New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Trump and Neoliberalism

What does the Trump election mean for neoliberalism as a doctrine?  Adam Kotsko over at An und für sich has some interesting thoughts on the matter; what follows is intended as a constructive engagement.  As I posted last week, I think Trump’s victory is inseparable from what Foucault calls state racism, and the appointment of Steve Bannon and nomination of Jeff Sessions certainly adds evidence to the theory that his will be a government of White Supremacy (I am not going to engage in the parlor game of distinguishing “white nationalism,” “white supremacy,” and so on.  It’s a parlor game that requires white privilege even to play, and all the iterations mean the same basic thing: white people should be in charge).  One of my points there is that the system is structurally rigged against cities and other places where non-Trump voters live.  At current count, Clinton - garden variety neoliberal - is up by nearly 1.7 million votes in the popular vote count, and that number is growing.  This means that more people who voted want neoliberalism than want Trumpism, for what that’s worth.  At the very least, it means that we need to think about neoliberalism as a dispositif of biopolitics, and how that intersects with the 1930s version that Foucault’s remarks on state racism address and that Trump seems to channel.

Kotsko thinks that we should grant that Trump isn’t a neoliberal, and think about the ramifications for neoliberalism.  All of this is thus necessarily a speculative exercise.  Still, I think a couple of points are worth noting, beyond the more general one that if neoliberalism can survive the financial crisis intact, then we should always be skeptical about reports of its death.  Here are two reasons I’m not convinced that Trump and Trumpism aren’t neoliberal in a fundamental way.

The 2016 Election and Racism, Soft and Structural

Foucault famously proposed that biopolitics - the power to foster life, or allow it to die - tended to produce its own outside in the form of state racism: not only might life be allowed to die, but there might be those who must die, literally or metaphorically, so an inside “we” could live. That is, it is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Society must be Defended, 254).  Note the subtle elision: there is life that is allowed to die, and then there is also life that must die.  Thus, “if you want to live, they must die” (255) becomes the message.  In other words, biopolitics produces two forms, almost simultaneously.  Foucault is thinking of 1930s fascism, where (for example), the German emphasis on the health of the ethnically-German population was coupled with the extermination of European Jews.

But there’s an analogue, however imprecise, in the Presidential election last week.  In it, we saw two versions of biopolitics.  On the one hand, Clinton ran on a campaign of building a better life together, with a particular emphasis on fostering the lives of children and families.  The Affordable Care Act would be improved.  Paid leave for working parents.  And so on.  Even her negative ads against Trump emphasized the positive biopolitics: our children are watching.  What kind of President do you want them to see? On the Trump side, we saw nothing but Herrenvolk biopolitics: Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans and women were taking over, making America not great.  This had to stop.  Law and Order.  Our country is at its nadir, thanks to an ineffective, losing President who was probably born in deepest, darkest Kenya anyway.  He also somehow founded ISIS, which by the way is winning. China is winning.  Everyone but America is winning.  But if we keep the Mexican rapists out, and all the Muslims, maybe something good can happen.  We will be strong.  We will win again.  In Messianic tones that Masha Gessen reminds us (this piece is a must read) we should take very seriously, he proclaimed that “I alone” can save you.  That almost none of that narrative was true became irrelevant, in the same haunted house in which Clinton’s email server somehow became a darker mark against her character than his many business failings, tax evasions, failures to pay subcontractors, etc.

Two version of biopolitics.  In Foucauldian terms, Trump was advocating the return of state racism.  At one level, this is an obvious point, given his endless racist rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims in particular.  But liberal commentators, including myself, have tried very hard to explain the Trump victory in other ways.  I have decided it can’t be done.  The Trump election is fundamentally about the maintenance of White Supremacy, something that women and people of color said a week ago.

Two Quick Thoughts on the Election

Leiter's post-mortem is worth reading, as is the analysis he links to by Ian Kerr.  If Trump does what he ran on (and what in his speech last night he said he wants to do: build infrastructure.  And really, he's right that our infrastructure is a national embarrassment), it's going to be very interesting to see how he intersects with the Republican party in Congress, since they don't want to spend money on things like that, or any of the other populist parts of the Trump agenda.  And his supporters are going to be very disappointed that he can't constitutionally do a lot of what he promised.

