Romand Coles & Lia Haro — Trump-Shock, Resonant Violence and The New Fascism

Romand Coles (left), Professor at the Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University & Lia Haro (right), Research Fellow in Sociocultural Anthropology at Australian Catholic University.

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones? 

Since the U.S. election, daily surges of Trump-shock – awful disorienting blasts – have regularly defied our standard ways of making sense of political life. Something is happening here, indeed. But, each unpredictable wave throws our paradigms into disarray. We are perpetually swept into the wake of an event that scrambles the measures of consistency and inconsistency we desperately try to employ. Trusted weapons of analysis and resistance cannot find their aim fast enough to keep up with the whirlwind.

While the new regime bears important similarities to classic fascism--rapid intensifications of white supremacist nationalism, dismissive attacks on reason, autocratic leadership, deepening entwinements of state and capital, disenfranchisement, the attack on liberal and representative democratic institutions, and the increasingly open right-wing populist violence – this new fascism relies on distinctive dynamics that must be illuminated to move toward understanding – and ultimately transforming – our current condition. To this end, we offer the following theses as a modest, preliminary contribution to a theory of the emerging fascism:

1. Beyond the substantive elements of what is shocking about Trump himself, he is a hyper-intensification of shock politics as such.  Neoliberal shock politics, as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, functions by creating and capitalizing on crises that send shockwaves throughout the polity that disorganize, dismantle and subsequently reorganize lifeways, institutions, and spatio-temporal regularities. While previous shocks have typically had at least the illusion of a substantive character – financial meltdowns, fiscal crises, terrorist threats, natural disasters – Trump-shock manifests more in the very character of the waviness itself, the chaotic aggressively disjointed temporality, of 140 letter pulses, refusing accountability, disavowing predictability, with a serial blast-like character that disorients all who are geared toward ordinary political reasoning and conduct. 

The chaos of Trump-shock sends waves of distracting, disorganizing, and dispersing energy through the polity in ways that defract and overload the circuits of critical response to the emergence of an extreme right-wing political regime that will consistently enhance capitalist circulation and vilify difference beyond all bounds. As the regime moves steadily toward the extreme right (a climate change denier takes charge of the EPA, Goldman Sachs steps in to head the Treasury, a multi-billionaire moves to privatize education, and a rabid purveyor of white supremacist hate assumes control of strategy ‘to see what sticks’), minute by minute twitter flares and ‘protocol smashing’ phone calls repeatedly draw away energy and attention. By incessantly provoking frenetic scrambles to react to each appalling new event, Trump-shock disables proactive movement and oppositional initiative.

2. Most fundamentally, Trump unleashes an extreme sovereignty of perpetual disruption, confusion, and contradiction, rather than embodying a power that imposes and is bound to a single order or a coherent, consistent ideology (though his regime surely orders and ideologizes).

  

 We can understand this as a nominalist mode of shock sovereignty that operates through radically disordered ordering, which simultaneously exceeds order and transforms ordering itself. While efficient and formal causalities of state and leader are still highly operative, technologically intensified and diffused modes of resonant causality assume transfigure the fascist machine. 

Trump-shock admits of no otherness, not even of himself an eyeblink prior to the present. In that way, Trump exemplifies power as instantaneous event with no stable form. This perpetual hyperspeed exceptioning makes Agamben’s State of Exception seem quaintly stable. Trump-shock is like the sovereignty of William of Ockham’s God, manifested in the fact that he can be bound by no law he had made, even to the point of totally changing the past willy nilly.

    In the extremity of Hobbes’ explication, such sovereignty is epitomized in the fact that there can be no law prior to nor uttered by the sovereign to which the sovereign can be held accountable, because law can be none other than the sovereign’s interpretive event at each instant. Hobbes writes: “To him therefore there cannot be any knot in the law insoluble, either by finding out the ends to undo it by, or else by making what ends he will (as Alexander did with his sword in the Gordian knot) by the legislative power; which no other interpreter can do.” (Lev., XXVI) Trump displays this power in an endless series of chaotic tweets, spinning out myriad unpredictable, ephemeral, and contradictory stances. 

