$12.

95
Nixons real crimes are not the petty ones
of bribery and corruption which his fellow
capitalists so hypocritically accuse him
of. Our movement to dump Nixon must
expose his real crimes against the people
of Indochina, the Arab peoples and the
people of Chile as well as the working and
oppressed people here in the U.S. While
these are not on Time Magazines or Sen-
ator Kennedys list of Nixons crimes, they
must be added to our indictment of the
Nixon government and the imperialist
interests which he represents.

Dump Nixon! Stop the Fascist Tide!

The Call, Vol. 2, No. 3, December 1973
Features ISSUE 24 WINTER 2017

pg. 23 pg. 41

FROM MARGINS HOW THE

TO MAINSTREAM DONALD CAME
DOUG HENWOOD TO RULE
CHARLIE POST

pg. 67 pg. 85

LOSING BEING ANTI-TRUMP

WEST VIRGINIA ISNT ENOUGH
CATHY KUNKEL DAVID BRODER

pg. 107

THE GLORY DAYS ARE OVER

NICOLE ASCHOFF

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 1

Departments
FRONT MATTERS READING MATERIEL THE TUMBREL

6 51 97
the soapbox canon fodder girondins
Letters + Coulterland False Answers
The Internet
Speaks

8 54 101
party lines field notes thermidor
Now What? Big Plans Paleocons
for Porn

11 62 103
friends & foes dossier versailles
Steve Bannons Discover Kiss the Ring
Autobahn the Networks

15
struggle
session
The Trump CULTURAL CAPITAL LEFTOVERS
Way

77 117
bass & popular front
superstructure
Results &
Stand Down Prospects:
MEANS OF DEDUCTION
Margaret Q4 2016

33 80 119
the vulgar ways of seeing means & ends
empiricist
How Pepe No Money,
What Nate Turned Brown Mo Problems
Missed

38 82
misery index beyond a
boundary
The New
Populists Adam Silver
Isnt Protesting

2 24 / WINTER 2017
Contributors
cover art by
Edward Carvalho-Monaghan
Nicole Aschoff is the managing
editor at Jacobin and the author
of The New Prophets of Capital.
Billy Bragg is an English rock
musician and activist.
David Broder is a translator and a
member of the Historical Materialism
editorial board. He lives in Rome,
where he is researching a phd on
dissident communists in the Italian
Resistance.
Arun Gupta was an editor of the
Guardian Newsweekly and founder
of the Occupied Wall Street Journal.
Doug Henwood edits Left Business
Observer and is the host of Behind
the News. His new book is My Turn.
Tanner Howard is an editorial
assistant at Jacobin.
Brendan James is a writer in New
York City and the producer of Chapo
Trap House.
Susan L. Kang is an associate
professor of political science at John
Jay College of Criminal Justice,
City University of New York. She is
the author of Human Rights and
Labor Solidarity.
Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial
board of Jacobin.
Cathy Kunkel is an independent
consultant on energy and electric
utility issues based in Charleston,
WV, and is also active with the
community organization Advocates
for a Safe Water System.
Ella Mahony is an assistant editor
at Jacobin.
Branko Marcetic is an editorial
assistant at Jacobin. He lives in
Auckland, New Zealand.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Matthew Miranda writes about
sports for SB Nation and FanSided,
and teaches English and writing
at Stony Brook University.
Angela Nagle is a cultural critic
for the Baffler, Current Affairs, and
Dublin Review of Books.
Leo Panitch is a professor of political
science at York University and the
co-editor of the Socialist Register. His
latest book, with Sam Gindin, is
The Making of Global Capitalism.
Charlie Post is a longtime socialist
activist who teaches at City University
of New York.
Alex Press is a writer and phd
student in sociology at Northeastern
University. She lives in Boston.
3
Citoyens
Jacobin is a leading voice
E D I TO R & P U B L I S H E R O U T R E AC H & D E V E LO P M E N T of the American left,
Bhaskar Sunkara Jason Farbman offering socialist perspectives
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C R E AT I V E D I R E C TO R R E A D I N G G RO U P S
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4 24 / WINTER 2017
 FRONT
MATTERS

A HEALTHY START
TO A NUTRITIOUS
MAGAZINE.
 FRONT MATTERS
THE SOAPBOX
Letters
Storm the Libraries!
As Chris Maisano wrote in The ABCs of
Socialism, public libraries would be
one of the most important institutions
in any socialist society worthy of the
name. Where is the mention of libraries,
museums, and other institutions that
exist for the common good in The Party
We Need? Most public libraries are
funded by property taxes, which create
well-funded libraries in wealthy areas
and underfunded ones in communities
where a library would benefit people
most. Educational institutions would not
have to grovel to corporate interests
if they were divorced from property-tax-
based funding. We need equitably dis-
tributed funds for all public education.
Mike Monahan, Chicago, IL
6 24 / WINTER 2017
Small Is Not Beautiful
In the last issue, Megan Erickson laid
out an excellent vision for the education
policy we need. One policy she did not
mention, but that we desperately need,
is decoupling public schools from mu-
nicipal property taxes. The way schools
are funded in this country results in
further segregation (and hurts housing
affordability), as well as constrains
budgets in communities that need fund-
ing the most.
Education research has consistently
shown that school integration is one of
the best ways to close the achieve-
ment gap, so eliminating systems that
prevent integration will create better
schools for all. The Supreme Court failed
to protect students in San Antonio
Independent School District v. Rodriguez
when they held that property tax
funding of schools is not a violation of
the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus,
the work falls to us, at the level of state
organizing.
In 2013, Colorado attempted to pass
a constitutional amendment that would
have shifted school funding away
from local property taxes and towards a
guaranteed state level of funding per
pupil. Although Amendment66 failed
(and included some bad provisions on
charter schools), the push to shift school
funding away from local property taxes
provides a model for how the Left can pur-
sue policies that make schools more
equal for all.
Ryan Dykhouse, Boston, MA
No
is this where we send in letters that
get printed in the personals section of
jacobin?
Moya Mrquez, Los Angeles, CA
 The
Internet
Speaks

Someones Figured out the Formula Because communication

Such social democratic bs from this is at the heart
page, acts like it is marxists.
of any good relationship.
Martin Burk, Berkeley, CA

Against Mike Barnicle

Ive had to listen to Mike Barnicle
yammer my whole life I grew
up in Massachusetts and he was on
Youll Need to Give Us State Not a Bad Idea...
the local news, moralizing about
Power First Memo to self: Stop reading the
sports and ripping off George Carlin.
If that asshole knew where Aleppo I wonder if Jacobin is ever going to Comments on Jacobins fb page.
was nine months ago, Ill shit out an give us regular updates on Socialist
Jeff White, Toronto, Canada
official Patriots gameday ball signed and Communist massacres.
by the devil himself and give it to Barn-
Melissa Borman, Atlanta, GA
icle for a belated Christmas gift.

Peter Berard, Watertown, MA Dont Do This!

Jacobin drinking game: Take a shot
every time you read neoliberalism
or elite. Die before finishing the
first paragraph.

Brian Biekman, Houston, TX

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 7

 FRONT MATTERS
PARTY LINES

1. Trumps victory signals a deep political

crisis, not simply a failure of strategy.
Trump didnt win because hes a Twitter Jedi or a master-
ful orator. He won because he acknowledged
working peoples fear, anger, and anxiety. This doesnt
mean he cares about them nothing in his long
history as a money-grubbing businessman indicates that
he does. It simply means that for enough Americans,
more of the same was enemy number one, and Trump
took that sentiment to the bank.

Now What? Put differently, Trumps victory is the result of a

Back at the beginning of the 2016 campaign, pundits
predicted a boring slog between Hillary Clinton
and Jeb Bush. The heir that raised the most cash would
take the crown, simple as that.
Instead, Bush collapsed almost immediately, vying with
Lincoln Chafee for candidate we felt most sorry
for, and Clinton found herself in the fight of her career,
battling political outsiders on both wings.
Election night was a nightmare for progressives. Instead
of a candidate we all knew and loved or hated
accordingly we got Trump: a mendacious wild card
whose recipe for making America great again
seems to be equal parts xenophobia, misogyny, and
nationalism. Now what?
deep crisis of legitimacy, present in the United States and
a growing number of countries around the world. The
institutions and alliances that constitute the bipartisan
consensus underpinning neoliberal capitalism are in
serious crisis; voters increasingly see the political center
as bankrupt and hopeless.
The Left cant ignore this fact. Sure, in hindsight its
clear the Clinton team made grievous errors, honing in on
piecemeal, identity-based pockets of voters to create
a winning coalition, ignoring the broader economic con-
cerns of voters in states like Wisconsin. But theres a
real danger that the political takeaway of Trumps victory
for progressives will be watch out for those Russians,
or that next time around we should do the same, but bet-
ter better polling, better analytics, better messag-
ing instead of recognizing that different, not better, is
whats needed.

This question has been on our minds. In our last print

issue we talked about how the Left could build
on the surge of support for Bernie Sanders and craft a
socialist platform to challenge the common sense
of our for-profit system. Trump hasnt extinguished this
possibility hes made it more urgent than ever.

Journey to the Dark Side takes this urgency as its

guide. It shines a light on Trumps victory and
examines what his win says about our political landscape.
Three lessons can be distilled from the arguments
within:

8 24 / WINTER 2017
 We cant count
on the
Democrats to put
up a fight;
the fight must
come
from the Left.

2. Americans are divided, but they have
the potential to be united.
A wide expanse of Americans found Trumps xenophobic
rhetoric an appealing narrative to explain their
troubles. But the two Americas narrative, in which
a foward-thinking, tolerant, educated people
is pitted against a hateful, ignorant, nostalgic people,
is simplistic and unsubstantiated.
3. Fight the movement, not the man.
Trumps myriad flaws, shameful history, and opportu-
nistic antics are like a magnet, constantly monopolizing
our attention and criticism. But difficult as it is, we
must resist his centripetal powers because focusing our
shared energies and resources on attacking Trump
will only result in an even weaker left and a strengthened
populist right.

A look at the numbers shows that the liberal elites story
that Trump rode to victory on a wave of euphoric
white working-class support doesnt hold water. Voter
turnout in this years election was abysmal as usual
hitting a twenty-year low in some states and the major-
ity of working-class whites stayed home. Trump didnt
rally the hordes; he won by a nose on a promise to give
people jobs. Chances are he wont keep that promise.
Its up to the Left to make good on it instead bringing
people together in a class-based movement of us
against the rich, instead of emphasizing all the things
that keep ordinary people apart.
Americans are divided by identity and culture, but they
also have the potential to be united by their shared desire
for a good life, rooted in security, respect, and justice.
Trumps presence in the White House will empower
the most disgraceful elements of American society. This
includes not only neo-fascists and racists, but also
voracious capitalists who are ready to run through the
doors Trump will open. We cant count on the
Democrats to put up a fight; the fight must come from
the Left.
But how we fight matters. We need to take the lessons
from last year to heart. The most important of these
is that the Left needs a vision, not a defensive posture. We
must organize around a positive, forward-looking
program for real change a program that gives people
something to fight for, not just something to fight
against.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 9

10 24 / WINTER 2017
 FRONT MATTERS
FRIENDS & FOES BY CONNOR KILPATRICK

ILLUSTRATION BY
JAMES CLAPHAM

Steve Bannons
Autobahn

There is no doubt that Steve Bannon You cant fight Herrenvolk

is a bulging sack of shit.
With his chin fuzz and sloppy
gray mane, he looks like an alcoholic
stepdad grimly watching a History
Channel special on Rommel in the
desperate hope of an erection. In
Bannon, President Trump has found
his very own jack-booted Worm-
tongue. He will whisper darkly about
race realism and the evils of birth
control.
His ascent to the White House
should indeed send chills down all
of our spines. But whats dangerous
about Bannon isnt that his loony, far-
right politics have reached such high
places. After all, thats practically an
American tradition.
Have we already forgotten about
Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana,
who reenacted Bill Clintons supposed
assassination of Vince Foster with a
pistol and a cantaloupe? What about
Reagans secretary of the interior
James G. Watt, the man who banned
the Beach Boys from playing on the
National Mall because they attracted
the wrong element? Ultra-right
populism with weak-tea
liberalism.
John Birch Society president and
conspiracy theorist Larry McDonald
came to Congress in 1975 during
that supposed era of reasonable
bipartisan consensus. A few years
later, he urged the nomination of
Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess for
the Nobel Peace Prize on anticom-
munist grounds. Before he made his
way to the Senate, Ted Cruz declared
a war on dildos, stating in a legal brief:
There is no substantive due-process
right to stimulate ones genitals for
non-medical purposes. And in 1980,
Ronald Reagan stood just seven miles
from Philadelphia, Mississippi
where three civil rights activists were
murdered in a conspiracy involving
the county sheriffs office, the local
police, and the Ku Klux Klan and
promised to restore to states and
local governments the power that
properly belongs to them.
If terrifying right-wing loonies at
the levers of state power could bring
about the Fourth Reich, it wouldve
happened decades ago, during a truly
raging wildfire of American class con-
flict, at the behest of powerful oilmen
like Clint Murchison Sr, who rumor
has it funded the American Nazi
Party, and Texaco chairman Torkild
Rieber, who helped cinch Francos
victory in the Spanish Civil War with
shipments of much-needed oil and
a telegram that read, Dont worry

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 11

 FRIENDS & FOES
Just like Lin-Manuel Miranda,
Bannon once wrote
his very own rap musical.
about payments. Despite fascist
sympathies in high places, none of
these uber-powerful slimeballs tilted
our constitutional oligarchy into
fascism.
So far-right racist doesnt make agenda for America something he
Bannon particularly unique or wor-
rying. Its how devastatingly well he
understands liberalisms failures and
how willing he is to craft a fraudulent
and reactionary program for those
whove only experienced decline
during the Clinton and Obama years.
Like a mutant weed growing out
of a shit-covered pile of compost,
Bannon has cultivated his particular
brand of reaction entirely within the
decomposing corpse of American lib-
eralism. In no other soil could it ever
have blossomed.
Summing up the Democratic
Partys embrace of Silicon Valley
and finance, he gloats: [The Dem-
ocrats] were talking to these people
with companies with a $9billion
market cap employing nine people.
Its not reality. They lost sight of
what the world is about. For the
most part, hes right: the Demo-
crats abandoned even went to war
with labor, embracing the pro-
fessional classes instead. Bannons
rise on the back of a candidate who
received fewer votes than even Mitt
Romney was only possible with the
collapse of turn-of-the-century liber-
alism and its agents in the Democratic
Party. Bannon (and Trump) would be
12
nothing and nowhere without that
implosion.
In a Hollywood Reporter interview
that appeared shortly after Trumps
surprise victory, Bannon outlined his
infrastructure cash alone creates
calls economic nationalism.
Were going to build an entirely
new political movement.... Its
everything related to jobs. The
conservatives are going to go
crazy. Im the guy pushing a tril-
lion-dollar infrastructure plan.
With negative interest rates
throughout the world, its the
greatest opportunity to rebuild
everything. Shipyards, iron-
works, get them all jacked up....
It will be as exciting as the 1930s.
Except it wont look anything like
that. Trump and the Republican leg-
islature are no more likely to enact
Bannons program than Obama was
going to launch a Green New Deal.
Trumps actual infrastructure plan
consists of nothing but tax credits.
Private investors might jump on pipe-
line expansions, but they wont be
interested in overhauling municipal
water systems.
This is hardly the Tennessee
Valley Authority, which modernized
and developed the most backward
regions of the United States, despite
being an unprofitable venture for
the private sector. The New Deal,
which Bannon cites as inspiration,
24 / WINTER 2017
wasnt a mere giveaway to construc-
tion and building-trades hustlers like
Trumps proposal or even like much
of Obamas American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act (arra). Instead,
it employed Americans with public
oversight. Between 1935 and 1943,
the Works Progress Administration
hired 8.5million men and women, not
to mention the 3million who worked
for the Civilian Conservation Corps.
As the Hurricane Katrina fiasco
demonstrated, without effective
federal regulation and oversight,
a race to the bottom in terms of
wages and workplace protections.
In December, a worker died at one
of the new affordable-housing units
going up in New York City. Unions
had demanded that all workers be cov-
ered, but de Blasios City Hall wanted
to maximize production rather than
pay union wages. And now someone is
dead because that worker was not ade-
quately protected. Whatever projects
Trump launches, workers pay, safety,
and well-being wont matter. Theyll
be just as disposable as the tens of
thousands of employees the president
has already scammed throughout his
miserable career.
Nevertheless, what Bannon said
about negative interest rates creating
the perfect opportunity for a mas-
sive infrastructure upgrade is true.
(Even the increasingly worthless Paul
Krugman agrees on this point.) And
yet President Obama who ushered
in arra when interest rates were
even lower refused to fully fund a
plan to rebuild the country when he
had the perfect chance.
Obamas economic adviser
Christina Romer estimated at least
$1.2trillion was needed to pull the
country out of the Great Recession.

His political team, fearing the t-word
(which apparently does not frighten
Bannon), whittled it down to less than
$800billion, much of it tax cuts. But
even Romers initial estimate was far
too conservative she later said the
country needed at least $2trillion
in stimulus money. Obama shunned
a New Deal, and now a reactionary
is riding into office promising the
Herrenvolk version.
What made the New Deal effec-
tive and nothing like arra or
Trumps proposals was that mil-
lions went from unemployed to
employed within a matter of weeks.
It prioritized well-paying jobs for
workers, not handouts to construc-
tion tycoons. Labor union militancy,
much of it shaped by the Commu-
nist Party, made this possible. As
much as we might loathe Obama for
having no plan to revive the Amer-
ican working class, we should never
have believed he or the Democratic
Party would. Liberalism failed in the
twenty-first century not because of
any new developments but because
it always had wild deficiencies, even
at the peak of its powers. It was only
worth a damn when there was a rad-
ical labor movement for it to co-opt
and, reluctantly, invite into a political
coalition.
Without working-class militancy,
there was never going to be a new
New Deal under Obama. And there
certainly wont be one under Trump.
Does the Donald have a plan to spur
a new wave of unionization with his
very own Wagner Act? Or a proposal
to go after the donor class Bannon
claims to despise?
Of course not. Trumps already
targeting union leaders from his
Twitter account and inviting corpo-
rate America into his administration
with unparalleled vulgarity. He wants
to make a working-class paradise by
bringing back manufacturing jobs
that can compete with develop-
ing-world wages. It makes Obamas
food stamps and Uber economy look
like 1970s Sweden.
A true right-wing economic
nationalism, on the model of early
twentieth-century fascism, is a
dead letter in twenty-first-century
America. The Republican Party may
be the hard right of our ruling class,
but its still a thoroughly capitalist the Democratic Party has altogether
ruling class no Prussian dueling
scars or epaulets these days. And
these dull, business-minded captains
of industry have no interest whatso-
ever in a new New Deal, reactionary
or otherwise. Neither tva nor auto-
bahn. Theyre far too bourgeois for
anything like that.
As is both Trump and, for all his
rustic bluster, Bannon. Despite his
common-man shtick, Bannon worked
at Goldman Sachs before turning
Hollywood financier and growing
rich off Seinfeld. His screenwriting
partner claims Bannon once pro-
posed limiting the vote to property
owners. Hes more Federalist snot
in the mold of Alexander Hamilton
than reactionary Jacksonian. Behind
his supposed working-class economic
program lies the same shitty elitist
views he pillories in liberals. Just
like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bannon
once wrote his very own rap musical.
Like every rich, right-wing asshole,
he plays gi Joe in public or Julius
Streicher, if the mood is right
before settling in with a nice bottle
of Amarone in a climate-controlled
beachfront property.
Bannons ambitions make grue-
somely clear that liberalism and
the Democratic Party in no way
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Steve Bannons Autobahn
represents the left-wing obverse
of conservatism and the gop. And
liberals, deep down in their hearts,
understand this. They have no true
ideological counterpoint no real
program and certainly no vision
for changing society for the better.
Michael Wolff correctly diagnosed
Bannon as embodying more than
anyone the liberals awful existen-
tial pain and fury. This doesnt just
refer to his disgusting comments it
includes his fiery ambition, something
lost. And even at its absolute best,
liberalisms aspirations were only
a watered-down, cheap knockoff of
the utopian dreams of communist and
socialist activists.
Trump winks and smirks at Nazis
while the Democratic Party can barely
disguise its contempt for Scandina-
vian social democracy whatever
that means, as Clinton said. Finlands
government-provided baby boxes are
as likely to elicit howls of contempt
from Democratic Party officials as a
golden hammer and sickle. Leading
left-of-center pundits now seem to
regard liberalisms most popular
quasi-social-democratic achieve-
ments Social Security, Medicare,
the Wagner Act as little more
than the tainted products of a racist,
sexist past. Meanwhile, the partys
leadership spent the better part of
last year slandering its most popular
politician only very recently and
reluctantly a member of that party
as a wild-eyed demagogue.
Despite the outcry over the Bre-
itbart News connections, Trump
stood by Bannon and didnt so much
as flinch when his white nationalist
associations were splashed across
front pages around the world. Ban-
nons position as senior counselor
13
 FRIENDS & FOES
and White House chief strategist
remained secure. And yet the most
ambitious, leftmost member of
Obamas inner circle, Van Jones a
one-time card-carrying Maoist who
was supposed to lead the green jobs
initiative was forced out within
nine months. Why? A video surfaced
in which Jones called Republicans
assholes as did a signature on a
silly 9/11 truth petition. Bannon,
in contrast, was once charged with
beating his wife, with a police officer
as witness.
With Trumps rise alongside lib-
eralisms popular decline we have the
clearest manifestation of what Perry
Anderson calls the United Statess
all-capitalist ideological universe:
A mental firmament in which the
sanctity of private property and
superiority of private enterprise
are truths taken for granted by
all forces in the political arena....
There will tend to be more elas-
ticity to the right of its center of
gravity than to the left, since the
basic belief system lends itself to
stronger articulation, and readier
appeal, in unalloyed rather than
dilute form.
Just as buttoned-down conservative
Robert Taft (the Paul Ryan of his day)
privately pushed Joe McCarthy to go
as far as he needed to, the Repub-
lican Party made their peace with
Trumpism in a matter of weeks. Weve
yet to see that rightwards elasticity
snap back. The gop establishment
may initially fear what lies farther
down their end of the spectrum and
a few politicians like Charlie Crist or
the Bushes might cry uncle but
eventually, like The Thing, they will
consume the threat and shape it just
as it shapes their party in turn.
14
No such relationship exists
between the Democratic Party and
the socialist left. Liberalism without
labor is far worse than worthless and
a Left without Marxism even more so.
Affirmed right-wingers like Bannon
have always understood this.
He calls himself a Leninist, and
much like Grover Norquist, keeps a
bust of V.I. on his desk. Its not ironic
in either case, and it never has been.
For them, Lenin represents both the
trophy of a conquered ideology
He calls himself
a Leninist,
and much like
Grover
Norquist, keeps a
bust of
V. I. on his desk.
something like a safari pelt and
an admission of revolutionary inspi-
ration and discipline. They arent
mocking Lenin theyre mocking
the Left for abandoning Marxism.
Even David Brooks has chided the
twenty-first-century left for dis-
carding anticapitalist critique:
The Left no longer has Marxism
or any other coherent intellectual
structure... no rigorous founda-
tion to rely on, no ideology to give
it organization and shape.... It
undermines the power and effec-
tiveness of modern politics more
generally.
24 / WINTER 2017
They cant even hide their glee.
The Right not the Democratic
Party wants to remake this country
from top to bottom. And socialism
and Marxism are its true opponents.
If were going to fight Trump and
Bannon, thats how we do it. The
racism Trump both conjured and
campaigned on goes beyond very real
bigotries its promise has a mate-
rial lure: jobs, loans, and property
values.
But you cant fight Herrenvolk
populism with weak-tea liberalism.
A paltry means-tested welfare state
just flips white-supremacist pro-
grams and policies for the deserving
us not the undeserving them. Both
fit comfortably in the ruling-class
politics of divide and conquer as
opposed to the broad solidarity they
fear. How can we expect the public
to rally around something like Med-
icaid when huge portions of the
working and lower-middle classes
dont qualify for it? Universal social
democracy a more transformative
program than the one Sanders cam-
paigned on is called for. Were in
the midst of a reckoning with the
neoliberal consensus. The Right has
made their play, and now we have to
make ours.
So lets return liberalism to
its rightful place as dinner-table
etiquette for the elite who are gob-
bling up the country and making
peace with Trump and Bannon as we
speak. Because thats all liberalism
is today and all the Left will be if we
continue to borrow so much from it,
consciously or unconsciously.
While etiquette can get people
to wipe their mouths and use polite
words for impolite concepts, it can
never transform society. It can never
defeat creeps like Bannon.
 FRONT MATTERS AN INTERVIEW WITH
STRUGGLE SESSION LEO PANITCH

The Trump Way

What kind of economic agenda

does Trump have in store for
workers?

