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From Obama to
Trump: The Failure of Passive Revolution
By William I.
Robinson
January 14, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "teleSur"
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The seeds of 21st century fascism were planted,
fertilized, and watered by the Obama administration and
the politically bankrupt liberal elite.
President Barack Obama declared to CNN on Dec. 26 that
he could have beaten Trump had he the chance to run
against the president-elect for a third term. However,
he may have done more than anyone else to assure Trump’s
victory.
While Trump’s
election has triggered a rapid expansion of fascist
currents in U.S. civil society, a fascist outcome for
the political system is far from inevitable and will
depend on the fight back that has already begun. But
that fight back requires clarity as to how we got to
such a dangerous precipice. The seeds of a 21st century
fascism were planted, fertilized, and watered by the
government of outgoing President Obama and the bankrupt
liberal elite that Obama’s presidency represents.
By the final
years of the George W. Bush regime, and especially with
the financial collapse of 2008, seething discontent
burst out into mass protest in the U.S. and around the
world. The Obama project was, from the start, an effort
by dominant groups to re-establish hegemony in the wake
of its deterioration during the Bush years. Obama’s
election was a challenge to the system at the cultural
and ideological level that shook up racial/ethnic
foundations upon which the U.S. Republic has always
rested – although it certainly did not dismantle those
foundations.
However, the
Obama project was never intended to challenge the
socio-economic order. To the contrary, it sought to
preserve and strengthen that order and to sustain
capitalist globalization by reconstituting hegemony and
conducting a passive revolution against the mass
discontent and growing popular resistance that began to
percolate in the final years of the Bush presidency.
The Italian
socialist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of
passive revolution to refer to efforts by dominant
groups to bring about mild change from above in order to
defuse mobilization from below for more far-reaching
transformation. Integral to passive revolution is the
cooptation of leadership from below and the integration
of that leadership into the dominant project.
Obama’s 2008
election campaign tapped into and helped expand mass
mobilization and popular aspirations for change not seen
in many years in the United States. The Obama project
co-opted the brewing storm from below, channeled it into
the electoral campaign and then betrayed its
aspirations. The Democratic Party establishment
effectively demobilized the insurgency from below with a
more passive revolution even as it resumed and actually
accelerated the project of capitalist globalization and
neoliberalism. The mass enthusiasm that the first Obama
electoral campaign generated quickly dissipated.
ransnational
corporate capital financed both of the Obama
presidential campaigns and purchased the Obama
presidency. Obama pushed forward the agenda of global
war, neoliberalism, and the drift towards an
authoritarian state. He became the corporate bailout
president, the mass deportation president, and the
drone-warfare president. His government pushed the
construction of a repressive police and surveillance
state. It authorized the indefinite detention without
writ of habeas corpus of anyone the state deems an
“enemy,” waged war against whistleblowers and leakers,
and defended NSA domestic and global spying. It ramped
up the military budget, which had already reached a
historic high under the Bush regime. It brokered the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership, and the Trade in Services
Agreement.
In this sense,
the Obama project weakened the popular and left response
from below to the crisis, which opened space for the
right-wing response: an insurgent project of 21st
century fascism. The Obama administration appeared,
certainly in this respect, as a Weimar Republic.
Although the Social Democrats were in power during the
Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s
they did not pursue a leftist response to the crisis,
but rather sidelined the militant trade unions,
Communists and Socialists, and progressively pandered to
capital and the right before turning over power to the
Nazis in 1933. Obama’s 21st century Weimar Republic
generated conditions propitious to the development of
neo-fascist forces in the United States.
During the Bush
regime, these neo-fascist forces spread throughout U.S.
civil society, exhibiting a growing cross-pollination
between different sectors of the radical right not seen
in years. Right-wing elements among the transnational
corporate community broadly funded during Obama’s
presidency neo-fascist movements like the Tea Party and
neo-fascist legislation such as Arizona’s notorious 2010
anti-immigrant law, SB1070. That legislation sparked
“copy-cat” laws around the country and helped spawn a
vicious anti-immigrant, border vigilante, and white
supremacist movement. The far right-wing billionaire
Koch brothers, for instance, were the prime bankrollers
of the Tea Party and also of a host of foundations and
front organizations such as Americans for Prosperity,
the Cato Institute and the Mercatus Center.
These
organizations pushed an extreme version of the
neoliberal corporate agenda, including the reduction and
elimination of corporate taxes, cutbacks in social
services, the gutting of public education, and the total
liberation of capital from any state regulation. This
neoliberalism on steroids is precisely the economic
program of the incoming Trump regime and converges
perfectly with the interests of the transnational
capitalist class, even if its cultural and ideological
garb is dramatically distinct from that of Obama and the
liberals.