   Analysts and opponents, missing the performativity of this power and the power of this perfomativity, often scurry to measure the veracity of his missives according to traditional frameworks (law, ideologies, empirical facts) - or even their consistency with his own past statements. Thus, for example, when Trump claimed to The New York Times that “the law’s totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” pundits jumped to reference U.S. Code, presidential tradition and constitutional law to assess the correctness of the claim. We suggest that the substance of his claim adheres to the nominalist event - the energized sword that Hobbes describes. The affective energies and powers of this event, however, are not missed by those hungering to unleash themselves from all restraints of democratic norms and accountability.

3. The power of nominalist shock functions through a modulation of resonant violence that is ubiquitous and also unaccountable. 

The affective energies of this movement of will to power animate significant portions of the polity – particularly on the neo-fascist right. As Trump’s Twitter shocks surge directly into the pockets of over 17,000,000 followers, many are propelled into barrages of raging threats against those he vilifies--directly or indirectly. In this way, the violence of shock-sovereignty exceeds the formal channels of the state (themselves horrifying). For example, when Trump tweets condemnation of a union organizer in Indiana or a woman at a rally, hundreds of threatening communications (including murderous violence) to the targeted follow almost instantaneously. 

Picture by Johnny Silvercloud

Just as Trump-shocks come anytime and all the time – these expressions of resonant violence can emerge explosively from anywhere and everywhere. This unpredictable ubiquity is amplified by the intimate relationship between the Trump regime and neo-fascist right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News, which spontaneously launch their own call and response shock waves that vilify, threaten, and enact violence. Rather than being met with condemnation from the president-elect, they resonate with and are amplified by previous and coming 3 a.m. kindred tweets from Trump Tower. In turn, these frequently drive mainstream news cycles that perpetuate the resonance in more subtle and insidious ways. 

Operating according to resonant probabilities, these shock waves have a Teflon-like quality in relation to calls for accountability that follow logics of formal and efficient causality, for they come less from a single location and more from resonances among nominalist shocks that move too quickly in and out of being to be caught at rest.

4. This form of power both draws on and transforms what we conceive of as a neoliberal smart political energy grid that has been taking shape in recent decades. 

A smart energy grid is one that employs a variety of modes of (political) energy production, transmission, consumption, and blackout in highly flexible and responsive ways to maximize power. No longer relying on a few central nodes of power generation, they work with increasingly interactive forms of energy production to create even and usable flows of power across a wide area. Elemental to the neoliberal grid are mutually amplifying currents between overwhelming episodic energies of political economic shock, on the one hand, and myriad quotidian energies associated with radically inegalitarian circulations of goods, finance, capital, bodies, and media resonances. 

Each shock wave simultaneously summons new flows and resonances that maximize capitalist power and profit, energize vitriol, and enhance capacities for future shocks while shutting down impediments to capitalist metastasization. These amplificatory currents are immanently connected with affective currents of fear and rage that both energize and are energized by capitalist intensities - particularly in manifestations of xenophobia, white supremacy, and fundamentalisms that are hostile to reasoning and science. Trump draws on and proliferates these existing flows of power as well as intensities of shock. 

As shock politics moves from being episodic to becoming itself quotidian and accompanied by dispersed resonant violence, the neoliberal dynamics are at once amplified and rendered more unstable in ways that may ultimately short-circuit the grid itself with intensities and counter-energies it cannot handle. 

5. 

Efforts to parse truths, reveal contradictions, or selectively negotiate and collaborate with this mode of power are both 

blind to and disguise what it fundamentally is - a new fascism that exercises and enhances nominalist sovereignty 

through disordering ordering and hyper-prerogative power

. 