In the run-up to November, commentators from across JACOBIN Are there positive outcomes from
the political spectrum predicted a round defeat for Donald this election? Can we say corporate
Trump, not least because of the palpable disgust he elic- free-trade deals are no longer a
ited from elites. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was sure thing?
the recipient of a number of moneyed defections from the
Republican Party and soaring capitalist confidence. LEO PANITCH Certainly the Trans-Pacific
Trumps hostility to free trade, the threat his xeno- Partnership is over, and the Trans-
phobia posed to the maintenance of a cheap and precarious atlantic Trade and Investment
labor force for capital, and his general instability all seemed Partnership is probably too. That
inimical to the interests of a globalized ruling class. Yet said, I dont think this spells
since the election, hes seamlessly assembled a coterie of the end of neoliberal international
corporate bosses into his transition team, and markets, trade arrangements that allow
after wobbling initially, have stabilized and even risen. for the free flow of capital and the
Meanwhile, the Left is trying to make sense of his infra- protection of that capital when
structure proposals and promises to workers. it lands in another state, which is
Arun Gupta and other Jacobin contributors spoke to the main point of the free-trade
Leo Panitch about Trumps economic agenda, his relation- and investment treaties now. And I
ship to transnational elites, and how neoliberalisms crisis dont think we are going to see
could mean revitalization for the Left. the introduction of massive import

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 15

 STRUGGLE SESSION
controls that would interrupt
the integrated global production
network we have.
The Trump administration has an
enormous interest in keeping
the flow of capital and trade going. I
expect we will see a diminution
of the labor and environmental side
agreements that go with these
international arrangements, not that
they were worth very much,
including those that are a part of
nafta.
At least this seems to be the end
of Clintonism, of which Obama was
the last gasp.
Yes. I do think this is the nail in
the coffin of the Third Way, that is,
the social-democratic line of
progressive competitiveness, global-
ization, and the free movement
of capital inaugurated by the Clinton
administration in the 1990s and
followed by the Blairites in the United
Kingdom and Europe in general.
The Third Way is attached to the
promise that through retraining,
workers in the United States could
compete with Vietnamese workers
earning a dollar a day. I think thats
over. We see the utter hollowing
out of the Third Way project.
So far Trumps economic agenda
appears to be warmed-over
supply-side economics, such as
massive tax cuts. But it seems to be
neoliberalism with a white nation-
alist face.
What this moment represents,
and its been coming for some time
since the 2008 global financial
crisis, is the delegitimization of the
institutions from mainstream
16
parties to the European Union
that attached themselves to
neoliberalism. The claim from these
institutions that the nation can
benefit from neoliberal globaliza-
tion is now all but dead, even as they
continue to impose neoliberal
austerity measures to keep the old
arrangements going.
In this context, there has been a
notable shift from protest to politics
on the Left in recent years. The
focus of protest itself visibly shifted
to emphasizing class inequality
in the wake of the financial crisis
from Occupy Wall Street to
the Indignados in Spain. But since
then its taken a turn to recogniz-
ing that you cant change the world
without taking power.
The radical left has reentered elec-
toral politics. This could be through
new parties, as in Greece and
Spain, or through old parties, as in the
United Kingdom and the United
States, where this shift surprised and
roiled the old discredited political
establishment of those parties.
But the delegitimization of main-
stream institutions also involved a
much more powerful rise of the
xenophobic right, which claims to
represent the national interest in
cultural and ethnic terms.
The big question is whether this
nationalist political right represents
a turn away from transnational
capital accumulation. These forces
sometimes express themselves
as protectors of domestic manufac-
turing jobs. But I dont think
thats their main thrust. Their main
thrust is to define the nation
again in xenophobic terms, which
also combines with protection of
24 / WINTER 2017
old cultural values that would
restore hierarchies of race, gender,
and sexual orientation.
Peter Gowan used to say of Sam
Gindins and my analysis of
the American states leading role
in facilitating and coordinating
global capitalism that this might
come undone by a nationalist
right taking power in Germany.
Astonishingly, this happened
first in the United States. We need
to see if this xenophobic right,
which is coming to prominence not
only in the Western capitalist
world look at India, Turkey, and
the Philippines will oppose
being involved in capital accumula-
tion on a global scale. Or we
could see it start constructing a
continuation of global capital
accumulation that is deliberately
asymmetric in terms of closing
the mobility of labor.
Thats another important question:
Is closing off international labor
mobility feasible amid economic
globalization and capital mobility?
I think that it could be feasible,
tragically. It wont just be trickle-
down economics, though that
will be a large part of it. It may entail
brownshirt infrastructure
capitalism.
It seems youre referring here to a
kind of right populist approach
to the state and deficit spending
using things in the toolkit that
the Paul Ryans of the world wouldnt
use. But a lot of people do mean
this literally. They look at people like
Bannon and say that Trump is
supporting, or at the very least

The Trump administration has an
enormous interest in keeping
the flow of capital and trade going.
fostering, neo-facist political
elements. Do you think its useful to
think about Trump that way?
I dont mean that Trump himself
represents a fascist movement
with ground troop militias, or any-
thing like that. But its worth
remembering that fascist regimes
were capitalist. There is a ten-
dency among analysts to think of
capitalist regimes as tending to
be free-market, but the type of state-
led capitalism that Hitler introduced
was very much capitalist. This is
where I was going with the brown
notion, trying to get at the fact
that we might see authoritarian state-
led, but blatantly capitalist, infra-
structure programs and policies.
The authoritarian populist dimen-
sion of this will be something that
we will need to pay very careful
attention to. Again we do not neces-
sarily have to take this in the sense
of Trump explicitly using the equiv-
alent of the brownshirt militias
(some of which are already around
on the far American right today),
or deliberately planning something
like the Reichstag fire as a staged
event to trigger the closure of demo-
cratic political space. But as at
other dark moments in American
history such as the repression
of domestic dissent that followed
the US entry into World War i
and was sustained in the years
immediately following it, let alone
the anticommunist repression
through the decade after World War
ii we should definitely be on
the lookout for new practices of un-
ethical authoritarian political
opportunism, which would especial-
ly involve deliberate attempts
to target progressives and the Left.
Trump is talking about a trillion-
dollar infrastructure program.
But its not a traditional program
that the government funds
directly. He wants to use tax breaks
to incentivize the building.
I think it could be a really big
infrastructure program. Yes, it will
probably involve public-private
partnerships (ppss), and massive
taxes, subsidies, and pork-barrel
spending for the construction compan-
ies involved. After all, Trump is
a developer, and that industry often
forms the base of the Republican
Party across the country. Their mo-
dus operandi is to accumulate at
public expense while ideologically
biting the hand that feeds them.
The state currently funds infrastruc-
ture through private construction
companies rather than direct public
employment.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
The Trump Way
ppss will likely entail the floating of
corporate debt on an even more
massive scale than we are already
seeing, on the premise that the state
will underwrite it. It will cost more
money by virtue of corporations bor-
rowing at a higher rate of interest
than what Treasury bills can be float-
ed at to cover a federal budget
deficit.
Thats also part of the inegalitarian
nature of this, and capital is es-
pecially happy to build and manage
public infrastructure so long as
the government will subsidize corp-
orate borrowing to that end in
various ways, such as tax forgiveness
and even covering private interest
payments, while these corporations
will for decades reap the profits
that come with the charges they are
able levy on either individuals or
local governments for the use of this
infrastructure.
Trumps infrastructure ideas focus
on the material moving economy
building roads, ports, rails, bridges,
airports. Do you think they could
actually work?
Well, what does that mean, work? It
could involve mass employment
on a big scale. We need to remember
Trump is a construction capitalist,
a developer. He hires construction
companies, and I think we are go-
ing to see that applied in a significant
way. It could involve putting work-
ers dispossessed of their old jobs in
manufacturing, or those who used
to be employed by the state itself, to
work building bridges and paving
highways. And that involves a hell
of a lot of movement of people a-
round and disruption of communities.
17
 STRUGGLE SESSION
If Trump expels three million more
Mexican immigrants, lots of whom
work in construction, will his white
working-class supporters take these
jobs? Heck, they may be needed to
work on golf courses, mowing the
grass in Palm Beach or Palm Springs.
The logic in this infrastructure pro-
mise combined with a xenophobic
threat to foreign labor is this: where
the only option before for laid-off
workers in Ohio was McDonalds or
Walmart, maybe now theyll take a
job doing construction, as laborers,
and that would involve a lot more
internal labor mobility within the
United States for these workers.
This may end up involving more than
old trickle-down economics,
where the state offers the wealthy
tax breaks in the hope they will
invest without any state guidance to
what they invest in, or whether
to invest at all. Its rational to have
massive state-led investment.
Without our side coming to power,
it will never be anything other
than a means of facilitating capital
Is closing of international labor
mobility feasible amid economic
globalization and capital mobility?
18
accumulation, of course. Can this
type of investment be done without
direct state employment and the
direct state movement of labor? I
dont know.
As for the international context for
the rise of this new right, will we see
states, led by the American state,
reintroduce import controls, capital
controls, and so on? I am not so
sure. We dont see capitalists who
want to accumulate only within
their own territory. Can you keep
globalization going via the coop-
eration of right-wing governments
that are anti-immigration?
Trumps chief strategist, Stephen
Bannon, articulates this as do
many of those on the new right in
Europe as something like: We
are not against any culture, we just
believe in cultural apartheid. They
belong over there and we belong
here. Can we have an asymmetric
globalization that keeps capital
accumulation going but which closes
off labor mobility, certainly that
closes off economic and political
24 / WINTER 2017
refugees, which a lot of Latinos in
the United States are?
Theres been a lot of connections
made between the rise of Trump
and a rising right populism elsewhere
around the world. Does Trump fit
neatly into this narrative? Whats
similar, and whats different in your
mind?
Ive been thinking lately about
the irony of Trump or Nigel Farages
nationalism. These are people who,
especially in the case of Trump and
the capitalists who hes appoint-
ing, have very extensive international
investments and ties with interna-
tional investors. Trump has a broad
range of links with investors
around the world, whether its major
players like Deutsche Bank or
gangster capitalists in the Russian
regime. Farage himself was a broker
in the City of London. You dont
get a more internationalized sphere
of capitalism than the financial
sphere of British capitalism.
Yet both of them played the national-
ist card, and it shows the extent to
which the nation-state has remained
integral to the global accumulation
projects of so many capitalists. These
guys understand that for accumu-
lation to continue on a global scale,
you need to legitimate it by attach-
ing it to a xenophobic nationalism
of some kind. Theyre trying to
ride this tiger of nationalistic ideol-
ogy that allows global accumula-
tion to continue. That may be at the
expense of the Ukrainian or the
Estonian nationalists, and for sure
at the expense of Mexican immi-
grants, let alone refugees of every
sort.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 19
 STRUGGLE SESSION
Now, where does this fit with the
nationalist, very far-right forces we
see elsewhere? They sometimes
have a more explicit antiglobalization
focus. This is most clearly seen in
Europe, with the National Front in
France and the Le Pen movement,
Golden Dawn in Greece, etc., which
are not only anti-immigrant, racist,
and so on, but explicitly hostile to
the transnational project of the
European Union. That said, we see
in Poland and in Hungary far-
right nationalist regimes that want
to remain within the European
Union.
So well have to see how this plays
out, whether this is one part of a
break with globalization. Its still
my view that unlike in the 1930s,
there arent significant enough
elements of the capitalist class who
have an interest in exclusively
accumulating on their own terrain.
Insofar as thats the case, I dont
think well see a return to a kind of
territorially-based capitalism,
operating behind closed borders.
But this all remains to be seen,
of course.
Moving back to the US political
landscape, is it possible to move the
Democratic Party more toward
the Sanders and Warren wing in your
view?
Well if we look at what has happened
in the Labour Party in the United
Kingdom, the Corbyn example is an
extremely positive phenomenon
that indicates possibilities for similar
developments in the Democratic
20
Party. That said, its clear the insur-
gency behind Corbyn wont suc-
ceed without a recalibration of what
the Labour Party is organization-
ally. That would involve a split from
the party of those members of
Parliament whose first loyalty is to
nato, the monarchy, the current
institutions of the British state, and
the practice of class harmony
with the financial capitalists in the
City of London.
More fundamentally, the insurgency
has to remake Labours apparatus
outside Parliament into a vehicle for
transforming the party branches
into centers of working-class life once
again. They would need to engage
in organization, education, and class
formation on a scale not seen in a
long time, indeed perhaps never seen
in that party in much of the country.
In the case of the US Democrats,
the possibility of organizational and
conceptualized it, or is there a
ideological recalibration runs up
against the loyalty of party leaders
to the existing state and their deep
links to Wall Street, Silicon Valley,
and the military-industrial complex.
But there is an additional obsta-
cle. The Democratic Partys organ-
izational structure is so diffuse
and its links to the working class, or
at least the active elements of it,
are much less organic than is the case
with Labour. For Labour, the con-
nections to the working class have
always gone beyond the links of
the political leadership to the union
bureaucracy.
Its a harder thing to change the
Democratic Party from a donkey
into a gazelle, and its bloody
hard already in the British Labour
24 / WINTER 2017
Party. In my view that could
only occur with a split and a fun-
damental reorganization of what
that party is. There will be an at-
tempt to recalibrate the Democratic
Party. There is no stopping this,
so lets see what happens.
How should the US left move be-
yond the election and build on
support for Sanderss vision? What
Andrew Murray wrote in Jacobin
about the new politics that produced
Corbyn and Sanders being gen-
erally more class-focused than class-
based rings true. Especially as
we get further and further from the
Sanders campaign, it seems like
theres a real danger that anything
tangible from it will dissipate.
And what role do you think
organized labor should play in all
this? Do you think it should have
a central role as weve historically
plausible alternative base for a left
opposition?
In a sense your two questions
are related to one another. Im not
convinced that without really
fundamental organizational change
in the Democratic Party, and
more fundamentally in the trade
unions, this will be all that dif-
ferent from MoveOn.org, or the
least mobilized aspects of the
Bernie fundraising campaign. Its
hard to imagine that the intent
to build the Left within the Demo-
cratic Party will go very far if
it isnt connected to an attempt to
transform the very nature of
labors long-standing alliance with
the Democratic Party.

Its a harder thing to change the
Democratic Party from a donkey
into a gazelle, and its bloody hard
already in the British Labour
Party.
Changing the labor base of the par-
ty is probably going to have to
involve challenging the structure of
trade unionism in the United
States, and a crucial part of this has
been the definition of politics
that accompanied the alliance with
the Democratic Party the very
limited mobilizing role the unions
have played while staffing the
|phone banks historically for Demo-
cratic candidates, and the role
the unions play merely in channeling
a portion of union dues to the
Democrats without any politici-
zation of a class kind.
At this moment when American
politics are clearly being reconstruct-
ed, I think there are two crucial
things to focus on. First, how to trans-
form protest politics, which to
some extent was class-focused since
Occupy, in such a way that it is
organizationally focused and class-
rooted.
The negative reaction of so many
activists in Black Lives Matter
and other movements to the insis-
tence on the left since the election
that we were not class-focused
enough, and especially not class-
based enough, has sometimes
amounted to saying this is just white-
supremacist male chauvinism in
another guise. Im afraid the Left is
going to be intimidated by this.
But it shouldnt be. We must insist
on the importance of organizing
among men and women in working-
class communities of color, and
doing so in practical, pragmatic ways,
that link up the needs of those
communities with the needs of the
broader mass of the working
people, so that theyre not seeing
what theyre demanding as a
special benefit to black people alone.
This is the way that racists, and
opportunists like Trump, have always
portrayed the welfare benefits
that have been won in the United
States, especially those won in
the 1960s, which is of course absurd.
The other thing that needs to be avoid-
ed is concentrating entirely on
the effort to reform the Democratic
protest to politics.
Party. This should not take away
from the efforts that need to go into
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
The Trump Way
transforming the unions struc-
tures and their strategy. Socialists
especially need to organize
alongside people trying to do both
those things, but they also need
to organize on their own, to engage
in socialist education, socialist
vote mobilization, and socialist cadre-
building. That way, when and if
the difficulties, the barriers, or the
limitations of operating inside
the unions to change them, and oper-
ating inside the Democratic Party
to change it, are confronted you have
some ballast you have some
core left, rather than just a disheart-
ening defeat.
More than that, given the ecological
crisis as well as the capitalist
crisis, the recalibration of the parties
and the unions I was speaking of
needs to actively involve working-
class people in imagining and
developing capacities for alternative
forms of production and consump-
tion in their own communities as well
as nationally and eventually inter-
nationally, and showing that this can
be done only through democratic
economic planning.
I really think this has to involve the
construction of new socialist parties
with this central to their agenda,
but they wont come out of nowhere.
They will come out of the reconsti-
tution of forces inside and outside of
old parties. The actual organiza-
tional form it will take right now is
hard to predict, but I do think
there is a real opening which we have
already seen with the shift from
21
ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHAEL DEFORGE
 From
Margins
to
Mainstream
DOUG HENWOOD

