The revolution indeed will be televised
Now that all of culture and politics has suddenly morphed into reality TV
Peggy Noonan, an opinion columnist at the Wall Street Journal where she has dripped an appreciable nonpartisan wisdom for almost a quarter century, is someone worth reading.
Noonan is one of the last of the ideologically ambiguous, agenda-fluid opinionators in journalism today. She writes with a sensibility and nuance that can at times prove quite irritating, especially if you as a reader are looking for bloody red meat to stuff into your voracious and affect-swollen media maw.
She can also on occasion come across as a bit schoolmarmish – and even boring.
In this age of political polarization in extremis, she is not so much refreshing as provocative in her own highly abstruse manner.
In other words, you never know exactly what angle she is going to take in her commentary.
Until Thursday she, like myself, had stayed rather low-key in commenting on the impact of the policy and messaging maelstrom that characterizes President Trump’s first fortnight in office. If the mainstream metaphor for the initial ten days had been “shock and awe”, hers were weirdly more in keeping with the iconic 1960s Bob Dylan song The Times They Are A-Changin’.
Since the Dylan song was effectively the anthem for the birth of the contemporary progressive movement that has gained increasing institutional power in America (until just now), the irony is unmistakable.
From the progressive vantage point the Trump accession is far better summed in Dylan’s other famous song from the same period – Desolation Row.
In her op-ed piece “Trump and the Collapse of the Old Order” Noonan makes the telling observation that the new President’s political power flows these days not from his electoral margin last November, but from his cultural omnipresence, which is underscored by the not-so-obvious, albeit blatant, fact that “100% of Americans know who ‘the president’ is, including children above 5 and nonnative speakers.”
In other words, governance has become indistinguishable from reality TV.
Noonan notes in her typical style of understatement that “no modern president has achieved this level of complete cultural saturation”.
She sums up her argument midway through the essay in referencing her own recent visit to Washington:
I saw a broad and growing sense in Washington that American domestic politics, or at least that part of its politics that comes from Washington, is at a similar inflection point. That the second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past—that stable order, healthy expectations, the honoring of a certain old moderation, and strict adherence to form and the law aren’t being “traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun. People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different—something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.
In short, “something is happening, but you don’t know what it is”, another obscure trigger lyric for the much reviled Baby Boomers from the Dylan repertoire.
Historical comparisons are always fraught with danger, and Sixties romanticism nowadays is about as moribund and retro as VCRs (if you’re old enough to recognize even what that is).
But Noonan has advice for Democrats reminiscent of the line in the Dylan song to the effect “you better start swimmin’”, or you will “sink like a stone”.
The majority voted for Trump because things have become a disaster over the last four years, she argues. Unlike MAGA true believers, the majority simply wants change, even if it comes with real risk.
As for Trump’s so-called “authoritarian” modality of politics, Noonan observes: “people back boldness when they think a lot has gone wrong and needs righting.”
And?
“Most of all, make something work,” she advises Democrats. “You run nearly every great city in the nation. Make one work—clean it up, control crime, smash corruption, educate the kids.”
Revolutions are messy and disorienting, especially if you suffer from the delusion that you are one of the revolutionaries.
The first Trump administration was clearly a rebellion. This time around it feels like a revolution.
A revolution for what?
At this point it turns out to be at a deeper level a thoroughgoing revolution against everything, not necessarily for something. That’s more in line with what historically has been called “anarchism”.
But even anarchism has a strategy. This revolution does not.
The tiresome meme about the “fascism” that lurks in the MAGA movement is all but worn thin now.
Historical fascism always involved the aim of imposing a shiny, new, beguiling totalitarian order on an antecedent chaos.
The fascism of the 1920s and 1930s was inevitable, insofar as World War I and the Great Depression spread unprecedented chaos across Europe.
Hitler and the Nazi party promised to save their respective “nationalities” from not only the chaos, but the rival totalitarianism of Bolshevism that at the time had an almost equal chance of triumphing.
Bolshevism almost did. That’s what the Spanish Civil War was all about. Or, if you ever watch the German-made Netflix series Babylon Berlin, it becomes easy to discern what was really going on then.
But Trump is not a fascist. He may sound like one at times to Trump-haters, but he is really a highly cunning chaos-maker. He want not only to disrupt, but to dismantle, if not burn down, the entire global neoliberal world order, which claims to be “rules-based” but hypocritically bends and changes its own rules at whim.
In 2020 he came close to being check-mated but this time around he may actually pull it off.
If it’s a revolution, it’s not like any one in written history. It’s neither 1789, 1917, nor 1968.