The Italian term fascismo referred to the fascio littori--a bundle of rods attached to a battle ax symbolizing strength through unity and the bolstered authority of the Roman civic magistrate. In the Twenty-First Century, the ax becomes the chaotically moving nominalist cyber-sword of shock plugged into the neoliberal power grid of circulations and affective resonances, such that even within government all that is solid melts in the air. In the first

weeks of the Trump administration, the nominalist cyber-sword has been quickly turned on the agencies and processes of American government. In this process, chaos is not only a means of dissolving the recalcitrance of other branches of government and agencies but also a principle of governance itself.

Consider the example of the so-called Muslim ban executive order, the “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” order issued January 27, 2017.

Preceding the release of the order, different members of the regime leaked multiple, contradictory versions—sowing seeds of speculation and confusion. Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway even claimed it may never be released. In rolling out the order, Trump did not consult department heads including the very relevant State Department nor did he vet the order with the Office of Legal Counsel. The Department of Homeland Security saw the text of the order only shortly before it was released. In the midst of all this interpretive confusion, the execution of the Order was left largely to the judgement of officers of Customs and Border Protection. What all this begins to show is the extent to which the Trump regime enables, deploys and tolerates a high degree of chaos and unpredictability as a mode of reinventing government. While such mayhem in an earlier moment would be an indication of weakness and disarray, the new fascism operates through disordering-ordering, which simultaneously exceeds order and transforms ordering itself. Nominalist sovereignty seeks to liquify government to the ever-changeable will of the sovereign. In the ceaseless exercise of prerogative power and its chaotic effects, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the state of exception almost seems quaint. Prerogative power doesn’t quite capture this phenomenon. Rather, it is a kind of hyper-prerogative power in which each communicative and ordering action intensifies and proliferates a whirlwind of contradictory and confusing qualities that endlessly call forth new exercises of prerogative. 

   Clearly, radical democratic politics must target the classical manifestations of fascism we noted at the outset. As we do so, a monumental challenge will be imagining how to resist and contest the unprecedented apparatus of surveillance, security, and militarized policing whose potentials have been constructed since 9-11, but whose uses are likely to take countless new and horrifying forms. 

    Yet, we believe all of this will hinge upon our capacities to counter the shock politics and resonant violence characteristic of the new fascism. This will require engaging in a double politics. On the one hand, we must escalate sustained modes of direct action carefully-targeted to short-circuit the worst aspects of the regime. On the other hand, we must develop a radical democratic politics that shocks in a different way, that overwhelms the unaccountable vitriol of Trump-shock with dramatic engagements and magnetic enactments of receptive solidarity. This will take great creativity among those who oppose Trump and neo-fascism. Stay tuned.

John Buell — Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: Exxon, Neoliberalism, and the Climate Crisis

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book is Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age.

After investigations by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times showed ExxonMobil’s own scientists recognized the risks of burning fossil fuels in the 1980s., the company faced harsh criticism even from some shareholders as well as possible legal action. Yet remarkably even in the face of these revelations Exxon continues to fund climate science denial. Recent recipients include such stalwart denialists as the American Enterprise Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).


My initial reaction to this story was the famous Upton Sinclair line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But there is much more than simple greed in Exxon’s actions. Understanding the broader context of Exxon’s malfeasance is one clue to a more complete recognition of the harm it has inflicted. Exxon’s early climate science denialism took place within an emerging neoliberal rejection of the New Deal and post World War II capitalism. Among other changes, emergent neoliberal capitalism altered earlier notions of corporate responsibility and not only restored but deepened and extended faith in the market.  As always, Milton Friedman provided the baldest defense of this position: “The businessmen believe that they are defending free en­terprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em­ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid­ing pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of re­formers. In fact they are–or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously–preach­ing pure and unadulterated socialism. Busi­nessmen who talk this way are unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”

