Trump's Counter-Revolution - Softcover

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1789040183 ISBN 13: 9781789040180

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

In Trump's Counter-Revolution, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen looks behind the craziness of Donald Trump to decipher the formation of a new kind of fascism, late-capitalist fascism, that is intent on preventing any kind of real social change. Trump projects an image of America as threatened, but capable of re-creating itself as a united, white and patriarchal community: "Make America great again". After forty years of extreme, uneven development in the US, Trump's late-capitalist fascism fuses popular culture and ultra-nationalism in an attempt to renew the old alliance between the white working class and the capitalist class, preventing the coming into being of an anti-capitalist alliance between Occupy and Black Lives Matter. 'A lucid, clear-eyed analysis of the morbid spectacle of Trump's racist counterrevolution. Mikkel Bolt proposes to add to the rubble of the neoliberal order by demolishing the political form of capitalism - democracy itself - as it slides into fascism. Welcome to life in the postcolony.' Iain Boal, co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is an art historian and cultural critic who has published in English and in Danish. He co-produced the exhibition 'This World We Must Leave' in collaboration with Jakob Jakobsen at the Kunsthall Oslo art space. Mikkel is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and is co-editor of the journals K&K and Mr Antipyrine. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is an art historian and cultural critic who has published in English and in Danish. He co-produced the exhibition 'This World We Must Leave' in collaboration with Jakob Jakobsen at the Kunsthall Oslo art space. Mikkel is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and is co-editor of the journals K&K and Mr Antipyrine. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Trump's Counter-Revolution

By Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78904-018-0

Contents

Introduction, 
Chapter 1. A Protest against the Protests, 
Chapter 2. Politics as Images, 
Chapter 3. A New Fascism, 
Chapter 4. 'America', 
Chapter 5. The New Order, 
Chapter 6. Neither Trump, Nor Democracy, 
Endnotes, 

CHAPTER 1

A Protest against the Protests

What had seemed unthinkable became reality. Donald J Trump first gained the Republican nomination, and then beat Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election in the fall of 2016. Thus, President Trump replaced President Obama in January 2017. Obama, America's first black president and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (but also, of course, the keen user of drone warfare, the banks' saviour and deporter of illegal immigrants). The eloquent, humorous and dialogue-seeking Obama was succeeded by Trump, who had never held public office, but made his name as a flamboyant property speculator, proprietor of bankrupt casinos and more recently, star of his own reality show, The Apprentice. Until he ran for president, Trump's most noticeable contribution to American political life had been his dogged insistence that Obama wasn't American. The contrast between the out-going president and his successor could not have been greater. Trump's victory over Clinton took many by surprise, since all the mainstream media, from CNN and NBC to the New York Times and the Washington Post had warned strongly of the dangers of a Trump presidency. If this wasn't enough, pretty much all the diplomatic, military, cultural and political establishment, including a large part of the Republican Party, whom Trump represented, sought to distance themselves from him. But to no avail; Trump won just enough votes to win the election and became president. Clinton won the most votes, 2.7 million more, but Trump won the most electors and therefore won the election.

The mobilization against Trump was spectacular. It's rare that neo-conservative commentators and left-wing activists have struggled side by side, as they did against Trump. All the politico-economic mainstream and its media in the USA and Western Europe, the Economist, Financial Times and the Guardian, along with Børsen and Politikken in Denmark, Le Monde and Le Figaro in France, and Frankfurter Allgemeine and Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, agitated more and more strongly against 'The Donald'. As did the rest of the Left in the USA and Western Europe, anti-racists, LBGTQ groups, campaigners for social justice and human-rights organizations. All were united against Trump. In Denmark, former Prime Minister and ex Security General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, warned of the possibility of global recession in the case of a Trump presidency, and Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, former spokesperson for the red-green alliance Enhedslisten, was shaken by Trump's campaign. Everyone was frightened at the prospect of the blonde, fake-tanned building matador sitting in the Oval Office. Few thought it possible that he would win. But as we know only too well, that's nevertheless exactly what happened.

In hindsight, there were many signs pointing in that direction. Not least the vote for Brexit in Great Britain. The status quo is only maintained with the utmost difficulty at the moment. Matteo Renzi's inability to push through constitutional reform in Italy shortly after his victory was the next example of dissolution. On the same day in December 2016, Norbert Hofer was just about prevented from becoming President of Austria after a nip and tuck race, but it seems fair to say there's a pattern here. Although Marine Le Pen 'only' progressed to the second round of the French presidential election and lost to Macron, the underlying pattern is painfully clear: the ruling order has great difficulties reproducing itself, giving ground to a rapidly accelerating turn to the right.

This is the story of Trump as part of something much larger, the current high point in a rapidly growing rejection of the political system as we have known it since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Populations defy the media and experts' expectations and vote against the 'system', and therefore vote the 'wrong' way. All across the world, people are reacting to a situation characterized by dissolution and crisis, in which the established political parties are seen as out of touch and unable to change course or offer something else.

The effect of Trump's victory is political chaos. The Republicans are at sixes and sevens and, up to now, are deeply split over Trump as their president. Not only do they now control both Senate and Congress, they also have a majority in the Supreme Court and, most importantly, they have the presidency. But, Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan and Trump disagree on a whole range of signature policies. Things look much worse for the Democrats, though; the party managed to lose an election against the least likely of all candidates and many now hope that the party will collapse so that new ones can be formed, not so attached to the political and economic interests that the Clintons represented.

An initial analysis of the election of Trump would be that he encapsulates the recent popular reaction. Trump is anything but mainstream. He is not only a rejection of the politics broadly accepted by mainstream economists and established politicians, he's also a break with the previous US political system. Right enough he stood as a Republican candidate, but he was in open conflict with more or less all the party's leading members and, during the election campaign, made more out of the similarity between the Democratic and Republican parties as corrupt members of the political establishment under the sway of the banks. Washington had been lining its own pockets and couldn't give a damn about ordinary Americans was a common soundbite. In this way, Trump emerged as a protest against the system. He came from the outside and dissolved the opposition between Democrats and Republicans that had dominated the political system since the middle of the nineteenth century. Trump held this binary structure in suspense and, even though he made use of one of the big parties, he wasn't like any of the other candidates, who were all experienced politicians. He was a mix between Robin Hood and Citizen Kane, at one and the same time a man of the people fighting a corrupt elite, and a self-made man who had founded a business empire and was now moving into politics.

Trump stood out, then, as a rejection of the norm. His election is an expression of protest. Many of those who voted Trump said they didn't especially like him, but they were sick and tired of politicians and the political system, and this is why they were voting Trump. Trump refused to accept the conventional code of conduct during his campaign, and at no point laid out anything near a coherent political programme. Any idea of politics as a knowledgeable dialogue, based on a well-informed argument was replaced by violent tirades against migrants, Muslims, black criminals, Wall Street and the government. And that's what worked. Trump was different, he wasn't reasonable, but tasteless. He was a latter-day Jesse James, who took the fight to the establishment and its naturalized values.

As remarked earlier, Trump is part of something bigger. Phenomenon Trump can't be explained away as an American thing. It's important, of course, to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1789040183
• ISBN 13: 9781789040180
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 100
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland