Opinion Sur
Honoré Daumier Ratapoil (1851) Statuette, patinated bronze. It can be seen in the Musée d’Orsay.
This article contains a double warning. It is not for the weak hearted. As in the movies, parental advice is suggested. As the United States come closer to electing a fascist as President, the world in which the American hegemon operates will move closer to open warfare between states. The loss of civility may well lead to the loss of civilization.
In the 1850s the caricaturist Honoré Daumier published thirty lithographs illustrating a character representing “the shady agent, the indefatigable representative of Napoleonic propaganda”. In this way, Daumier attacked the anti-democratic regime of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Elected to head the Second Republic in 1848 for a fixed four-year term, the Prince-President had organized a coup against him and taken on absolute power as Emperor, following the footsteps of his uncle, the first Napoleon. Daumier’s character Ratapoil (Skinned Rat) represented a supporter of militarism, chauvinism, and fake “grandeur” in the new regime, which an observer from Germany –Karl Marx—called a farce.
The current national election cycle in the United States has no precedent in either the twentieth or the twenty first centuries. Global (late) capitalism, characterized by extreme financialization, extreme inequality, and the transfer of productive capacity abroad, has led to a decline not of American power (which remains enormous by standard measures), but to a noticeable decline of a once vibrant middle class. The rising tide of (concentrated) wealth has failed to lift all boats.
Downward social mobility on a large scale is something that challenges the very basis of the much heralded “soft power” of the United States, namely, a way of life that was for at least fifty years the envy of other nations. That very class is now saddled with unsustainable debt, stagnant incomes, the decline of individual and inter-generational mobility, and the end of organized collective action (where are the factories where employees may strike?). Decades of sociological research have shown that middle-class social psychology is the home of moral indignation and that this attitude, when stoked, can lead to claims of moral purity and a bent for persecution. In the history of the West, such a class-psychological predicament was the breeding ground of mass movements of reaction, which is fascism.
The internal political upshot of this social crisis has been the breakdown of the hitherto stable and seemingly unshakeable two party system –the mainstay of American democracy. It led first to ideological polarization, second to governmental gridlock, and finally to the fragmentation of each party. As in Weimar Germany, in America today the only majority is a negative majority –the majority of discontent—and the elites are paralyzed, watching in stupor how the system they were used to run has run out of control. It is in times of such impasse that a republic –as Marx said of France in the middle of the nineteenth century—is ripe to be raped.
And there is no lack of adventurers ready to move to center stage, as Louis Bonaparte did in 1852 when, as an elected president, he staged a self-coup and established an imperial dictatorship—the first proto-fascist experiment in Europe. His critics (Victor Hugo among them) called him Ratapoil. Today, Donald Trump is America’s Ratapoil: imperious, foul mouthed, punitive, a man of privilege that speaks for the white segment of the underprivileged and above all, a leader who expresses the resentment of the petty middle class. But this class in decline faces a stark dilemma: traditionally supportive of the very system that now leaves its members behind, it cannot dare attack the power structure of which it felt symbolically a part, so it looks for culprits: foreigners, immigrants, minorities, financiers, all seen as takers not makers. The American Ratapoil is glad to offer them not practical solutions but enemy targets instead.
In a previous article for Opinion Sur I described how the American Republican party, after decades of espousing an ever more extreme right-wing ideology, and sabotaging every attempt by the opposite Democratic party to govern, ended up conjuring a sort of political monster in which it no longer recognized itself. The rise of Donald Trump is in fact the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by a demagogue, after the party failed to present, candidate after a candidate, a credible alternative. The very masses the party had energized to a feverish pitch through propaganda, in the end decided to support an authoritarian opportunist from outside the ranks. The systematic and largely successful campaign to de-legitimize President Obama and the Democratic coalition ended up de-legitimizing the entire political establishment based in Washington. The Democratic Party was equally taken aback, and ended up opposing not a predictable counterpart but an aggressive, irrational, and manipulative individual with a mass following that expects him to bring the entire edifice down, like Nero sought through fire to cleanse Rome.
The learned reflexes of two-party politics no longer work in facing a novel challenge –nothing less than what many decades ago the great sociologist Max Weber called the rise of a plebiscitary Führer democracy.
In choosing Hillary Clinton to oppose Donald Trump the Democrats have probably made a structurally bad situation worse. According to opinion polls, she is disliked as much as Mr. Trump by a large segment of the populace. The coming election is one in which voters in each camp will vote not for their candidate but against the other candidate. As a result, the outcome is in the hands of the undecided, the independents, and those with the strongest motivation to go to the polls, when such motivation is mainly anger and resentment. It will be a political showdown that reflects the well-known poem written by Yeats in 1919, “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
For the first time in American political history, the triumph of fascism has moved from possible to probable.
In the context of a dire international situation summarized by the Pope’s frank statement that “the world is at war,” the arrival of fascism in America can trigger an epidemic of similar movements elsewhere. The global spread of right-wing nationalisms can only risk the escalation of this war (still a diffuse and low intensity warfare) to a higher level of intensity in which some bad actor –especially those with fewer conventional resources– will feel compelled to resort to the ultimate weapon (the nuclear bomb) to prevail. It would only take one. If others follow, a more general nuclear exchange could happen. Imagine a situation parallel to that leading to WWI (which inspired Yeats), but this time with nuclear ammunition. The world could move from the end of the civility to which we were once accustomed to the end of civilization as we know it. Donald Trump and others like him around the world are capable of producing more history than they can consume.
