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HOW TO BEAT TRUMP IN A WORLD OF UNREASON  
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Eric Reinhart
July 5, 2024
The Nation
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_ To counter authoritarian drift, Democrats can’t just swap out
nominees. They need to be bold. _

An image of President Donald Trump looms over crowds of supporters
before his speech from the Ellipse at the White House on Wednesday,
January 6, 2021., Photo By Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call via AP Images

 

The prevailing diagnoses for what has ailed American politics since
the rise of Donald Trump point to widespread racism
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and self-harming irrationality
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Although these observations are correct, they are not productive. Yes,
people are racist, cruel, and irrational, but this is nothing new.
Leaning on pop psychology to explain away political failures is
dangerously inadequate as a substitute for genuine political response.

Trump’s bellicose public image allows many people to identify with
him at the level of primal aggression
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Clearly, a large segment of the electorate remains compelled by Trump
at unconscious levels of desire. But such energetic attachments are
fungible—and transforming those attachments is the task of politics.
Trump’s ascent has followed a strategy more consistent with the
promotion of a reality-television show than with advancing a coherent
political ideology, and it should make clear a vital
truth: _Effective politics cannot simply reflect the will of the
people; it must shape the desires of the electorate_. 

If we rely on voters’ existing virtuous character, rational
deliberation, or deep empathy as a starting point for democratic
politics, we will never succeed. Cultivating an ethical responsibility
to one another is precisely the work of political organizing and
policymaking. The mass energy that goes into racist and authoritarian
desire can be redirected, but such redirection can only be achieved by
a politics that offers inspiring and inclusive policy agendas capable
of addressing disaffection, and aggression.

To date, Democrats have shunned the basic political responsibility to
engage with desire and have instead leaned on a mirage of morality and
reason. President Joe Biden, who reassured wealthy donors during his
2020 campaign that “nothing will fundamentally change
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if he’s in the White House, has
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provide an ambitious policy vision during his reelection campaign. His
case for another four years rests on little more than “we’re not
Trump” and a promised return to the same pre-pandemic “normal”
that set the stage for Trump’s emergence.

Campaigning to protect the status quo of profound inequality in both
wealth and political power has, unsurprisingly, failed to galvanize
the discontented segments of the electorate. And polls
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recent debate fiasco suggest that simply shifting to another
Democratic nominee in his place is not likely, by itself, to overcome
Trump’s primal appeal come November.

Biden, or whoever replaces him on the ballot, will need to offer
something much more. To beat Trump, the Democratic candidate must
rally the public around a positive vision for the future that excites
mass enthusiasm through transformative policies and affectively
rousing narratives. These could include a wealth
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the ultra-rich, guaranteed basic income
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mass student and medical debt forgiveness, a renewed
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health system
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around community care workers
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guaranteed universal rights to housing
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[[link removed](19)33019-3/abstract],
and large-scale investment in public arts initiatives to cultivate
belonging and community in a nation currently plagued by isolation and
despair.

With a short timeframe before November, candidates don’t need to
invent such plans from scratch. They could draw from existing bills
and policy proposals, such as the Green New Deal
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address climate change, the People’s Response Act
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preventative community care systems
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Futures Agenda
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revitalize youth opportunity and education, and various proposals for
restructuring the anti-democratic institutions of the Supreme Court
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and Electoral College
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For decades, at least since President Bill Clinton devoted himself to
dismantling—or, as he put it, “reforming”—public welfare
systems, Democratic Party leadership has refused to back ambitious
policies for public programs and even frequently joined right-wing
politicians in dismissing them as “radical socialist” utopianism.
Democrats have instead repeatedly used their power to hollow out the
state
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empower profiteering businesses in its place, leaving struggling
Americans at the mercy of private corporations and their lobbies. This
has intensified inequality. It has eroded public trust
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both government and civic institutions, including the Democratic Party
itself. And it has pushed discontented voters to far-right demagogues
who, having now taken over the Republican Party, validate their
discontent while promising to give them a radically different future
in which to believe.

Nearly a century ago during a political period with marked
similarities to our own, an influential German legal theorist argued
that the underlying nature of political struggle is defined by the
distinction between friends and enemies
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In this paradigm, you’re either with me or against me; either loyal
to me or worthless. This man, Carl Schmitt, became a supporter of the
Nazi regime. From his perspective, both liberal and conservative
leaders had failed to embrace the power of mobilizing hatred of “the
enemy” as a political strategy for unifying the masses to
consolidate power and reinspire national pride and purpose. In
contrast to this weakness, Hitler’s boldness in suspending legal
codes, declaring a state of emergency, and mobilizing hatred for an
enemy excited Schmitt, who praised Nazism for “recultivating
traditional concepts
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We saw elements of a similar strategy in the Trump administration,
though we should be careful not to exaggerate
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exceptionalism. As Corey
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Moyn [[link removed]], and
others have pointed out, Trump implemented many of his most
reactionary measures through standard constitutional structures,
and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
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on Terror
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only deepened under Obama and Biden
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be an even stronger illustration
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Even so, it is not difficult to recall the invented enemies against
which Trump has gathered his friends: He has demonized immigrants and
Mexicans, Muslims, the news media, Black Lives Matter, and “the
radical socialist left.”

