a class basis. So they do turn to reactionary politicians to hear their concerns out of frustration, deception and inclination.

       But that really can't explain everything and it doesn't. The US is in a very deep crisis in both its role as the guarantor of global capital and as a world empire. Previous neoliberal "globalizers"argued that the working class and American industry had to take some licks in order to preserve America's international interests--and pay they did.  But in the aftermath of financial bubble collapses, stagnant wages, and industrial capital flight/bankruptcy each crisis has wrought deeper and deeper scars in the social fabric--even in the nation considered to be capital's heartland, its true Empire. Even if American transnational corporations still dominate the global economy, nothing says that translates into greater competitiveness and higher living standards at home. To be clear, there was something of a humane alternative, as humane an alternative as could be found under capitalist-imperialism at least, which was Bernie's suggestion of a fair trade regimen with countries with rough wage parity with the United States. This would have been effective US support for a global minimum wage and at least plays some justifying role in Bernie's social vision: a new type of social democracy for the United States in a  "globalized" world. Who knows how serious it really was or its level of political feasibility. The point being that if capitalists in the Global North are increasingly accepting the arguments of the anti-WTO protestors: that what we increasingly have now is freedom of movement for capital and not for people then it follows some rough parity should exist if goods and labor forces are to be permitted to move from North to South and vice versa without restriction. For the vast majority of people, some security would have to be the precondition for "opening" up their societies and thinking of themselves as global instead of national citizens. Bernie could have proposed Universal Basic Income and a shorter workweek to encourage job creation, job sharing and poverty alleviation for the working poor. Clinton perhaps would represent the status quo but on an even vaster scale which is politically difficult and unpalatable for a number of reasons.

     What Trump had which Bernie didn't was an emphasis on jobs, especially manufacturing jobs which are a slipping proportion of American employment constituting a sign of capitalism's agonizing death for Westra and the descent of the US into a Third World economy for many other critics.There is the question of whether the US economy, as dependent on it is on unproductive service work and finance could even survive without financial bubbles; because what drives the economy if the production of real products take-up an increasingly declining share of the labor force, GDP proportion and output?

     So here we have a real estate mogul, the very essence of the FIRE sector which is strangling the US economy arguing for greater protection and increasing the output of US industry. But of course, here he runs into the problem of arguing that he would tariff "US" corporations who operate overseas and US firms still make up a large proportion of trans-national corporations; for Trump "US" corporations are killing the US economy and workforce by employing foreign labor and importing "foreign" products. But this message is popular, even among people who don't have "white" skin.  Some polls suggest inordinately large support for Trump among minority voters compared to past republicans. This is an appeal that has dollars and cents behind it; not Jesus and Cowboy hats like during the Bush administration. The man who refers to Alabamians as: "the real America" also defends New York from other conservative republicans proclaiming that his home city has "the best values".  For the insiders in the Establishment it does not help that America has a long history of protectionism and economic populism.

     What Trump is doing in my view is attempting to enclose America off as a global Empire; so America is no longer in German and Japan too, but it is in the territorially constituted boundaries of the United States. This is not to say that America will have no foreign role but for Trump it will now be on America's terms; with the Cold War over there is no need to extend deals that Trump views as being extortionately magnanimous to our friends and allies. America's role will be to look after American capitalism not global capitalism Trump seems to say; whatever that even means in an era where American capital has so effectively colonized the structure of the global economy that sometimes it seems that "capital" and "America" are effectively the same thing. It certainly marks dangerous times, but for those "non-whites" within US borders I believe that Trump wants to make them an offer they won't refuse by trading global solidarity for prosperity, or even at this point, just a job. Trump wants to reorient citizens towards the classic imperial conception of republicanism that the founders inscribed with the emphasis on values, culture, and birth-right. Essentially, I believe that Trump has no problem with Hispanics who are loyal to the Empire but his gripe is with those who stream across the border working in the Empire's construction sites and farms without changing to please the Empire. Maybe it could be said that they change the Empire itself. And this is not the first time that has happened.

The call that immigrants must be "American" is an old one and I do not think Trump will rule out letting more immigrants in--on the condition that they become "Americans". After all, what capitalist could rule out allowing valuable labor at a lower cost if a new economic boom were to actually occur.
But I think the identity politics Left is going to find that avoiding economic self-interest questions and their divisive and undisciplined practice has won them little affection from real people, beyond when they occasionally talk about issues that matter to them in the right way. The white working class might not be Tumblr but for that matter Tumblr doesn't exist in the barrio or the ghetto either. Tumblr-world only exists in elite liberal institutions, college campuses, and a make-up/porn sharing website for bitches who were bullies in high school but  who want to feel good about themselves and who want to feel like they are still in the in-crowd. Not-so short memories even in amnesiac post-modern America may soon teach Hillary a painful lesson.