Dispatches from the Empire


The Shooting of Trump

That’s why liberals are so fascinated and horrified by Trump: to avoid the class topic. Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.

Slavoj with the clearest distillation of our current politic.

The Left’s obsession with Trump — something I’ve only recently recognized as such — is a strange phenomenon. I should first say (because I feel obligated to do so, lest I be cast out of polite society) that Trump is a grave threat to democracy. I’m in no way diminishing that opinion.

But the Left does indeed fetishize him. I’m guilty of this as well. During his first term, I was a ball of nerves much of the time. I hated Trump, and that hate began to spill over onto his supporters. I excised Trumpers from my life and felt no shame in doing so.

At least not for a while. In the first year of Biden’s presidency, something in me changed. Perhaps it was living in a small, rural, conservative town that helped me to realize most Trump supporters are not monsters. They’re not fascists, nor do they hate me or people like me. Many people support Trump for purely economic reasons, regardless if I think those reasons are sound. (Do I think many of those people are ignorant of the implications of his re-election on democracy? Yes, but you can't hate someone for their ignorance. Or so I'm told.) 

But I have so many friends that hate Trump, yet refuse to reckon with why he's so popular. They insist that his supporters must be racist, stupid, or Christian Nationalists. And while some are, they're not the majority. The Left has to reckon with the underlying causes of his popularity, and those causes are clear as day from where I sit: class issues. This is all about class.

Not race, class.

Economic inequality, wealth inequality, wage inequality, housing insecurity...

I'm astonished by how Liberals are so unwilling or unable to acknowledge this. It's been nearly a decade and they keep insisting that if we could just get rid of Trump, things'll get better. There is zero reckoning with their role in neoliberalism or with just how profoundly the Democratic Party is controlled by corporations and their money, just as the Republican Party is.

To add insult to injury, the populist Right is largely correct when they say "coastal elites" are calling the shots, looking down on the common people, etc. Highly educated people, myself part of this crowd, do judge the hell out of conservatives and of rural people. I see this all the time. The Left's hatred of Trump and their treatment of his “basket of deplorables” is proof.