Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments of radical process. They form a dynamic in and of themselves. They express the chaos and transition of the moment but they are also and at the same time forces in the transformation and transmutations of capitalism and world history, perhaps, with the complications of the COVID19 pandemic, virtually an axial moment, a switch or turning-point of crisis, as Don Kalb has argued on FocaalBlog early in the pandemic (Kalb 2020).
This involves a re-consideration of what is fast becoming the master narrative concerning Trump, with ideological implications of its own. Trump is presented as a spectre of a fascist past rather than a foretaste, a mediation into, the potential of an authoritarian totalitarian future involving major transmutations in capitalism. What follows concerning the Trump phenomenon is written with all this very much in mind.
Our guess (a risky gamble in these times when almost anything seems possible) is that Trump will fade. There are doubtless many other political figures similar or worse who could take his place. With the going of Trump so may his “movement”. What crystallized around him was more an assemblage, a loose-knit heterogeneous, motely collection of diverse persons and groups ranging from the extreme far right to the more moderate, whose organizational cohesion may be more illusory than real. Not yet a political ‘Party Trump’ it is as likely to melt into air and go the way of most populist movements as it might congeal into a longer-lasting force of opposition headed by Trump.
This is not to gainsay the shock of the storming of the Capitol on the otherwise ritualistic day of the confirmation of Biden’s victory that concludes the liminal transitional period conventional in the US-American democratic cycle. Such a liminal space (Turner, 1969) is a relative retreat and suspension of the state political order as the presidency is renewed or changed. This is often a festive time given to all kinds of political excess when the people vent their potency in the selection of those who are to rule them. Trump encouraged and intensified the potential chaos of liminality at its peak when, ideally, it should subside and political order be fully restored. He aimed to disrupt this critical moment and to maintain his uncertain presence as the Lord of Misrule, if not necessarily to effect a coup. Named as “God’s chaos candidate” by some evangelicals who supported him, Trump promoted, even if unwittingly, a moment of extreme chaos that was all the more intense for the liminal moment of its occurrence when the participants themselves blew out of control.
Night of the World, Pandemonium at the Capitol
In the nightmare of the event, newscasts presented visions of a fascist future filled with Fascist and Nazi images and other commonly associated symbols. There was a strong sense of dialectical collapse along the lines of Hegel’s “Night of the World” of demonic appearances when forces in opposition dissipate against each other and lose their meaning. The representatives of the nation cowered under their desks fitting gas masks while those who would challenge them in festive mood and drunk with brief power put their feet up on desks aping their masters and carried off the mementos and spoils of their invasion. Exuberant chants of “this is our house” echoed down the corridors of power.
Shades of the past paraded in the present, foremost among them that of the enduring trauma of the rise of Nazi Germany. What Sinclair Lewis had warned in It Can’t Happen Here – a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of the democratic world – anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s apotheosis, seemed to be actually materializing. This accounts for the excitement on the steps of the Capitol – “this is America 2021 y’all!!” Arlie Hochschild captured the millenarian Nuremberg feel of his campaign rallies when researching Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Hochschild 2016), her excellent ethnography of the white far right and their sympathisers in Louisiana, America’s poorest state and a Donald Trump heartland. Hochschild recounts at a lecture to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin a scene, reminiscent of the opening frames of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, when Trump’s plane, “Trump Force One”, appears through the clouds and, as if from heaven it descends “down, down, down” to the waiting crowd; electrified in expectation of the saviour’s endlessly repeated sermon of redemption of the deep resentment that they felt for having been pushed aside from the promise of the American Dream.
But here is the point: The immediate reaction to the storming of the Capitol gave further confirmation to the real and present danger of Trump’s fascist threat fuelled in the rumblings of class war which Trump has inflamed and exploited. It is a liberal fear, mainly of the Democrats but including some Republicans, who are the chief targets of Trump’s attacks. His demonisation of elite liberal value (marked by accusations of moral perversities aimed at unmasking the claims to virtue) is at one with his condemnation of the liberalism of Federal political and social economic policies which he presents as contributing to the abjection of mainly white US-American working class and poor; to be seen in the rapidly increasing power of global corporations, policies of economic globalization, the privileging of minorities, refugees, recent immigrants etc.
It might be remembered at this point that the violence of the Capitol invasion–the marked involvement of military veterans, the carrying of weapons, baseball bats, the reports of pipe bombs–that shocked so many, reflects the fact that all modern states are founded on violence. This is particularly the case in the US where the US Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in defence of democratic rights. In an important sense the violence of those invading the Capitol refracts back at the middle class and especially the ruling elite the very violence that underpins the structure of their rule. If liberal virtue was shocked by the events on January 6 it was also confronted with the violent paradox deep in its democratic heart (see Palmer 2021). Thus, this paradox slips into paroxysm at this critical moment in American political history.