It seems more like 1848.
I’ve been reading the book Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, Christopher Clark’s excellent account of that epochal upheaval which, in contrast to the most well-known country-specific revolutions that have made history, was the first transnational uprising.
It was a transnational revolution, according to Clark, because the demand for political liberties was powerfully garrisoned by social grievances, very much like the present. That “revolution” was indeed all about the emerging global economy, stupid, not to mention catastrophic and burgeoning income inequalities across the board after just a few decades of rapid industrialization.
Clark remarks: “freedom of the press was all very well, the radicals of 1848 never tired of saying, but what was the point of a high-minded newspaper if you were too hungry to read it”.
It should be also noted that Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto with its haunting, inaugural line, a “spectre is haunting Europe” on the eve of the 1848 revolution.
That specter today is not communism, but populism – a real thing, unless you’re immured in the habitual thinking of the “old order”. Populism for a long time has never been regarded by political theorists as a “movement” - more like a cultural abreaction than a coherent political passel of ideas – until now.
In the popular progressive neoliberal imagination populism is routinely identified as a kind of nascent fascism. But the historical data gives the lie to that assumption.
As scholars Cas Mudde and Cristobal Kaltwasser make clear, the more astute advocates of radical democracy do not make this familiar category mistake. For them,
…populism is considered not only as the essence of politics, but also as an emancipatory force. In this approach liberal democracy is the problem and radical democracy is the solution. Populism can help achieve radical democracy by reintroducing conflict into politics and fostering the mobilization of excluded sectors of society with the aim of changing the status quo.
That sounds a lot, if not altogether, like Trumpism, depending on how you stipulate what is meant by “excluded sectors”. The injection of “conflict into politics”, of course, rings resonantly true, whether we like it or not.
To date there have been no global precedents for populist revolutions, so it is hard to envision where the current chaotic catena of events will take us in either the short or long run.
And revolutions themselves almost always disappoint, largely because they never fulfill their own utopian aspirations while leaving in their wake expansive collateral damage.
But they are necessary in the same way that controlled burns are necessary, particularly if you don’t want to be devastated later on by a cataclysmic wildfire.
What Noonan dubs the “old order” is the progressive neoliberal order of nation states that numberless false prophets less only thirty-five years ago declared was the capstone of history.
The millennium, unfortunately, didn’t last very long.
What George H.W. Bush crowed in the early 1990s about the advent of a “new world order” is now taking shape as a kind of malignant global disorder. Russia and China much more than populist politicians have reset the rules.
Joe Biden’s outgoing warnings about the dangers of “oligarchy”, aimed at Trump and his allies, have positioned the whole picture backwards. Even if Trump were actually to let the tech bros run amok with their AI algorithms, the latter could never play the “real oligarchs” bit part.
Democratic political advisor James Carville, who actually authored the memorable quip “it’s the economy, stupid,” admonished his constituency in an op-ed for the New York Times in early January that they need to stop obsessing with Trump’s behavior and personality.
“Mr. Trump won the popular vote by putting the economic anger of Americans front and center,” Carville wrote. “If we focus on anything else, we risk falling farther into the abyss.”
As an interview with Silicon Valley Mark Andreesen shows, the tech bros these days are the ones kowtowing to Trump, who channels the anger of his backers, not the other way around.
Anger is the rocket fuel for populist politics.
Trump knows perfectly how to perform for his audience. But it is really the audience that runs the show.
The only recourse to quell populist anger is for our leadership class to get serious about learning to respect, not disrespect, and reshape the economy for all members of society. That’s what “radical democracy”, as Mudde and Kaltwasser frame it, comes down to.
MAGA has been catching fire in recent years with even the “marginalized”, non-white segments of the American electorate because the slogan “make America great” appeals to the most visceral and primordial subconscious effigy over the decades of what draws immigrants in the first place – a better economic future, or what is popularly and emotionally condensed into the phrase “the American dream”.
The dark side of that dream, particularly if viewed through a lens that calls constant attention to humanity’s historic inhumanity as well as the brutal fact of economic exploitation over the centuries, is not what even those most impacted by it seem to want to hear about any longer.
Only the cultural elites seem currently keen on mobilizing the wretched of the earth, and they no longer appear to command any respect because they are perceived by their would-be clients as utterly hypocritical.
As I write today it is becoming increasingly self-evident that we are at ground zero for a global crisis and shakeout that is only beginning to manifest.
Like all historical temblors it will manifest in many, many unanticipated – and invariable not-so-nice – historical guises.