The making of the

modern Republican
Party.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 23

FROM MARGINS TO MAINSTREAM
T
he original version of this essay
was written in June 2015, almost at the
moment Donald Trump announced his
presidential campaign. No one took him
seriously, and everyone including me,
the author of a very critical book about her thought
Hillary Clinton had a lock on the presidency. Democrats
have yet to process this loss, blaming Vladimir Putin and
the incurable bigotry of the white heartland rather than
their own ideological and organizational deficiencies and
the fatal weakness of their candidate and her already-for-
gotten running mate.
Its striking, re-reading this after Trumps election, to
reflect on his formation of a very right-wing government
despite the lack of any elite or popular mandate for one. He
was endorsed by almost no capitalist of significance, and
he lost the popular vote by nearly three million. Though
theres little doubt that while quite a few of his voters we
have no good idea of just how many yet were hardcore
xenophobes and misogynists, he won mainly because of the
exhaustion of the mainstream of the Democratic Party, an
exhaustion perfectly embodied by Hillary Clinton. Its a
party vulnerable to the sort of takeover from the left that
the gop experienced from the right from the 1960s into
the 1980s. While there are certainly obstacles to that sort
of renovation for one, our ossified labor movement
could never provide the kind of institutional support to the
Left that the corporate lobby provided for the Right, and
for two, the Dems moneybags would fund a formidable
resistance to any insurgency theres a lot to learn from
the discipline and far-sightedness of the revolutionists of
the Right.
Who Wants to Save Capitalism?
The American right, never on the ropes for very long,
is on the march again. In some sense, this resurgence is
hard to understand. If you buy the thesis that the Right is
driven by a defense of hierarchy and privilege and draws
its energy from opposition to a strong left, its strength is
almost incomprehensible. Its hard to think of a time when
American capital and capitalists were so politically secure.
During the first Gilded Age, the sleep of the moneyed was
often troubled by populist and socialist agitation. Armories
were built in major American cities to house National
Guard units meant to suppress strikers and demonstrators,
something that seems unimaginable today.
24 24 / WINTER 2017
Heres an anecdote that captures elite anxieties. In
February 1897, ruling-class lawyer Bradley Martin and his
wife Cornelia threw a costume ball at the Waldorf Astoria.
J.P. Morgan dressed as Molire; John Jacob Astor dressed
as Henry of Navarre and brandished a sword covered in
jewels. No less than fifty women dressed as Marie Antoi-
nette and Mrs Martin wore a necklace that had once
belonged to the royals. But the hosts were so nervous about
men of socialistic tendencies interrupting the festivities
that they surrounded the hotel with Pinkertons and had
the first-floor windows nailed shut. The public outcry over
the egregious too-muchness of their costume ball drove the
Martins to resettle in England soon afterwards.
Contrast that with a sixtieth birthday party that pri-
vate equity titan Stephen Schwarzman the man with
the biggest living room in Manhattan threw himself
in 2007 at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, with
1,500 of his closest friends and Rod Stewart as the head-
line entertainment. The major security concern was
paparazzi, not men of socialistic tendencies. And the
site was one of those armories built to house the troops
whose mission was suppressing a restive working class.
It was no ordinary armory. Its interiors were by Louis
Tiffany because it was the regiment of the citys upper
class. That regiment didnt do much fighting (and lasted
a couple of weeks in the Civil War before returning
home), though they may have put down a strike or two.
But now we dont need a national guard to put down
strikes, and we can repurpose their armories as venues for
fancy parties.
And yet the reactionary community is agitated and
paranoid. For much of the Right, and not just the obvious
lunatics, Barack Obama is a man of socialistic tendencies.
Theyve been energized by opposition to the so-called
Affordable Care Act, affectionately known as Obamacare,
a contraption that has its roots in 1980s and early 1990s
scheming by a British Tory, Stuart Butler, who was then
working at the Heritage Foundation. It got a trial run in
Massachusetts under Gov. Mitt Romney, a minor private
equity titan who was also the 2012 Republican presiden-
tial candidate. While the better part of it the expansion
of Medicaid, a joint federal-state program for providing
health insurance to the poor does expand the public
sector, the bulk of it is very friendly to the private insurance
industry, which isnt surprising considering that a former
lobbyist for the industry wrote a good bit of the original
draft legislation. So we have the Democrats embracing a
capital-friendly plan with a right-wing pedigree that the
Right now opposes because its too statist.
This is a neat illustration of two aspects of modern
American political life: the ever-rightward drift of the
Right, and the way in which the Democrats tail them and
thereby enable that drift.
While today the Rights ascendancy in American pol-
itics looks inseparable from its takeover of the Republican
Party, for most of the twentieth century, while the gop was
usually more conservative, especially on economic issues,
than the Democrats, there was a great deal of ideological
diversity within the two major parties. The Republican
Party also had a liberal wing, just as the Democrats had a
conservative wing.
Of course, there had long been far-right tendencies in
the Republican Party, most notoriously Wisconsin sen-
ator Joseph McCarthy, who ended up disgraced after a
wild run in the 1950s, but whose obsessions, like hatred
of upper-class Harvard-educated liberals, prefigured his
modern descendants.
But the gop of the 1950s was dominated by north-
eastern wasps (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the ruling
elite for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).
Though its hard to believe today, when the Republican
Party routinely race-baits to win the votes of white bigots,
the gop of the 1950s and 1960s often had a stronger civil
rights record than the Democrats, because the Dems still
had a large Southern component.
Into the 1960s, the Republicans often were stronger
on civil liberties than Democrats as well. Robert Kennedy,
his brother Johns attorney general, wanted to expand the
Sedition Act of 1918 to prohibit Americans from writing
or speaking anything deemed disloyal to or abusive of the
United States. (Sidney Zion, who served as an assistant US
attorney under Robert Kennedy, said that he had the worst
record on civil liberties of any attorney general, and used
his office as if he were the Godfather getting even with the
enemies of the Family. Zion was probably exaggerating,
but his point survives a prudent toning-down.) Congres-
sional opposition to the bill was led by John Lindsay, the
liberal Republican congressman from the Upper East Side
of Manhattan, then known as the silk-stocking district for
all its upper-class residents, but the bill passed. Lindsay
would later become mayor of New York, much to the annoy-
ance of William Buckley, who ran against him as part of
his effort to destroy liberal Republicanism.
When big business found political expression through
organizations like the Committee on Economic Devel-
opment (ced), founded in 1942 by Paul Hoffman, an
automobile executive who would later become an Eisen-
hower intimate, this was a significant departure from the
traditionally reactionary policies endorsed by the National
Association of Manufacturers.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
The ced, while distressed by some of the antibusiness
attitudes of the New Deal, accepted that unions were here
to stay, as with some version of the welfare state and
cutting wages to subsistence levels did no one any good in
the long run. This point of view animated the policies of
the Eisenhower administration. As Ike himself famously
said, Should any political party attempt to abolish social
security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you
would not hear of that party again in our political history.
There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that
you can do these things.... [B]ut their number is negligible
and they are stupid.
Eisenhower rejected sending troops to Indochina to
bail out the failing French, and warned against allowing
the United States to become an occupying power in a
seething Arab world, and left office with a famous warning
about the military-industrial complex that is impossible to
imagine any politician uttering today. Liberals generally
disdained him as simple and boring the Great Golfer,
Gore Vidal called him, who presided over a regime of dull
terror. But Eisenhower now seems, if such a transhistorical
comparison is possible, a more peaceful and egalitarian
figure than Obama.
But that petit bourgeois provincial branch of
that splinter group had a material problem with the
Eisenhower-era settlement: General Motors may have
preferred life without the United Auto Workers, but it
could afford to pay union rates, especially in exchange for
labor peace. Smaller fry couldnt. They were caught in the
The American
right, never
on the ropes for
very long, is
on the march
again.
25
26 24 / WINTER 2017
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 27
FROM MARGINS TO MAINSTREAM
petite bourgeoisies classic difficult competitive position,
squeezed by Big Labor and Big Capital. Their freedom
was under siege and they reacted by funding a right-wing
insurgency. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by
the retired ceo of a Massachusetts-based candy company,
Robert Welch, whod made a fortune off lollipops (which his
brother invented) and Junior Mints. Welch made a fortune,
but still, he was no Rockefeller or Mellon.
That was three years after William F. Buckley, a few
years out of Yale, founded National Review, with the mis-
sion of stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time
when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience
with those who so urge it, as he wrote in the magazines
first issue. Though the United States might have seemed
to many a conservative country, making the founding of
the magazine an act of supererogation, as the Catholic
reactionary put it, in fact it was anything but: it was a bold
counterstroke against liberal hegemony. As risible as that
might sound now, Buckley had a great deal of trouble
raising money for the magazine, and needed help from his
father, a small-time oil baron. As Buckley later put it, the
capitalists didnt seem all that interested in the project of
saving capitalism.
Eisenhowers tepidity and compromises energized
the Right, whose insurgency was almost Bolshevik in its
ideological and organizational discipline. The Bolshie
tendencies were no accident. There were not only intel-
lectuals like James Burnham, ex-Trot turned co-founder of
National Review, but important organizers like Clif White
and the ex-Communist Marvin Liebman who consciously
emulated Red tactics in organizing their insurgency. Tom
Hayden, observing a Young Americans for Freedom dele-
gation attending a national conference on the Peace Corps
in 1961, noted their use of multiple communist tactics.
Both the organizational and ideological rigor of this
right in the Republican Party at the time dismayed and
disoriented the moderates, who preferred politeness
and compromise above all things. Though it would take
decades, the Right eventually drove the moderates out of
the party. Even today, what liberals are left (all of them
Democrats) are still confused by the Rights fervor, and
lack both the passion and vision to fight it.
The Serfs in the Estate
The Birchite and Buckleyite tendencies would eventu-
ally split, sort of, but before they did, they united in their
28 24 / WINTER 2017
affection for Barry Goldwater as their political avatar.
Continuing the provincial petit bourgeois theme, Gold-
water was the grandson of the founder of a five-outlet
department store chain based in Phoenix, Arizona
a flyspeck next to the likes of Macys. Goldwater, or
more accurately Goldwaters supporters, launched a
bid for the 1960 Republican nomination, which failed
badly and had victor Richard Nixon betray the Right in
several ways but most visibly with his choice of the Mas-
sachusetts aristocrat Henry Cabot Lodge Jr as his vice
presidential candidate.
Goldwater tried again in 1964, and though he would
eventually be crushed in the general election by Johnson
by a 23-point margin, the convention that nominated the
Arizonan was an important rite of passage for the conser-
vatives. As the journalist Murray Kempton put it, This
convention is historic because it is the emancipation of the
serfs.... The serfs have seized the estate of their masters.
Nelson Rockefeller, a leader of the moderate Repub-
lican faction whose surname symbolized the old elites
domination of the party, was rudely heckled, shocking
old-schoolers. The old northeastern wasp aristocracy was
in decline, their fortunes reduced by inflation, successive
generations of inheritance, and the competitive weakening
of the industrial basis of their fortunes in old-line industry.
And the partys transition on race was made crudely clear
by insults directed against black delegates one of whom
saw his jacket deliberately burned with a cigarette. Dele-
gate Jackie Robinson, the man who integrated professional
baseball, said that the performance made him feel like a
Jew in Hitlers Germany.
Movement conservatives were undeterred by Gold-
waters massive loss and continued with their plot to take
over the Republican Party. A year later, Buckley ran for
mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket, with
the conscious aim of drawing enough votes away from the
liberal Republican John Lindsay to elect the Democratic
candidate, Abe Beame, and thereby weaken the gops left
flank. (The contrast with liberals, who shy away from any
third-party challenge that might lead their party to a loss,
is a vivid symptom of their lack of conviction.) Buckley
initially thought hed harvest votes from the citys wasp
elite, but they were put off by his social conservatism.
Instead, he tapped into the growing backlash of white
ethnics the people at the end of the subway lines, as
they were described by future Nixon adviser Kevin Phil-
lips, lead architect of his Southern Strategy against civil
rights and permissiveness. He ended up with 13percent
of the vote not huge, but a non-trivial amount for a
third-party candidate.
Though much of that backlash was driven by race, there
was also a class angle that most center-left analysts over-
look. Lindsay was a social liberal, and very attentive to the
concerns of black New Yorkers, but on economic policy he
worked largely on behalf of the citys powerful real-estate
industry, reflecting his patrician base. At the time, city
policy was several years into accelerating the eviction of
manufacturing and working-class housing from Manhattan
and replacing it with offices and upscale residences. This
was good for financiers, developers, and lawyers, but not
for working-class whites who expressed their resentment
by lashing out at blacks and elite liberals.
Nixon, elected in 1968, would work similar resent-
ments on a national scale, developing a mass base for
conservative politics. But in many ways he governed to
the left of his rhetoric (which is why Garry Wills called him
the last liberal). Despite his various corruptions (including
spying which looks mild by todays standards), Nixon
governed mostly as a moderate Republican. His time in
office brought us food stamps, the Environmental Pro-
tection Administration, and a proposal for a guaranteed
annual income.
Those compromises with liberalism energized the
Right the same way that Eisenhowers had two decades
earlier. But Nixon did longer-term help to the cause of the
Republican right with his Southern Strategy appealing
to the resentments of white southerners (and their fel-
low-thinkers in the urban North) over the social gains of
black Americans.
Within the GOP, the liberal wing remained lively into
the 1970s. Among its leaders was George Gilder, who later
would move sharply to the right. Gilder illuminates how
what later came to be called cultural issues fit neatly with
the economic agenda from the first, they were never in
tension. For the likes of Gilder, the roles of the entrepre-
neur and the patriarch were inseparable, and the attack on
the privileges of both, along with the attack on the racial
hierarchy, fueled a rightward move on both macro and
micro levels, both large-scale social conflict and changes
in gender relations within the household.
The centrality of sex and gender roles to the rise of
the Right in the 1970s could be seen from how conserva-
tives were galvanized by the fight against the Equal Rights
Amendment to the Constitution, which said little more
than Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State on account
of sex. Passed by Congress in 1972, it was promptly ratified
by thirty states, but momentum stalled with the Rights
mobilization against it, and it failed to reach the required
thirty-eight states. At the 1980 Republican convention,
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
the one that nominated Ronald Reagan, the party dropped
support for the era from its platform for the first time
since it was adopted in 1940. The nomination of Reagan
marked the victory of the Right in the Republican Party.
There were many developments outside the Repub-
lican Party that would prove fertile soil for a right-wing
mobilization. Nixons resignation in 1974 could be read
as a major symptom of a broad set of crises: oil shortages,
chronic inflation, miserable financial markets, a Third
World in rebellion, US defeat in Vietnam, the spread of
1960s rebelliousness into the domestic working class, and
a general sense that the system was rotten and lacking all
legitimacy.
That political and affective constellation was cus-
tom-made for the Rights appeal but, as Sidney
Blumenthal shows in The Rise of the Counter-Establish-
ment, the conservative counterrevolution was led not by
ceos, but by policy entrepreneurs operating in think tanks
like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage
Foundation.
Going into the 1980 election, most ceos supported
John Connally or George Bush and not yet Reagan,
who during the 1970s had become the new public avatar
of movement conservatism. Former Citibank chair Walter
Wriston told Blumenthal that most Eastern executives
underestimated his skills and his great political strength.
That, of course, would change.
Blumenthals account is of the movement right, and
hes correct that the corporate establishment was not
involved in that mobilization. But that doesnt mean the
corporate class wasnt mobilizing. It was developing new
institutions, and reviving older ones, to fight the inflation,
the Keynesian order, and impose what we would later call
the neoliberal agenda.
The Managers Revolt
As Benjamin Waterhouse emphasizes in Lobbying America,
many of the businesspeople who pushed the neoliberal
agenda in the 1970s were neither movement conservatives
nor self-made entrepreneurs but career managers.They
were often socially liberal. But they objected to the host
of new claims along what wed later call identitarian lines
(gender, race, etc.) as well as an explosive growth in social
regulations (environment, workplace safety, and the like,
as opposed to more narrowly drawn economic regulation
of prices and product lines), which they felt were annoying
restrictions on the free play of capital. This strained the
accommodation with the New Deal and the Keynesian
state starting in earnest in the late 1960s, a discontent that
intensified in the 1970s as inflation and fiscal recklessness
seemed not like transient problems but the foundations of
the new order (or disorder). Deepening the hurt feelings
29
FROM MARGINS TO MAINSTREAM
of capitalists was what was perceived as a hostility to busi-
ness in public opinion, popular culture, and increasingly
among their employees.
It took some time for capital to mount its counterrevo-
lution. Modern business political action committees (pacs)
got their start with the American Medical Associations
efforts against socialized medicine in 1961. Their ranks
expanded with nams foundation of the first corporate pac
in 1963. But the legal standing of corporate pacs remained
murky, diluting their power, until the Federal Election
Commission legalized them in 1975. The number of cor-
porate pacs increased almost tenfold in the following four
years, and would more than double by the end of the 1980s.
While the influence of the Powell memo is sometimes
exaggerated, it did embody the business wisdom of the time
and helped inspire a quadrupling of the Chamber of Com-
merces membership during the 1970s. Shedding its musty
reputation but not its conservative politics, it reinvented
itself as a slick, modern organization but one railing
against occupational safety inspectors and environmental
regulations. It argued that business had no social respon-
sibility, a position once associated with marginal figures
like Milton Friedman, who of course was on the verge of
becoming not marginal. The renascent chamber became
an important part of the Rights institutional structure.
But capital was organizing on other fronts as well.
The Business Roundtable, made up of the ceos of 150
large corporations, was founded at a private club in Man-
hattan in 1973, to fight the antibusiness drift of American
politics. It had its roots in a late-1960s business mobiliza-
tion against inflation, which they saw as fundamentally
caused by unions, and the growth of the welfare state
during the Johnson years. The Roundtable took up that
fight, though they felt outclassed in the political realm
by labor, a problem compounded by what the politically
conscious ceos saw as fragmentation among the ranks of
business lobbyists.
The Roundtable came into being just as the Right was
founding its flagship think tanks. The Heritage Founda-
tion was born in the same year as the Roundtable, 1973,
and the Cato Institute appeared a year later. For that
relatively brief moment the late 1970s into the early
1980s there would be productive parallel agitation by the
mainstream business lobby and the newly mobilized right
whose moments of political triumph were the appointment
of Paul Volcker to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve
and the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Together,
30 24 / WINTER 2017
Reagan and Volcker would end the inflationary spiral of
the 1960s and 1970s and break the economic and political
power of organized labor.
That triumph, however, would lead to a dissolution of
capitals broad political unity. In contrast with the days of
the ceds corporate liberalism, we now have a different
sort of ceo class now its all about shareholder value,
short-term profits, and getting rich now, as Drutman put
it. Compounding businesss fragmentation is the radical-
ization of the Republican right, which is more interested
in blowing things up than in the preference for stability
usually attributed to the ceo class.
If you poke about the partys elite base, you see some
commonalities with the old days. Look, for example, at the
board of the Cato Institute, which published essays by Patri
Friedman (Miltons grandson) and Peter Thiel (venture
capitalist and Donald Trump enthusiast) explaining how
libertarianism was incompatible with democracy. Cato is
libertarian, and so they take some half-decent positions
notably against the carceral state and against many imperial
wars. But on economic issues, theyre firmly reactionary:
against any sort of stimulative fiscal or monetary policy,
regulation, or anything that might interfere with the pro-
cess of accumulation, even for a second.
So the Right, despite its power, seems not to be the
dominant ideology of the US ruling class. But it is very
useful, apparently. The last few years have been fascinating
for students of the US ruling class. The Republican Party
is now dominated by evolution-deniers, climate-change
deniers, xenophobes, religious nuts. This seems not to
alarm corporate America, which remains publicly devoted
to diversity and the powers of instrumental reason. Closer
to home, weve seen congressional Republicans shut down
the federal government and even threaten default on Trea-
sury bonds. Some of this is performance art, designed to
rile up the base. But its also risky stuff, threatening both
the credibility and creditworthiness of the US state on a
global scale.
So of what use is the Right today? According to former
Republicans like economist Bruce Bartlett and long-time
congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, all that the Amer-
ican corporate class cares about these days is lower taxes
and lighter regulations, and the battering ram that is
todays gop is a great way to get that, despite the risks.
With no left opposition to speak of, the big bourgeoisie
wants it all, and is happy to let the ravers do some dirty
work for them.
 MEANS OF
DEDUCTION

WE GOT MORE
GRAPHS THAN ROSS
PEROT.
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST
The pundits and pollsters have been
criticized ad nauseam for failing to
correctly predict the 2016 presiden-
tial election. Granted, they didnt get
everything wrong. The popular vote
tallies matched the predictive models
more closely than the Electoral Col-
lege projections, which saw Hillary
Clinton winning a decisive victory.
Nonetheless, it is has been a time of
many apologies. Both political science
as an academic discipline and profes-
sional pollsters have a bulls-eye on
their back for their failures.
Social scientists should recognize
and acknowledge their mistakes. But
we should first be clear about what
these mistakes were. More pressing
than flawed models and a failure
to predict outcomes is the political
science disciplines complicity in
limiting our political imagination.
Mainstream political science views
its mission in a highly depoliticized,
technocratic manner that results in a
blinkered understanding of the range
of political possibilities. Taking on
that vision is more important than
ever in the age of Trump.
BY SUSAN KANG
What Nate
Missed
It wasnt just bad math that led us
to believe Trump would be
defeated. It was a lack of political
vision.
Polling has become gospel in preexisting partisan loyalties. People
American politics. Without polling dont exist in a vacuum; polling itself
and reliance on datasets, it is nearly shapes the narratives they adopt to
impossible to make a respected polit- understand and make decisions about
ical argument. This is unfortunate, policy.
because polling by its nature is flawed. This past year polling numbers
It does not provide a neutral snapshot were used to reinforce conventional
of voters understandings of politics. political strategies precisely along
Instead, polls reflect the dominant these lines. For over a year, experts
narratives at a moment in a way that assured us that Sanders was unelect-
naturalizes key controversies. able and urged the nomination of the
In contrast to the assumptions of safe candidate. While acknowl-
most poll- and survey-based studies, edging that Democrats had gone
political psychologists demonstrate more liberal in recent years, poll-
that exposure to campaigns (both sters argued that voters were not
directly and through the media) influ- yet liberal enough to elect Sanders.
ences voters in sophisticated ways, Such polling-driven arguments fore-
and does not merely reinforce voters closed the real possibility that surging
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 33
 THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST
support for Sanders might not require
voter self-identification as more
liberal.
Polling data couldnt adequately
capture a comprehensive picture of
voters thoughts and orientations,
which are after all nothing more than
preferences at a single moment and
depend almost entirely on how var-
ious questions are framed.
Polls (and media reliance on
polls) also naturalize and delineate
the potential range of political out-
comes. People are seen as consumers,
with preexisting, ordered preferences
that drive their political behavior;
they are presented with a limited
range of choices and issues and must
respond in a circumscribed, preor-
dained way. Pollsters, experts, and
political scientists then use this data
as a definitive representation of the
electorate rather than for what it
is imperfect timebound data points
34
that require triangulation with other
forms of information.
Political scientists and pollsters,
relying on their existing models
and methods, could only dismiss
the Sanders campaign as a long-
shot distraction. Sanders lacked the
name recognition, party connec-
tions, resources, and other standard
markers of a winning candidate. The
fact that Bernie Sanders, not Hil-
lary Clinton, filled stadiums and had
supporters waiting for hours in cold
weather to hear him speak may not
have been quantifiable but in ret-
rospect it was more meaningful than
anything represented by polling at
the time.
Even in the election postmortem,
there is strong pushback against
claims that Sanders, or a more
socialist, left-populist candidate in
general, could have beat Trump. To
squelch this idea pundits point to
24 / WINTER 2017
exit polls that demonstrate that the
number one issue reported by Trump
supporters was immigration, followed
by terrorism. Sanders did not run a
xenophobic campaign, so by exten-
sion were told his message would not
have gained traction among Trump
supporters.
As socialists, we must reject this
limited poll- and data-driven thinking.
Just because many Trump supporters
checked off the box for immigration
on exit poll questionnaires does not
that mean that they could not join a
broad, multiracial, working-class coa-
lition to fight for progressive change
in the future. Most Trump supporters
also felt the economy was doing
poorly, in contrast to the Democratic
narrative praising Obamas recovery.
This presents a clear opportunity to
introduce a progressive, redistribu-
tionist narrative that moves beyond
poll-centered politics.
 THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST

Cant Buy Clinton was great at

raising money not so
Me Love great at inspiring voters.

Presidential Campaign Spending:

19602016
737.1 million Donald Trump was the first modern
presidential candidate to still
win after being massively outspent.

Democrat

Republican

8.8 million

60 64 68 72 76 80 84 88 92 96 00 04 08 12 16

Donations to Presidential
Campaigns by Industry
Lawyers / Law Firms 6.1 million
Trump 0.3 million Clinton

Real Estate 1.8 million

0.7 million

Doctors 1.9 million

0.5 million

Wall Street 1.6 million

0.3 million

Entertainment 1.4 million

0.05 million

36 24 / WINTER 2017
 Why They Didnt Vote
Didnt like any candidates 26%
My vote would not matter 25%
Not registered/eligible 22%
Something came up 18%
Ran out of time 17%
Pretty sure who would win 15%
Not interested in politics 14%
Tried but was unable 10%
Physically could not go 8%

Change in Support for Democratic Candidate

in Presidential Elections: 20122016

Households Earning
Less than 50K / year Union Households
Barack Obama (2012) 60% 59%
Hillary Clinton (2016) 52% 51%

African Americans Latinos

93% 71%
88% 65%

Change in Households
Earning Less than 50K / year
-1,700,000 Republicans
Democrats +350,000
Obama Counties
Swinging to Trump

Over 200 counties

that voted
for Obama swung
to Trump

represents 10 counties

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 37

 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
MISERY INDEX

The New Most of Donald Trumps dream

team walk and talk like run-of-the-mill
Populists Republicans.

Stephen Bannon
Former investment banker turned Hollywood financier
turned Breitbart News chief, Bannon has called for both
draconian immigration restrictions and massive federal
infrastructure programs.

Kellyanne Conway
Long supported immigration reform efforts that the
president rejects, while holding hardline views against
abortion and gay marriage. On economic issues she
identifies with the libertarian wing of the party.

Betsy DeVos
Businesswoman and would-be education secretary
whos a strong proponent of charter schools. Heavily
involved in right-wing Christian foundations.

Nikki Haley
The former South Carolina governor attacked Trump
during the campaign for failing to renounce white
supremacist groups. She even implicated Trump in far
right violence. Opposed her states bathroom bill,
but otherwise espouses standard conservative positions.
Jeff Sessions
Rick Perry The National Review called the Alabama senator
Former Texas governor and energy secretary, known amnestys worst enemy for his anti-immigrant stances.
for wanting to eliminate the Energy Department. Former colleagues testified that he used the n-word
Supported a $145billion cross-Texas highway system that and joked about the kkk, saying he thought they were
would be partially controlled by private interests. okay until he found out they smoked pot.

Wilbur Ross Rex Tillerson

A ruthless investor and banker, Ross breaks with his peers
by calling for steep tariffs on China. Previously a
Democrat, he advocates against free-trade agreements,
and helped start New York Blade, a now-defunct lgbt
newspaper.
The former ceo of ExxonMobil and next Secretary
of State. Supports conservative Christian church
groups but otherwise standard business conservative.
Breaks with Trump on tpp, which he supports.

38 24 / WINTER 2017
 Donald Trump Jr. Ivanka Trump
Donald Trumps oldest son and Trump Ivanka plays a leading role in her
Organization trustee. Hes a fathers empire. Shes at least spoken
staunch supporter of daddy, but has out in favor of equal pay and
been consistently pro-choice other protections for women in the
and in favor of gay marriage to atone workforce. Claims to be neither
for some of his sins. a Republican nor a Democrat. Why
pick one when you can have it all?

Pat Robertson

Milton Friedman
Huey Long

Betty Ford

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 39

ILLUSTRATIONS BY RAL SORIA
 How
the Donald
Came
to Rule
CHARLIE POST

A radical middle-class
insurgency has
stormed the Republican
Party.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 41

HOW THE DONALD CAME TO RULE
I
n 2016, a radical, right-wing, middle-class
insurgency displaced the dominant cap-
italists in the Republican Party, at least
temporarily. Donald Trumps nomination
and election is the most recent chapter
in an ongoing struggle that began in the aftermath of the
economic crisis and the 2008 Democratic electoral victory.
Capital successfully beat back the first wave of middle-class
radicalism in the Republican Party the Tea Party supported stricter immigration controls and wasnt fazed
during the 2014 congressional elections, but these rebels
were not vanquished. They were radicalized.
Since the 1960s, the voter base of the Republican Party
has been made up primarily of older, suburban, white,
middle-class, small businesspeople, professionals, and
managers, and a minority of older white workers. Until
recently, the particular passions of that base especially
its hostility to the democratic gains of people of color,
women, and lgbt people could be contained. Minor
concessions to social conservatives on abortion, affirmative
action, voter restrictions, and same-sex marriage/legal
equality maintained their loyalty, while capitalists set the
substantive neoliberal agenda for the Republicans. As
with the Democrats, the non-capitalist elements of the
Republican coalition were clearly junior partners to capital.
A Failed Marriage
The Bush and Obama administrations bailouts of banks,
the auto industry, and some homeowners changed this
dynamic, catalyzing a radicalization of the Republican
electorate. The Tea Party began as an alliance between a
grassroots rebellion of older, white, suburban small busi-
nesspeople, professionals, and managers, and elements of
the capitalist class. While the middle-class ranks of the Tea
Party railed against corporate welfare and bailouts for
undeserving homeowners, in particular people of color
who held subprime mortgages, capitalists like the Koch
brothers saw an opportunity to advance their libertarian
agenda of defeating Obamacare and privatizing Medicare
and Social Security. Broader layers of the capitalist class
encouraged the Tea Partys mobilizations as long as they
targeted unions and social services, and supported the
continued deregulation of capital.
This alliance continued through the 2010 congres-
sional elections, when the Republicans won a majority in
the House and deprived the Democrats of their filibus-
ter-proof supermajority in the Senate. While particularly
42 24 / WINTER 2017
right-wing capitalists like the Koch brothers helped finance
the Tea Party, most capitalists continued to hedge their
bets electorally, with capitalist donors slightly preferring
Democrats in 2010. Capital was more than willing to use
this nativist, racist, and anti-union movement when their
interests coincided. However, the new right has an agenda
independent of and, at times, opposed to that of capital.
Unlike the political establishment, the Tea Party right
by the possibility of a federal credit default. The minority of
older white workers who voted Republican viewed undoc-
umented immigrants as competitors on the labor market,
while the older small businesspeople and professionals who
made up the majority of the Tea Party cadre and voters
viewed those immigrants as a threat to their quality of
life and competitors for scarce social services.
Capitalists, however, have a different perspective on
immigration. Not only do high-tech industries want access
to skilled foreign professionals, but labor-intensive sec-
tors like agriculture, construction, landscaping, domestic
service, child care, health care, and hospitality rely on low-
wage, vulnerable immigrant labor.
The two most important business lobbying organi-
zations the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business
Roundtable oppose wholesale deportations and other
policies that reduce the size of the immigrant workforce.
Instead, they are leading the fight for an immigration
reform that would create massive guest worker programs
and a difficult path to citizenship for those in the United
States without papers.
There is more common ground on the federal budget
deficit, which capital would like to make inroads on through
massive social spending cuts. However, the Tea Partys
political brinkmanship its willingness to let the United
States default on its public debt by refusing to raise the
debt ceiling in 2011 estranged capital from it. Both
the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable
opposed attempts to shut down the government as a
threat to the US economy and global financial system.
The uneasy alliance between the Tea Party and the cap-
italist class ended in autumn 2013. The 2012 campaign to
Fix the Debt brought together dozens of former senators
and congressmen and over 150ceos of US transnational
corporations in support of a grand bargain to close corpo-
rate tax loopholes and lower the overall tax rate in exchange
for restructuring federal pensions, Medicare, Medicaid,
and Social Security. The campaign won the support of
 President Obama, the Democratic leadership, and main-
stream Republicans, but the Tea Party refused to accept the
compromise, sparking the late 2013 government shutdown.
Capital wasnt pleased. In 2014 it waged primary cam-
paigns against the Tea Party (organized primarily through
the Chamber of Commerce). Scott Reed, the chambers

Trumps
chief political strategist, launched Vote for Jobs, targeting
key Senate and House races to defend incumbents like
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and defeat Tea

populist Party candidates. Vote for Jobs was effective in shaping

the Republican congressional primaries and the November

nationalism
2014 election. Only one Republican was elected to the
Senate without a Chamber of Commerce endorsement.
Initially, the capitalist attempt to discipline the

appeals Republican Party appeared successful. Despite the greatly

reduced Tea Party congressional contingents success in

to elements of
blocking serious discussion of a pro-corporate immigration
reform and forcing John Boehner out of Congress, calls by
the Tea Party to shut down government to block Obamas

the older, executive order on immigration failed. Bipartisan coali-

tions in both the House and Senate pushed through the

white middle
nearly $1.1trillion spending plan in late December 2014.

class who
Enter Trump
But the radical revolt symbolized by the Tea Party hadnt

fear sliding
disappeared. Donald Trumps outsider campaign for
president marked a deepening of the right-wing radical-
ization of sections of the middle classes. When Trump

downward announced his candidacy in June 2015, few political

commentators took his campaign seriously. With a field

into the
dominated by mainstream Republicans like Jeb Bush and
Marco Rubio, most believed that Trumps campaign would
be short-lived. However, within a month of announcing,

working class. Trump was outpolling his competitors. In a years time he

would be the only one left standing.
What made Trump unacceptable to the Republican
establishment and their corporate backers was not merely
his unabashed racism and misogyny, or his casual refer-
ences to his penis size. Trump champions an economic
nationalism that rejects central tenets of the bipartisan
neoliberal agenda that has impoverished segments of
the middle and working classes. Capital was uneasy with
Trumps stance on immigration and the federal debt he
floated the idea of trying to persuade creditors to accept
less than full payment on loans to the US government.
The corporate elite is even more disturbed by his ideas
about foreign policy and global free trade. Trump claims
to reject the established US alliance system, in particular
nato, that has maintained US dominance since World
Warii. An advocate of America First politics that have
been rejected by the US corporate elite since the 1940s,
Trump is perceived as an unreliable agent of US capital.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 43