Here are two things that I haven't heard mentioned that need to be talked about.

1. Libertarians.  Gary Johnson got more votes than Trump's margin of victory in a lot of places, if my memory of late last night serves me well.  What percentage of those votes came from Clinton versus from Trump?  We'll never know, but in a very concrete way, libertarians own the Trump presidency.  When Nader was informed that his candidacy cost Gore in 2000, the response was a smug "well, Gore should have been a better candidate."  No doubt he (and Clinton) could have been better (I'm going to say something about that in point #2).  But that argument fundamentally misunderstands what it means to live in a majoritarian system.  In a parliamentary system, vote for the 5% candidate!  You'll get a seat in parliament, and maybe even a part of a ruling coalition.  But in a majoritarian system, if you vote for a candidate who can't win, you are indicating your acceptance of whoever does win.  You don't care, you can't tell a difference, whatever.  Because you take away a vote from the candidate you regard as less evil.  This isn't strategic voting or anything like that.  This is a structural feature of the system.  Don't blame the parties.  Blame the Constitution.  Anybody who voted for Johnson in a state more of a battleground than California or Texas needs to know that they played a non-trivial part in the Trump victory.  And Trump has indicated hostility to rights: during the campaign, he showed complete contempt for the 1st, 4th (and probably 5th), and 14th Amendments.  And women's rights are next, given that he's going to get Court appointments.  The Contrast with Clinton was very stark.  A Johnson vote in a battleground state was at the level of "what's Aleppo?"
2. The Auto Bailout.  I had to go out and get milk this morning, and had a moan with the cashier at the grocery store.  She said that she couldn't believe he won Michigan, given the auto bailout.  And then it struck me.  Obama made a very high-risk, unpopular decision to bail out the auto industry - and in the process saved thousands and thousands of largely-white, working class jobs in places like Michigan and Ohio.  In other words, he took a huge risk to help the sort of people who voted for Trump.  Did he help them all?  Of course not.  Did other things he do hurt them?  Probably.  But the rust belt would have been in much, much worse shape without the bailout.  And I didn't hear Hillary mention the auto bailout even once during the campaign.  When you're looking for something to say in Ohio and Michigan about how democratic party elites stand up for working people without college degrees, you should probably start there.  It's an actual achievement, and it took some courage to get it done.

 

Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and the APA's "Code of Conduct"

by Edward Kazarian and Leigh M. Johnson

A little over two years ago, more than 600 philosophers petitioned the American Philosophical Association to “produce a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of Philosophy.” The immediate motivation for the petition was several high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by philosophers, which together amplified what many viewed—rightly, in our estimation—as a widespread and endemic culture of hostility, predation, exploitation, and intimidation within the profession.  Shortly thereafter, in March 2014, we co-authored a piece entitled “Please Do NOT Revise Your Tone,” articulating our concerns about the problematic effects of tone-policing, generally, and about the drafting and institution of a “Code of Conduct” by the APA, specifically.  In that piece, we argued that there was good reason to worry that such a Code would:

1) impose a disproportionate burden of changing their behavior to "fit in" on those who are members of out- (that is, underrepresented or minority) groups within the profession; 2) likely be applied disproportionately against those expressing dissenting views or criticizing colleagues for lapses in judgment or perception; and 3) tend to reinforce or provide opportunities to reiterate the structures of privilege and exclusion already operating within the profession. 

The Executive Board of the APA subsequently decided in favor of producing the document and, earlier this week, published the final version of the discipline’s official “Code of Conduct” here.

Reading that document over, our original worries remain unassuaged and unabated, if not also intensified. We are especially concerned now that this quasi-official document—which elaborates a set of norms, but does not include any mechanisms for enforcement, adjudication, or sanction—will inevitably be used at the local (department-, college-, or university) level in unofficial, ad-hoc ways to undermine or sabotage already vulnerable members of the profession. Worse, we worry that this document will provide pretext for attempts to pressure APA members by complaining to their employers that they have in some instance or another behaved ‘unprofessionally.’ We recognize that any law or regulative code as such allows for the possibility of perverse application, but we maintain that the current iteration of this Code of Conduct is particularly susceptible to manipulation for a number of reasons.