Protests that began in Los Angeles against ICE immigration sweeps have spread across the United States. Trump’s decision to mobilize the California National Guard and put 700 Marines on stand by has not dampened but catalyzed the simmering opposition to ICE’s made-for-TV immigration raids. (There is no Baudrillardian postmodern exaggeration in this claim: Dr. Phil of all people was embedded with the ICE agents that conduced the initial raids that sparked the protests in LA). Trump’s almost immediate resort to deploying troops raises the suspicion that the architects of his immigration policy have been hoping to provoke confrontations that could justify sending in the army–constitutional or not– but whether planned, semi-planned, or spontaneous, the rapidity with which Trump has unleashed the hounds supports those who warned that Trump’s authoritarian and even fascist tendencies would be given full vent in his second administration.
The response of Trump’s supporters to the troop deployment has been sadly predictable: the Republican members of the “land of the free” see no problem in deploying soldiers against largely peaceful protests and refuse to contest the nonsensical rhetoric of “insurrection.” The troops themselves apparently have a clearer view of the political reality of their deployment. According to a number of advocacy groups who speak for deployed soldiers (who cannot comment on their mission while on active duty), they resent being used as pawns in Trump’s political games. (Unfortunately, resentment is not refusal to obey orders of questionable constitutional legality. Perhaps some courageous few will emerge if these deployments spread).
I must admit that I have been guilty of underestimating the dangers that Trump poses to liberal-democratic institutions. Robert Reich was right and I was wrong: Trump 2.0 is a five alarm fire threatening to burn down American democracy. My earlier analyses of his re-election focused too much on the economic disaffection of his working class supporters and downplayed the appeal of his authoritarianism. But this fact can no longer be denied: In the five months since his election his administration is openly totalitarian. They have attacked the independence of academia and the scientific community; they have deployed armed thugs against a demonized “enemy within,” with “illegal immigrant” playing the role of “Jew” in 1930s Germany; they have openly argued that the function of the legislative and judicial branches of government is to obediently implement the executive’s agenda; they have called for the arrest or removal of democratically elected and legally legitimate politicians and judges who oppose that agenda; they have torn up public sector collective agreements and unapologetically purged the federal bureaucracy of administrators and workers whose job it is to study threats to human health and the environment, regulate business, and ensure respect for labour and environmental law, and they have gleefully dismantled the limited gains of historically oppressed groups in the form of affirmative action principles and employment equity legislation.
Radical social critics can easily list all the limitations and failures of each of these liberal-democratic institutions and legislative reforms, but liberal-democratic institutions and legislative reforms have the merit of being real while a world without borders or fully developed communism are just ideas. The inadequacies of liberal-democratic institutions are manifold, but they are also plateaus of achievement of past social struggles: one reaches the summit of the mountain not by blowing it up but by moving from plateau to plateau.
Trump has once again beaten his critics, mainstream or radical, to the punch. Troops are on the ground in LA and Austin, TX while Trump’s critics criticize and are left to fight rearguard actions in court. People outside of and to the left of the Democratic Party will see in these protests signs of generalized radicalization, just as they did when Black Lives Matter protests swept the country during Trump’s first term. But those protests taught a different lesson: demonstrations on their own do not put forward policy alternatives or portend the formation of new, internally cohesive, and, above all politically disciplined political movements.
The widespread and militant nature of the BLM protests had some commentators talking of an “uprising,” as if America were entering into a pre-revolutionary period. But without any organized political vehicle to formulate an alternative political, economic, and social agenda that could win support beyond those, mostly young people, inspired to demonstrate, the protests were bound to fizzle out, as in fact they did. Trump has learned from those protests (and also from the campus anti-Israel protests) that violent state repression of demonized opponents is a powerful mobilizing tool that solidifies rather than weakens his base. Hyperbolic rhetorical inflation of threats that go unchallenged by Trump’s Congressional supporters reinforce the feelings in MAGA-world that the US has been invaded. Democrats like John Fetterman exacerbate the problem when they mouth platitudes about the right to protest but condemn actual demonstrations of anger and opposition. When they corroborate Trump’s fantastical construction of these protests as insurrectionary violence in an effort to appear politically “responsible,” they play into Trump’s hand. Political responsibility in times demands that people stand up against the naked dehumanization of immigrants and Palestinians by Trump and his handlers and enablers. Even those unmoved by the plight of Trump’s targets ought to be alarmed by the spillover effects of militarized policing and surveillance on their own share of endlessly vaunted American freedoms.