44 24 / WINTER 2017
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 45
HOW THE DONALD CAME TO RULE
Even more disturbing for the corporate elite are
Trumps positions on trade. The removal of political obsta-
cles to the free movement of capital and goods but not
labor has been a fundamental element of neoliberal
orthodoxy for over thirty years. From Bill Clintons signing
of the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) to
Obamas proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (tpp), the
entire US capitalist class and its political representatives
in both major parties have promoted the liberalization of
trade and investment. However, Trump blames nafta and
other trade deals for the loss of US manufacturing jobs, and
calls for tariffs as high as 40percent on imports to protect
American jobs against unfair competition despite
warnings that this could spark a global trade war that could
damage the role of US corporations in the world economy.
Trumps nomination sent the majority of the capi-
talist class, including traditionally Republican capitalists,
running to support the reliable neoliberal imperialist,
Hillary Clinton. According to OpenSecrets.org, Clinton
received over 92percent of corporate contributions in
the 2016 election cycle, including over 80percent of the
contributions from finance, insurance, and real estate;
communications/electronics; health care, defense, and
miscellaneous business. Trumps support was limited to
6070percent of contributions from construction, energy
and natural resources, transportation, and agribusiness
which together accounted for less than 10percent of total
capitalist donations.
So how did Trump win? Despite losing the popular
vote by almost three million votes, he swept the Electoral
College. Voter participation among traditionally Demo-
cratic segments of the electorate fell. African Americans
dipped from 13percent of all voters in 2008 and 2012 to
12percent in 2016. In some communities of color, the
drop was even more precipitous. In Milwaukees Council
District 15, which is 84percent black, voter turnout was
nearly 20percent lower than in 2012. Households earning
less than $50,000 a year, who made up 51percent of the US
population in 2014, dropped from 41percent of voters in
2012 to 36percent in 2016. The percentage of households
earning over $100,000, a mere 17percent of the population,
rose from 28percent to 33percent of voters between 2012
and 2016. Put simply, the electorate in 2016 was even more
disproportionately well-off than in the last three elections.
Within these key categories, there were also small, but
significant shifts in voter preference. While 60percent of
voters in households earning less than $50,000 a year voted
46 24 / WINTER 2017
for Obama in 2008 and 2012, Clintons share of these voters
dropped to 52percent. Clinton only won 88percent of the
black vote, down from 95percent and 93percent for Obama
in 2008 and 2012. Especially alarming for the Democrats
was their falling share of the Latino vote. Democratic poll-
sters were confident that Trumps racist diatribes would
allow Clinton to sweep this key sector. However, among
Latinos, the Democrat share declined from 71percent in
2012 to 65percent in 2016. Finally, the percentage of union
households voting Democratic fell from 58percent in
2008 and 59percent in 2012 to a mere 51percent in 2016.
Trumps ability to retain the core sectors of the Repub-
licans post-1980 voter base primarily the traditional
(self-employed and small businesses with less than ten
employees) and new (professionals, managers, supervi-
sors) middle classes, including evangelical Christians,
and a minority of older white workers was clear in all
of the exit polling.
Trumps margin of victory came from a small minority
of voters who had supported Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Of 700 counties that had voted for Obama twice, nearly
one-third (209) swung to Trump; and of 207 counties that
Obama won once, almost 94percent (194) went to Trump.
The shift to Trump was concentrated in traditionally Dem-
ocratic states of the Great Lakes and Midwest that had
suffered the loss of manufacturing jobs and were experi-
encing a rise in the Latino population. However, Trumps
victory was primarily a result of a sharp drop in the par-
ticipation of traditionally Democratic voters, rather than
a sharp swing to Trump.
Trump did gain around 335,000 more votes than
Romney among households earning less than $50,000
a year in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wis-
consin. However, Clinton received 1.7million fewer votes
than Obama among the same group. It was these small
shifts in voter preference that gave Trump his razor-thin
margins in a number of key states: less than 0.25percent
in Michigan, less than 1percent in Pennsylvania and Wis-
consin, and less than 1.5percent in Florida. According to
one analysis, had about 100,000 Trump voters in these
areas voted for Clinton instead, she would have swept the
Electoral College.
Why They Voted Trump
Trumps populist nationalism appeals to elements of the
older, white middle class who fear sliding downward into
the working class. Arlie Russell Hochschilds Strangers
in Their Own Land, a study of Southern Tea Party and
Trump supporters, reveals people who believe they are
hard workers who play by the rules and never ask
for handouts but are constantly falling behind socially
and economically. They are threatened both by powerful
economic and social elites and line jumpers blacks,
Latinos, and women who benefit from affirmative action,
as well as undocumented immigrants and refugees.
In certain respects the attraction of the middle classes
to right-wing populist demagogues is clear these political
strongmen promise to defend the little man against the
forces that squeeze them from above and below. Yet the
Left often falters in explaining why a minority of workers
support right-wing politics. Why have around 40percent
of union households supported Republicans or other right-
wing candidates (Ross Perot in 1992) in most elections
since 1980? Why did another small, but significant group
of white working-class voters embrace the nationalist pop-
ulism of Trump, giving him his margin of victory?
Historically, many on the Left have treated work-
ing-class support for the Right as a form of false
consciousness. Capitals control of the means of ideolog-
ical production (the media) allow them to distort workers
thinking. For others, working-class racism and sexism is the
defense of white and male privilege against threats from
women, queer people, and racialized minorities.
Both of these explanations are inadequate. False
consciousness presents capital and their ideologists as
all-powerful, and portrays workers as passive consumers
of capitalist ideologies. Meanwhile, simplistic notions of
defense of privilege ignore the increasing precarity all
working people face today.
Grasping the contradictory character of capitalist
social relations of production allows us to transcend these
explanations. The objective, structural position of workers
under capitalism provides the basis for both collective,
solidaristic radicalism; and individualist, sectoralist, and
reactionary politics. As Bob Brenner and Johanna Brenner
pointed out in their 1981 analysis of Reagans election:
... workers are not only collective producers with a
common interest in taking collective control over
social production. They are also individual sellers
of labor power in conflict with each other over jobs,
promotions, etc. This individualistic point of view
has a critical advantage in the current period: in the
absence of class against class organization. It seems to
provide an alternative strategy for effective action a
sectionalist strategy which pits one layer of workers
against another.
As competing sellers of labor power, workers are open
to the appeal of politics that pit them against other
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
workers especially more vulnerable ones. Without the
experience of mass, collective, and successful class orga-
nization and struggle, it should not surprise socialists
that segments of the working class are open to right-wing
politics.
Workers in the United States have seen forty years
of attacks on their living and working conditions. The
labor movement has responded with one surrender after
another, as concession bargaining and futile attempts to
forge labor-management cooperation have destroyed
almost every gain workers made through mass struggle
in the 1930s and 1970s.
Faced with an impotent labor movement that tails
after an ever-rightward-moving Democratic Party, it is
not surprising that a minority of older, white workers
are attracted to politics that place responsibility for their
deteriorating social situation on both the corporate glo-
balists and more vulnerable workers blacks, Latinos,
immigrants, Muslims, women, and lgbt people. Kirk
Noden, writing in the Nation, grasps why the Republican
right wins many working-class votes:
Two narratives emerged about the collapse of the
industrial heartland in America. The one from the
right has three parts: First, that industry left this
country because unions destroyed productivity
and made labor costs too high, thereby making us
uncompetitive. Second, corporations were the vic-
tims of over-regulation and a bloated government that
overtaxed them to pay for socialist welfare systems.
Third, illegal immigration has resulted in the stealing
of American jobs, increased competition for white
workers, and depressed wages... The second narrative,
promoted by corporate Democrats, is that the global
economy shifted and the country is now in transition
from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy.
This story tacitly accepts the economic restructuring
of the heartland as inevitable once China and other
markets opened up.
Trump and his nationalist populist ideologues from Bre-
itbart and the alt-right added a fourth element to the
Rights narrative the role of globalizing corporations
and free trade. Given a choice between an elitist neoliberal
who refused to speak to the realities of their lives (and
rejected Bernie Sanderss social-democratic program as
unrealistic); and a populist demagogue who offered an
illusory solution to their problems, it is not surprising that
some white workers embraced Trump.
Trumpism is the fruit of decades of lesser-evilism,
where the Left trails after the labor officials, who continu-
ally surrender to capital, while chasing a rightward-moving
Democratic Party in the name of fighting the Right.
Without a clear and potent independent working-class
47
HOW THE DONALD CAME TO RULE
The uneasy
alliance between
the Tea Party
and the capitalist
class ended in
2013.
political alternative, one rooted in mass struggles in work-
places and communities, more and more workers will see
no alternative to the neoliberal capitalist offensive other
than white populist nationalism.
The Task Ahead
What can we expect from a Trump presidency? We
can expect a continuation and intensification of the
attacks on working people that every administration
including Obamas carried out since the late 1970s.
We should expect even more deportations of criminal
undocumented immigrants (Obama set the record for
deportations), more cuts to social services (Obama made
the deepest cuts to food stamps of any president), and the
removal of even more regulations on capital, especially in
terms of energy production.
Despite the presence of Steve Bannon and other
nationalist populists in the administration, it is unlikely
that Trumps promises to roll back neoliberal free-trade
agreements or to renege on US commitments to imperialist
diplomatic and military alliances will come to fruition.
Trump himself has already backpedaled on his threats
to deport all undocumented workers, reinstitute water-
boarding, withdraw from the Paris Climate accords, indict
Bill and Hillary Clinton, or ban all Muslims from entering
the United States. His proposals to renegotiate nafta and
impose tariffs on China, withdraw from Trans-Pacific Part-
nership negotiations, build a wall on the Mexican border,
or shift US military and diplomatic alliances from nato
48 24 / WINTER 2017
to Putins Russia will face concerted opposition from both
the establishment-dominated Republican Congress and
the permanent officialdom of the federal government.
Put another way, Trump will likely face the sort of
structural-institutional obstacles social democrats face
when attempting to implement anticapitalist reforms
through the capitalist state. This will, of course, demor-
alize many of his middle- and working-class supporters
and make it easier for the mainstream Republicans to
regain control of the party, possibly through the creation
of a system of unelected superdelegates like those the
Democrats created in the 1970s.
Of course, there is another threat brewing. While
the Trump regime is not fascist, his election has encour-
aged small groups of organized fascists and individual
right-wingers. They believe they have the wind at their
back, freeing them to assault people of color, immigrants,
Muslims, queer folks, and leftists. Just one full week after
Trumps election, the Southern Poverty Law Center
counted around seven hundred violent hate crimes in the
United States.
The fight-back against Trumpism will have to take
various forms: organized, collective antifascist defense
against attacks; mass protest; and ultimately struggles
within the workplace. Strategically, new organizers need
to understand that we cannot rely on either the Democrats
or the forces of official reformism. While the labor officials
and their allies may be more willing to mobilize against
Trump than they were against Obama, we can expect them
to double down on their support of the Democrats in the
2018 congressional elections.
The spontaneous protests in many cities and the
growing campaign to wear safety pins as a sign of solidarity
against racist and homophobic violence are promising
beginnings. However, the danger is that these struggles,
like the Wisconsin Uprising, Occupy, and Black Lives
Matter, will be short-lived and leave little independent
organization in their wake.
The way forward for the Left is rebuilding the militant
minority the layer of activists with a strategy and tac-
tics that go beyond reformism in workplaces and social
movements. Without such a core rooted among broader
layers of working people, the labor officials, Democratic
Party politicos, and the middle-class leaders of social move-
ments will be able to continually derail and demobilize
promising struggles as they have for most of the last
forty years.
READING
MATERIEL

WE READ THINGS
YOU SHOULDNT
READ, SO WE CAN
TELL YOU
WHAT TO READ.
 READING MATERIEL
CANON FODDER
The Conservative Heart
Arthur C. Brooks
Arthur C. Brooks, who heads the influ-
ential conservative think tank
the American Enterprise Institute, is
consumed by the fact that conser-
vatives appear to have lost touch with
ordinary working people, lecturing
them about fiscal responsibility and
hard work while failing to acknowl-
edge the poverty and lack of opportu-
nity that afflict many. As a solution,
he provides a blueprint for the Right
to adopt the rhetoric of compassion
while changing nothing about its pol-
icies, many of which disadvantage
the working poor he hopes to win over.
The Conservative Heart is conse-
quently a study in cognitive dis-
sonance. Brooks acknowledges that
most people who are falling
behind are not doing so on purpose,
yet spends much of the book
endorsing work requirements for
welfare and arguing government
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Coulterland
Buying these books really messed
up our Amazon recommendation
algorithm.
assistance goes out to people
who arent really poor. He spends
a whole chapter extolling the
uplifting nature of work, while also
deriding the Obama stimulus
package. He complains conserva-
tives criticize the welfare state
without providing an alternative,
yet believes social justice can be
reached through promoting the right
values. Still, there is much to
be gleaned here about the rhetorical
shifts the Right hopes to make
in a more populist era.
51
 COULTERLAND
The Intimidation Game:
How the Left is Silencing
Free Speech
Kimberley Strassel
History has seen a number of in-
stances of speech repression coming
from the liberal-left from the
Brown Scare of the late 1930s to
todays student activists keeping
their campuses free of right-wing
speakers. Wall Street Journal
columnist Kimberley Strassel
chooses to focus on none of those,
reserving her ire for financial
disclosure and transparency laws
that have helped expose the
corporate and big money donors
behind political groups of all stripes.
The Kochs, Exxon Mobil and groups
like alec are now experiencing
what civil rights campaigners of the
1950s went through, Strassel
argues, except instead of being shot
at, firebombed and murdered,
these conservative campaigners face
harassment. While Strassel
notes some instances of death threats,
the harassment she outlines
seems suspiciously like the tools of
regular democratic action, such
as protests, boycotts and, in one par-
ticularly sinister case, an ad cam-
paign that would publicly announce
corporations support for alec.
How to Debate Leftists
and Destroy Them:
11 Rules for Winning the
Argument
Ben Shapiro
At its heart, former Breitbart
editor-at-large Ben Shapiros short
ebook is a feel-good pamphlet
for conservatives. It rests on the
dubious proposition that the
52
for will remain to be seen by in-
trepid conservatives who try these
techniques out in the field. Happy
strange allies in our mission. Elite
Right which spent eight years attack-
Wall Street to ethnic activists
ing Obama as an anti-American,
Kenyan Marxist motivated by anti-
white rage, eager to plan concen-
tration camps and death panels is
simply too intellectually honest
and policy-focused for twenty-first
well-heeled donors and business
century politics. The Left, mean-
while, are bullies who label their
ideological opponents bigots
and misogynists solely to feel better
about themselves.
Shapiro therefore presents his readers
with an eleven-point plan for how
to humiliate leftists (represented in
the book by well-known Maoist
Piers Morgan). Tips range from the
sensible (If You Dont Know
Something, Admit It; Force Left-
24 / WINTER 2017
ists to Answer Questions) to the
obvious (Spot Inconsistencies in the
Lefts Argument). Whether or not
Shapiros advice will actually work
on an opponent who isnt the hapless
Morgan whose show cancellation
Shapiro appears to give himself credit
hunting.
Adios, America!:
The Lefts Plan to Turn
Our Country Into
a Third World Hellhole
Ann Coulter
For forty years, Ann Coulter writes,
voters have been warning politicians
that Americas suicidal immigration
policies are the single biggest threat
facing the nation, destined to turn
our homeland into a Third World
hellhole.
Its a leftist plot to drown out the
native-born vote, but we have
interests from the media to
hide the evidence and tar con-
cerned citizens as xenophobes and
racists. Coulter strikes a populist
cord, even lambasting Republicans
who push for amnesty to please
interests. She buttresses her case
with bad math, inflating the number
of undocumented immigrants in
the United States and their impact
on the economy. At one point
Coulter even claims that a quarter
of the entire population of Mexico
has fled to the United States.
But that doesnt make her a
xenophobe: Mexico? Love the
food!
 READING MATERIEL
FIELD NOTES

Text from Trumps official

economic policy package.
September 16, 2016

Big Plans

The Trump Economy:

Created In The Next

25Million New Jobs
Behind Trumps big economic
promises is a lot of bullshit.

Decade

54 24 / WINTER 2017
 Donald Trump has proposed sweeping reforms
in tax, trade, energy and regulatory policies.
The Trump campaignseconomist estimates
that the plan would conservatively boost growth
to 3.5percent per year on average, well above
the 2percent currently projected by govern-
ment forecasters, with the potential to reach a
4% growth rate.
Growth averaged at least three and a half per-
cent per year in the 55 years between World
War II and the year 2000. With the faster
growth from the Trump Plan, the economy will
create 25 million new jobs over the next decade.
For each 1 percent in added GDP growth, the
economy adds 1.2 million jobs. Increasing
growth by 1.5 percent would result in 18 million
jobs (1.5 times 1.2 million times 10 years) above
the projected current law job figures of 7 mil-

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

lion, producing a total of 25 million new jobs for
the American economy.

A Pro-Growth Tax Plan

Every income group receives a tax cut under the
Trump plan, with million more being removed
You get a tax cut, you get a tax cut,

$9,275 will get a 2% spike.

actually, anyone making less than
$215,000 per household. And
everyone gets a tax cut! Oh,
but the rich get a lot more about

from the income tax rolls and low-income

Americans paying no income tax at all.
The greatest percentage reduction in tax bill
goes to working and middle class taxpayers:

55
56
A married couple earning $50,000 per year with
two children and $8,000 in child care expenses
will save 35% from their current tax bill.
A married couple earning $75,000 per year with
two children and $10,000 in child care expenses
FIELD NOTES

will receive a 30% reduction in their tax bill.

Married couple earning $5 million per year with
two children and $12,000 in child care expenses
will get only a 3% reduction in their tax bill.
The plan lowers the business tax rate to 15%.
The current business rate 35% rate is one of the
highest in the world, making domestic invest-
ment unattractive. It includes a 10% tax on
repatriation, instantly bringing trillions of dol-
lars back into the U.S. economy now parked
overseas.

24 / WINTER 2017
The plan also allows U.S.-based manufacturers
to elect full expensing of plant and equipment,
an invitation to massive investment. If they
elect this approach, they will give up the ability
to deduct interest expense.
tax rate in the world (behind those business-

Puerto Rico), so Im going to slash the rate to

start competing with Ireland over which of us

Tax brackets in the individual income tax will be

will be large multinationals tax haven of choice.
The United States has the third-highest corporate

be the developed worlds third lowest. Then, we can

hating communists in the United Arab Emirates and

reduced from 7 to 3. Tax rates will be 12%, 25%

the price tag of Bushs cuts. Tremendous.

about $7trillion over ten years, more than double
and raise the rates we originally proposed in the
of the House GOP and have only three tax brackets
a business card, so Im going to follow the lead

process. Im banking that you wont realize theyll cost

Tax plans should be simple enough to fit on the back of
or 33%, with thresholds very similar to the
House GOP plan.
The plan will close special interest tax breaks
and cap deductions at $100,000 for single filers
and $200,000 for married filers, eliminating
 many costly tax loopholes while stimulating
growth.
The standard deduction will be $30,000 dollars
for married couples and $15,000 dollars for
single individuals. Most taxpayers will have no
need to itemize, simplifying their tax returns
and making it easier to file.
The plan provides a child care deduction for
children up to 13 years of age for average child
care expense. Theres an income cap, so the new
deductions dont apply to the rich.
Finally, the plan eliminates the carried interest
loophole for Wall Street and the death tax,
vaguely populist.

which falls especially hard on small businesses

and farmers.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

A Modern Regulatory Framework

without limit.
One of the keys to unlocking growth is scal-
ing-back years of disastrous regulations
unilaterally imposed by our out-of-control
but in practice will fail to help most families, who

bureaucracy.
on an unspecified income cap so this still sounds
The plan provides a child care tax deduction that
in theory should alleviate working families concerns,

In 2015 alone, federal agencies issued over 3,300

find child-care unaffordable. But dont worry, well tack

final rules and regulations, up from 2,400 the

prior year. Every year, overregulation costs our
economy $2 trillion dollars a year and reduces

freedom to pass their riches on to their children

Its about time the ultra-wealthy or as I prefer
Wall Street with the elimination of the estate tax,
household wealth by almost $15,000 dollars.

to call them, small businesses and farmers had the

Finally, were going to pair a populist pitch that targets

which only falls on estates worth more than $10.9million.

57
Big Plans
58
Mr. Trump has proposed a moratorium on new
federal regulations that are not compelled by
Congress or public safety, and will ask agency
and department heads to identify all needless
job-killing regulations and they will be removed.
FIELD NOTES

This includes eliminating some of our most

intrusive regulations, like the Waters of The

agencies.
U.S. Rule. It also means scrapping the EPAs
so-called Clean Power Plan which the govern-
ment itself estimates will cost $7.2 billion a year.
This Obama-Clinton directive will shut down
outbreak, Im not going to

most, if not all, coal-powered electricity plans in

ing regulations I should gut,
matter how great the public

appointed as heads of federal

America.
Ill ask the various plutocrats Ive
Unless theres a new deadly virus

implement any new regulations, no

need. And to figure out which exist-

A complete regulatory overhaul will level the

playing field for American workers and add
trillions in new wealth to our economy
keeping companies here, expanding hiring and

24 / WINTER 2017
investment, and bringing thousands of new
companies to our shores.

atmosphere, so those will have to go.

of the tap, or that prevent a catastrophic
businesses) are saying they dont like laws
An America-First Trade Policy

A lot people (mainly those who own the affected

amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into the

Trade will be an important driver of economic

that help to ensure were not drinking pesticides out

growth along with other key structural reforms.
Donald Trump will ensure that every single one
of our trade agreements increases our GDP
growth rate, reduces our trade deficit, and
that have moved jobs off-
cut back regulations to the
free reign to pollute and to

them back. Everybody wins!

strengthens our manufacturing base.

If we just eliminate workplace

shore might be tempted to bring

level of a failed state, companies
safety standards, give companies

There will be no Trans-Pacific Partnership, even

sell unsafe products, and generally
 if the President and Congress are reckless
enough to pass it in a lame duck session against
the will of the American people.
Donald Trump will appoint the toughest and
smartest trade negotiators to fight on behalf of
American workers and direct the Secretary of
Commerce to identify every violation of trade
agreements a foreign country is currently using
to harm our workers.
NAFTA will be renegotiated to get a better deal
for American workers. If our partners do not
agree to a renegotiation, America will withdraw

We want

deals with

regulations.
from the deal.

bilateral trade

even less thorny

China will be labeled a currency manipulator.
Any country that devalues their currency in
order to take unfair advantage of the United
States will be met with sharply, and that

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

includes tariffs and taxes.
The U.S. Trade Representative will bring trade
cases against China. Chinas unfair subsidy
behavior is prohibited by the terms of its
entrance to the WTO. If China does not stop its
illegal activities, including its theft of American
trade secrets, Donald Trump will use every
lawful presidential power to remedy trade dis-
putes, including the application of
tariffs.

59
Big Plans
60
Unleash American Energy
The Trump energy policy that will make us
energy independent, create millions of new
jobs, and protect clean air and clean water.
FIELD NOTES

We have one of the worlds most diverse

resource bases from abundant coal, oil, and
natural gas to geothermal, solar, and wind. We
are also the worlds leader in energy technolo-
gies like nuclear power.
The United States will become the worlds
dominant leader in energy production. The first
Hopefully this will be enough

children will end up wandering

step will to undo the damage of the last 8 years.

a deserted hellscape bereft of life.

By 2030, the Obama-Clinton energy restrictions

to offset the fact that you and your

will eliminate another half a million manufac-

turing jobs, reduce economic output by $2.5
trillion, and reduce incomes by $7,000 per

24 / WINTER 2017
person.
The Trump Administration will unleash an
energy revolution that will bring vast new
wealth to our country. We will support coal
production. We will support safe hydraulic
fracturing. We will allow energy production on
federal lands in appropriate areas. We will also
open up vast areas of our offshore energy
resources for safe production.
Lifting unnecessary restrictions on all sources of
American energy (such as coal and onshore and
offshore oil and gas) will (a) increase GDP by
 more than $100 billion annually, add over
500,000 new jobs annually, and increase annual
wages by more than $30 billion over the next 7
years; (b) increase federal, state, and local tax
revenues by almost $6 trillion over 4 decades;
and (c) increase total economic activity by more
than $20 trillion over the next 40 years.
The Trump Administration will ensure a reli-
able, streamlined regulatory and permitting
process for energy infrastructure projects, and
will work with their sponsors to find workable
solutions so that worthy energy infrastructure
projects can be completed on time and on
budget.
Finally, a Trump Administration will support
continued research into advanced energy tech-
nologies, but we will not be in the business of

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE

government picking winners and losers.
We need to allow the free market and the inno-
through government intervention.
Nevermind my other promises and

the coal industry can be brought

back from the brink is
that virtually the only way

vative spirit of the American people to product

[sic] the new energy technologies of tomorrow,
without undue government interference.

