It is very easy to argue that whatever Trump is doing, it is nothing more than a rehash of older conservative stereotypes that brand themselves as returning to common sense, or ridding the Western world of its bureaucratic hangups. Ironically, the New Republican's self-proclaimed return to a purer American capitalism fails to realise that this free-market capitalism will inevitably produce the same asymmetrical information-exchange systems and obscurantist bureaucratisation that it wants to escape from, as the by-product of the unequal concentration of power that free markets produce.
At the same time, others seem to want to insist that Trump stands for something new. He may recycle standard reactionary doctrines and to even return to the colonial, settler mindset of early America, but ultimately something about Trump cannot be reconciled with any past templates of political structures. This was Rafael Holmberg's insistence in a recent Newsweek article entitled "Donald Trump is No Populist". Whatever it is that Trump's politics produce - and their obscure and contradictory effects certainly are extensive - the old-fashioned label of populism needs to be traded in for something new. Holmberg specialises in philosophy and political theory, and it is not surprising that he is forced to frame US politics according to a theoretical lens, but despite this he seems to be unusually critical of this frame, and not only of the political state-of-things that the frame is applied to.
The standard model of populist logic that Holmberg refers to comes from the structuralist theorist Ernesto Laclau, who argued that populism operates by subverting any "plurality" of active social demands. The populist solution is a solution that deploys a 'logic of equivalence' (Laclau's term, that Holmberg forgets to mention) against a 'logic of difference'. In other words, populism imposes a structural identity across various un-identical, or formally different, social necessities. What Trump did in 2016, for example, was to unconditionally blame Mexicans for a multitude of social ills, many of which ills were in fact epiphenomena produced by the radically destabilising accumulation of financial power produced by the American style of mixed market-capitalist economy.
Holmberg's main point, however, is that something different characterises Trump 2.0. Despite endless accusations of being a populist, something about Trump's politics remains fundamentally different from the previously accepted theory of populism. The article claims that the relationship between demands and (false) solutions is reversed by Trump: unlike the populists of old, he does not provide a virtual solution to very real social demands, but rather he retroactively constitutes a plurality of social demands by beginning with a solution. It is not therefore a case of real demands and virtual solutions, but of solutions (such as the annexation of Greenland or dismantling the Department of Education, which thinly veil a pandering to private financial interests), which install virtual social demands without any serious political weight (such as a popular concern for the geopolitics of ownership of Greenland for its natural resources, or a generalised hysteria about wokeism turning children gay).
Trump's supposed solutions do not even maintain the semblance of reacting to any real social disparities. They are solutions that have been temporally and structurally divorced from the demands that these solutions would previously have claimed to satisfy. It is clear that this criticism of Trump is at the same time a critique of the inadequacy of Laclau's populist logic (or his theory of populist reason, as it is in fact called). The reason we've yet to make sense of Trump is because we've yet to realise that the label of 'populist' is becoming insufficient. It is probably true that if we stick to Laclau's formula that populism gives us empty solutions to a differential series of social demands, then the argument that Trump is not a populist makes sense.
But one thing remains unconsidered in this analysis: the self-admittance of Trump's inherently contradictory, chauvinistic politics. Holmberg may be disagreeing with Laclau, but he nevertheless insists on using a language of "demands" and "solutions", reluctant to acknowledge that it may be these terms themselves that should be exchanged in order to make sense of the post-populist politics of Trump. As philosophers such as Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupancic have noted, there is indeed something qualitatively new about the politics of the New Republicans. But this is not merely, as Holmberg would suggest, a new way of lying. In a more perplexing way, the effectiveness of their proposals is because of the fact that they admit to lying, or to not be covering up any hidden intentions. Trump seems to be something of a Deleuzean in this sense: he abolishes the distinction between depths and surfaces in politics. He does not conceal private interests behind a human face, but instead happily wears a face of private interests, and the strange thing is that he does so only to his own advantage.
As Dolar suggests, it is no longer a question of convincing the people that the Emperor is naked beneath his clothes (that despite his grandiose and appealing exterior, the politician is hiding some less-than-pleasant facts behind his appearance). Instead, it seems that the Emperor is quite happy to show that he is naked, to let the people know of what 'lies beneath'.
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