Friedman himself reflects and helped develop a view of the market that goes beyond even Adam Smith. Smith saw markets as instruments for the allocation of physical goods. Neoliberals up the ante. Markets are viewed as perfect self-organizing systems and ideal information processors, able to solve an indefinite range of social problems.  As one neoliberal advocate puts it, “markets are superb mechanisms for the delivery of information, as they capture a huge array of information and make it available in a single price…Even unknown unknowns are quickly revealed in market   prices. “  What conventional moralists might regard as lies are perfectly okay. They represent the interest of one market participant and are fully balanced by other interests in the marketplace of ideas.  Furthermore, as both Johns Hopkins political theorist William Connolly and Notre Dame historian of economics Philip Mirowski point out, modern neoliberalism differs from its classical predecessor in acknowledging that markets do not emerge spontaneously. They must be imposed. Toward this end, neoliberals develop an exoteric version of their worldview for public consumption while articulating an esoteric version among themselves.

That markets can serve as information processors in certain domains and time frames does not establish their universal validity. Markets are not the only self-organizing systems in our universe, and, as Connolly puts it, economic markets are “more fragile, interdependent, and volatile than their most fervent supporters imagine.” Their evolution can just as easily lead to system threatening crashes as to a higher rationality. Models based on this ideal failed to anticipate even the possibility of a market crash, let alone its timing.

Exxon’s Lies and a Word from the Pope

Viewers of the recent Olympic games were treated to another deceptive effort by Exxon to rebrand itself as a responsible corporate citizen. The neoliberal worldview—often called the Washington consensus-- has done far more to damage the environment than Exxon’s lies about climate change.

Consider the infamous cap and trade. As Mirowski, points out, most neoliberals never believed in their own denialism. It was a strategy to fight off regulation and to find a market-oriented approach to the problem. A market in transferable permits for allowable levels of carbon emission seemed the ideal neoliberal solution. From the start the market has been dogged by the failure of enforcement mechanisms. More fundamentally markets for carbon permits interact in destructive ways with security and consumer markets. When the world financial market collapsed, coal prices and the price of carbon permits declined, thus removing any incentive to move out of this noxious fuel. Finally, when such dangerous and uncertain programs as cap and trade, financial deregulation, or off shore oil production blow up, as they inevitably will, clean up costs are largely dumped on the public. Then when government debt grows, this phenomenon is taken as proof of government’s overreach.

Shareholder value and the deification of the market thus are only one of neoliberalism’s inegalitarian thrusts. These would include a commitment to fiscal austerity, and privatization of key state resources.

Implicit in these concepts of market fundamentalism, austerity, and privatization is a dangerous contempt for democracy and the role of the state in markets.  In the marketplace of ideas, dollars vote. Some ideas are therefore more equal than others. In this regard Mirowski cites one of the central esoteric tenets of the neoliberals: This is Friedrich Hayek on the popular will: “if we proceed on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will practice are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom.”

Taken together, austerity, privatization, and periodic financial bubbles and crises and the hollowing out of democracy have driven a fierce turn toward socioeconomic inequality.  Inequality in turn places pressure on the environment along several pathways. Inequality isolates the rich.. The poorest—and especially minority groups--are virtually disenfranchised and left vulnerable to accepting the blandishments of the oil giants. To paraphrase Rousseau, inequality has reached the point where a substantial part of the population no longer has the resources to participate effectively whereas a tiny minority thinks it has the affluence and power to escape social problems.

What about those in the shrinking middle? Workers face longer hours in highly inegalitarian work places, exacerbating pressures to keep up with the higher ups Here is Connolly from a prescient passage in a 1995 book, The Ethos of Pluralization: “The American Political Economy is built around the illusory promise of universalizing exclusionary goods. As it becomes increasingly clear to a variety of constituencies that they are losing ground in this elusive quest, they either drop out of institutional politics or vent their anger on the most vulnerable scapegoats available.”