The transitional figure of Trump feeds on the prejudices of his intended constituencies and exploits an already ill-formed class awareness building on ready commitments and vulnerabilities – the well-rehearsed fascist and populist technique – creating indeed a false consciousness (there is no other way to say it) that is not only destructive but in the hands of the likes of Trump integral to intensifying the feelings of impotence and the miseries that give Trump his relative popularity. Slavoj Zizek says as much in what he describes as “Trump’s GREATEST TREASON”.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator,’ was quick to counter the white supremacist, macho, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper and Three Percenter elements highly visible in media newscasts with a Conan the Barbarian performance. This was his take on the dominant brand of Make America Great Again. (Really, all those along the political spectrum participate in MAGA – Democrat Party badges and hats from the recent election read “Dump Trump Make America Great Again”). He focussed on his own immigration away from his native Austria and its Nazi associations to the liberated American world of his success. For Schwarzenegger, the Capitol invasion and its vandalism equated to Kristallnacht. Noam Chomsky likens the storming with Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 observing that it effected a greater penetration to the heart of power than did Hitler’s failed attempt. But Chomsky, with characteristic acuity, adds that the fascist danger lies in the anti-democratic class forces (including electoral and political manipulations on all sides) that provide the fertile ground for fascism; forces that have acutely and early been pinpointed by anthropologists (Holmes 2000, 2020; Kalb and Halmai 2011; Kalb, forthcoming).
But the point must be taken further. New class formations are in the making right now and they are being driven in the explosive nature of technological revolution (see Smith 2020). This is something Marx himself was very much aware of and why he wrote more than one hundred pages on the machine and the human in Capital. This is also the concern of Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (2002) and the continued focus of today’s accelerationists such as the Nick Srnicek (2017) on platform capitalism.
Creative Destruction, the Transmutation in Capital and Corporate State Formation
The rise and fall of Trump (not discounting the possibility that Humpty Dumpty might come together again, which is the fear of the master narrative) may be understood as expressing a transition between two moments of capitalism during which one formation morphs into another. Trump is the embodiment, instrument, and anguish of this transition, a tragic figure in a theatre of the absurd. Grand Guignol almost, but in Gothic American Horror Story style. The accession of Biden is the apotheosis of the new in the hopes of most; he is a vehicle for healing the divisions in the U.S. that Trump brought to a head and are still very much present. But Biden’s rise has ominous oppressive indications of its own.
The Trump events have all the hallmarks of the crisis and rupture of transformation or, better, transmutation. The millenarian spirit that Hochschild captures in her account is one born in the capitalist ideology of the American Dream; fortified in the religious fundamentalism of Trump’s many followers that revitalizes their hopes in that American Dream in the face of abject failure. The rallies and the impassioned actions of those invading the Capitol are filled with revitalizing energy.
Such millenarian explosions, distinct in their own historical contexts, occur at many other points in global history. It was apparent at the dawn of capitalism in Europe, at later moments of crisis and redirection in capitalism up to the present – indeed at the inception of the Nazi horror, and at points of the disruptive expansion of capital in the western imperial/colonial thrust as in the Cargo movements of the Pacific (Cohn 1970, Lanternari 1960, Worsley 1970 (1959); Neveling 2014 for a link between Cargo Cults and neoliberal capitalism).
The rupture of transmutation in capital, the crisis that the Trumpian progress manifests, is an instance of what Marx and others have understood to be the creative/destruction dynamic of capital; whereby it reproduces, renews, revitalizes its potency against contradictions and limitations to its profit motive that capital generates within itself as well as those thrown up against it in the very process of its own expansion and transformation.
The circumstances underpinning the current transmutation in capital relate to the revolutions in science and technology those associated particularly with the digital age and advances in biotechnology). The rapid development of capital (and especially that of the still dominant, if declining, US-American form) was driven by the innovations in knowledge and technology (something that Marx and many others admired in US-America). What became known as the nation state (the dominant political form that nurtured capital) and the class orders that were generated in capitalism and necessary to it (not to mention the over-population and ecological disasters that grew in capital’s wake) also constituted barriers and limitations to capital’s growth.
