Corey
Robin

I fully agree with your refusal to predict, although it is a basic function of the human mind to be always looking ahead to try to find opportunities and prevent dangers and disasters.

I also think that your argument that many basic features of U.S. constitutionalism and governance can serve revanchism and have in the past. I would just want us to remember that they can also be used to resist it, as they have in the past. It all depends on what the people do–all of the people, including those who sit and do nothing. I have adopted my own slogan, which I want to write on a sign for the next demo: “You’re apathetic? That’s pathetic!”

Let’s keep hitting the streets. The more commotion we stir up, the more it bugs him, and the more it bugs him, the more craziness he indulges in, and the more people who get roused to stir up commotion. At least that’s a hope, maybe our only hope.

Another thought I want everyone to consider. Most of the mass demos so far seem to be largely filled by people who are very angry about Trump only, or mostly. But the problems he is exacerbating have existed in this world for a long time before he came along. What needs to happen is that the people who haven’t yet thought beyond this one man begin to understand what needs to be tackled at a more basic level, which in my opinion is essentially capitalism. Lots of work ahead, even if Trump is toppled.

Corey,

In my own view it would help immensely if the people who are lambasting the Trump administration had at least given some thought to the following questions and could go some way to giving answers to such questions as:

1 – Do you accept that America (like many other countries in the world today) has security problems? Do you recognise that despite the giggly charts on social media showing lawnmowers to be more of a threat to American life than terrorism, there are legitimate security concerns that reasonable Americans might hold?

2 – Do you recognise that Islamic terrorism is not a figment of a fevered imagination, but a real thing that exists and which causes a risk to human life in America and many other countries? This isn’t to say that other forms of terrorism don’t exist – they obviously do. But how might you address this one (assuming you can’t immediately solve global peace, poverty, unhappiness, lack of satisfactory sex, masculinity etc)?
3 – If you do recognise the above fact then would you concede that large scale immigration from Islamic countries into the US might bring a larger number of potential challenges than, say, large scale immigration from New Zealand or Iceland?

4 – Is everybody who wants to visit Disney World morally akin to Jews fleeing the Holocaust? If not then what are the differences, and is it always wise to conflate the two?

5 – Would you recognise that Iran is one of the world’s leading state-sponsors of terror, and that, for example, an Iranian-born American citizen in 2011 was caught planning to carry out a terror attack in Washington (against the Saudi Ambassador)? Would you recognise that aggravating though a temporary halt on all Iranian nationals visiting the US might be, and many good people though it will undoubtedly stop, there is a reason that some countries cause a greater security concern than others? Might citizens of a country whose leadership regularly chants ‘Death to America’ present a larger number of questions for border security than, say, citizens of Denmark whose government rarely says the same? What would your vetting policy be to distinguish between different Iranians seeking to enter the US?

6 – Does the whole world have the right to live in America? This is a variant of the same question we Europeans should have been asking for years. If you do not think that the whole world has the right to live in the USA then who should be allowed to live there and who should not? Who might be given priority?

7 – If you believe in giving some people asylum, as I do, who should be given priority? Should asylum be forever? Or should there be a time-limit (such as up until such a time as your country of origin is deemed safe)? How do you deal with people who have been given asylum, whose reason for asylum is over (i.e. their country has returned to peace) but whose children have entered the school system (for instance)?

8 – Is it wrong that the Trump administration says it wishes to favour Christian refugees over Muslim refugees? This is a fascinating and difficult moral question. Many Christians refuse to accept that the plight of Christians – even when they are the specific target of persecution – should be given priority over anyone else. This is a noble example of Christian universalism, but is it wise or moral when you consider the limited numbers that can come in and if you accept that the entire persecuted world cannot arrive in America?

9 – How do you identify the type of Muslims who America should indeed welcome? And how do you distinguish them from the sort of Muslims who the country could well do without? In other words, what would your vetting procedures be? There are some people who have thought about this. But what is your policy?

If you think all of the above questions are simply ‘racist’ or ‘bigoted’ then I suppose the rest of us will just have to accept that we’re going to lose you to four years of shouting on the streets in vagina hats. But the rest of us should try to address these questions. We’re not going to be able to shout them away you know.

Hi Corey, thanks for writing this and for linking me via twitter to your earlier go at explaining Trump’s win.