That said, it remains true that fundamental social transformations result from the institutionalization of collectively generated creative intelligence, not the spontaneous venting of righteous anger. Eventually– as in BLM or Occupy before that– people have to go back to work, a necessity that can be hastened by steadily intensifying state repression. Only a relatively small minority of people are willing to persistently demonstrate, blockade, and occupy public space. A smaller minority are willing to risk arrest fighting night after night with the police. And an even smaller minority will be willing to face down fully armed soldiers.
Trump, or Trump’s advisors, study history and know these facts. He is banking on the hope that his rapid deployment of troops will separate the hardcore from the genuinely-concerned-but-not-willing-to-risk-it-all majority, put a quick an end to these protests, and burnish his image as decisive, willing-to-do-what it takes leader. While the initial response to his decision to mobilize the national Guard and Marines has been admirably defiant, one should not be misled into thinking that these actions alone are going to de-rail Trump.
The problem that opponets of Trump face is that they are not members of a single, internally unified, coherent, political movement or party. It is important to take back the language of “democracy” from Trump, but it is even more important to have a program that can win support and make concrete changes in the here and now. The left needs more than slogans and street energy; it needs a political program with concrete short term and long term objectives and a credible project that explains how those changes will actually address the anxieties that have drive some workers to Trump. Trump classically acknowledges those anxieties and displaces the cause from system dynamics to a dehumanized other. The left has to refocus on the system and explain what causes millions of people to risk humiliation and arrest to come to America. But even more than this program and project and refocusing of the terms of the debate on system-dynamics, the American left needs a party that can win power and use it to implement that program. Trump proves that state power matters. But who on the left is capable of taking state power and using it to implement an agenda that does not exist?
There is no point expending energy to prove that fundamental change is impossible. On the other hand, there is a point to highlighting the weakness of the American left. The left of the Democratic Party has made the right arguments, but they are trapped in debilitating tension with the party establishment and this conflict prevents them from developing the sort of program that could break the section of the American working class bewitched by MAGA propaganda from Trump. If Trump’s tearing up the collective agreements of federal workers did not wake the union movement up to the fact that a billionaire property developer with authoritarian politics is not the friend of workers, even if his tariffs result in a steel mill or two re-opening, the arrest of David Huerta, President of the Service Employees International Union, certainly should. Union leaders have to be full throttle opponents of the Trump agenda, including his tariff project, even if it might satisfy some very short term interests of some section of the working class. The tariff agenda is about the forcible re-assertion of American hard power on the global stage, not restoring “good jobs” to America. Those jobs were good not because they were in steel mills but because they were unionized: people fought for the wages and benefits the first generation of steel workers did not enjoy. Does Sean Fein really think that Trump is a fan of unionized autoworkers?
But even more than a program, a project, and a party, the American left needs political discipline and this need, I fear, might be the most difficult to satisfy. Political discipline means accepting that decisions taken by a party or movement are absolutely binding on members. Once a decision has been taken after full and free debate, members of the movement publicly support it, work to realize it, and defend it against external opponents and critics. Trump is a sterling example of the power of political discipline. Whatever Republicans think about his strategy and tactics, they support it. The proof of the power is in the pudding: a candidate facing over 130 criminal charges won the Presidency and his party won both Houses of Congress. Opponents need analogous unity and discipline, but the continued influence of identity politics on the left will, I believe, make this necessary goal almost impossible to achieve.
No political movement can be both internally unified in support of a coherent program and be publicly representative of every different identity and group that makes it up. The place for arguing from particular perspectives is in the caucuses and debates through which policy and a program are formulated. Once votes have been cast and a policy supported, political discipline demands that internal factions, groups, and identities subordinate their disagreement or particular perspectives and support the democratically determined policy. But too often this unity disintegrates as soon as a project has been formulated because it purportedly fails to “represent” the interests of some group or other. Typically the leadership then acquiesces until all political coherence is lost. Gay and lesbian struggles used to be about the liberation of same sex desire from the oppressive shackles of legally enforced heteronormativity. What exactly does LGTBAQ2S+….. n stand for beyond the weakest and most vacuous liberal idea of “inclusion?”
The “horizontalism” and decentralization embodied by movements like Occupy and BLM failed as an alternative to democratic centralism. Maybe the Tik Tok generation will work out an alternative that works better than democratic centralism and political discipline as an institutional vehicle for political movements. I continue to believe that unless the diverse opponents of the right wing populist agenda agree on deep, substantive shared values and accept the need to work together to embed them in social institutions, the left will continually be outflanked by an opponent that learns from history and acts as one to impose its agenda.