The horrors of the Holocaust and now also the far-right Israeli
government’s massacres of Palestinian civilians in Gaza make clear
the hazards of such a political strategy within conservative politics,
while Stalinism and Maoism offer illustrations of its potential for
violent embrace from the left. But American liberals must not ignore
the relevance of Schmitt’s critique for themselves. From Schmitt’s
view, liberal democracy typically responds to the friend-enemy dynamic
not by encouraging and intensifying it, as authoritarianism does, but
by using systems of law, order, and constitutional proceduralisms to
disguise underlying structural conflicts without addressing them.

An example of this strategy of denial can be found in the empty
invocations
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“unity
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changing
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material distribution of resources and opportunity. The realities
of extreme
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inequality
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rates of poverty
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wage stagnation
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racism
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a profiteering [[link removed]] private
healthcare system that imposes tens of thousands
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unnecessary deaths annually due to economic barriers
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care have all persisted through decades of “unity” rhetoric
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This language has most often functioned in service of commitments
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market fundamentalism
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perpetuating racial hierarchies
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than to advance equality, justice, and shared responsibility to care
for the most vulnerable.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin, who while fleeing the Nazis killed
himself to avoid deportation to a concentration camp, offered a
counterpoint to Schmitt’s reactionary political vision. In his
well-known 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Benjamin described the convergence of two forces to
explain the rise of violent far-right politics: (1.) the vulnerability
of the working class exploited by an economic system that intensifies
wealth at the top but does little for most working people, and (2.)
the promise of fascism to give them opportunities for the free
expression of anger and hatred for an invented enemy. As Benjamin
wrote, “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their
right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a
right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an
expression while preserving property.”

A politics that offers neither changes in the property structure of
American society nor an affectively compelling alternative to the
violent political expressions mobilized by figures like Trump is not
likely to redirect the energies of the electorate. 

Both Benjamin and Schmitt wrote from within a proto-fascist
environment shaped by capitalism and modern bureaucracy that Max Weber
famously characterized as suffering from a pronounced disenchantment.
But, unlike Weber, both Benjamin and Schmitt recognized that the
irrational energy that once found partial release through historical
forms of enchantment, such as religious belief, did not disappear; it
is now free-floating, available to whoever can provide it with power
and, most of all, a feeling of vitality or aliveness.

Trump’s popularity shows that we are not now less enchanted
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in times past. If anything, we are more readily enchanted by a passing
fad, celebrity, or aspiring political strongman. In a world in which
reality-television stars wield more power than administrative experts,
the manipulability of our ostensibly disenchanted life remains the
political problem of our time. It is with this now wide-open space of
untethered feeling and hunger for belief in something—whether true
or false—that any viable politics must find a way to effectively
engage.

For either liberals or leftists to do so, we must formulate and
visibly implement policies accompanied by narratives that affectively
ignite rather than vainly attempt to moderate the electorate. Trump
and the global far right’s mounting successes bear a lesson: Neither
neoliberal policy nor displays of managerial competence can provide a
long-term path forward without transformational social visions.

Only by mobilizing the power of mass feeling tied to grand public
visions and concrete policies can we generate the popular leverage to
effectively fight for collective care, economic equality, and a
society that values shared beauty and belonging over destruction and
division. If the Democratic Party fails to take on this task, it will
continue to foster the ideal conditions for the growth of right-wing
populisms with their characteristic xenophobic, militaristic, and
police-state manipulations.

As Trumpism overwhelms the flailing project of American democracy, the
nation’s leaders are refusing to channel the energy of the
electorate into bold projects for the common good. To stop Trump and,
more importantly, to stop allowing the country to be held hostage by
far-right threats with every new election cycle and Supreme Court
session, Democrats must do more than simply swap out the names listed
on their presidential ticket.

_ERIC REINHART [[link removed]] is a
physician-anthropologist of law, psychiatry, and public health and a
psychoanalytic clinician in Chicago._

_Copyright c 2024 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* elections
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* Donald Trump
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* authoritarian regimes
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* Joe Biden
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* mass struggle
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* Inequality
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* Racism
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