Trumpism’s
far-right agenda – contrary to superficial
interpretations – constitutes a deepening, not a
reversal, of the program of capitalist globalization
pursued by the Obama administration and every U.S.
administration since Ronald Reagan. The crisis of global
capitalism has become more acute in the face of economic
stagnation and the rise of anti-globalization populism
on both the left and the right of the political
spectrum. Trumpism does not represent a break with
capitalist globalization, but rather the recomposition
of political forces and ideological discourse as the
crisis deepens and as international tensions reach new
depths.
Whether in its
20th or its emerging 21st century variants, fascism
is, above all, a response to deep structural crises of
capitalism, such as that of the 1930s and the one that
began with the financial meltdown of 2008. I have been
writing for the past decade about the rise of 21st
century fascist currents in the context of the new
global capitalism. One key difference between 20th
century fascism and 21st century fascism is that the
former involved the fusion of national capital
with reactionary and repressive political power, whereas
the latter involves the fusion of transnational
capital with reactionary political power. Trumpism
is not a departure from but an incarnation of the
emerging dictatorship of the transnational capitalist
class.
Trumpism and
the sharp turn to the extreme right is the logical
progression of the political system in the face of the
crisis of global capitalism. The liberal elite and its
project of capitalist globalization through a “kinder,
gentler” discourse of multiculturalism reached a dead
end and led the system into a new crisis of hegemony. To
paraphrase Clausewitz’ famous dictum that “war is an
extension of politics by other means,” Trumpism is an
extension of neo-liberalism by other means.
There is a
near-straight line here from Obama to Trump. It was the
Obama government and the liberal elite that more fully
opened the Pandora’s box of Trumpism and 21st century
fascism. As the 2016 elections approached, the question
was how renewed mass discontent would be expressed. The
liberal elite marginalized Senator Bernie Sanders and
his insurgent progressive campaign and lined up behind
neoliberal hawk Hillary Clinton. But unlike 2008, this
time it failed in its effort to pull off another passive
revolution. By once again quashing a left-wing response
to the crisis the liberal elite fed the turn to the far
right.
The liberal
elite’s refusal to challenge the rapaciousness of
transnational capital and its brand of identity politics
served to eclipse the language of the working and
popular classes and of anti-capitalism, pushing white
workers into an "identity" of white nationalism and
helping the neo-fascist right organize them politically.
Alongside voter suppression of largely Black and Latino
voters, Trump deftly mobilized a significant portion of
the white working class around a demagogic discourse of
racist scapegoating, misogyny, imperial bluster and the
manipulation of fear and economic destabilization.
Trumpism’s
veiled and at times openly racist and neo-fascist
discourse has “legitimated” and unleashed ultra-racist
and fascist movements in U.S. civil society. These
forces seem to be achieving a toehold in the U.S. state
through the emerging Trump regime. This regime brings
together billionaire bankers and businessmen with
politicized warrior generals and neo-fascist activists
in a deadly cocktail that threatens to lead us to
disaster if the fight back is not able to derail
Trumpism.
This is an
extremely dangerous moment but it is very fluid.
Political and economic elites are divided and confused.
Trumpism has further fractured ruling groups and may
well be generating a crisis of the state that opens up
space for popular and leftist responses from below. A
significant portion of the elite opposed Trump during
the electoral campaign. Will they accommodate themselves
to his regime or turn against it?
We are not at
this time in a fascist system and it can be averted if
the fight back is expansive, organized, and unified into
an anti-neo-fascist front. In order to do that, the
fight back cannot turn to the decadent liberal elite
organized in the Democratic Party. Foundations and
corporations will fund the liberal anti-Trump groups to
try and shape the agenda of the anti-Trump fight back.
The Democrats and their corporate backers will try to
channel the fight back it into the next legislative and
presidential elections.
Working-class
politics must achieve hegemony in any united front
against neo-fascism. Trump’s electoral base among the
white working class will discover very early on in his
regime that his promises were a hoax. How will their
rage be contained? Will they be recruited into projects
of 21st century fascism or into a popular and leftist
project of resistance and transformation? For the latter
to happen we need to move beyond identity politics to
reconstruct a working class identity by coupling
anti-racism and defense of immigrants with a program of
economic and social reconstruction that brings the
language of class and socialism back into the
vocabulary. Only by building up the organization of the
global working class in all its diversity and placing
its multitude of struggles at the center of the fight
back can we win.
William I.
Robinson is a professor of Sociology at the University
of California at Santa Barbara.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
