Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss ~~ Adolph Reed, Jr.

 https://nonsite.org/going-forward-from-the-edge-of-the-abyss/

~~ recommended by calgacus ~~

Every now and then even Steve Kornacki says something worth paying attention to.

I held my breath at first, expecting the standard Kornacki crackhead gerbil performance. I was relieved that he turned it down a bit. The real takeaways should be that none of those “constituencies” he points to are real or organic, that they never made practical sense and have always been pollsters’ and their followers’ reifications, which they and political operatives try to impose in a procrustean way on the actual society.

Trump has no new coalition; he can’t because those “groups” aren’t real as groups, and people identify with them largely around thin identities more like consumer taste “communities” or partisan fans of sports teams. (Recall that some people got cues for what they should believe or how to line up on current issue positions from watching Archie Bunker.) That’s why so much of this politics reduces to “you say potAYto; I say potAHto.” This is not to say that the reified categories couldn’t become constituencies on the same principle as the Heisenberg effect; part of the beauty of interest-group politics is that tossing some resources around will produce constituencies—or at least people who claim to speak for them.

And it’s not just the right; that’s also how the Democrats have been reinventing every four years under differing labels that magical constituency of “reasonable” upper-status, suburban, moderate Republican (white) women, which hasn’t materialized in thirty years or more, or their happy-face version of Passing of the Great Race in the simple-minded contention that changing racial demographics would provide yet another way to win without confronting capitalism’s contradictions. Indeed, constructing those taxonomies of identity configurations and reifying them into bodies of shared political interests is, ironically within a so self-consciously and performatively antiracist “left,” quintessentially racist.

Of course, those won’t be the takeaways. To the extent that the totality of politics, including among those who see themselves as the “left” or even advocates of a working-class agenda, has reduced to winning this election or preparing to win the next one, there’s no impetus to break with what passes for “sophisticated” political understanding that people like Kornacki, Ezra Klein, et al. peddle and the others who seek to join and follow them in that breathless, oh-so-serious Conversation swallow and regurgitate. And this isn’t to suggest that we need to disengage from electoral politics. We must engage; the everyday world and its concrete challenges don’t go away just because we want to transcend them. And we have to relate to that domain through the Dems, not consider it a platform for “Here I stand; I can do no other” performances of individual righteousness. We have to face up to the fact—finally—that all we can expect from Dem success is kicking the can of confrontation with fascism down the road for four years. But for that approach to make sense someone, and only the labor-left can lead it or maybe even do it, has to spend another four years between elections organizing a real constituency for a different way of talking and thinking about and doing politics. To put it bluntly, we won’t be able to face up to the fascist juggernaut without working to build an actual popular constituency for a different, openly working-class-based politics.

I’m not alone in noting that Trump/ism is not an anomaly; it’s now the point of the lance of what’s clearly a fascist international. As nonsite readers know, I’ve been contending for a while now that neoliberalism is, from one important perspective, only capitalism that has eliminated effective working-class opposition. And for the right that fact has always held out the same promise: thirty years ago, after the GOP took over Congress, I happened upon a press conference of seven of the most reprehensible reactionaries in the House, led by Gingrich, gloating about their plans to take the country back to the 1920s. More recently, I’ve asked what if neoliberalism is no longer capable—if only because significant sections of the bourgeoisie and its political reactionaries no longer see a need or are so drunk with their own power that, like their bolsonarista allies in Brazil or Gilded Age progenitors here, they’re utterly mortified by having to share public space with the rabble or pay taxes—of delivering enough to enough of the population to retain legitimacy as a nominally democratic order? And I’ve suggested that, if that’s the case, we may be facing the equivalent of a T-intersection at which there are only two possible, totally opposite directions to take. 

In the absence of serious left opposition—i.e., a left capable of contesting the fundamental terms of political debate—liberalism accommodates the right. And that’s been the Dems’ trajectory since Carter, if not earlier. The entire postwar “compromise” forced down our throats by a triumphant right bequeathed us the conceptual apparatus that, useful as it may have seemed (if flawed in well-known ways), has completely tied us to a commonsense crafted by the ruling class and its ideologists. For example, we aren’t going to be able to contest fascism dressed up as popular will, which is its sartorial preference anyway, so long as we acquiesce in talking about class as a cultural rather than political-economic category. We also need to break with the idiotic purely ideological notion of a “middle class,” which has always been a project of making the working class disappear; recognize the limits of homeowner populism for what they are, especially as those limits have never been so obvious; or accept that support for American military interventionism is somehow “really” about “supporting the troops” and not bloodthirsty imperialism. That’s only to name a few hot spots where need for working-class political education is obvious.

Finally, another cause for concern about Kornacki’s chatter about “new Trump coalition” is that it fits nicely with advocacy of red-brown alliance that’s also grown in the nominal left chattering class in recent years. I won’t be surprised if the next four years among intellectuals come increasingly to evoke scenes from Visconti’s The Damned, Bertolucci’s 1900, or Szabó’s Mephisto. I already can envision names and faces at epaulet-fitting ceremonies and lusty competitors for the equivalent of Gauleiter positions or the rectorate at Freiburg, perhaps even some who, like Leni Riefenstahl, seemed not to notice the equivalent of anyone saying anything about Jews (“It was all about the economy!”) at the 1934 Nuremburg conference.