The new technological revolutions are a response to the limitations on capital emergent within its own processes. Technological innovations enabled revolutions in production and consumption, creating new markets and increasing consumption, reducing the need for human labour and the resistances it brings with it, overcoming problems, and opening up novel lines, of distribution; forcing the distress of unemployment (especially among the erstwhile working class), creating impoverishment and uncertainties reaching into once affluent middle classes as captured in the neologism ‘the precariat’; shifting class alignments; redefining the nature and value of work, of the working day, the expansion of zero hours and, as an overarching manifestation, a sense of the return of a bygone era.
The current technological revolution is a key factor in the extraordinary growth in the monopolizing strength of corporations such as Google, Amazon or even Tencent. The dot.com organizations (the flagships and spearheads of capitalist transformation with huge social transmutational effect) have wealth that dwarfs many states and they are functioning in areas once controlled by the state (from what used to be public services to the current race to colonize space). Indeed the corporate world has effectively invaded and taken over the operation of nation-states (Kapferer 2010; Kapferer and Gold 2018).
This is most noteworthy in those state orders influenced by histories of liberal social democracy, in Europe and Australia for example, which tended to draw a sharp demarcation between public interest and private enterprise. The nation-state and its apparatuses of government and institutions for public benefit have been corporatized so much so that in many cases government bureaucracies have not only had their activities outsourced to private companies but also have adopted managerial styles and a ruthlessness along the lines of business models. The corporatization of the state has aligned it much more closely with dominant economic interests in the private (now also public) sectors than before and enables a bypassing of state regulation, even that which once sustained capitalist interest, but which became an impediment to capitalist expansion.
These changes have wrought socio-economic and political disruption and distress globally and most especially in the Western hemisphere. This is not merely collateral damage. The revolution in science and technology has been a key instrument in effecting social and political changes via destruction, for the regenerative expansion of capital. It is central to the re-imagination of capital in the opening of the twenty-first century.
This is particularly so in the United States whose socio-political order is historically one of corporate state formation which accounts for its long-term global political economic domination. Some renewal in leftist thought (e.g. with Bernie Sanders) is an index of the depth of distress that is being experienced although the ideological and counteractive potency of the American Dream fuelled especially in fundamentalist Christianity suppresses such potential and contributes to the intensity and passion of the Trump phenomenon. The ideological distinction of the Trump event aside, its dynamic of populism is reflected throughout the globe (Kalb 2021)
One common feature of this is the rejection of the political systems associated with nation state orders and, to a marked extent the largely bipartite party systems vital in the discourses of control and policy in nation states. Trumpism and other populist movements (in Europe notably) complain of the alienation of the state and its proponents from interests of the mass. The expansion of corporatization and the further hollowing out of the state, the corruption of its public responsibilities by corporate interests, is effectively what Trump was furthering in his presidency. It is a potent dimension of the Trump paradox and a major irony of the Capitol invasion that, for all the apparent fascist tendencies, it was the spirit of reclaiming democracy (admittedly of the freebooting kind) in an already highly corporatized establishment (subject to great corporate capitalist interest) that Trump’s actions were directed to. An important figure in this respect is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The tech billionaire, early investor in Facebook and founder of PayPal, was an early Trump supporter and named a part of Trump’s transition team in 2016. His book, Zero to One, based on his lecture courses at Stanford University, argues for a corporate-technocratic governance beyond older systems of government. (Thiel 2014).
From Panopticon to Coronopticon
COVID-19 has highlighted the social devastation of the destructive/creative dynamic of capitalism’s transmutation (see also Kalb 2020). The class and associated ethnic inequities have everywhere been shown up and probably intensified by a pandemic that is starting to equal, if not surpass, the depressing and devastating effect of two world wars. Like them it is clearing ground for capitalist exploitative expansion – something like Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).
Under the shadow of the virus, labour demands are being rationalized, the cutting back of employment and its benefits legitimated, governments are pumping capital into the economies in a way that protects consumption in an environment where there is declining occupational opportunity and income. The idea of the universal basic income is seriously discussed. Its implementation would offset some of the contradictions in a transformation of capitalism that is reducing our dependence on labour and endangering consumption through automation and digitalization. While the poor are getting poorer the rich are getting richer; most notably those heading the revolutionary technologies of the digital age and biotechnology, with the competitive race to secure viable vaccines against the virus one example for the latter sector’s power.
There is a strange synchronicity linking the pandemic with the dynamic of capitalism’s transmutational corporatization of the state. The virus reproduces and spreads in a not dissimilar dynamic. Indeed, COVID 19 in some ecological understandings is the product of the acceleration of globalization effected in those processes of capitalism’s transmutation associated with corporate expansion and the corporatization of the nation state. As a crossover from animal to human bodies the virus is one manifestation of increased human population pressure on wild animal territory, the closer intermeshing of animal and human terrain. The scale of the pandemic is, of course, a direct consequence of the time space contraction and intensity of the networked interconnections of globalization.
