Trump May be on Trial,
But the System that Produced Him will be Acquitted
It is a fitting end to four years of Donald Trump
in the White House.
On one side, Trump’s endless stoking of political
grievances – and claims that November’s presidential election was “stolen” from
him – spilled over last week into a mob storming the US Capitol. They did so in
the forlorn hope of disrupting the certification process of the electoral
college vote, which formally declared his opponent, Joe Biden, the winner.
On the other side, the Democratic party instituted
a second, unprecedented impeachment process this week, in the slightly less
forlorn hope that Trump leaves office disgraced and humiliated, foreclosing any
possibility he can run again in 2024.
Barely concealing its alliance with the incoming
Biden administration, Silicon Valley has shut down Trump’s social media megaphone. House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi has lobbied the joint chiefs of staff to cut an “unhinged” Trump
out of the chain of command, in a move that was reportedly rejected out of hand by Pentagon officials because they told the
New York Times, it would amount to a “military coup”.
And Biden, who boasts that he was the author the
Patriot Act years before 9/11, has been touting a new “domestic terrorism” bill, as though
the US did not already have a plethora of ways to crackdown on dissent, of
both the legitimate and the illegitimate varieties.
With this as the backdrop, Washington DC is designating the inauguration of Biden a “national special
security event”.
Authoritarian tribes
All this is not just the latest sign that the US
political system has degenerated into a tawdry theatre. It is growing evidence
that US politics is devolving into a permanent confrontation between two
authoritarian tribes. Both are convinced that the other side is un-American,
perverting the true republic. Both are unwilling to compromise, believing they
share no common ground. And ultimately both are fighting for a rotten cause.
This is not a divide between ethical and unethical
politics. This clash is now a bitter grudge match. It is civil war by other
means. Not only is the chasm between these rival camps widening, but the real
criminals are making off – as they always do – with the loot.
Each tribe has been coalescing for a while now
around a center of gravity. On the Republican side, that became clear with the
emergence of the Tea Party and the birther movement during Barack Obama’s
tenure. But it took Trump’s election as president in 2016 to create a proper
oppositional center of gravity on the other side.
Those in the Democrat tribe who now disdain Trump
and his supporters for their desperate refusal to accept November’s result
overlook how they greeted Trump’s victory in 2016. They struggled to accept the
legitimacy of that outcome too, even if they did not resort to the overt
violence of the mob at the Capitol.
It began with arguments that, while Trump might
have won the electoral college vote, he lost the popular vote. Four years ago, the electoral college also faced
self-serving accusations that it had disenfranchised the majority.
The
Democrat tribe took to the streets as well, in protest marches in cities across
the US under the banner of the Resistance, denying Trump was their president.
That was understandable, given his personal behavior and the policies he advocated.
But it did not end there.
Russian
conspiracies
The disavowal of the Trump presidency quickly
regressed into a dangerous narrative – one that has never properly gone away,
despite the dearth of evidence to support it. The claim was not only that the
Russians interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win, but that Trump
himself had actively colluded with Russia to steal the election from his
opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Anything that had damaged Clinton – including
emails showing that the Democratic leadership rigged its own primaries to make
sure she was the party’s candidate rather than Bernie Sanders – got sucked into that vast conspiracy theory. That included
the messenger of these bad tidings: Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.
For
years, the Democrat tribe has invested its considerable energies in fruitless
efforts to prove its theory, including the first bid to remove Trump through an
entirely self-defeating impeachment process.
None of this could be justified politically. It was a
Democrat counterpoint to Trump’s MAGA slogan: “Make America Great Again”.
Democrats promised the much less catchy SAPD: “Save America from President
Deplorable”.
Antagonistic
tango
For this tribe, Trump was an illegitimate president
from the outset, one whose election to the highest office in the land revealed
something unwholesome about their country they preferred to avert their gaze because it might implicate them too. Removing Trump largely eclipsed the
struggle to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.
The obsession with Trump above everything else
seemingly rationalized any means – fair or foul – to be rid of him. Few thought
about how this would look to his supporters or to those not already safely
ensconced in one or another tribe.