The Penny Plan

anything right. What a deal.

functions, the Republicans in Congress can
crippled and fails to adequately carry out its basic

justify further cutbacks since government cant do

The good news is, once the government is
The Penny Plan would reduce non-defense,
non-safety net spending by one percent of the
previous years total each year. Over ten years,
the plan will reduce spending (outlays) by
almost $1 trillion without touching defense or

61
Big Plans

entitlement spending.
 READING MATERIEL
DOSSIER
Discover the
Networks
The new GOP is fueled
by some old think tanks.
Marginalized in academia for much
of the twentieth century, conser-
vatives built their own apparatuses
to develop ideas. Heres a guide
through the alphabet soup of conser-
vative think tanks, and what role
theyll play in Trumps administration.
American Enterprise
Institute (AEI)
Founded in 1938, for decades the
aei viewed its role as an objec-
tive research adjunct to policy-
makers. By the time Lyndon
Johnsons Great Society had come
and gone, it sought instead to
62
counter liberal influence in the mar-
ketplace of ideas. The think
tank soon began receiving millions
of dollars from conservative
foundations and business interests.
Paul Ryan has called the think
tank one of the beachheads of the
modern conservative movement.
While the aei has been far from com-
plimentary towards him, Trump
has admitted that he seeks out aei
Senior Fellow John Bolton for
foreign policy advice. Besty DeVos,
Trumps choice for education
secretary, is on the think tanks Board
of Trustees, and ExxonMobil
whose ceo Rex Tillerson is Trumps
24 / WINTER 2017
pick for secretary of state has pro-
vided it $1.9million since 2007.
The aei quickly declared Tillerson
the right choice for the position.
It has laid out a range of policy recom-
mendations for 2017, including
boosting charter schools, rolling back
fuel efficiency regulations and re-
forming entitlements.
Center for Immigration
Studies (CIS)
The cis, which the Southern
Poverty Law Center has called the
anti-immigrant movements think
tank, was founded in 1985 by John
Tanton, a retired ophthalmologist
bent on maintaining a Europe-and-
American majority in the US.
Since 1995, the cis has been headed
by Mark Krikorian, who believes
the government is undertaking social
engineering through a policy of
mass immigration.
The Trump campaign consulted with
the cis on immigration policy
during the election, and Krikorian
was one of sixteen people who
met with Trump at his home in August
for a foreign policy briefing.
Center for Security Policy
(CSP)
The csp was founded in 1988 by
former Reagan administration
Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, a
far-right Islamophobic neocon
who was behind the rumors that
President Obama is a Muslim
and that Hillary Clinton confidante
Huma Abedin is a covert oper-
ative for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Gaffney was reported by multiple
outlets to be serving on Trumps
transition team, but he quickly
denied it. Nonetheless, Gaffneys
relentless anti-Muslim conspira-
cizing fit neatly with Trumps cam-
paign, and Gaffney has publicly
praised Trump. Trumps call for a
Muslim ban closely mirrored a
tweet by Gaffney made around the
same time, and Trump even cited
a bogus csp poll to justify the
policy. Trumps cia director, Mike
Pompeo, also has ties to the
organization.
Family Research Council
(FRC)
The frc is a Christian right think
tank founded in 1983 by James
Dobson and other conservatives,
focusing on issues like homo-
sexuality, abortion, sexual behavior,
stem cells and, increasingly,
the dangers of Islam. The frc is
virulently anti-gay, advancing
false claims that gay men are more
likely to be pedophiles. Its president
also praised a Ugandan bill that
would have sentenced gays to death.
Dobson, who continues to have
ties to the frc, joined Trumps exec-
utive evangelical advisory comittee
in June and endorsed him a month
later. Trump, in turn, was the first gop
nominee to ever address the frcs
Values Voter Summit. The domestic
policy chair for Trumps transition
team is an FRC senior fellow, and
several more team members have
ties to the organization.
Federalist Society for Law
and Public Policy Studies
The Federalist Society started in 1982
to counter what three conservative
law students viewed as liberal dom-
inance in the legal world. By 2010,
there were more than 45,000 lawyers,
judges, academics, and others in-
volved in the Societys various activi-
ties. It has produced four Supreme
Court justices over its lifetime.
With Trump eager to assure the gop
establishment of his conservative
bona fides, the Society looks to retain
its influence under his administra-
tion. Trump promised that his judges
would be all picked by the Federal-
ist Society and met with its executive
vice president to discuss filling the
vacancy left by Antonin Scalia. Nine
of the names on Trumps shortlist
later appeared at the Federalist Soci-
etys annual national convention.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Foundation for Excellence in
Education (FEE)
The fee was started by Jeb Bush in
2008, largely to advance the edu-
cation reforms he had implemented
as Florida governor. This includes
promoting charter schools and digital
education, issuing taxpayer vouch-
ers for private schools, and grading
school performance on an A to F
scale.
While a think tank founded by
Trumps mortal enemy might seem
a strange fit with the new adminis-
tration, its policy proposals are ones
that conservatives have long cham-
pioned. On top of that, Betsy DeVos
has served on its board, and vari-
ous DeVos family foundations have
donated to the fee and continue
to do so. ExxonMobil has also been
a consistent donor.
Heartland Institute
The Heartland Institute is a free-
market think tank founded in 1984,
advocating for rolling back taxes
on tobacco (a product whose health
concerns it has downplayed),
spreading climate denial, pushing
for private schools, and more. It has
a full-time staff of 38, and works
with a network of more than 200
elected officials.
Steel manufacturer Nucor donated
$502,000 to Heartland in 2011
and 2012, the think tanks largest
single donor for the period. Until
2014, Nucor was run by Dan DiMicco,
who was one of Trumps fourteen
economic advisors during the cam-
paign. Rebekah Mercer, a hedge
fund heiress who has been a major
donor to Heartland and other
63
 DOSSIER
conservative groups, has used her
connections to influence Trumps
transition effort. Heartland also
received $736,500 from ExxonMobil
between 1998 and 2006, though
it has ceased to make its donors pub-
lic since then.
The think tanks Action Plan for
Trump includes policies like
withdrawing from the Paris climate
deal, approving Keystone and
other pipelines, rolling back various
epa regulations, repealing and
replacing Obamacare, and block
granting Medicaid.
Heritage Foundation
Founded in 1973, Heritage became
the leading fountainhead of
conservative ideas and policies by
the 1980s, with its Mandate
for Leadership serving as the policy
blueprint for the Reagan adminis-
tration. The think tank has continued
to serve as the premier conser-
vative intellectual voice ever since.
In the words of one defense consul-
tant, it has now similarly positioned
itself as the intellectual foundation
for a Trump administration, while
the Wall Street Journal has called
it an administration-in-waiting for
Mr. Trump, with dozens of cur-
rent and ex-staffers either floated for
posts or working on the transition.
This follows a shift by Heritage to an
increasingly more antagonistic
relationship with the gop, epitomized
by the think tanks push for Repub-
licans to defund Obamacare at the risk
of government shutdown.
64
Heritage has received tens of millions
of dollars from conservative foun-
dations and corporate donors over
the years, including Dow, General
Motors and the Scaife Foundations.
Some of these donors have a direct
line to the incoming Trump adminis-
tration: the DeVos family has deep
ties to Heritage, supporting the think
tank for the last ten years. Trumps
transportation secretary Elaine Chao
also served a fellowship there, while
Tillersons ExxonMobil has given
nearly $800,000 to the think tank
since 1998.
Hoover Institution
Founded by former president
Herbert Hoover in 1919, the Hoover
Institution was focused chiefly
on anticommunism in its first few
decades, as well as pushing the
public and lawmakers towards indivi-
dual liberty. The think tank came
into its own when Glenn Campbell
took the reins in 1960, pushing
Hoover to focus more on advocacy
for the latter. By the time he died
in 2001, Hoover was called one of the
worlds most influential conserva-
tive research groups by the New York
Times, producing conservative-
leaning research and housing various
right-wing intellectuals.
Like other think tanks on this list,
Hoover has been the recipient of
large donations from conservative
foundations and corporations, as
well as maintaining connections to
the gop. ExxonMobil has given
it nearly $300,000 over the last nine-
teen years. Numerous Hoover
staffers joined aei personnel to work
on the 1964 Goldwater campaign,
24 / WINTER 2017
while others later joined the Rea-
gan and Bush administrations.
Trumps secretary of defense, James
Mad Dog Mattis, has been a
visiting fellow with the institution
for the last two years. Three of
the members of Trumps transition
team Peter Thiel, Williamson
M. Evans, and Edwin Meeseiii
also have close ties to Hoover.
New Century Foundation
The New Century Foundation is a
white nationalist think tank founded
in 1994 by Jared Taylor, a Yale grad-
uate and former West Coast editor
of PC Magazine. Its chief function is
putting out the magazine American
Renaissance, which argues in favor of
eugenics and for the existence of
a link between race and intelligence.
The New Century Foundation has
also published The Color of Crime, a
book arguing that racial bias by
police is negligible, that race is con-
nected to criminality and that black
on white crime is a serious problem.
The New Century Foundation has
no direct links to the Trump admin-
istration. However, its fortunes
and the movement it represents have
seen an uptick since Trumps vic-
tory. Having been granted the status
of a non-profit, the group has, along
with three others (including the npi)
raised $7.8million to spread their
beliefs.

Texas Public Policy
Foundation (TPPF)
The tppf was founded in 1989
by James Leininger, a conservative
Christian activist who made his
name through campaigns against
same-sex marriage in Texas, pro-
moting school vouchers and through
his giving to various conservative
politicians. The tppf counts itself
today as Americas largest free
market state think tank, and de-
scribes its mission as a fight for
freedom for which it is developing
workable ideas for elected of-
ficials. These ideas range from tax
cuts and tightening government
spending to school choice and
scaling back federal regulations.
Like Trump, one of its chief targets
is the epas Clean Power Plan.
Trumps Department of the Interior
transition team is being led by
Doug Domenech, head of the tppfs
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Discover the Networks
Fueling Freedom Project, which
aims to explain the forgotten moral
case for fossil fuels and push
back against epa regulations. Trumps
energy secretary pick Rick Perry
also has ties to the organization, which
receives thousands of dollars from
billionaires like the Koch brothers,
conservative foundations and
various businesses. One of these,
unsurprisingly, happens to be
ExxonMobil.
65
ILLUSTRATIONS BY AXEL PFAENDER
 Losing
West
Virginia
CATHY KUNKEL

Few states better illustrate the

contradictions and failures
of the Democratic Party than
West Virginia.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 67

LOSING WEST VIRGINIA
W
est virginia got a lot of attention in
this years presidential election cycle. It
was spotlighted regularly by the media to
explain the phenomenon of the Trump
voter. Unlike states like Michigan and
Pennsylvania, Trumps victory in West Virginia was pre-
dicted far in advance. On Election Day he took the state
in a landslide, with 68percent of the vote.
The story of West Virginias drift to the right in pres-
idential elections is well known. George W. Bushs first
campaign marked a significant shift in the states voting
patterns as it switched from reliably voting Democrat to
Republican in presidential elections. This move is typi-
cally explained by pointing to West Virginias declining
unions, opposition to climate-change regulations that
would impact the states coal industry, and the rising appeal
of social conservatism.
Less discussed is the decline of the West Virginia
Democratic Party, particularly its collapse in the last two
years. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of the
West Virginia legislature for eighty-two years from 1932 to
2014. But in the space of two years the party has become a
shadow of its former self: the Democrats went from holding
71percent of the seats in the House of Delegates in 2008 to
54percent in 2012 to 36percent in 2014 (and maintained
37percent in 2016). Democratic representation in the state
senate fell from 71percent in 2012 to 47percent in 2014 to
35percent in 2016.
So while the focus on West Virginia over the past
year was largely superficial, the attention wasnt entirely
unwarranted. Few states illustrate the contradictions and
failures of the Democratic Partys economic policy and
the challenges ahead in rebuilding the Left better than
West Virginia.
The Unmaking of a Party
The West Virginia Democratic Party brought to power
in the early 1930s on the heels of a coal market crash and
the Great Depression has historically drawn its stron-
gest base of support from the states union movement. The
United Mine Workers of America, bolstered by the pro-
labor policies of the Roosevelt administration, emerged as
a powerful force in West Virginia politics in the thirties,
and in the decades that followed West Virginias indus-
trial and coal-mining unions continued to exert political
power. In the mid-1960s, about 35percent of West Virginia
68 24 / WINTER 2017
workers were in a union, compared to less than 30percent
nationally.
But after peaking in the early 1980s, West Virginia
union membership fell dramatically as manufacturing
(notably in the steel industry) and mining jobs disappeared.
In 2015, only 12.4percent of West Virginia workers were
unionized. With the decline of its union base, the states
Democratic Party became increasingly vulnerable. The
recent collapse of West Virginias coal industry was the
final straw.
After a 2008 boom in global coal markets, West Vir-
ginia coal production and coal-mining employment began
a rapid decline from which it is not expected to recover.
Coal production fell 39percent from 2008 to 2015, with
the states southern coalfields (long the base of the states
Democratic Party machine) seeing a drop of 59percent.
Since 2008, more than seven thousand miners in West Vir-
ginias southern coalfields lost their jobs; in Boone County,
formerly the states largest coal-producing county, mining
employment fell 58percent from 201115.
The main reasons for the collapse are structural:
geology (the states southern coalfields are increasingly
uncompetitive as the easiest-to-mine coal is gone), the
increasing use of natural gas for power generation nation-
ally, and a weak market for coal exports. But the drop in
coal production and employment coincided with Obamas
presidency, creating an opportunity for the West Virginia
Republican Party. Despite the fact that federal environ-
mental regulations have had minimal impact on the decline
Sanders won
all 55 counties
in the states
Democratic
primary.
of the states coal industry, the sectors rapid decline pro-
vided the perfect opportunity for Republicans to attack
the Obama administrations war on coal.
West Virginias state elections came to be seen by
Republicans as up for grabs, and out-of-state money and
politicians flooded in to make the war on coal the domi-
nant issue. In early 2013, Republican Alex Mooney moved
from Maryland to West Virginia to make a successful run
for House of Representatives the next year. Patrick Mor-
risey moved to eastern West Virginia in 2006 (he still
maintains a home in Alexandria, VA) and won the 2012 state
attorney general race, the first time a Republican held the
office in nearly a hundred years. The national Republican
Attorneys General Association plunked down $3.4 million
to ensure Morriseys reelection in 2016.
Seemingly overnight the Democratic Partys control
over the West Virginia political system collapsed.
A Party of Coal
Yet the failure of the West Virginia Democratic Party cant
simply be placed at the feet of global coal prices or oppor-
tunistic Republicans. The Democrats failure to develop an
economic vision that would benefit West Virginia workers
is central to the story.
The West Virginia Democratic Party has long been
beholden to dominant economic interests in the state, par-
ticularly coal mining. Even back in the 1950s, a proposal
by Democratic governor William Marland to impose what
would have been the first severance tax on the coal industry
was soundly defeated by his Democratic legislature after
an industry outcry. Today, West Virginias Democratic
politicians dont just represent the industry some are
the industry. Senator Joe Manchin has made millions from
his familys coal brokerage business and Governor-elect
Jim Justice is a coal-mining ceo.
The partys capture by industry has intensified in
recent decades as union influence has waned in the face
of mechanization. Coal mining has gone through a series
of booms and busts in West Virginia, but each successive
boom has employed far fewer people. At its peak in 1948,
coal mining employed nearly 132,000 miners; in the mid-
1970s, mining employment peaked again at 64,000 miners,
and in 2008, mining employment reached a high of 22,034.
And of these only one in three miners worked on the highly
mechanized mountaintop removal mines, which accounted
for nearly half of the states coal production.
While mechanization has systematically destroyed
coal-mining jobs, the state Democratic Party has pos-
tured as an advocate for workers, opposing environmental
regulations on the industry as a way to save jobs. But
their pro-worker position is a faade. The party has
attacked restrictions on mountaintop-removal mining
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
(by systematically under-enforcing federal surface-mining
regulations), despite the fact that mountaintop mining
employs far fewer miners than underground mining. West
Virginia Democrats have also catered to the coal industry
on worker safety issues, failing to meaningfully increase
mine safety regulations even after the 2010 Upper Big
Branch explosion killed twenty-nine miners.
The state Democratic Party acknowledges no con-
tradiction in its cozy relationship with coal, arguing that
whats good for the industry is good for jobs. As governor,
Joe Manchin even tried to change the states official motto
from wild and wonderful to open for business until
public outcry forced him to backtrack. Under Manchin, the
state eliminated the business franchise tax and cut other
corporate taxes by $425million a year.
The fragile position of West Virginia workers has been
exacerbated by the West Virginia Democrats long-term
failure to pursue meaningful economic diversification in
the state, itself a product of industry capture. Rather than
pursuing other opportunities for economic diversification,
the party has doubled down on extractive industries. For
example, the state Democratic Party embraced the Mar-
cellus shale gas drilling boom that swept into the state in
the late 2000s, catering to another out-of-state extractive
industry rather than building and retaining wealth and
jobs within the state.
The Democratic Partys attempts at true economic
diversification have been meager at best. In 2009, the Dem-
ocratic legislature passed an alternative and renewable
energy portfolio standard that was ostensibly designed
to diversify the states electricity system. In reality, it did
literally nothing because it allowed utilities to count their
existing coal-fired power plants as alternative energy
resources. And unlike some other extraction-intensive
states (Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota), for decades West
Virginias legislature failed to establish a permanent min-
eral trust fund to keep natural resource wealth in the state
during times of bust. When it finally did so in 2014, the
legislature severely underfunded it.
The Last Straws
The WV Democratic Partys accelerating representation
of coal industry interests in the wake of weakening union
power left it ill-prepared to deal with the recent structural
decline of the states coal industry. The party had no real
answer to offer thousands of laid-off coal miners or the
towns and counties whose budgets were slashed by the
decline in coal severance tax revenues.
When confronted by the Republican Partys decision
to opportunistically blame the decline of the coal industry
on Obamas war on coal and the job-killing epa, the
West Virginia Democratic Party could not articulate any
69
70 24 / WINTER 2017
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 71
alternative vision. Instead, many Democratic politicians
chose to run even further to the right, joining in with the
bashing of the Environmental Protection Agency and dis-
tancing themselves from Obama.
This strategy worked for a few Democrats. Governor
Joe Manchin successfully ran for US Senate in 2010; one
of his campaign ads featured him picking up a gun and
shooting a cap-and-trade bill. In 2016, the party also
managed to get Jim Justice elected as governor Justice
escaped being tarred with the war on coal brush by virtue
of being a coal-mining ceo and the wealthiest man in
the state. He was also a registered Republican until three
months before deciding to run.
But on the whole, the party was annihilated. At first
glance, this is somewhat puzzling. After all, shouldnt
the West Virginia Democrats steadfast support for the
industry have insulated them from the Republicans war
on coal rhetoric?
The Republican strategy was successful for two rea-
sons: the constant message tying the Democrats to Obama
and his war on coal a message that also played to dog-
whistle racism in an overwhelmingly white state made
it all but impossible for state Democrats to fully distance
themselves from the national party of the same name. As
Charleston Gazette-Mail journalist Ken Ward Jr wrote in
2015, every 2016 race in West Virginia will again be about
President Obama, who wont be on the ballot.
Whats more, the decision of most Democratic candi-
dates to run further to the right, emulating Republicans,
underscored the fact that the Democrats have no new
ideas to offer. After more than eighty years of Democratic
rule at the state house, the Republican Party successfully
positioned itself as the party of change and channeled
real anger at the economic desperation in West Virginia.
Boone County which voted for Obama in 2008 and
Trump in 2016 is perhaps the starkest example of this
economic desperation. In 2008, the county was the largest
coal producer in the state. From 2008 to 2015, coal pro-
duction there fell 72percent, and in just the last four years
mining employment fell 58percent.
West Virginias overall economic outlook has been
declining, as well. In 2015, the state experienced the third
largest employment decline in the country. The job gains
that have occurred have been in low-wage sectors, exacer-
bating poverty in a state that historically ranks at or near
the bottom of most economic indicators, including per
capita income and life expectancy.
Ultimately, the West Virginia Democratic Party found
itself caught in its own version of the internal contradic-
tions plaguing the national Democratic Party. For the last
three decades, the national Democratic and Republican
Party establishments have maintained a consensus on
core economic issues. These have revolved around support
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
for the financial industry (including bank bailouts in the
wake of the 2008 financial crisis) and big corporations, and
trade deals that prioritize the free flow of capital and fail
to incorporate labor or environmental standards. These
policies have resulted in widening inequality and pervasive
economic insecurity, making it harder for the Democrats
to credibly position themselves as representatives of the
working class.
The West Virginia Democratic Party created an anal-
ogous situation by championing dominant extractive
industries in the state while also claiming to be the party
of labor. The decline of the coal industry laid bare the
fact that the state Democratic Party has no real vision for
supporting workers, particularly as the tensions between
creating jobs and protecting the environment become
increasingly fraught.
At the national level, environmental policy has never
been coupled with social and economic policy to aid com-
munities transitioning away from fossil fuels, leaving
the national Democratic Party open to attack for pitting
workers against the environment. The same jobs vs. envi-
ronment argument was used effectively by Republicans in
West Virginia to crush the state Democratic Party.
Yet the WV Democratic Party itself has failed to artic-
ulate any critique of the ways in which neoliberalism and
mechanization have destroyed the working class in West
Virginia or how a different economy could provide both
dignified work and a just transition.
Such an analysis would not have been foreign to prom-
inent West Virginia politicians of the early twentieth
century, some of whom who clearly saw how the extraction
of wealth from the state and its people went hand in hand
with environmental degradation. Republican governor
Henry Hatfield (191317) once asked:
Why will not those who have large holdings in our
commonwealth assist in the up-building of the state?
When will relief come to us? Will it be when these hills
and valleys have been exhausted of their bounties of
nature and when these great mountains have shed their
last stately oak, and when the hills will resound with
emptiness because the mineral beds that once reposed
within have been exhausted in a market beyond the
state borders?
It is difficult to imagine an elected official of either party
posing such a question today.
The Republican Vision
The future for West Virginia seems bleak. At the state
level, since the Republicans took power in 2014, they have
rolled back protections for workers, repealing the states
prevailing wage law (which had set a minimum wage for
73
LOSING WEST VIRGINIA
In the mid-1960s, 35 percent of
West Virginia workers were in a
union, compared to less than 30
percent nationally.
state-funded construction projects) and making West Vir-
ginia a right-to-work state.
At the federal level, it is unlikely a Trump presidency
will do much to benefit the state, despite his campaign
promise to bring back coal. Trump will be unable to
deliver on his pledges to make both natural gas and coal
great because the fuels are in direct competition with
each other for electricity generation; given that natural
gas is cheaper, it will presumably win out. Even noto-
rious coal baron Bob Murray, an early backer of Trumps
campaign, urged Trump to moderate his campaign
promises to coal miners because of the impossibility
of delivering on them. Quoted in the industry publica-
tion SNL Financial in May 2016 Murray said, [Trump]
wants to bring the mines back and I told him that was
not possible.
And considering that Trumps pick for treasury sec-
retary is a former Goldman Sachs banker (as was Timothy
Geithner, Obamas first treasury secretary), there is no
reason to expect that Trump will improve overall economic
conditions in the rest of the country either. The Steven
Mnuchin pick all but assures that campaign promises to
enact protective tariffs to bring back jobs will not materi-
alize. Instead, a continued prioritization of the interests
of finance will exacerbate the trend of widening income
inequality and growing economic discontent that contrib-
uted to Trumps rise in the first place.
In Search of Alternatives
The recent history of the West Virginia Democratic Party
underscores the desperate need for an economic vision in
West Virginia, and in the rest of the country, that actually
works for working people.
Bernie Sanders began to provide an outline of what this
vision could look like in West Virginia. Campaigning in
the state he challenged the Democratic establishments ties
74 24 / WINTER 2017
to Wall Street and also to the pharmaceutical industry
that has flooded the state with prescription painkillers over
the last decade. He spoke directly about climate change,
a problem that West Virginia Democrats prefer to pre-
tend does not exist. And he addressed the reality that the
Democratic Party has abandoned the working class in
West Virginia.
Sanders won all fifty-five counties in the states Dem-
ocratic primary. His victory suggests that the challenge of
winning back a state that voted 68percent Trump may be
less impossible than it appears.
But winning will require the articulation of a real anal-
ysis of the states problems rather than a continuation of the
myth that whats good for the states extractive industries
is necessarily good for workers.
Nationally, an economic vision for the working class
must seriously address the twin crises of economic inse-
curity and climate crisis. Addressing climate change
solely through technological innovation and regulating
polluters the Democratic Partys approach so far will
leave behind states like West Virginia whose economies
have depended on fossil-fuel extraction for decades.
A path to a future that protects both workers and the
environment will require transitioning towards an eco-
nomic system that does not produce sacrifice zones in
pursuit of fossil-fuel extraction and in which communities
have the resources to weather the serious climate change
impacts that are already on the way. It will involve breaking
up large monopolies and large concentrations of wealth in
order to return greater political power and control over
resources to local communities.
The economic transformation needed to build an eco-
nomic system in the interest of workers while remaining
within natural limits is a long-term transformation. But
we must begin it. The alternative, a continued failure to
address underlying economic realities, will continue to
drive voters to the Right.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 75
CULTURAL
CAPITAL

OUT-OF-CONTEXT
GRAMSCI
QUOTES GO HERE.
 CULTURAL FRONT
BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE
Today, its hard to imagine an artist
crooning I dont want to change the
world and becoming a left-wing icon.
But when Billy Bragg released New
England in 1983, Margaret Thatcher
was pursuing a radical program to
destroy the postwar Keynesian con-
sensus and usher in a brave new world
of capitalist hegemony. What the
Conservative Party termed prog-
ress in that years elections meant
the ruination of British working-class
political power.
I dont want a new England, were popularizing the harder, faster,
Bragg opined, and who could blame
him?
When miners initiated their
national strike a year later, Bragg
threw himself into solidarity efforts,
performing in miners towns across
the country. Later, inspired by the
1970s Rock Against Racism tours
that pit antiracist performers against
neo-Nazis, he set up the musicians
collective Red Wedge to organize
opposition to the Tories.
Its possible that being embedded
in such struggles is what preserved
the clear, folksy, even upbeat sound
BY BILLY BRAGG
Stand Down
Margaret
Songs from round
one to inspire us
to win round two.
in his music, even as fellow musical
rebels like the Ramones and the Clash
world wars, its adherents have trans-
and louder. The impossible faith of
striking miners against the Conserva-
tive government must have served as
an antidote to the pessimism, sliding
into nihilism, that gave punk its sexy,
transgressive edge in the same era.
Now, the neoliberal order
Thatcher pioneered has succeeded
in its major goals. As the Left was
defeated and labor beaten back, the
musical battle cries of the seventies
and eighties turned to whimpers, and
punk seemed more and more a relic
of a countercultural past.
Yet winning has its downside.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Now that neoliberalism has con-
quered its old enemies and won its
formed from radical pioneers into
conservative defenders of the status
quo. There is no alternative sounds
less like the battle cry of uncompro-
mising reformers and more like the
plea of an embattled caste.
In this context, the Left and its
musicians can once again say that yes,
we do want to change the world
while remembering why Billy Bragg
didnt in 1983.
Here, Bragg takes us through
eight songs that best captured
the resistance and rebellion of the
Thatcher era.
77
 BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE

THE STYLE COUNCIL

Walls Come
Tumbling Down
Paul Weller had already established
himself as a sharp observer of
working-class angst during his years Are
you gonna try to make
fronting The Jam. When he
broke up the band in 1982 and formed
this work
a jazz/soul outfit The Style Or spend your days down in
Council, his social commentary came
wrapped in a cooler sound.
the dirt
The 1984 miners strike brought the You see things can change
fire back to his songwriting and
this punchy single got to number six YES an walls can come
in the UK charts. Opening with tumbling down!
the words You dont have to take this
crap, Walls Come Tumbling THE STYLE COUNCIL, WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN
Down sounded a rallying call to those
dismayed by Thatchers Britain.
Its message: unity is powerful.