State surveillance has intensified as a by-product of combatting COVID which is also its legitimation, with digitalization as the major surveillance instrument. The digital penetration into every nook and cranny of social life (see Zuboff2019, and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma), is interwoven with the commodification of the social and personal for profit – economizing individuals calculating the costs and benefits of their social ‘interactions’ (the YouTube or Kuaishou ‘influencer,’ the hype TED talker as Foucault’s entrepreneurial self, cut, pasted, uploaded and remixed).
The management of Covid-19, demanding social isolation and the disruption of ordinary social life, has exponentially increased the role of the digital as the primary mediator of the social and a commanding force in its very constitution. Covid-19 has been revealed as a kind of social particle accelerator. As such, and ever more exclusively so, the real of the social, is being re-imagined, re-engineered and re-mastered as a digital-social, a ‘Digisoc’ or ‘Minisoc,’ constrained and produced within algorithmically preset parameters. Here is Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show, radically updated. And, as with Truman, the space of freedom is also and at the same time experienced as a space of unfreedom.
This manifests in the deep ambivalence many feel about the new technologies they daily live with and through. The digitized social is often presented as a new agora, a liberating ‘space’ in which new, progressive ideas and directions are enabled, operationalized and indeed optimized. The internet has become a site of multiple struggles in which class forces and new potentials for social difference and proliferating identity-claims are continually emerging. The freedom of the internet has provided exciting opportunities for many. Such freedom also and at the same time contributes to conspiracy imaginations on all sides. As has been made clear in the two elections featuring Trump, the superpower of corporations like Google and Facebook threatens to install a domain of hyper-control. Digital walls and electronic fences are appearing everywhere in the age of the global ‘splinternet.’
The hegemonic and totalizing potential for the ruling bodies of the corporatizing state who control the digital is as never before. This is so not just in the global scale of the network reach but in the heightened degree to which controlling bodies can form the ground of the social, radically remodel, engineer and design reality in accordance with dominant interests, and where motivated shut out that which threatens their order. The awareness of this has driven the fury of censorship and self-censorship on all sides – Trump’s threatened TikTok ban becomes Twitter’s actual Trump ban.
Back in Some Form: From 1984 into a Brave New World
Trump and Trumpism are moments in the transitional, transmutational process of capitalism outlined above and of the formation of new social and political orders. Echoing the past, they express its transmutation (and its agonies) rather than repeat it. Trump and Trumpism manifest the contradictions of such processes, agents and agencies for the transmutations in the social and political circumstances of life that are in train, themselves forces in the bringing forth of a future that, in some aspects, is already being lived.
Trump himself can be described as an “in-betweener”, a bridge into the new realities, both a force in their realization and a victim. His manner and style, the brutal no holds barred amorality is familiar from the captains of industry and robber barons of an earlier age, who built capitalist America and crushed working-class resistance by all means, more foul than fair. Trump maintains the style but in reverse redemptive mode. In his shape-shift he presents as supporter of the working classes not their nemesis as did his forerunners.
However, his authoritarian business manner, of The Apprentice’s “you’re fired” fame, matches well the managerialism of the present. He is an exemplar of contemporary venture capitalism and most especially of profit from non-industrial production (often anti production) gained from real estate, property transfer, asset stripping, and the expanding gaming and gambling industries (their importance as symptoms of the crises of transformation in capital) from which some of Trump’s key supporters come.
Trump’s reactive anti-immigrant nationalism and “Make America Great Again” rhetoric not only appeals to the white right but is an engagement of past rhetoric to support new political and economic realities. Trump’s economic war with China stressed re-industrialization but it was also concerned with counteracting China’s technological ascendancy, especially in the realm of the digital, a major contradiction born of the current globalizing transmutation in capitalism involving transfers of innovatory knowledge.
Trump anticipated the risk to his presidential re-election. It manifested the dilemmas of his in-betweenness. His inaction with regard to the pandemic was consistent with the anti “Big Government” policies of many Republicans and the US-American right who cherish QAnon conspiracy theories as much as they want to reduce government interference and modify regulation in capitalist process, a strong emphasis in current transitions and transformations of the state and of capital.
Trump’s cry that the election was being stolen was excited in the circumstances of the pandemic. His attack on postal votes related to the fact that the pandemic gave the postal vote a hitherto unprecedented role in the election’s outcome by by-passing and neutralising the millenarian populist potency of his mass rallies already reduced in numbers by fear. Trump sensed that the COVID-inspired move to ‘working from home’ and ‘voting from home’ would challenge, fence in and fence out his base of support.
