Trump, February 2016. Wikicommons/Marc Nozell from Merrimack, New Hampshire, USA. Some rights reserved.Trump's victory marks a geopolitical turning
point that has led many to start talking about ‘the populist era’, in shock at
the crushing arrival of this New York tycoon in the capital of Empire.
Faced with events of this magnitude, it’s
appropriate to pause to think about the causes and consequences. Some of us
have spent years theorising and predicting that the blurring of political faultlines
by the centrist progressive consensus would result in a "return of the
political", understood as a friction between radically different political
projects.
To the extent that the "Third Way” –
applied in traditional socio-democratic parties – accepted neoliberal hegemony,
it paved the way for a populist logic that would re-establish "the
people" as a collective subject. The type of content or meaning acquired
by this subject thus becomes fundamental, as the irruption of “the people” into
political discourse is not in itself enough to unify us into a common category.
Examples range from Trump and Le Pen to Podemos. "Concrete policies" will continue to be necessary in
order to win, but they are no longer enough.
Right-wing populism is sometimes reminiscent
of the fascism of the thirties, with which it shares some elements. However,
categorising it as such hides more than it explains, as right-wing populism
proposes new solutions to the problems of a globalised world.
Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to be an
oligarchic attack upon the checks and balances of liberal democracy, seeking to
replace them with a totalitarian regime. Trump is a right-wing populist in the
sense that he represents and channels demands and subjectivities that had been
left behind or made invisible by the Washington establishment. These include
the impoverishment of ordinary people, the crisis of expectations amongst the
white middle class, the loss of global hegemony to China, as well as the erosion
of traditional aspects of identity such as masculinity, race, family or
religion. Each of Trump's outrageous remarks has been interpreted by wide
sections of the population as a blow to "political correctness",
which has gone from representing a language of emancipation to being identified
with the cultural consensus of traditional elites.
This is symptomatic of the loss of cultural
hegemony by the ruling classes in the United States. It explains how demands
arising from subaltern groups have coalesced around Trump, a figure who
successfully represents the American dream, with all its contradictions, but
with an obvious aspirational component.
The US election results are not so much a
victory for Trump, as they are a defeat of the establishment personified by
Hilary Clinton. The US election results are not so
much a victory for Trump, as they are a defeat of the establishment personified
by Hilary Clinton.
Politically, the key is to recognise that
the demands and the identities excluded by the establishment could have been
re-signified and re-articulated in a radically opposite and progressive
direction, as Bernie Sanders began to do. Only Sanders could have posed a real
challenge to Trump's campaign: "A future you can believe in" is the
reverse of "Make America great again", because it doesn’t retreat
into moral rejection or resistance politics.
Instead, it embraces the challenge of
fighting the political battle on the same terrain, attacking right-wing
populism where it hurts the most: in the re-articulation of collective subjects
and passions. A wish can only be displaced by another wish, one which is both
opposite and more powerful. A wish can only be
displaced by another wish, one which is both opposite and more powerful.
It therefore shouldn’t surprise us that a
high percentage of blacks, hispanics and women voted for Trump; just as it
should not surprise us that large sections of the French working classes,
formerly members of the Communist Party, today vote for Le Pen. Any rigorous analysis
must start from this deeply volatile and fluid notion: if we don't define what
‘the people’ means, they will do so for us.
In Spain, thanks to the democratic vaccine
that was the Indignados movement, and to the fact that Podemos continues to be
a transversal and popular force, the victory of a Trump-like figure is
unthinkable. "Concrete policies" will continue to be necessary in
order to win, but they are no longer enough.
To the extent that the traditional elites
remain entrenched in technocracy, hegemony will remain in the hands of
neoliberal powers. The counter-hegemonic space, however, will be fought over by
populist forces of the right and the left.
This article is translated from the original in the
Spanish magazine called El Siglo (with thanks to translators Carmen Williams and Adrián Bua).