HEAVEN 17 THE BEAT THE REDSKINS

(We
Dont Need Stand Down Keep On
This) Fascist Margaret Keepin On
Groove Thang The Two Tone movement was a key A trio of hard-left skinheads hence
aspect of antiracist activism in the name the Redskins were
Heaven 17 recorded this dance
late 70s Britain, bringing black and inspired by a heady mixture of sixties
floor favorite in 1981, shortly after
white youth together to fight soul and Trotskyism and promised
splitting from the Human League.
against discrimination, while dancing to walk like the Clash and talk like
While their erstwhile colleagues top-
to ska-influenced pop. It was only the Supremes. Their one album,
ped the charts, they took their
natural that the bands involved in Neither Washington nor Moscow,
synthpop in a more political and, it
the scene should take a stand against took its title from the slogan on the
has to be said, funky direction.
Thatcher. The Beat were among front of the Socialist Workers Party
With Thatcher and Reagan in power,
the first, transforming Prince Busters newspaper and the bands politics
there was a sense that the forces
Whine and Grine into an anthem were uncompromising and workerist.
of reaction, which had been held in
of opposition. The white law However, they avoided the mis-
check by youth culture since the
mentioned in the lyrics is an oblique erablism that sometimes afflicts the
1960s, were gaining the upper hand,
reference to William Whitelaw, Trotskyist left by writing great
pushing back against civil, social,
Thatchers hardline minister for law pop tunes like this.
and sexual rights. Heaven 17 spoke
and order, but we all knew what
out, alerting us to Racist men
they really meant.
with evil views spreading all across
the land.

78 24 / WINTER 2017

ELVIS COSTELLO
Tramp the Dirt
Down
Costello was probably the nearest
to a traditional protest singer thrown
up by the punk rock scene, with a
back catalogue of powerfully topical
songs that seek to make sense of a
hostile world. However, none of the
others have the personal invective
contained in this song, made all the
more powerful by being a lament
rather than a ranting thrash. The image
of Costello stamping on Thatchers
grave to ensure she doesnt rise again
might seem faintly ridiculous now,
but her ghost still haunts British
politics.
Cant
remember such a
bitter time
The Boss says jump! The
workers fall in line
Im not down, but Im
feeling low
They whip us into line
With the threat of the dole
THE REDSKINS, KEEP ON KEEPIN ON
TELEVISION PERSONALITIES
A Sense
of Belonging
The real enemy of all of us who
want to make a better world is not
capitalism or conservatism, but
cynicism our own feeling that no
one cares about this shit, that
nothing will ever change, so whats
the point? Woody Guthrie knew
this, as did Dan Treacy, the driving
force behind Television Person-
alities. Cynicism takes hold when
empathy becomes a chore the
only real antidote is activism. This
song makes that point in a wonder-
fully world-weary way.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Stand Down Margaret
ROBERT WYATT
Shipbuilding
Shipbuilding is about what happens
when a leader uses war to whip
up patriotic fervor and distract from
their domestic unpopularity.
Thatcher was floundering mid-term
when the Argentine junta invaded
the Falkland Islands in 1982. Pushing
aside all reasonable attempts at
brokering peace, she sent the Royal
Navy down to the South Atlantic
in search of a glorious reenactment of
British imperial might. Britain
was victorious and Thatcher was re-
turned to office a year later in a
landslide. Nine hundred and four
combatants lost their lives.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
Strike!
The 1984 miners strike was a
catalyst for opposition to Thatcher.
Over the course of the twelve
month struggle, artists identified
themselves by doing benefit gigs
and recording supportive singles.
This piece of spartan agitprop
was released by Keith Le Blanc, whose
previous hit featured the voice
of MalcolmX. His nom de guerre
comes from a quote by Thatcher,
who in a speech to the Conservative
Party during the strike juxtaposed
the defeated Argentine junta the
enemy without with the miners
the enemy within. The voice you
can hear is that of Arthur Scargill, then-
leader of the National Union of
Mineworkers.
79
 CULTURAL FRONT
WAYS OF SEEING
How Pepe
Turned Brown
Inside every cartoon
frog is a totalitarian
screaming to get out.
In simpler times (aka 2005, the height
of the Bush years), Pepe the Frog was
a neer-do-well stoner, whose frequent
munchies often resulted in acid reflux
attacks. Created by artist Matt Furie
for a comic book called Boys Club,
the affable frog and his friends rev-
eled in scatological humor and other
juvenilia. It wasnt pathbreaking or
insightful by any stretch, but it was
hardly creeping fascism.
Pepes popularity jumped in
2008. That year, a page from Boys
Club showing Pepe peeing with his
pants pulled down made the rounds
on 4Chan, and his accompanying
catchphrase, feels good man,
80
BY TANNER HOWARD
quickly became ubiquitous on the
websites infamous /b/ board. In
time, Pepes sunny optimism would
grow more complex, as anonymous
web users developed a range of emo-
tions for him, including Sad Frog,
Smug Frog, and Angry Pepe. Stripped
of his pre-recession innocence, Pepe
would never be the same.
Before he became an alt-right
icon, Pepe unwittingly became a
sought-after commodity. In 2014,
4chan users began trading customized
Pepe macros, calling their creations
rare Pepes. The inevitable backlash
saw collectors flood the web with huge
batches of rare Pepes to depreciate of Pepe with Trumpian hair behind
24 / WINTER 2017
the market, but not before someone
almost sold 1,200 Pepe images on
eBay for $99,166, or more than $80
a Pepe.
Pepes sad descent reached its
nadir this election cycle, as white
supremacists decided to reclaim
Pepe from the normies misusing
his image. Pepes transformation into
fascist icon began last July on 4chans
/pol/, or Politically Incorrect board,
with a macro of a Smug Pepe with
Trump hair grinning in front of a US
border fence.
A s Tr u m p e m b r a c e d t h e
amphibian, retweeting a cartoon
 ILLUSTRATION BY
JAMES CLAPHAM

a potus lectern, we witnessed the

spectacle of the Clinton campaign
publishing an article denouncing a
cartoon frog. The response to white
supremacy suggested by the cam-
paign was typically uninspiring:
Vote.
Their strategy couldnt keep
Trump out of the White House.
Neither could a valiant campaign
to #SavePepe prevent Pepes tragic
downfall into racism, making him the
first frog to be labeled a hate symbol
by the Anti-Defamation League. With
the Right on the move, we can expect
more of even the dankest memes to
fall prey to the forces of reaction.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 81

 CULTURAL FRONT
BEYOND A BOUNDARY
Adam Silver
Isnt Protesting
As long as no one risks the leagues
power or profits, the NBA can sell
politics all the way to the bank.
Last August a month after police
shot and killed Alton Sterling and
Philando Castile, two years after
police shot and killed Michael
Brown and choked Eric Garner to
death, and three years after wan-
nabe cop George Zimmerman
was acquitted for killing Trayvon
Martin San Francisco 49ers quar-
terback Colin Kaepernick refused
to stand for the national anthem. I
am not going to stand up to show
pride in a flag for a country that
oppresses black people and people
of color, he said afterward. There
are bodies in the street, and people
getting paid leave and getting away
with murder.
82
BY MATTHEW MIRANDA
His actions seemed to align with
comments made by nba stars LeBron
James, Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade, and
Carmelo Anthony at the espy awards
that July, just a week after Sterlings
and Castiles murders. They called on
athletes to resurrect the activist tradi-
tion of Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson,
Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, and
others. Its not about being a role
model, its not about our responsi-
bility to the tradition of activism,
James said. I know tonight were
honoring Muhammad Ali, the goat,
but to do his legacy any justice, lets
use this moment as call to action for
all professional athletes to educate
ourselves, explore these issues, speak
24 / WINTER 2017
up, use our influence and renounce all
violence...
After generations of basketball
players reserving their voice for com-
mercial endorsements Michael
Jordans Republicans buy sneakers,
too and Charles Barkleys I am not
a role model todays stars will-
ingness to take meaningful stances
seemed like a welcome development.
nba commissioner Adam Silver,
the more progressive successor to
David Sterns serrated antagonisms,
praised the athletes for put[ting]
themselves in a leadership posi-
tion. He went on, When they see
sort of symbolic gestures by athletes
in other sports, and not to devalue
them in any way, I think their view
is Weve moved past that stage
already... we will be judged by the
substantive actions were taking in
our communities.
A closer look reveals that these
substantive actions carry far less
weight than the symbolic gestures
the nba has purportedly moved
past. These include Wades bike
ride through Miami that included
police officers, Los Angeles Lakers
sponsored pickup games between
law enforcement and children, and
Memphis Grizzlies head coach David
Fizdales initiative to register his
players to vote. Meanwhile, several
teams chose to lock arms during the
national anthem. Were not pro-
testing, Milwaukee Bucks head coach
Jason Kidd declared. Were showing
unity. Theres not a protest.
When players do go beyond the
nbas vague rhetoric about leader-
ship, theyre punished.
Last July, players from three
w n ba teams faced fines after
wearing t-shirts during warm-ups
that decried the Sterling and Cas-
tile shootings as well as the murder
of three Dallas police officers during
a peaceful protest. Even after being
fined $5,000 almost a tenth of
the average wnba salary New
York Liberty players Swin Cash,
Tina Charles, Kiah Stokes, Carolyn
Swords, and Tanisha Wright focused
the post-game press conference on
police brutality and criminal justice
reform, refusing to discuss that days
game. Although wnba commissioner commercial advertising. While the players eventually won. They risked
Lisa Borders, who reports to Silver, league can afford for half its audience their careers to benefit themselves
eventually rescinded the fines, Silvers to turn off the press conferences, it and future players. The average nba
response to the protest exposed the cant let politics interfere with its salary now rests just under $6mil-
nbas true face. game time ratings. lion a year.
I would greatly prefer that But when players do threaten Todays owners are no less driven
the players use the platforms theyre the leagues massive revenues, they by profit and power than owners fifty
given, he said. Social media, win huge gains. In 1964, the nba years ago. The nba is a $5 billion-a-
press conferences, media in lockers All-Star game was scheduled for live year industry whose financial partners
rooms, however they want to do it, television, an enormous opportu- include many of the people and media
to make their political points of view nity for the league to establish itself. this activism means to disrupt and
be known. To put it more clearly, Shortly beforehand, the players, who discomfort. LeBron and Carmelo can
players can say and wear whatever earned so little they often worked two keep talking. Philando and Trayvon
they like off the court, but they cannot jobs, told the owners they wouldnt can keep dying. Neither affects the
desecrate the sanctum sanctorum play unless they received certain bottom line. As long as no one risks
the stadium and the uniforms. No benefits, including a pension. The the leagues power or profits, the
matter that these same courts and owners huffed and puffed outside nba can sell politics all the way to
uniforms are acceptable spaces for the locked locker room, but the the bank.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 83

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUCA BATTAGLIA
 Being
Anti-
Trump Isnt
Enough
DAVID BRODER

Silvio Berlusconis tenure

reminds us that the Left
needs to attack the
neoliberal center, not just
the populist right.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 85
BEING ANTI-TRUMP ISNT ENOUGH
J
ust months after the left seemed
poised for a historic breakthrough, a shock
national vote brought a dangerous reac-
tionary to power. Smashing open the old
party of the Right, the billionaire tycoons
populism surfed a wave of anger against the corrupt elite
that had long controlled the political center. Making gov-
ernment the stage for a permanent public performance,
this curiously wealthy popular champion radically reshaped
the countrys political life.
Such was the scene in Italy in 1994 as Silvio Berlus-
coni took power amid the ruins of Christian Democracy,
the Catholic conservative party which had long domi-
nated national government. In power since World Warii,
the Christian Democrats collapsed together with their
Communist rivals at the end of the Cold War, and it was
Berlusconis Forza Italia that filled the void. But Italys new
right was no mere rebranding of the traditional conserva-
tive party it was a novel coalition stretching from the
tycoons business associates to populists and ex-fascists.
Since November many have suggested that the nine
years of Berlusconi rule scattered between 1994 and 2011
were Romes own Trump moment. Italians often rue
their record in exporting such lamentable phenomena
as 1920s fascism and 1990s Berlusconism, and indeed there
is much to learn from what this new right achieved in its
homeland before spreading abroad. This is all the more
important when we consider that Berlusconi was not, as
his opponents expected in 1994, simply exposed as a char-
latan upon reaching high office. Rather, he succeeded in
making lasting changes to Italian political life, including
the near destruction of the Left.
Prominent figures in
Berlusconis coalition had
links to the most explicit
historical fascism.
86 24 / WINTER 2017
The Berlusconi comparison should be understood
within its specific limits. The United States in 2017 is not
the same as 1990s Italy. Today there is turmoil and political
realignment across the globe, but we can hardly assume
that the weakest links in the chain are holding up to the
more powerful and stable states a mirror of their own
future. Berlusconis Italy and, on the other end of the polit-
ical spectrum, Syriza in Greece are test beds for broader
dynamics, not models which later parties or leaders are
doomed to copy.
Still, in the face of a potentially much more dangerous
Trump the US left would do well to learn some lessons
from Berlusconism.
A Time of Monsters
Berlusconisms origins lay in a systemic crisis, with the
early 1990s collapse of a political order based on the Cold
War binary pitting Christian Democrats against Italys
second party, the Communists. While Italy had nearly fifty
governments between 1947 and 1992, each one of them
was a coalition based on the dominance of the center to
center-right and pro-nato Christian Democrats, designed
to keep the Communist Party from ever reaching power.
Forming a continual series of cabinets that balanced
its internal factional interests and those of its episodic
coalition partners, the Catholic and anticommunist Chris-
tian Democracy built up a vast network of corruption,
patronage, and links with organized crime, sure of its per-
manent ownership of the state.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 destroyed this
system, breaking up the Cold War dynamic on which it was
based. As the 1991 collapse of the Communist Party in turn
dissolved the Christian Democrats own internal solidarity,
a far-reaching judicial inquiry was launched, the so-called
Clean Hands investigation into the Bribesville prac-
tices long sustained by Italys blocked democracy.
Swamped with accusations of fraud and bribery, the
Christian Democrats dissolved just two years after their
historic Communist rival. Unscathed by this scandal due to
their Cold Warera exclusion from high office, the majority
of the Communists now reformed as the Democrats of
the Left, and from 1992 to 94 this new social-democratic
formation looked to be on the brink of power.
Fearing the Left reaching office for the first time since
the coalition governments of 194447, the Right sought a
new standard-bearer. A candidate soon emerged to save
the ruling class from the discredit into which Christian
Democracy (and smaller allies like the centrist Italian
Socialist Party, psi) had dragged it. Their hero was bil-
lionaire media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, in the early 1980s
associated with the (only nominally socialist) psi but now
the frontman of the populist right. He stood independent
from the discredited Christian Democrats (rebranded the
Italian Peoples Party) and was also fiercely hostile to the
ex-Communist Democrats of the Left. Entering the field in
January 1994, he promised a continuation of free-market
and pro-nato policies while replacing the corrupt indi-
viduals who populated the Italian government.
Berlusconis victory at the March 1994 election despite
his total lack of political experience succeeded not only in
heading off the Democrats of the Left but also in radically
reshaping the Right. Organized around a single charismatic
leader, his newly created Forza Italia was a media vehicle
created from the top down and promoted through Ber-
lusconis own tv channels. It was more like an American
party than anything seen in the postwar Italian context.
Whereas the Christian Democrats had participated in
the anti-Nazi Resistance of 194345 and for the most part
repudiated any fascist presence in government over subse-
quent decades, Berlusconi had no such scruples. With the
historic parties of Italian democracy disappearing in the
early 1990s, the barriers to the far right were effectively
removed, and they were soon welcomed into his new coali-
tion. In the 1994 election, Forza Italias eight million votes
were complemented by five million for the post-fascist
Alleanza Nazionale and over three million for the Lega
Nord, a hard-right party seeking to detach the wealthier
North of Italy from the lazy, corrupt South. Together
they dominated the new parliament.
Prominent figures in Berlusconis coalition had links
to the most explicit historical fascism. Alleanza Nazionale
was a 1994 rebranding of the Movimento Sociale Italiano
(msi), the fascist party created in 1945 by surviving lieu-
tenants of Benito Mussolinis Nazi-puppet Italian Social
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Republic. Alleanza Nazionale leaders such as Gianni Ale-
manno (1970s msi youth organizer and theorist of its most
radical, revolutionary wing; 200813 mayor of Rome),
Gianfranco Fini (who in 1991 described himself as a fascist
for the 2000s), and Alessandra Mussolini (the dictators
granddaughter, in 1994 msi candidate for mayor of Naples)
would over the next decade move from being ministers in
Berlusconis coalitions to members of his party. While the
1990s creation of Alleanza Nazionale was itself an attempt
to mainstream the far right by shedding its fascist baggage,
these figures along with Berlusconi continued to relativize
the crimes of the Mussolini regime, transgressing the
norms of postwar Italian democracy.
Above all an opportunist, Berlusconis policies in gov-
ernment were, however, characterized not by creeping
fascism but a continuity with prior Christian Democrat
administrations.
Beyond such decisions as abolishing inheritance tax
and a botched attempt to create a two-party voting system,
Berlusconis rule was notable less for economic and institu-
tional reforms as for his use of office to protect his personal
business interests. This principally centered around mea-
sures designed to remove constraints on media monopolies
(the Gasparri Law) and protect him from prosecution
for crimes like fraud, massive tax evasion, and paying a
seventeen-year-old for sex.
Romano Prodi, today a leading figure in the Dem-
ocratic Party, denounced Berlusconis obsession with
passing ad personam legislation aimed at protecting
himself from jail time. His rule was thus mostly remark-
able for a tedious soap opera of court appearances, appeals,
and counter-attacks against what he labeled a politically
motivated caste of judges.
Hoping that the courts would punish Berlusconi for his
dubious business dealings, the center-left merely mirrored
his attempt to polarize Italian politics around his own per-
sona rather than questions of general interest or economic
recovery. Following the sweeping Clean Hands trials and
the emergence of judge-politicians like Antonio di Pietro
(in 199394 a lead prosecutor against Berlusconis friend
Bettino Craxi, and later founder of the liberal Italy of
Values party and minister in Prodis government), pros-
ecutors and corruption charges increasingly took the place
of substantial political issues in left discourse.
Consider the example of the countrys antiwar move-
ment. Italy had the worlds largest demonstration against
the Iraq War, as three million people took to the streets of
Rome on February 15, 2003. Yet the Democrats of the Left
consistently abstained on all bills relating to Berlusconis
decision to send troops. The Italian left more broadly never
made the invasions disastrous failure a key criticism of
the media magnate, as it had become for George W. Bush
and Tony Blair.
87
BEING ANTI-TRUMP ISNT ENOUGH
Indeed, during the post-2008 European crisis the Dem-
ocratic Party (formed by the Democrats of the Left and
fragments of the old Christian Democracy in 2007) even
adopted positions favoring much harsher budget cuts than
Berlusconi himself, attacking him for his unseriousness
in conforming to the European Central Banks austerity
demands.
There was, of course, political substance to even the
moral and personal criticism of Berlusconi. Trumps
claim in the second presidential debate that his failure to
pay federal income tax was smart echoed a key theme
of Berlusconism, namely the swaggering billionaires
attempts to pose as just like the little guy (i.e., small
businessman/patriarch) who wants to put his foot down
in his business and family without state interference. He
spoke less the language of the strongman la Putin
than of unfiltered individual self-interest, thus detaching
neoliberal ideologys underlying conception of human
behavior from its typical association with managerial-
centrist government.
Faced with critics who were often themselves of
dubious financial propriety, Berlusconi took the poison out
of their accusations with his own brazen, almost honest
admission that he was working purely for personal advan-
tage. Already in the 1980s he had notoriously built up a
close relationship with psi premier Bettino Craxi, who fled
into Tunisian exile in 1994 to escape corruption charges.
The case against Craxi included the help his government
had given the media tycoon in expanding his tv networks.
Yet in his own time in office Berlusconi was unabashed in
pursuing this same agenda, merging the role of statesman
into his higher calling as an entrepreneur.
Berlusconis maintenance of a straight-talking public
persona and throwback machismo went hand in hand with
his frequent provocatively sexualized, racist, and misog-
ynistic jokes. His rancid public statements ranged from
defending his paying for sex with a teenage girl Better
fancy beautiful girls than be gay to his claim that it
would be impossible to combat street rapes because we
would have to deploy as many soldiers as there are pretty
girls, and our women are too beautiful. In a 2003 interven-
tion at the New York Stock Exchange that perhaps summed
up his whole worldview Berlusconi declared, Italy is now a
great country to invest in... Today we have fewer commu-
nists, and those who are still there deny having been one.
Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful
secretaries.
88 24 / WINTER 2017
As with Trump, some of his more famous gaffes
merely put the unspoken assumptions of Western poli-
cymaking into unduly direct terms. After 9/11 this future
participant in the Iraq War made clear the chauvinism that
underpinned the war on terror: We should be conscious
of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a
value system that has given people widespread prosperity
in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect
for human rights and religion. This respect certainly does
not exist in the Islamic countries.
Faced with a non-politician turning public life into the
stage for his crass performances, the center-left, however,
proved unable to propose a political alternative that went
beyond decrying Berlusconi and his malign associates.
After the system-wide collapse of the early 1990s,
to accuse him of bringing his office into disrepute, of
undermining the democratic spirit of the Constitution
won through the Resistance, or even of being a fascist,
made little impression on an Italian public weary of both
such pieties and the continual media revelations of scandal,
crossing party divides.
Moreover, given the Democrats of the Lefts open
embrace of the Blairite-Clintonian Third Way, with the
partys former Communist leaders now abandoning the
legacy of Antonio Gramsci in favor of managerial neoliber-
alism, they had no basis to oppose him with an alternative
economic agenda. Stathis Kouvelakis has aptly noted the
macabre spectacle of former Communist leader Achille
Ochetto visiting Wall Street and the nato headquarters
to declare them the homes of civilization and democracy.
Subordinate to the antiberlusconismo underpinning
the Democrats, even the radical left effectively played into
the tycoons hands. This was most marked in the actions
of Rifondazione Comunista, formed by those activists
who opposed the dissolution of the Communist Party in
1991. A promising force in the 1990s, regularly receiving
up to 10percent of the vote and establishing solid social
movement links, Rifondazione was ultimately destroyed
by its obsession with antiberlusconista ideology.
An endlessly repeated analogy with Communist policy
in the 194345 Resistance in which the party had allied
with socialists, liberals, Christian-Democrats, and monar-
chists against Nazi German occupation over time came
to justify an infinitely broad, barely political front against
Berlusconi. Rifondazione entered into repeated electoral
and governmental pacts with the Democrats on this basis,
during Prodis 20068 administration even voting for the
 war in Afghanistan in order to prevent the government
collapsing and Berlusconi regaining power.
Demoralizing its own membership (and even expel-
ling those who refused to vote for the war in parliament),
Rifondazione was heavily punished at the 2008 general
election, when Berlusconi returned to government and

Berlusconis
no Communist MPs were elected for the first time since
World Warii.

rule was The Worst Product of Berlusconi:

Anti-Berlusconism
notable Indeed, while Italys historically strong Communist Party
and social movements had begun their slow decline already

less for in the early 1980s, anti-Berlusconism was the instrument

by which the followers of Blair and Clinton diverted the

economic
Italian left from an agenda of social change to an essentially
moralistic-judicial conception of political legitimacy. The
weakening of Italian trade unions following the defeated

and 1980 strike at the massive fiat Mirafiori plant in Turin

the countrys largest factory and historic bastion of the

institutional
labor movement was compounded at the turn of the
1990s with the final collapse of the Communist Party and
the neoliberal triumphalism that soon followed.

reforms As elsewhere in Europe, this weakening of social

struggle was the context in which a new classless left

as for his
emerged. The rearguard action against Berlusconi would
prove to be the decisive pretext for the Democrats of the
Lefts efforts to form a corporate-liberal Democratic Party,

use of explicitly imitating the US model. Refashioning the Com-

munists historic veneration of Italys postwar republican

office to
institutions, they came to portray Berlusconi as an abnor-
mality, external to the constitutional establishment.
Initially formed by the majority of Communists who

protect his voted to dissolve the party in 1991, across the following
two decades the Democrats of the Left consistently moved

personal
to the right in an effort to win conservative voters from
the illegitimate Berlusconi. Whereas the old Commu-
nist Party had always had some elements tending toward

business social democracy, the 1990s fragmentation of the Christian

Democrats allowed this zombie incarnation of the Left to

interests.
devour a series of Catholic and conservative forces also
opposed to the billionaire.
In government from 1996 to 2000 and 2006 to 2008,
the center-left coalitions led in turn by former leftChris-
tian Democrat Romano Prodi and ex-Communist Massimo
dAlema included not only the Democrats of the Left,
Greens, and small Communist groups (and Rifondazione
as an external ally) but also the continuity Christian
Democrats (the Italian Peoples Party) and center-right
Republicans. Another party in the Prodi coalition was Italy
of Values, a liberal force led by anti-Berlusconi prosecutor
Antonio di Pietro.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 89