Despite these chronic problems, shareholder value, austerity, and the magic of the market are so common today that they are taken as axioms of modern societies. Mirowski calls this phenomenon everyday neoliberalism. Yet neither law nor economic history affirms the validity of the neoliberal creed.  A corporation’s obligations are to its consumers, workers, and the larger community. Corporations are granted special privileges—by governments-- but accompanying these privileges are obligations. The shareholder is owed corporate honesty but only residual earnings after responsibility to workers. Consumers, and the community are met.

Adequately addressing Exxon’s lies involves more than punishment of the perpetrators. Market fundamentalism must be challenged, and the finance industry curbed. That sector breeds instability and sucks away talent and resources from the productive economy. Safety nets, including especially unemployment compensation, must be preserved and strengthened, precautions against at least some of the volatility of modern society. Proactively ambitious spending is required to meet a climate emergency.  Declaration of a climate emergency should also include recognition that many poor and minority communities have been treated as sacrifice zones that must bear the burdens of what Naomi Klein calls the extractive economy. Proper attention to this phenomenon—including disproportionately generous funding-- and recognition of the role that these communities have played in resisting extraction’s excesses might blunt some of the racial antagonisms that have bedeviled progressive politics.

In this connection progressive must consider some fundamental dilemmas of coalition building. University of Texas Economist James Galbraith spoke of a “Keynesian devolution,” a set of policies that combined public spending, tax incentives, planning and regulations, and private investment in transit and suburban housing. This combination brought us the relative prosperity of the post World War II era. We need comparable programs to revamp transportation, urban planning, and the energy infrastructure to meet our current crisis.

Meeting these needs, however, requires addressing a persistent paradox. An ambitious progressive agenda might reduce social tensions and the inclination to demonize, but current racial and religious divisions impede enactment of such a program.

Some progressive Democrats are aware of this tension, but their approach is at so high a level of abstraction as to leave as many questions as answers. Consider this section from the party’s environmental platform.

- Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
It’s a simple but powerful idea: we are stronger together.

Unfortunately, many social conservatives would also endorse these terms—and been ready to impose their interpretation of unity on us. Their unities are fostered and sustained by denigration and demonization of a foreign or domestic dissident. Is unity sustained by commitment to one core principle? Could that principle subtly reflect values that exclude some segments and interests and thus be a tool to secure particular identities? Might more unity be possible through recognizing and cultivating difference?

There are expansive movements across ethnic, religious, and national boundaries to build coalitions in support of programs to promote environmental health. In an earlier post, Connolly has provided a close reading of Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on social justice and the environment. The Pope has acknowledged the reasonable contestability of his core creed.  This is especially important if, as Connolly would argue, the traditional views of nature that have sustained and been sustained by socialist, capitalist, and feudal and Catholic regimes are deficient. Nature has been conceived as an organic totality, an orderly hierarchy with God and man at the top or as a mechanistic domain fully comprehensible and manipulable for human purposes. In one way or another nature exists for us. This “ontological narcissism” thus provides the conditions for confidence in at least the eventual unity of core beliefs. But if, as Connolly argues in The Fragility of Things, " the cosmos is composed of innumerable, interacting open systems with differential capacities of self-organization set on different scales of time, agency, viscosity, and speed,” such a world is unlikely ever to establish and sustain unanimity of core beliefs. To his great credit, Francis is willing to encourage breaths of some fresh air into this stalemated conversation.

Unlike some of his predecessors Francis does not denigrate atheists. He has invited participants from multiple religious backgrounds to debate the differing convictions as to the ultimate nature of the cosmos even as they converge on some common measures and become more responsive to “unknown unknowns” in our attempt to save the planet.  Different motives and ideals will lead different groups to participate in such coalitions, but the willingness to debate core convictions and to acknowledge gaps in one’s own world view strengthens and is strengthened by such pluralistic politics. Connolly recognizes that “many will refuse his or similar invitations,” but a positive spirituality—just as hateful and vindictive ones—can be contagious.  Even sporadic and partial local successes in a world so linked by social media can by their example change the character of politics. Rather than wonder whether we have time to act we must proceed now.