At the moment that the "normal" police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium -- the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat -- all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.
--Leon Trotsky, What is Fascism and How to Fight it (1944)
The liberal state-capital love story begins in an amalgam of apathy and arrogance. What is ushered in is an etiolated austerity regime, which combines the most bureaucratic and ineffectual side of the welfare state to the most isolating and cronyistic version of the free market. Paralyzed by ‘neutrality’ the state watches society from above, while the water rises.
At the culmination of inequality, to which society is inevitably dragged by capital, the status quo can no longer sustain itself in the face of mass disaffection. Those who experience relentless stress from, and unabated capitulations to, a system which demands from the many to survive, what is pocket change for the few. The distance between the rich and the poor seems to have increased infinitely, and routine financial disasters only widen the chasm. From the apex of the crisis, social upheaval is made the only alternative for the “declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat”. In the absence of class organization, which seeks to emancipate all those brought to this “frenzy,” the only elements of the human psyche left undisturbed are those of the most primal nature. This state of affairs eventually leads us to the hands of right wing reactionaries who ventriloquize national, sectarian and racial fervor for political gain.
Beginning with the death throes of the post-war welfare state, Reagan-era free-marketism eye-rollingly repeated the same policy which plunged humanity into economic and social catastrophe--the immiseration of the liberal nation-state and consequent rise of totalitarianism, in its ashes. This new liberalism has been following suit, making concerted efforts to roll back taxes, fattening the rich, and trimming the already buzzed welfare state, emaciating the poor. While the impossible task, to leap from chain link to white picket fence, was increasingly delegated solely to the working class, fats cats are allowed to make rashly irresponsible financial choices which cyclically plummet the economy. The imbalance only grows with time: real wages are stagnant, the wealthy have proven to be alone in their recovery from the global financial crises and economic disparity in the U.S. mirrors the gilded age. Today, society, in some sense, has begun to grasp this sordid state of affairs.
Donald Trump brutally and hilariously picked off his Republican contenders one by one, like target practice. Vic Berger’s renditions of infamous phrases like “little Marco,” “lyin’ Ted” and of course the ferocious, but nonetheless true, evaluation of Jeb Bush as a, “mess” lay bare the pitiful fruits of the neoliberal consensus. Trump was on the hunt and out for blood; his center and religious right adversaries were mere babes. The man possessed a crudeness to inspire laughter in some, moral panic in others and incredulity in the political elite.
Although by the initial phases of the 2016 election campaigns the frustrated electorate had seen through the empty neoliberal regime, much of its rank ideology still clung on. The enormous emphasis on the individual vs society, the concept of complete separateness from one’s environment, inflamed the fomenting grievances of the white working class (not insignificantly: those who had previously voted for Obama).
The hyper-individuality of neoliberalism psychologically destroys class politics. Consequently, the poor are traded national for class consciousness. When one cannot see his neighbor as rich or poor, winning or losing, the world is understood through idiosyncrasies.
What happened on Tuesday November 8th of 2016 is, in retrospect, perfectly logical. Mr. Trump attracted two populations. The first was the new right wing, upper middle class intelligentsia (Bannon, Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, to name a few), resentful of the neoliberal elite who’ve abandoned society, and ready to unleash their festering nationalism. The second, and more importantly, the crestfallen white working class. The former may have been the catalyst for change, but the latter, given no other option, provided the political action to bring it about.
“Fuck Donald Trump” monopolized the airwaves. The election was met with outrage, punctuated by cynicism, defined by stupidity. Liberals typically explain, although this theory is attenuating, the election of Donald Trump with ‘American racism,’ as either a) self explanatory or b) the consequence of poor education. Conservatives—that ‘political correctness’ caused Trump. Both put the cart miles before the horse.
The explanations for the ignition of ethno-national conflict in Africa or Asia too take on a suspiciously glib tone. Socio-cultural factors are emphasized as the cause--‘we’ are not the same as ‘them’. Others may espouse this belief in a more polite way by suggesting that ‘they’ simply have different practices and cultures than ‘us,’ which we should be respectful to and understanding of. Last I checked, the inclination towards race murder was no inherency of any culture. Despite their nihilistic undertone, however, it remains that it is one thing to explain the rise of a populist buffoon, and another the mass production of corpses. Again, however, this revulsion at a materialistic, universal assessment of history is only the byproduct of the, for a lack of better words, culture precipitated by a system which insists on the importance of the individual and the idiosyncratic.
The Rwandan economy suffered a massive blow with the collapse of the international coffee market in 1989; in turn, the government was pressured to push an policy of austerity, diminishing the state’s capacity to provide for society. In Sudan: with repeated failures to capitalize on the agricultural sector, increasing desertification, drought and excessive budgetary appropriations towards the military, Khartoum too precipitated the economic conditions ripe for conflict. In 1980, the Yugoslavian unemployment rate was at 13.8%. Deteriorating living conditions during the 1980s paralleled the rise in unemployment to 17%, while another 20% were underemployed. 60% of the unemployed were under the age of 25. By the end of 1989, inflation reached 1,000%. In all of these cases, an underclass was created, a pool of latent political action, desperate for change--a time bomb for any reactionary promising change and ready to seize power.
This is all to say nothing of international financial institutions’ role, encouraging duplicitous loans which entrenched these countries further into poverty, worsening economic realities for divided ethnic groups. Descending from the crises, every action by the political elite were in response to the society which they themselves forsook. They of course feared their ouster in the context of potential or actual institutional collapse in say, the anteroom of civil war and/or partition (Yugoslavia, Sudan) or democratization (Rwanda). What is the one reliable tool left for crumbling regimes? What can they do if their constituency may turn against them? They turn them against each other— and this human reservoir, driven to desperation by capitalism, is ready made for those who are incentivized to use it.