90 24 / WINTER 2017
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 91
BEING ANTI-TRUMP ISNT ENOUGH

Hoping that
Finally reaching office in 1996 after decades of Chris-
tian Democratic rule, the center-left however did nothing
to challenge the historic right-wing domination of the state.
Upon arriving in his new role, Prodis ex-Communist inte-
rior minister Giorgio Napolitano promised police chiefs
the courts
would punish
he would do nothing to seek out the skeletons in the cup-
board, as he and his comrades sought to create a new party
of order. By the late 2000s the Democrats would invite
even ex-fascists like Fini into the anti-Berlusconi camp.
Outside of such parties, there were important social
Berlusconi
for his dubious
struggles during Berlusconis rule. The anticapitalist move-
ment at the turn of the millennium in Italy largely built
around social centers created a growing number of com-
munity and activist spaces and reached its peak at the 2001
g8 summit held in Genoa, where over two hundred thou-
business
dealings, the
sand people demonstrated in defiance of a police lockdown
of the harbor city.
Hosted by Berlusconi, the summit would become
a lasting icon of the antagonism between the social
movements and the Italian state. Indeed, the murder
center-
left merely
of twenty-three-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani by a
policeman, as well as aggressive nighttime police raids
on buildings where demonstrators slept, made the Genoa
events comparable even to the appalling violence orches-
trated by the Italian governments of the 1970s.
mirrored
his attempt to
Chanting Mussolini-era anthems and slogans as they
brutalized hundreds of arrested protesters, the police cer-
tainly showed their sense of what was at stake politically,
the ring of steel around the neoliberal leaders summit
giving them their chance to beat down the activist left. Yet
polarize
Italian politics
even so far as extremism in Italian police ranks has fascist
overtones, a center-left determined to display its respon-
sible credentials utterly failed to support the targeted
activists. Even an attempt to launch a public inquiry into
the fatti di Genova was sunk by Italy of Valuess insistence
around his
own persona.
that it also investigate protester actions.
As the powerful but brief surges of anticapitalist and
antiwar mobilization dissipated over the 2000s, Italian
liberalism increasingly settled into its own moralistic-ju-
dicial battle against Berlusconi, devoid of any wider social
content. This was true not only of the Democrats but also
of separate so-called citizens movements against Ber-
lusconi such as the girotondi (human chains) protests
starting in 2002, or, from 2009 Il Popolo Viola.
These mass citizens demonstrations organized on
Facebook claimed not only to be non-partisan (except for
their self-described antifascist anti-Berlusconism) but

92 24 / WINTER 2017
to stand only for the Constitution itself. Calling a No
Berlusconi Day in 2009, Il Popolo Viola issued a call to
demonstrate that deemed Italy an anomaly in the demo-
cratic West, intoning that the country had become what
foreign press call a dictatorship led by a man hostile to
all forms of free expression. While not enjoying the Dem-
ocrats support and claiming to embody a direct form
of citizen expression not mediated by parties even who had long sought an external benefactor to resolve
this more street-based march for civic values reflected
a basically similar idea of anti-Berlusconism, an ethical
crusade standing above social or political interests, beyond
the values expressed in the Constitution.
Grimly warning of the coming fascism, the spokes-
persons for Italys supposedly class-neutral citizen
initiatives enjoyed fulsome praise in the English-speaking
business press. This owed not least to the Berlusconi gov-
ernments bizarre legal row with the Economist (deemed
by the Italian premier a communist publication) and
liberals own reference to the negative image of Italy in
such organs as the Financial Times to declare that theirs
was not a normal country.
Such liberal handwringing however proved distinctly
lacking in democratic probity. Following the most recent
general election in February 2013 la Repubblica co-founder
Barbara Spinelli launched a petition, signed by anti-estab-
lishment luminaries such as the late Dario Fo, calling on the
courts to refuse Berlusconi his seat on account of his con-
flicts of interest. Spinellis attempt to fell the leader of the
second most popular electoral coalition was unsuccessful,
though the following year she renounced her own pledge to
refuse her seat in the European Parliament, before abruptly
quitting her party and then keeping the salary.
In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini had characterized the Com-
munist Party as an honest, uncorrupted country within
a country, and in that same decade its ascetic general
secretary Enrico Berlinguer sought to associate the Left
with moral austerity as he denounced rising consum-
erism and political scandal. In a very real sense the postwar
Communists did form an Italy apart, not only in winning a
third of the vote at national elections, leading mass trade
unions, or setting up millions-strong cooperatives, but
also in brandishing the platonic progressive sentiments of
Italys 1948 Constitution even despite their own exclusion
from office.
However, as this community and workplace organizing
withered during the 1990s and Communist politicians
became neoliberal Democrats, this in-group mentality mor-
phed into a hollow liberal elitism, redefining opposition
to Berlusconi as the new marker of republican virtue, able
to embrace even his right-wing and Catholic-conservative
critics. This was notably expressed in the slogan that Italy
ought to become a normal country, the demand that other
European states help unseat Berlusconi, or the meme that
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
he was a national embarrassment. Such sentiments went
hand in hand with the center-lefts increasing embrace of
the European Union as a cure for the countrys ills.
The rise of this elitist-institutional instinct across
the liberal left reached its most extreme conclusion in
the behavior of Giorgio Napolitano, president of the
republic between 2006 and 2015, a Democratic grandee
Italys dysfunctions. Beginning his political life as a fas-
cist student hoping that Nazi Germany could be Italys
benign protector, a belated Stalinist turn in 1945 saw
him turn his allegiances to the Soviets, before he became
a staunch supporter of the European Union in more
recent decades.
Although the Italian presidency is supposed to be a
neutral guardian of the Constitution, Napolitano instead
used his office to promote an EU-driven coup against Ber-
lusconis elected government, punishing the premier for
failing to meet European Central Bank budget-cutting
targets. As Perry Anderson has explained, Berlusconi was
removed from office by basically unconstitutional means,
under eu pressure that the Left would find outrageous if
applied to almost any other leader.
Conspiring with Angela Merkel and incoming Euro-
pean Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, over the summer
of 2011, Napolitano worked to position former eu commis-
sioner and Goldman Sachs adviser Mario Monti as premier.
Appointing Monti a senator for life in November 2011,
Napolitano intended to form an unelected government of
technocrats to carry out la manovra, slashing the budget
deficit without those involved ever being accountable to
the electorate. As Anderson recounts, Under threat of
destruction by the bond markets should he resist, Ber-
lusconi capitulated, and within a week Monti was sworn
in as the countrys new ruler, at the head of an unelected
cabinet of bankers, businessmen and technocrats... Those
who had long attacked Berlusconi for subverting Italian
democracy didnt seem to mind.
The supposed fascist Berlusconi thus fell victim to an
antidemocratic coup. Beyond the Monti administrations
role in implementing a slew of anti-labor and budget-cut-
ting reforms, this maneuvering was a lackluster success
even within the narrow terms of keeping Berlusconi out
of office.
When the country did again go to the polls in Feb-
ruary 2013, the Democrats again failed to win a majority.
Unable to form a government, they squared the circle by
forming a grand coalition including none other than Silvio
Berlusconi. Having used the need to fight Berlusconi as the
stick with which to discipline the Left, the Blairites now
combined with him in government.
Today Italy remains ruled by a coalition of the Demo-
crats and center-right splits from Berlusconis party; the
93
BEING ANTI-TRUMP ISNT ENOUGH
media tycoon himself left the ruling coalition at the end
of 2013 when it failed to guarantee him immunity from
prosecution. The rising opposition, in the aftermath of a
historic victory in Decembers constitutional referendum,
is dominated by the populist Five Star Movement and
hard-right Lega Nord.
Despite the 1990s folding of the historic msi into Ber-
lusconis coalition, anticapitalist fascist movements like
CasaPound/Lotta Studentesca today make increasing
headway among alienated youth. While the activist left
clings onto life, only in isolated areas has it been able to
galvanize the mood of social revolt mostly hegemonized by
Five Star and the Right. In the wake of its 2000s disasters,
Rifondazione Comunista today barely exists.
Building a Political Opposition
The lessons for the American left are clear. US Democrats
who, having long insisted that only Hillary Clinton was
moderate enough to break conservatives from the fas-
cist Trump, now speak of national unity and owing
him the chance to lead. They are just as rudderless as the
Italian Democrats who beat the drums of antiberlusconismo
before combining with Berlusconi in 2013.
Barely more clarity comes from those liberals who
more intransigently deny Trumps legitimacy and see
his administration as an unprecedented advance for white
supremacy.
The justified fear of Trumps future actions blinds pro-
gressives to even the most recent American history, with
the actual victims of the Obama or Clinton administrations
suddenly rendered nonexistent and the great history of
black and working-class struggles made a mere adjunct
to calls to rally round corporate liberalism.
The point is not that Berlusconi or Trump today are
mere paper tigers, only as bad as what went before.
Rather, it is that pandering to their honest conservative
opponents or painting them as foreign to mythologized
national values has no chance of success.
We should know this. Not just because of the harmful
effects illustrated by the Italian case, but because we saw
it fail in the United States on November 8. Exactly these
arguments were the entire basis of Hillary Clintons less-
er-evil campaign.
To persist in the offended liberal defends institutional
values approach to politics is to disregard everything
we see all around us, from Brexit to Duterte to Le Pen
94 24 / WINTER 2017
to Trump. It is to imagine that the attempt arbitrarily to
define the boundaries of legitimate political discourse
can dam a wave of populist reaction.
Of course, American politics are more deeply racialized
than Italys, and the stakes are also far higher. Govern-
ments in Rome have long served as a border sergeant for
the European Union, even outsourcing this responsibility
to Berlusconis long-time ally Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.
Casual racism, the exclusion of ethnic minorities from
almost any aspect of public life, and the lack of political
correctness are hallmarks of Italian society, and in their
own way more extreme than the US scenario.
Yet with its lower levels of immigration, relative lack
of established ethnic-minority communities, and weaker
traditions of black political organization, organized white
backlash is also less present in Italy. While many call Trump
a fascist in order to paint him as extreme and illegitimate,
the armed racism of the US right including within the
police is already a far more pervasive physical threat to
minorities than Italys own fascist-nostalgic subculture.
Political forces similarly toxic to Berlusconis allies now
rise to power in the United States in a situation of much
more dramatic social tension.
In this regard the Italian case presents a dire warning,
even despite Berlusconis ultimate ejection from office.
Today as the Democratic Party-led coalition continues its
program of tearing up postwar labor rights, detaching his
party from any vestigial attachment to the Left, the mass
opposition to him comes not from social movements or
Rifondazione Comunista, but an individualist and often
ugly populist reaction, winning huge support even in the
historic red bastions of Northern Italy.
Where the Democrats have moved to occupy the cen-
trist and center-right political space now left by Berlusconis
ailing party, the leftists who joined their anti-Berlusconi
crusade now lie in ruins. Instead of a Podemos or Syriza,
2010s Italy has the Five Star Movement and Lega Nord
an anti-political revolt shaped not by social struggle or a
vision of progress, but atomization, reactionary common
sense, and even xenophobia. It got Trump, not Bernie.
The Lefts alignment with neoliberal centrists against
Berlusconi did nothing to thwart right-wing populism or
keep racism out of politics. It guaranteed these forces
unchallenged hold over millions of voters, while destroying
its own alternative voice. Looking over the wreckage of the
2016 campaign, the US left must avoid making a similar
mistake.
 THE
TUMBREL

RIGHTEOUS
HATERADE AGAINST
THE GREAT ENEMIES
OF PROLETARIAN
PROGRESS.
 THE TUMBREL
GIRONDINS
In a remarkable display of self-as-
suredness entirely unjustified after
uniformly failing to predict Trumps
victory our professional commen-
tariat immediately began putting
forward theories to explain Trumps
success. Disregarding explanations
that tend toward the bogus fbi
director James Comey handed Trump
the election or the conspirato-
rial Russian hackers the more
reasonable of this group settled on
the narrative that racism, and to a
lesser extent sexism, are to blame for
Trumps victory.
The racism elected Trump
take became the preferred explana-
tion almost instantly. The Washington
Posts Jim Tankersly penned a column
on November9 headlined How
Trump Won: The Revenge of Work-
ing-Class Whites. Slates Jamelle
Bouie ran a piece under the more
succinct title White Won. Damon
Young wrote in the Nation that
Trump voters didnt vote against
their own interests, they voted for
the preservation of white privilege
their paramount interest.
BY ALEX PRESS
False Answers
The Clinton establishment has
every interest in obscuring
why they really lost in November.
Cosmos Brittney Cooper rightly blue-collar white men over the coals,
noted the ways in which racism and they finally had enough.
overlaps with sexism and class, but The story of white racists electing
decided to blame whiteness before Trump is an easy story to tell; after
gender because a majority of white all, racism is rampant in the United
women 53percent voted for States. But the data belie such simple
Trump. Vox, hedging its bets, ran explanations. Indeed, Tankersly him-
both stories, publishing a piece self notes that half of these voters
exploring how Trump won because of said the economy was the most
misogyny and another on how Trumps important issue in their vote, com-
win is a reminder of the power of pared to 14% for immigration. A
racism. majority said international trade takes
Tankerslys Post column, which away American jobs. Three-quarters
blames the racist white working class said the economy is not good or
for handing key Rust Belt states to poor and nearly 8 in 10 said their per-
Trump, is representative of the field. sonal financial situation was the same
He argues that for the past 40years, or worse than it was four years ago.
the American economy has raked In other words, many Trump
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 97
 GIRONDINS
voters are experiencing the eco-
nomic anxiety that many mainstream
pundits have brushed off from their
comfortable coastal homes, choosing
instead to characterize these voters as
hicks, rednecks, deplorables.
So while its true that many
Trump voters do express higher rates
of racist or sexist views, this shouldnt
be the end of the conversation. People
dont have pre-packaged ideological
beliefs. Their ideas are rooted in an
ambiguous set of experiences open
to interpretation and change.
We need to talk about why some
of the white working class broke to
the right this election cycle but not
the last, and what it would look like
to offer an alternative.
The punditrys relentless run-
downs of survey and exit polling
data takes as a given what must be
explained. Why did key Rust Belt
demographics switch their support
from the Democrats to Republicans?
Why did so many voters not vote?
Plenty of counties that Obama easily
carried flipped to Trump. When
liberal elites cast these areas as irre-
vocably bigoted, we should see this
98
The Left must
offer all working-
class voters
a compelling
narrative that
blames the rich.
for what it is: a refusal to do politics,
one that stems from a fear that what
they might discover could lead to a
condemnation of Clintons campaign
strategy, placing the blame for her
loss squarely on the bankruptcy of her
ideas and the short-sightedness of her
campaign rather than voters.
This is exactly what critical
Clinton campaign analyses show,
few as they are in number. Politicos
Edward-Isaac Doveres thorough
postmortem on how Clinton lost
Michigan details a top-heavy and
data-driven campaign that couldnt
see the walls collapsing around
it. The alias for Clinton hq was
Brooklyn an appropriate mon- it failed or tell us what we must do
iker for a campaign so disconnected
from the Rust Belt that it was blind
to the droves of voters flocking to
Trump.
The refusal of Democratic elites
to consider their culpability in the
election outcome showed itself in a
particularly stark light in a post-elec-
tion interview with Jess McIntosh,
the Clinton campaigns director of
communications. When msnbcs
Chris Hayes pointed out that Clinton
24 / WINTER 2017
didnt get much more of the white
womens vote than Obama, McIntosh
responded: Internalized misogyny is
a real thing. In other words, it was
womens irrevocable sexism, not
bad strategy, which cost Clinton the
election.
We should expect nothing less
from the liberal establishment, poli-
ticians and pundits alike. It will always
shrug off responsibility for its fail-
ures. But in this political moment
we cant let it. We cannot leave our
understanding of how we got here to
the so-called experts.
The establishment wont pro-
vide an honest assessment of how
better. Rather than catering to racists
or sexists precisely what Clintons
campaign did the Left must offer
all working-class voters a compel-
ling narrative that blames the rich
for the immiseration of the majority,
one that gives people a reason to
vote rather than stay home. The
Clinton campaign was never going
to articulate that understanding.
Socialists must do this ourselves, and
we can.
100 24 / WINTER 2017
 THE TUMBREL
THERMIDOR
A new right is alive in America
and its weird. While some alt-right
figures like Richard Spencer aspire
pretentiously to a style of European
blood-and-soil right-identitarianism,
the real creative energy behind the
new right-wing sensibility online
today springs from anonymous chan
culture. Nihilistically reveling in
shock, transgression, and trolling,
youre more likely to find these young
men posting diaper porn, My Little
Pony hate, and swastika-laden Pepe
memes than listening to Wagner or
reading Alain de Benoist.
Feminist analysis has often
characterized the movements
rank misogyny as a throwback to
toxic patriarchal traditions. Its sty-
listic roots, however, could be more
accurately traced back through avant-
garde movements to the Marquis de
Sade, whose scandalous libertinism
and extreme pornographic writings
led to his imprisonment, than it could
to Edmund Burke, who wrote amid
the tumult of the French Revolution
that manners are of more importance
than laws.
ANGELA NAGLE
ILLUSTRATION BY
JAMES CLAPHAM
Paleocons
for Porn
The new online right draws
on transgressive aesthetics
to rebrand conservative
politics. Its a contradiction
that wont hold.
Chan cultures shitposting and its leaderlessness and its nonhierar-
crapflooding shares more with the chical form. But as Evgeny Morozov
Paris 68 slogan It is forbidden to warned, this network fetish could
forbid! than it does with Phyllis easily cause us to overlook the real
Schlafly or William F. Buckley. Its content of any movements ideas,
dark obsessions with cruelty, rape, which in this case remains the lowest
humiliation, suicide, murder, race, form of a vacuous, faux-ironic, snig-
and genocide taboos have led chan gering moral imbecilism. Its empty
culture to an avant-garde antimoral postmodern style has energized and
sensibility not unlike French dra- fused with the openly antisemitic
matist Antonin Artauds theater of and white-supremacist core of the
cruelty: There can be no spectacle alt-right who mean what they say lit-
without an element of cruelty as the erally but snobbishly roll their eyes
basis of every show. at the normies and basic bitches
In the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing who dont get their sophisticated
days of the early Occupy movement, non-irony as they Sieg Heil and very
pro-hacker progressives did a great clearly lay out their vision for a white
deal to glamorize 4chan because of ethno-state.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 101
 THERMIDOR
Infighting over the precise defi-
nition of alt-right may continue
for years to come, but the broadest
interpretation encompasses various,
often warring, factions from the
white supremacists who consider
themselves the rightful owners of
the term, to followers of Nick Lands
Dark Enlightenment, to the alt-
light, which includes social media
figures like Milo Yiannopolous,
right-transhumanism, traditionalist
neo-masculinism, and right-wing
chan-influenced culture broadly.
What these factions have in common
is that they constitute a total break
from the preexisting American con-
servative movement and, in different
ways, they all seek to reassert the
power of some combination of the
last remaining identity group yet to
be admitted to the identity politics
tent white heterosexual men.
The real numbers of the hard,
ideologically driven alt-right remain
small. Even with the emboldening
Trump win, the National Policy
Institute conference from which
the famous Hail Trump! footage
came had only around two hundred
adherents in attendance. Site traffic
to the more serious alt-right sites like
Counter Currents and RadixJournal
are all under three hundred thousand
visits monthly, with an average visit
duration of one to two minutes.
This small alt-right is influenced
by the French new right, sometimes
called the Gramscians of the Right,
and Richard Spencer stresses the
importance of profoundly changing
the culture, not just cutting taxes.
But people like Milo and others in the
sjw-mocking alt-light have most
successfully used media and culture
in this Gramscian sense.
Milo even regularly says he
102
doesnt care about politics, instead
quoting Andrew Breitbarts line that
politics is downstream from culture.
In a relatively short period, Breitbart
News has far outgrown other main-
stream, establishment conservative
outlets with ninety-three million
visits in the last month. The hard alt-
right regards Milo as a kike faggot,
but his and Allum Bokharis widely
cited and highly flattering article
about them boosted their profile
enormously.
The alt-
right mourns
European
cultures decline
but has itself
created the
most degraded
and degenerate
forms of culture
the West has
ever seen.
Other alt-light figures include
Mike Cernovich, author of Gorilla
Mindset and MAGA Mindset, who
has 182,000 Twitter followers, and
Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of Vice
Media who has 140,000 followers and
two different YouTube shows. Tomi
Lahrens white power Barbie miscuity, and the amoral libertine
video condemning Colin Kaepernick
for not standing for the national
anthem garnered 66million views.
24 / WINTER 2017
The Alex Jones channel has posted
over 29,000 videos on YouTube, each
with views in the five and six figures.
While liberals enjoyed cultural
hegemony and became compla-
cent and intellectually lazy, the
young transgressives of the alt-right
produced an undeniable level of cre-
ative energy. The war for the soul of
America Pat Buchanan waged in the
1990s has long since been won by
the cultural left, and the tyrannical
overreach of liberal intellectual con-
formity undoubtedly helped create
the youthful rebellion against it.
But this temporary alliance of very
different factions the most stark
being between the traditionalist
right and the libertinism of chan cul-
ture has produced a schizophrenic
incoherence.
The alt-right mourns European
cultures decline but has itself created
the most degraded and degenerate
forms of culture the West has ever
seen in its own fetid forums. It roman-
ticizes the West but hates its Christian
slave morality and the best of its
intellectual traditions. The alt-right
uses the now completely bankrupt
language of counterculture and trans-
gression when they talk about being
the new punk, which should serve as
a reminder of how empty those ideas
have now become.
But how will that framing con-
tinue to make sense during the
Trump era? When liberals are no
longer in power, the philosoph-
ical irreconcilability between its
paleo-conservatism, which aims
for a return to traditional marriage
while disapproving of porn and pro-
Internet culture from which all the
real energy has emerged, will soon
begin to show.
 THE TUMBREL
VERSAILLES BY BRENDAN JAMES

Kiss the Ring

1. The Ricketts Family After months of denouncing

Trump, the rich and powerful
Before realize they could use some
I hear the Rickets [sic] family, who
Donald in their life after all.
own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly
spending $s against me. They better
be careful, they have a lot to hide!

Trump, March 2016.

2. Linda McMahon
The Ricketts, led by patriarch Joe,
founder of online trading hub
td Ameritrade, has long put their Before
money to work in belt-tightening I think [his] rhetoric has really
initiatives like Ending Spending, gone over the top. Some of the
Inc. and massive donations to the comments that have been made,
Republican Party the old version. I think, are quite deplorable.
In the primaries, Joe and his wife
Linda McMahon, March 2016.
Marlene gave $5.5 million to the anti-
Trump pac Our Principles and After
earned themselves an angry Trump
Despite using the D-word on Trump
tweet.
months before Hillary Clinton
After slammed Trumps supporters as a
nasty little basket, the wwes
Joes son Todd, co-owner of the Linda McMahon kept her options
Chicago Cubs and Gary Johnson open and eventually donated
donor, is now Trumps deputy $6million to a pro-Trump pac.
commerce secretary. Shes now his pick for Small
Business Administration head.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 103

 VERSAILLES
3. Steve Case
Before
Co-founder and ex-ceo of aol,
Case positioned himself as a Clinton
supporter despite his distaste for
hyper-partisanship and politics in
general. I agree with Clinton on
the need to control the deficit, he said,
as well as her goal to keep America
the most innovative and entrepre-
neurial nation in the world.
After
Hours after Trumps victory, Case
tweeted an open letter to the president-
elect inviting him to embrace his
ideas for a new economy based around
startup culture and Silicon Valley
values. Im looking forward to
working with you on these impor-
tant issues.
4. Marc Benioff
Before
Proudly declaring that he donated
to both Barack Obama and Paul Ryan
in 2012, the ceo of Salesforce
nevertheless vocally backed Clinton
last year. Benioff cited her com-
mitment to education. Im deeply
worried about the kids, he told
cnn.
After
As soon as Trump won, Benioff
tweeted his congratulations, said he
looked forward to slashing the
national debt, and speculated that
Trumps racism and xenophobia
were probably exaggerated anyway.
104
5. Sheldon Adelson
Before
The biggest and wrinkliest gorilla
in the room, casino mogul and pro-
Israel fanatic Sheldon Adelson
snubbed Trump through the entire
primary and continued to hold
out even after the convention, report-
edly disturbed by Trumps wild
temper and lack of discipline.
After
When the payoff finally came, it came
in a big way: Adelson dumped
$25million into Trumps campaign
last minute, handily becoming the big-
gest donor to either party in the
entire 2016 race. Hes now a key liai-
son between Trump and the
Netanyahu regime. I felt strongly
that someone with that level
of ceo experience would be well-
trained for the job of president,
he said. It turns out that is exactly
what we are getting in Trump. pro-Rubio super pac, and made
24 / WINTER 2017
6. Robert Mercer
Before
ceo of Renaissance Technologies,
Robert Mercer started as a hardcore
Ted Cruz guy, founding and donat-
ing $13.5million to a flush Cruz super
pac in the primaries. He flirted
briefly with Marco Rubio as well in a
desperate attempt to keep money
flowing to a more traditional Repub-
lican candidate.
After
Quicker than some of his fellow
heavyweights, Mercer kissed
Trumps ring in June and converted
to a pro-Trump super pac, giv-
ing another $1.5million. Now, along
with notorious Trump advisor
Steve Bannon, hes a main backer of
Cambridge Analytica, the data
firm behind Trumps operation and
the Brexit Leave campaign.
7. Paul Singer
Before
Hedge fund daddy Paul Singer
funnelled $2.5million to an
anti-Trump pac and $5million to a
headlines for declaring Trump would
cause a depression. The most
impactful of the economic policies
that I recall him coming out for
are these anti-trade policies, Singer
whined.
After
Now that Trump is in charge, Singer
is making nice, joining him at a
fundraising breakfast and reportedly
preparing a fat donation to the
inauguration committee.

