4 Take-Aways for the Left at Trump Time

Street violence and fear are things you exploit, create, suppress or flee from. The first three verbs can be combined — if you’re in power.

Fascists generally have hoped to create and exploit disorder, because not often are they co-opted into power. Seldom do they get elected.

Activists from Nick Griffin’s BNP campaigned in the UK in Oldham in 2001 when its riots occurred. The British National Party went bankrupt and the salience of any issues involved got captured by a new party, UKIP. But a dual strategy of street politics alongside electioneering goes back to Mussolini, whose thugs whipped up the disorder his candidates promised to suppress. It goes back to Gregor Strasser, hero to the faction Griffin adhered to before he discovered the International Third Position (the British vehicle for those ideas seen next in Troy Southgate and then Richard Spencer).

This is the us/them confrontation which identity politics has been pretending is normal. It is coming into the real world because wishing has made it so. It turns out to be performative politics, because it hacks people off. It was a Nazi thinker, Carl Schmitt, who employed this friend/enemy distinction, and it is time for the Left to pull back from it. Politics exist because people disagree. No-platform and outlawing views as unacceptable destroys politics and tries to install theocracy (albeit a secularised one). Without politics, tension, disagreement, discomfort, offence: we come to blows.

Schmitt also maintained that when liberal democratic or parliamentary politics was paralysed, it produced a ‘state of exception’ from the legal point of view. It was in the state of exception that sovereignty could be seen. The sovereign was the ruler who could make things happen, law being irrelevant, whereas sovereignty-under-the-law was, in this Nazi view, not sovereign at all.

In the atmosphere of fear, images on Twitter are like very rapid stained-glass windows. No more reading gets done than medieval peasants did, but a message is taken. Lukashenko leaves a helicopter with an assault rifle or Trump leaves a doorway alongside a soldier in combats, and that’s an image, with a take-away, and the take-away is — for the fearful and resentful — the promise that the tensions will end. That they will be ended. It is a promise of order, not law-and-order. The take-aways for the Left take more time than the Left may have left:

1. Don’t talk down democracy. It creates the state of exception. Don’t tell the stakeholders in this society that they’re too old to vote on an issue you think, affects you more. The logic of that is testing to qualify for the vote. Just get your own vote out.

2. Don’t punch down to the left behind, the couches moyennes, the low-information voters, or precariat. You may think they’re peasants. They think you’re graduates who won’t allow debate on your views. You may think they’re out-of-date, but remember it was medievals who began the universities which you’ve neutered as ‘safe spaces’.

3. Don’t police what people can or cannot say. Just like little children, if adults cannot use their words, when they come under pressure, they will bite you. And recover the distinctions between criminal and wrong, criminal and unacceptable. People are allowed to be wrong and unacceptable to you, because this is not Belarus, East Germany, or Oceania, yet.

4. Don’t underestimate the ugliness of what is coming, or imagine that sneering at it can amount to defeating it, or double down in identity politics because you don’t want to confess that this has been a dead end.

Or do. It will be as you decide.