I’m going to be blunt. I think your predictions have been wrong because you start with the ideological thread that you see running through conservatism rather than the material organisation of politics on the Right (and Left for that matter), and its relationship to the state and to civil society.

So there is a basic unwillingness on your part to accept that Trump is someone who came from outside the established, materially-existing contours of the organised US Right (the mainstream Right around the GOP, because independent far Right forces are so tiny, fragmentary and socially weak, even if capable of occasional outrages through terror tactics) — and leveraged the already-existing decay of GOP control over its electorate to win the nomination. He then played on the decline of the Dems’ control over their voters (already part-revealed by the unexpected success of a kindly old socialist from Vermont against their most well-connected party figurehead) in the general.

Yes Trump has some terrible reactionary policies, but he also has some weirdly non-GOP positions if you look at what the GOP is and has been rather than try to find an ideological thread that makes him just like them, or part of their philosophical tradition. If we look at ideology in the end we can always find overlap that allows us to arbitrarily point to someone like Trump and say “aha, he’s a real conservative!” while conveniently explaining away ideas that might make him overlap with liberalism (eg his insistence on LGBTQ equality on all but the issue of marriage) or even further Left (eg his trade position as one to defend “the American worker”).

If we look instead at what Trump has done we can see that his anti-political posturing was not just a side note but absolutely suited to a campaign against both the GOP and Dem structures and leaderships. We can also see how his appeal could cut across usual lines. The pundits were shocked by him winning the primaries because they thought he was a factional candidate, but from the start he took votes across usual factional lines that play out in the primaries. He could take southern states and New Hampshire, and the breakdown of the early exit polls made clear he was the candidate of a broad cross section of the GOP base. Actually sensible conservative commentary (by people who hated him) at sites like The American Conservative was pointing this out from late 2015. It’s how I could write my blog post in January last year with a high level of confidence that Trump would win the primary and have a serious chance in the general (http://left-flank.org/2016/01/25/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left/). It required looking at his whole message and all his behaviour rather than focusing on the “outrage” he liked to provoke to get media coverage and lock in voters on the basis he seemed tough enough to “get things done” cf the Washington paralysis no one else had solved.

Coming to what is happening now, the same pattern of behaviour is expressing itself. Trump needs to establish his (ideologically mixed) agenda now because he may well have defeated the GOP and Dem structures in 2016, but he is incredibly isolated in Washington. He has the power of the Executive Branch, but most of the rest of the Establishment hates him and wants him gone. Right now the GOP is mainly behind him, but he has exposed (and humiliated) their weakness, and they will want to leverage their alliance with him to eventually restore their own power. For Trump the problem is that he needs to not just keep enough public popularity to have a stick to beat them off with, he also needs to reshape how politics is done to secure his position (including a use of the state much less veiled by political game-playing).

Both parties’ problems are ultimately underpinned by ongoing US decline as a hegemon, something Trump openly addresses with his rejection of US exceptionalism.

Trump’s win has also exposed the fragility of the Dems’ identity-based politicking, and of Obama’s moral technocratic temporary fix for his party’s longer-run problems. The Dems are in full meltdown, and I think the protest activity of recent months is actually more a rearguard action against their unexpected defeat, not social resistance *independent* of the Dems. Everything is overshadowed by a theme that Trump’s outrages require a return to the old politics, even if that means the Dems need to be more progressive in the future (how many times have we heard that in social struggles against the Right before?). If voters turn out to be unmoved by the protests, there will soon be demoralisation and moralistic denunciation of the reactionary masses (and, I guess, more claims that the masses have been won to fascism).

Understanding Trump as being part of a long conservative ideological tradition misses what is happening structurally in US politics. It is not useful for predicting the future, because this is about a structural crisis of politics and how one uniquely placed maverick has tried to leverage it for his own ends. To do this Trump has had no choice but to continually disrespect the ideological lines of division that have justified the alignment of the US party system for decades. Not recognising this will leave progressives fighting an enemy in their imaginations, not the one who is actually there.

This type of analysis is a plague on the left and is itself a form of surplus: you could say of *any moment* in political history that the institutions themselves were the instruments of violent coercion. It’s redundantly true. The fact that you are forced to give as implausible and empty an answer as sheer gratuitousness to the question of why Trump and Bannon are working so diligently to undermine the Constitution and national institutions is indicative of the interpretive poverty of the argument.