Had they wished to understand, they needed only look
to the storming of the Capitol last week. How they felt watching the building
being ransacked – a Deplorable putting his feet up contemptuously on Pelosi’s
desk – was how Trump’s tribe felt watching their president being denounced as a
Russian agent and dragged through impeachment proceedings.
This
mood is not likely to dissipate. The two political tribes are locked in an antagonistic
tango, mirroring each other’s moves, each other’s grudges, each other’s sense
of victimhood. Much more unites them than they would ever care to admit.
Festering
culture war
This may be the pathology, but what of the cause.
What we see here is the culmination of a festering
culture war stoked by an unhealthy investment by both sides in a simple-minded
and highly divisive identity politics.
Much has correctly been made of the white supremacist
of the most loyal sections of Trump’s tribe, and that was on show again during
the invasion of the Capitol. The confederate flag, the neo-Nazi slogans, the
T-shirts extolling the Jewish supremacy of Israel are all indicators of a toxic
politics of white grievance that may be less articulated but is still felt by a
wider swath of Trump’s supporting constituency.
This
ugly identity politics is rightly rejected by the other tribe, but is
nonetheless mirrored in its equally deep commitment to identity politics. The
progressive coalition of identities at the core of the Democratic party may be
more reassuring to modern sensibilities, but has served in practice to
accentuate to parts of the Trump tribe the supposed threat to their white
identity.
This is not to equate the justified struggle of Black
Lives Matter against endemic racism, including in the police, with the
reactionary forces seeking to preserve some notion of white privilege. It is to
simply observe that when the political field of battle exclusively revolves
around identity, then one cannot be surprised if each side continues to frame
its struggle in precisely those terms.
Those who live by the identity sword are likely to die
by that same sword.
The Trump tribe want their president and the
Republican party more generally, to guarantee white supremacism they fear is
being eroded as the Democrat party flaunts its progressive, multicultural
credentials. The Democrat tribe, meanwhile, wants to challenge the old order –
and most especially reactionary institutions like local police forces – that
have been an oppressive bulwark against change.
This dynamic can lead only to permanent confrontation,
bitterness and alienation.
Class
struggle
There is a way out of the dead-end culture war that
pits one tribe against the other. It is to formulate an alternative, popular
politics based on class struggle – the 99 percent against the 1 percent. But
neither the Republican nor the Democratic leadership, or the respective medias
that cheerlead them, has any interest in encouraging a political realignment of
this sort.
The Democratic Party is not a vehicle for class
struggle, after all. Like the Republican party, it is designed to preserve the
privileges of an elite. Its biggest donors, like the Republicans, are drawn
from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, the arms industries. The political
battle in the United States is between two parties of capital united by far
more than divides them.
The shadow play of US politics is the enervating, the antagonistic confrontation of identities described above. While ordinary
Americans get stoked into a mutual tribal loathing by a corporate media that
profits from this theatre of hate, the elite enjoys a free hand to pillage the
planet and the commons.
While we fixate on identities that have been
crafted to divide us, while we remain immersed in the surface of politics,
while we are distracted from the real battle lines, those elites prosper.
Political paralysis may not harm the establishment.
But it is profoundly damaging to us, the 99 percent when our communities are
being ravaged by a pandemic, when our economies are in meltdown when the
planet is on the brink of ecological collapse.
We need a functioning political system that
reflects popular priorities, like Medicare For All, a dignified minimum wage
and free college; that understands the urgency of the challenges posed by
multiple crises; and that can marshal and channel our energies into solutions,
not into endless, irresolvable confrontations based on grievances that have
been cultivated to weaken us.
Trump is not the enemy. That target is far too
small and limited. The class he belongs to is our enemy, as is the system of
privilege he has spent the past four years upholding and his successor will
defend just as assiduously.
Whether Trump is ultimately convicted or not in the
Senate, the system that produced him will be acquitted – by Congress, by the
new president, by Wall Street, by the corporate media.
It is we who will pay the price.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha
Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash
of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing
Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His
website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/
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