Trump has always taken advantage of the digital age, his use of Twitter and Facebook the marked feature of his style of rule. His practices looked forward to the politics of the future ever increasingly bounded and conditioned in societies of the image. Following the events at the Capitol, Trump’s own Custer’s Last Stand to allay his fate, his cyberspace and internet accounts were switched off. He has been cancelled by the new digitally authoritarian corporate powers (who arguably benefitted the most from the Trump era and profited greatly under pandemic conditions) who are behind the growing new society of the image, in which he was a past-master and within which he had in the main established his identity. (Kapferer R, 2016)
The overriding image of the Capitol invasion and carried across most networks is that of the occupation of the heart of American democracy by those who would threaten its ideals. The media have concentrated on what was the dominating presence of the extremist macho white US-American far right violently parading symbols of a racist past combined with clear references to the not-so-distant memories of fascism and Nazism. There were others there more moderate in opinion and representative of other class fractions, if still mostly white, whose presence does not reduce the fear of fascism, possibly as in Nazi Germany when what seemed to be small groups of extremists hijacked power (and the events of the Capitol evokes such memory) to unleash the horrors to follow. Something similar could be said for what happened in the Soviet Union leading to Stalinism. These were the worlds of George Orwell’s 1984, in which some of the major ideals of the time flipped in their tragic negation. Such events were very much emergent in realities of the nation-state, its imperialist wars and the class forces of that particular historical moment in the history of capitalism and the formations of its social and political orders. There is no statement here that this could not happen again.
What we are saying is this: a different authoritarian and oppressive possibility may be taking shape – not of the fascist past but of the future. This is a future that Trump was mediating but which may be coming into realization, despite the great hope to the contrary, in the accession of President Biden. Perhaps this prospect can be seen as more akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World born in the current transmutations of capital (and its agonies of class) and in the circumstances of the radical technological revolutions of the digital era, involving the apotheosis of the corporatisation of the state, the corporate state emerging out of the ruins of the nation state.
Aldous Huxley depicted a world centred on production and efficiency, a bio technologically conditioned global system of perfect rational, optimised order. The class conflicts of the past are overcome here; everyone accepts their predetermined place. It is a post-human reality in which the foundation of human beings in their biology and passions is transcended. It is a somatised, artificially intelligent world of the image and promiscuity. Indeed, the American Dream. Those who do not fit or who resist are fenced out. Time and space are being reconfigured, incurving around the individual and ‘personalised.’
Biden’s inauguration for all its upbeat ceremonial spirit had some intimation of such a future, taking into full account the security constraints of its moment: to protect against the murderous unchecked rampage of the virus and the threat of the attack of right-wing militias. The stress on this, it may be noted, had an ideological function to distance what was about to come into being from, for example, the definitely more visceral world of Trump and thoroughly evident in the invasion of the Capitol – what Biden in his inauguration speech called an “uncivil war.”
The scene of the perfectly scripted inauguration was virtually devoid of people. Apart from the dignitaries and all-important celebrities, the highly selected order of the society of the corporate-state. Where the general populace would normally crowd, was an emptiness filled with flags and protected by troops, more than currently are stationed in Afghanistan. Those who might disrupt, Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘resistant savages,’ were fenced out. It was a totalizing and constructed digital media image presenting a reality of control, harmony, and absolute surveillance.
We claim that something like Trump and the events surrounding him would have happened regardless of the specific phenomena we have focussed on here. The events Trump are a moment, perhaps among the most intense, in the transitional transmutation of the history of capitalism and the socio-economic and political orders which build and change around it. The apparent chaos indicates a major axial moment in world history – a chaos driven in the emergence of a cybernetic techno-capitalist apparatus on a global scale. What might be augured in the Biden accession is already taking vastly different shape in China and elsewhere around the globe. New and diverse formations of totalitarian authoritarianism are emerging. The Trump phenomenon is crucial for an understanding of some of the potentials of a future that we are all very much within and that an overconcentration on the parallels with the past may too easily obscure.
Bruce Kapferer is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor Emeritus at Bergen University, Professorial Fellow UCL, Fellow Cairns Institute, and the Director of the ERC Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen.
Roland Kapferer is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Deakin University, a filmmaker and a musician. He does research on cybertechnologies.
Cite as: Kapferer, Bruce, and Roland Kapferer. 2021. “The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities.” FocaalBlog, 2 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/02/bruce-kapferer-roland-kapferer-the-trump-saga-and-americas-uncivil-war-new-totalitarian-authoritarian-possibilities/