8. The National Review
Before
Always the mouthpiece of the bus-
iness wing of the Republican
Party, National Review devoted an
entire January 2016 issue to
making the case against trump,
featuring right-wing luminaries
from Glenn Beck to Jonah Goldberg
to John Podhoretz. Some conser-
vatives have made it their business
to make excuses for Trump and
duly get pats on the head from him,
the editors wrote. Count us out.
If Trump were to become the
president, the Republican nominee,
or even a failed candidate with
strong conservative support, what
would that say about conserva-
tives? The movement that ground
down the Soviet Union and took
the shine, at least temporarily, off
socialism would have fallen in
behind a huckster.
After
By the end of summer the magazine
had begun looking on the bright
side, running pieces like, Trump
Can Fix It. (Written by onetime
media titan and convicted fraudster
Conrad Black, no less.)
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Kiss the Ring
9. Richard Uihlein
Before
The founder of industrial distributor
Uline, Uihlein gave $1million to
the anti-Trump pac Our Principles,
joining Paul Singer and the Ricketts.
After
And, like those fat cats before him,
Uihlein soon flipped and gave
$5,400 to the Trump campaign and
$325,000 to Trump Victory, the
joint fundraising committee with
the rnc. His wife Liz ended up
on Trumps economic advisory
committee.
105
ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARCO MICCICH
The Glory
Days
Are Over
NICOLE ASCHOFF

Trumps victory
signals a
deep crisis of
neoliberalism.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 107

THE GLORY DAYS ARE OVER
P
bs NewsHour is generally pretty staid
stuff like Ambien but less habit-
forming. Election night, however, was
something else. As the evening wore
on, and the pundits succumbed to quiet
bafflement, or barely concealed panic, the conversation
became punctuated by awkward pauses and murmurs.
Searching for a toehold, co-host Judy Woodruff asked
Amy Walters whether Trumps victory wasnt similar to
Brexit both because despite close last-minute polls, Brit-
ains vote to leave the European Union was a shock, and
because Trump himself had promised more Brexit for the
United States.
The Brexit analogy was Woodruff trying to make sense
of an event we were assured wouldnt happen, akin for
many liberals to the rogue gas planet colliding with Earth
in Lars von Triers Melancholia. She wasnt alone. Many
saw Brexit as a bellwether of the growing global discontent
with elites, globalism, and the political status quo a
feeling confirmed by Trumps victory.
In a NewsHour conversation over the summer, David
Brooks and Mark Shields discussed this very topic. Brooks
observed that in country after country, were seeing a
conflict between what you might call urban cosmopoli-
tans and less well-educated ethnic nationalism, and ethnic
nationalism is on the rise.
Shields agreed. I think the forces and the advocates
of globalization have been primarily obsessed with the
well-being of the investor class and the stockholders and
the shareholders, and been indifferent, oftentimes callous,
to the dislocation and the suffering that people in coun-
tries affected by this trade, the expanded trade, the larger
economy, who have been victimized by it. According to
Shields, this elitist condescension facilitated the rise
of right-wing figures like Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen,
and Trump.
Robert Reich summed up the sentiment in a nutshell
two days after the election: Americans have rebelled by
supporting someone who wants to fortify America against
foreigners as well as foreign-made goods.
Yet Brexit and Trumps election signify something
more than popular anger, xenophobia, and cultural anxiety.
They mark the end of neoliberalisms heyday and the emer-
gence of a competing capitalist vision. This vision, at least
rhetorically, rejects two of the founding tenants under-
girding contemporary global capitalism: the global trade
architecture operating through institutions like nafta and
108 24 / WINTER 2017
the inter-state alliances buttressing Americas decades-old
geopolitical vision and goals.
The End of the End of History
The decline of neoliberalism is emphatically not the decline
of capitalism, so what does it mean to say neoliberalism is
past its sell-by date? Neoliberalism is not, after all, just a
set of policies that can be discontinued and replaced with
something else neoliberal capitalism has birthed a com-
plex global economy that isnt going to change overnight.
Moreover, neoliberalism is also an encompassing set of
orienting ideas that pervades all spheres of life; its core
ethos of faith in private enterprise, ever-expanding com-
modification, and bootstrap individualism remains robust.
Yet Trump, at least rhetorically, has thumbed his nose
at the two keystones of American hegemony: existing
free trade agreements and the institutions and alliances
that underpin US-led capitalism. This has created a deep
crisis of legitimacy for the dominant ideas guiding global
capitalism.
Now whether Trump actually takes an ax to these
principles remains to be seen. His cabinet looks pretty
swampy at the moment: the Heritage Foundation is
quarterbacking his transition team, and his cabinet picks,
for the most part, would sit comfortably in any Republican
administration.
Moreover, Trumps roadmap like his plan to
generate public-private partnerships to carry out a tril-
lion-dollar infrastructure overhaul, or rewrite nafta
by tacking a 35percent tariff onto goods exported to
the United States by American companies operating in
Mexico lacks a certain plausibility given the makeup
of Congress and the deep, functional integration of global
and regional value chains.
Nevertheless, this competing vision has the Third
Way wonks committed to the thirty-year bipartisan con-
sensus worried.
Francis Fukuyama, in a post-election op-ed, put it
bluntly: Donald Trumps stunning electoral defeat of
Hillary Clinton marks a watershed not just for Amer-
ican politics, but for the entire world order. Fukuyama
famously dubbed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse
of the Soviet Union the end of history a cute turn of
phrase indicating the triumph of US-style global capitalism.
Today, that era is over. According to Fukuyama, we appear
to be entering a new age of populist nationalism.
 Comparing Trumps victory to the toppling of the
Berlin Wall was a common trope in the days after the elec-
tion. Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist at
the Financial Times, thinks

it is symbolic and poignant that the election of Donald

Trump was confirmed on the morning of November
9, 27 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
That was a moment of triumph for US leadership
Brexit and
Trump mark
and ushered in a period of optimism and expansion for
liberal and democratic ideas around the world. That
era has been definitively ended by Mr. Trumps victory.

Political columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote something

similar in the Washington Post:
the end of
Twenty-five years ago December 1991 commu-
nism died, the Cold War ended... That dawn marked
neoliberalisms
the ultimate triumph of the liberal democratic idea.
It promised an era of Western dominance led by a
heyday and the
emergence
preeminent America, the worlds last remaining super-
power That era is over.

of a competing
For these opinion makers, the death of the post-Communist
liberal world is a terrible thing. For them it represents
something great that has been thrown away in a fit of
stupidity.
The funeral dirge for the liberal world order goes some-
capitalist
vision.
thing like this: After World War ii, some forward-thinking
Americans began setting up a system of rules and institu-
tions that allowed global trade, investment, and democracy
to flourish. This system evolved and improved over the
decades, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
giving us container ships full of Pong chairs and Play-
Stations, all while boosting wealth and democracy for the
global poor.
According to liberals, the linchpin of this awesome-
ness was the United States unselfishly superintending the
global economy and providing a model of democracy that
world masses aspired to and authoritarian governments
feared. In his op-ed Richman shares a misty-eyed memory
of John F. Kennedy back in 1961 saying, Let every nation
know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay
any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support
any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the
success of liberty.
Alas, no longer. Financial Times editor Lionel Barber
declares that in 2016, we witnessed the birth of the Fourth
Way a new brand of politics that is nativist, protectionist
and bathed in a cultural nostalgia.
Instead of liberty first, liberals lament that now
its America first, that instead of idealism we have the
pinched nationalism of Trump, enabled by a gener-
ation fattened by fast food and infantilised by reality
television.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 109

110 24 / WINTER 2017
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 111
THE GLORY DAYS ARE OVER

Behind Hillary
But just as Trump has spun a fantasy of renewed great-
ness, in mourning the status quo of the past three decades
liberals are engaging in some wishful thinking of their own.
The bipartisan elements of hegemony globalization
and international alliances that have underpinned the
Clintons
Everything
American Century have themselves generated the deep
contradictions that explain Trumps victory.

Globalization and Its Discontents is fine, chill

campaign
Consider the global trade architecture. The elite con-
sensus of the past thirty years was that lowered barriers
to trade, production, and capital were essential to liberty
and prosperity. Today, globalization is increasingly being
denounced by respectable folks, and not just the Pope.
slogan and
Obamas
Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, recently
insisted that what were facing right now in terms of
the rise of populism and divisive and fearful narratives
around the world its based around the fact that global-
ization doesnt seem to be working for the middle class,
calm were
aggressive,
for ordinary people.
Granted, many on the global left criticized globaliza-
tion. But the bloated center was gung-ho and criticism
was slow to catch on. By the nineties, neoliberal policies
and ideas had become common sense. For people like Tom
ongoing
moves to
Friedman, proof positive of globalizations benefits was
the rebirth of the US economy beginning in the 1980s.
Following a decade when stagflation and political unrest
were wreaking havoc, neoliberal ideas brought about a
belle epoch, at least for the privileged.
fortify the
neoliberal
The US government resolved its crisis on the backs of
working people: it helped free up corporations to restruc-
ture operations, fire workers, and demand union givebacks;
it deregulated finance, exploding its avenues for profit-
ability; and it greased the wheels through militarism and
model.
debt spending.
Three decades of de- and re-regulation signposted
by Reagan-Thatcher, the wto, the single European market
and currency, the integration of China closed the book
on Keynesianism and the core ideas of Bretton Woods and
essentially removed restrictions on the flow of capital,
goods, and services. For global elites these were heady days.
These resolutions were successful for a time profit
rates soared, unemployment was kept in check, and
America seemed back on top. And others seemed to ben-
efit too. Sure, not those failed states in Africa or Latin
American workers and farmers, but the global bourgeoisie,

112 24 / WINTER 2017

transnational corporations, and the Asian tigers did amaz-
ingly in the eighties and nineties, and China and India
soared in the 2000s.
But if the bipartisan elite saw neoliberal globalization
as a way of ordering the global economy that brought huge
rewards, it also brought major crises.
The global financial and trade architecture that
emerged in the eighties and nineties ensured that you can
get your new iPhone in time for Christmas, but it was also a
wrecking ball that devastated economies and working-class
communities. Currency mayhem and spiraling debt, dein-
dustrialization, environmental destruction, exploitation,
and dispossession became the norm in the liberal world
order now mourned.
These contradictions manifested themselves in dozens
of financial crises in the 1990s and 2000s in countries
like Argentina, Mexico, Russia, and South Korea. 2008
brought a crisis that dwarfed previous crises in its scale
and scope as it rippled across the globe, dragging Europe
into its undertow in 2010, and triggering a worldwide
spike in food prices.
All the while the United States, the European Union,
and the institutions they created kept trucking along,
putting out fires, insisting that the kinks had been worked
out. The facts speak for themselves.
In the United States workforce participation is down,
and globalism has become enemy number one. The
past few decades have seen real wages stall and then drop
for most workers. Families have had to work harder and
longer to stay in place, and many cant even manage that.
Good jobs those with humane hours, decent pay, and
benefits are scarce, and anxiety about the economy is
persistent. The rich are riding high bolstered by tax
cuts, corporate subsidies, bank bailouts while poor and
working people stand on the sidelines. As Reich says:
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indi-
cators dont reflect the insecurity most Americans
continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and
unfairness they experience.
Advocates of the status quo are loath to acknowledge
these plain truths. But their actions demonstrate a defi-
nite awareness of cracks in the system. Behind Hillary
Clintons Everything is fine, chill campaign slogan and
Obamas calm were aggressive, ongoing moves to fortify
the neoliberal model.
Consider the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal
which Barber neatly characterizes as a geopolitical
building block as well as a trade pact. tpp advocates saw
the agreement as a way to protect the system theyve built
since the 1980s a global trade system for capital, but also
heavily weighted in favor of protecting wealthy states and
transnational corporations.
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
Protecting the system meant keeping China out of the
deal, thereby limiting its disruptive competitive potential.
But a growing chorus of voices didnt want to protect the
system any longer. In the end, Trump didnt destroy the
tpp; his opposition to the agreement reflected an already
overwhelming sentiment rooted in popular anger over the
costs and benefits of globalization.
Now that the pact looks dead in the water, China is
pushing forward its own regional deal the Regional Com-
prehensive Economic Partnership and countries like Japan
and Russia are interested. This, to put it mildly, is a horrifying
prospect for champions of the liberal world order.
The Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove
The question of China brings up the other half of the US
hegemony sandwich that elites recall so fondly: the alli-
ances that underpin the global trade and financial system.
They represent the iron fist in the velvet glove the insti-
tutions and arrangements that align states with Americas
vision and goals, whether willingly or by force.
Like all hegemonic projects, Americas has always
relied on both coercion and consent. The US government
skillfully blended these elements in the decades following
World War ii with tactics that spanned the spectrum from
full-scale war and slaughter, secret invasions, torture, and
covert ops, to sanctions, diplomacy, and mutual agreements
like the wto, nafta, and nato. Coercion and consent
were the yin and yang of US power a model of power
that for the past three decades hid its nasty bits behind
the apparent efficiency and neutrality of neoliberalism
and liberal democracy.
Trump says this model of power isnt making America
great anymore. Angered by the snubs and slights of our
ungrateful global inferiors, he is promising to go lone wolf.
Hes talking to Taiwan on the phone instead of Theresa
May, hiring pals of Putin, threatening to defund nato,
and stepping up denunciations of China.
This rhetorical realignment, much more than Trumps
racist slurs and misogynist quips, gives status-quo scholars
the goosebumps. With Trump in charge, who will challenge
Chinas influence in Asia? Who will keep Russias aggres-
sion in check? Who will preserve the liberal world order?
Instead of solemnly pledging allegiance to the Third Way,
Trump is pushing an inward political-economic vision.
Granted, Trump is a masterful opportunist and a
habitual liar, so it is impossible to get a bead on what hell
actually do in office. As Leo Panitch argues, he may settle on
a compromise, facilitating a continuation of American-led
global capitalism on xenophobic nationalist grounds
a right-wing revival that blends most of the features of
neoliberal globalization with brown infrastructure cap-
italism at home.
113
THE GLORY DAYS ARE OVER
Nonetheless, Trumps victory signals a deep crisis of
legitimacy for the reigning ideology, in large part because
hes not alone. Hes the lead blowhard in a growing gallery
of right-wingers whistling the same nativist tune. As Barber
says, Trump gives succor to the demagogues-in-waiting
like Le Pen.
Increasingly, states are rejecting the Third Way model
of open borders and inclusion. This is a significant shift. In
the decades after World War ii, Americas signature blend
of coercion and consent was viewed as a viable, valuable
model countries around the world signed on to the vision
because it provided growth and prosperity and was seen as
legitimate in the eyes of their populaces. Those countries
that didnt benefit or protested the rules of the game
poor countries, colonies, those in the Soviet bloc were
either repressed or excluded. After a rocky patch in the
seventies, new trade agreements rejuvenated geopolitical
alliances, while the solidification of the European Union
and the dynamism of India and China revived the hege-
mony of the United States.
But the contradictions of this revival generated a
crisis of legitimacy that cant be papered over with more
bank bailouts and quantitative easing. Today the global
geopolitical landscape is increasingly fraught. Indeed,
Barber thinks that a Le Pen victory in 2017 would surely
spell the end of the European Union. The political
and social costs of neoliberal globalization and finan-
cialization have proven impossible to repress in the
long run.
Breaking the Impasse
This legitimacy crisis is what has birthed Trump. And the
muddled nature of his vision speaks to the impasse that
countries find themselves in. The reigning centrist elites
and their party alliances are seen as hopelessly bankrupt,
and the Left has no power to enact its demands. This leaves
the Right to speak to working peoples fears and anger,
but that right is itself divided between capitalist elites and
social conservatives. Trump simply stepped into a vacancy,
an opportunist capitalist speaking the confused language
of an angry right-populist vision.
This is why the Brexit analogy resonated with
observers. It provided the connective tissue to talk about
a deep, multi-dimensional crisis. Unfortunately Brexit also
showed the winning strategy so far for dealing with this
crisis, and that strategy laced with hate and fear sucks.
114 24 / WINTER 2017
But the wailing neoliberals are equally deluded if they
think its possible to turn back time. Trump did not create
the crisis of neoliberalism. He simply tugged on the thread
of a model of power that has been rapidly unraveling for
a decade or more.
Capitalism is a masterful crisis generator of course;
contradictions are built into the dna of our for-profit
system, and crises have helped the system survive and
adapt for centuries. But at the same time, the arrange-
ments ordering the global geopolitical system seem to be
generating more crises than they are resolving these days.
Put differently, while the serious problems we are
facing like global warming and labor exclusion are
the result of longue dure processes like industrialization,
imperialism, and technological advance, they are now
reaching acute proportions, exacerbated by financialization
and neoliberal globalization. And as Giovanni Arrighi and
Beverly Silver have argued, the US hegemonic model is
increasingly unable to deal with these problems.
The rise of demagogues like Trump show the withering
away of consent, leaving only coercion. Heedless of its
failures after sowing nothing but chaos and suffering
in Iraq, Afghanistan, and countless other war zones
the US state is rapidly extending its tentacles into Africa
and ramping up its drone program. At home, Obama has
deported nearly two million people, the nsa spies on our
daydreams, and the police continue to kill with abandon.
Trump will not change this. Hell make it worse. Hes
a xenophobic, misogynist crook and his presence in the
White House will empower the most reprehensible ele-
ments in US society. But contrary to the misconceptions
of Third Wayers, Clinton would have made things worse
too. The global order is in crisis. Nostalgia for the mythical
days when America would bear any burden for the success
of liberty is a waste of time.
We need something different something more
than a defensive progressivism. We need to challenge
the common sense of our for-profit system by offering
an alternative vision of change rooted in worker power,
social rights, and democratic control over the institutions
central to our lives.
And more than ever we need this movement in the
United States. Trumpism is not going away, nor will the US
government quietly relinquish the keys to some imagined
global successor. The politics that prevail in America will
determine whether the transition from neoliberal capitalism
to something else is a step forward or a descent into hell.
LEFTOVERS

OUR WORK HERE

IS NOT YET DONE.
 LEFTOVERS
POPULAR FRONT BY ELLA MAHONY

Results &
Prospects:
Q4 2016

Back in November, the standoff With Trump in office, we need

in North Dakota between water
resistance, but also a credible
protectors and Energy Transfer Part-
ners (etp), the company behind the alternative.
Dakota Access Pipeline, set a tense
backdrop to the national election.
Law enforcement was growing more
aggressive towards the protesters,
and it looked like things might reach
a bloody conclusion until the Army
Corps of Engineers abruptly denied
etp the permits needed to drill below
the Missouri River.
Many were overjoyed at the
announcement. But with Donald
Trump headed for the White House,
activists dug in for the winter. Signs
on camp lavatories listed the symp-
toms of hypothermia the day of the
Army Corps announcement, water
protectors faced 37mph winds and
snow heavy enough to collapse all but
the soundest structures. Still, they
persisted. We should all stay until
its over, said Standing Still of the
Ojibwe tribe. It starts here and it
should stop here. If it goes past this
river, its going to affect 18million
people down the Missouri river.

JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE 117

 POPULAR FRONT
The harrowing conditions at
Standing Rock can be seen as a met-
aphor for the Lefts arduous task over
the next four years. Fortunately, social
movements seem to be responding
with similar determination. The week
after the election, tens of thousands
took to the streets, many of them
middle- and high-schoolers. The
largest student walkout occurred in
Seattle, where five thousand students
from twenty middle and high schools
took the streets; they were joined by
students in Portland, San Francisco,
Maryland, and Los Angeles (where
they chanted Undocumented and
unafraid and No papers, no fear).
In Boston, students briefly occupied
City Hall in an attempt to deliver their
demands, which included making
Massachusetts a sanctuary state.
The walkouts showed that young
people are acutely aware of the threat
Trumps education agenda led by
wealthy homeschooler Betsy DeVos
and his immigration agenda pose
to their future. Their willingness
to sacrifice to build an organized
resistance risking suspension or
expulsion stands as a model to us
all.
Still, despite these impressive
mobilizations, social movements
have so far failed to cohere a strategy
to respond to an empowered right.
Republicans January offensive
against Planned Parenthood, for
example, elicited the usual social
media rage and obtuse paeans to
the organizations cancer-screening
services, but little else. Abortion
is health care is a far cry from the
assertive declarations of the feminists
who first won us abortion rights in
the first place.
But its not just about picking
a new slogan. Hillary Clintons
118
If socialists are
too timid to
contest elections
and stand in
front of voters,
they will never
build a mass
movement.
campaign sought to make the election
a referendum on sexism. Instead she
cemented modern feminisms image
as a self-help philosophy for female
corporate climbers. Feminists must
rebuild a fighting movement that can
reach working-class women and lgbt
people where they are most threat-
ened the red states and rural areas
that Trump dominated. Luckily, there
are contemporary models to emulate:
Polands Black Monday strike, front of voters, they will never build
which mobilized thousands against
a draconian anti-abortion bill, and
the #NiUnaMenos protests against
an epidemic of femicides in South
America.
Yet the coming assaults on
women, lgbt people, labor, and
people of color cant be stemmed on
the streets alone. The contradictory
success of Sanders-style ballot mea-
sures in November demonstrated
that there is a broad base for potential
left-wing candidates to draw on and a
hunger for more ambitious, redistri-
butionist policies.
Electoral politics do present
serious dangers for the Left. For
one, the electoral cycle imposes its
own timeline on movements, often
causing activists to sacrifice long-term
visions for the short-time imperatives
of petition deadlines, fundraising, and
legislative politicking. For another,
24 / WINTER 2017
the dearth of experienced, authentic
left candidates often encourages
movements to take the shortcut
and endorse politicians who have no
organic connection to the Left and
do nothing to build its independent
power.
But a set of dangerous fanatics
holds the levers of state power, and
the official opposition in the Demo-
cratic Party is incapable of seriously
challenging them. We need a left
alternative even if it falters at times
in the short term. As the Sanders cam-
paign showed, even lost elections are
opportunities to promote a vision and
build a living, breathing base.
Many working class and poor
people, who work too much and are
excluded from higher education,
come to politics through unions or
through elections. If socialists are too
timid to contest elections and stand in
a mass movement.
By all accounts, social move-
ments have ballooned in size since
the national election. But the danger
is that they will amount to little more
than an incoherent network, unified
only by vague opposition to the per-
sonality of Trump and the specter of
the deplorables that back him.
A rabble of antis with no
broader vision or plan to address the
deep suffering that fueled Trumps
rise will only play into the presi-
dent-elects playbook. The Left must
see the abject failure of the Clinton
campaign for what it is: an opportu-
nity to assert itself as a freestanding
alternative both to a bankrupt center
and a nihilistic right. That requires
not trailing the center or piously
obsessing over alt-right transgres-
sions, but standing on the strength of
its own ideas.
 LEFTOVERS
MEANS & ENDS
Since my last note things have not gone as expected. Hell,
a couple weeks before the election we published an article
called In the Bag.
Ive been poking fun at Micah Uetricht for that piece ever
since, but I certainly agreed at the time. The next
decade seemed clear: Hillary Clintons centrism may not
have been enough to defeat Trumpism in the long
haul, but it should have at least beat Trump in November.
In the meantime, the Left could challenge her and
offer new alternatives to liberalism. We thought we had
plenty of time to build on the momentum of the
Sanders campaign and the hollowness of Clintons.
Instead, we got the Donald. In a way, we shouldnt be sur-
prised. Jacobin spent months talking about the
Democrats bankrupt policies, how millions felt left behind,
and why the Clinton establishments mix of socially
inclusive rhetoric and neoliberal economics was a weak
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE
BY BHASKAR SUNKARA
No Money,
Mo Problems
We didnt predict Trump,
but were bound
to get things right soon.
response to Trumps xenophobic populism. Still,
he seemed just too buffoonish and too unpopular to win.
We were wrong and things are moving fast in some-
times surprising directions. In the weeks after
Trumps election, Jacobin gained almost ten thousand
new subscribers. Just days before this issue went
to press, millions marched against Trump in the largest
demonstration in American history.
It was inspiring. Yet what this broad movement is for
is less clear than what it is against. Thats why,
now more than ever, we need socialist perspectives and
leadership.
Jacobin doesnt have all the answers by a long shot. But
we can play an important role reaching people
with clear, compelling arguments that see the existing
left as the core of a majority in the making, not a
subculture to be preserved.
119
 MEANS & ENDS

In 2017, under a Trump presidency and an uncertain What this broad movement
political climate, we have big plans to that end:
is for is less clear than
A constantly improving quarterly print magazine. what it is against. Thats why,
now more than ever, we
A new website with better and more diverse online need socialist perspectives and
features.
leadership.
More reading groups and events around the world.

A Jacobin-sponsored relaunch of Africa Is a Country,

an online magazine focusing on politics and culture
in sub-Saharan Africa.
The release of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and
Strategy, a companion project edited by Robert
Brenner and Vivek Chibber.
A handsomely produced podcast series and more
video content.
New books, including a title on the rise and fall
of the Brazilian Workers Party and another on the
relationship between race and class.
Were excited about what the future holds, but none of
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Donald Trump