I found Patti Smith’s performance of “Hard Rain’s Going to Fall” at the Nobel Prize Ceremony in Stockholm deeply stunning and moving. Which all goes to prove once again that Dylan is nobody’s fool. He chose well for this event in a double sense – singer and song.
Below is a portion of an article from the Portland Press Herald (Portland, Maine). It was written shortly after the elections. I’m posting it because it captures a sentiment that informed more white voters than many want to acknowledge.
Gary Morrison, 65, worked at the mill (in Maine) for many years before retiring in 2011. His wife died a year later from complications with diabetes. Morrison didn’t ride the wave toward Trump. The Republican candidate was simply too dangerous for him. Now, he looks around the town he’s called home for the last 40 years and is surprised by what he sees.
“These people who are saying that they voted for change, a lot of them actually fear change,” he said. “And that anger, that fear, he gave voice to all of it.”
In order to avoid unnecessary arguments, I will agree that corporate globalization – and let’s not forget financialization – and the retreat from class by the dominant makers and shakers in the Democratic Party over four decades do figure into any analysis of the elections and its outcome. But they don’t explain everything as some of the economic populists and people on the left seem to suggest. Many other factors bear on the outcome, especially the role of racism, sexism and misogyny, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, and the mischief of the right wing, the media, and FBI. Political (or if you like class) formation, understanding, and unity are constructed on more than the economic level. Indeed, the “economic” doesn’t stand apart in all of its grandeur untainted by everything swirling around and through it. Nor does it decide everything “in the last instance.” It has a considerable role to play for sure, but it doesn’t wait until the final curtain is about to fall to have its say.
That said, tomorrow I will post some observations that make the case that it wasn’t globalization at all (if by that we mean the abandonment of capital from domestic sites where it has long been sunk in favor of other sites in far flung regions of the world) that set the stage for the overperformance of Trump in huge swathes of rural and small town America. Instead it was its opposite, that is, the inward and massive penetration of agro-and commercial capital – Walmart anyone – into these same parts of the country that did. But I would add that the transformative and thoroughly disruptive changes that this movement of capital brought in its wake only set the stage for Trump’s overperformance on election day in rural and small town America. Who then orchestrated it, besides Trump himself? It was, simply put, the sustained intervention of an organizing element and right wing extremism, whose rise and ascendancy coincided with these underlying economic and social transformations, assiduously performed that role in this election, and long before.
Globalization and Hillary’s “retreat from class” has become the overarching explanation for Trump’s victory on the part of some left and progressive analysts. In this telling, right wing extremism and its mass constituency – by no means a new phenomenon – go largely unmentioned. Nor do the actions of the FBI in the final weeks of the campaign figure much, if at all, in their analysis. Ditto Wikileaks. Media equivalency of the two candidates doesn’t see the light of day either. Voter suppression, which held down turnout, is also a no-show
And you will have to dig deep to unearth even a hint that millions of white voters might have been motivated by their resistance to President Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s vision of an inclusive, multi-racial, multi-cultural, egalitarian society.
Nor does the left’s strategically flawed analysis – and here I include Bernie Sanders and his team – of the elections that resulted in most of the left sitting on its hands this fall merit a word. (What could be worse, after all, then to have one’s radical credentials sullied by any association with the neoliberal, hawkish, bourgeois feminist Hillary Clinton. She will get my vote, but I hold my nose, while doing it. And don’t expect me to say anything positive about her or canvas for her, so went the narrative.)
Noticeably missing as well is any acknowledgement of sexism, misogyny, and the myriad ways that they invaded this year’s election.
Finally, any suggestion that Trump’s politics of hate figured in the voting decisions of white workers, including those who supported Obama in earlier elections, is either rejected out of hand or minimized. In this rendering, globalization, which lately has become a catch all to explain just about everything, is what exclusively or largely framed their thinking and determined their vote. That a white, masculinist, and nativist frame may have been a significant factor in their voting calculus is given short shrift. Indeed, it is argued that to harp on the latter is nothing but participating in the “blame game.” And who needs that at this moment? Lift up “class” (and economic issues) and all will be right in the world, so we are instructed!
Seems like I heard that before.
Trump, to me, is more akin to a White Redeemer of yesteryear than a modern day Deal Maker. The Redeemers of the post-Civil War South broke the back of a brief experiment with multi-racial egalitarian democracy in the Civil War’s aftermath and imposed a new harsh regime – Jim Crow – of racist oppression and exploitation. Trump and the cast around him seem to have similar ambitions, updated to our times and conditions.
Moreover, he seems willing to embrace the same mix of force, violence, disenfranchisement, legislation, and racist and other backward ideologies in new and old forms as his forebears did in their time to realize his ambitions.
Feels like we’re at a pivotal moment and advantage is for now in the hands of the forces of reaction and worse. Never before have I worried so much about the future of our country and all the beautiful things about it – beginning with its mosaic of peoples and cultures. But to paraphrase FDR, we can’t let fear paralyze us.
That said, analogies – all of them – suffer in different ways. And this one is no different. What strikes me in this regard, first of all, is that the scale, infrastructure, understanding (including anti-racist understanding), media resources, and maturity of the contemporary democratic movement is on an entirely different level to resist and turn back Trump and gang than the freed people and their allies were in the years after the Civil War.
The left in these circumstances can play a major role in assisting this process if it sets aside time worn sectarian habits of thinking and doing, if it realizes that the point of departure – not the end – of any serious politics of the left isn’t what we think or are ready to do, but what much larger numbers of people think and are ready to do.
