The Allure of Fascism (Vol. II), Part 6
“Someone detached from reality should never be in charge of making decisions that are as real as they come.”
—Hillary Clinton.
In 2008, Barack Obama won his campaign for the US presidency by identifying himself with a simple idea—HOPE. After the terrible years of President Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan, the War on Terror, and Hurricane Katrina, American voters strongly desired a leader who would give them “Progress” and “Change.” They yearned for a break with the political logic of neoliberal capitalism and “low-intensity” imperialism that had reigned since Reagan.
In the end, Obama’s presidency would offer little resembling those optimistic concepts. A lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School—a major centre of neoliberal thought—Obama was no radical. Rather, as Yanis Varoufakis argued, the “left-wingers projected onto [Obama] the image they wanted to see, which was different to who he really was. He is a social climber, who wanted to become a member of the establishment, rather than to challenge it.”1
“Someone detached from reality should never be in charge of making decisions that are as real as they come.”
—Hillary Clinton
Once he was elected, it quickly became clear that Obama’s presidency would be defined not by progress or change but by continuity. After he won, Obama continued America’s violence in the Middle East, hugely increasing the use of drone strikes and bombings to assassinate terrorist suspects. Though he withdrew the US from Iraq, the power vacuum he created caused the country to descend quickly into chaos, leading to the rise of the Islamic State and the refugee crisis of the 2010s, which in turn fuelled far-right anti-migrant sentiments across the world. At home, Obama aligned himself closely with corporate powers in Wall St and Silicon Valley. He supported bankers at the expense of the population during the GFC, and failed to prosecute any of the financial professionals responsible for the crash.2 Internationally, he continued the US commitment to globalisation and international trade, and did little to help individuals and communities whose livelihoods were damaged by offshoring or automation. Critically, Obama also failed to do anything about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed for unlimited independent corporate spending on elections.
By 2016, Obama had shown that HOPE meant nothing more than a desire for the status quo—a desire for things to continue as they were, despite the crises that had stricken the country. Under Obama, a significant portion of Americans became disillusioned by that status quo and everyone who represented it. “Perhaps the greatest irony of Obama’s ‘Yes, we can’ presidency,” wrote one author, “is that inequality actually increased during his tenure.”3 And leading up to the next presidential election, there was an upsurge in support for outsider candidates like Bernie Sanders—and, of course, Donald Trump.
“Trump and Sanders,” Michael Hirsh wrote in Politico in early 2016, were “in many ways the yin and yang of America’s present discontent; both address, in different ways, the seething sense of unfairness, of inequality in Americans.” Sanders and Trump both positioned themselves as populists in 2016, speaking directly to the anger, disillusionment, and economic injustice felt by so many Americans. Politically, the candidates stood at an intersection, “bounded by the four corners of anti-globalization, anti-free-trade, anti-immigration and anti-Wall Street sentiment.” Sanders’ campaign was premised, in part, on renegotiating trade deals to improve outcomes for American workers, regulating Wall Street banks, prosecuting those responsible for the GFC, eliminating corporate influence in politics, and avoiding the “forever wars” that had plagued the nation since 2001. Trump, Hirsh continued, “emphasize[d] shutting down job-stealing immigrants and getting ‘better’ deals from the world” to improve America’s trading position. Like Sanders, Trump also campaigned against “endless wars.” Criticising the Bush administration’s “lies” that led to the invasion of Iraq, Trump even went as far as to blame Clinton and Bush for 9/11, claiming that “World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton [didn’t] kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him… George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn’t listen to the advice of his C.I.A.”4
Writing in late 2015, Ben Schreckinger said both Trump and Sanders “have hit on the same populist sentiment—that a spineless elite has left the rest of the country at the mercy of global economic anarchy.”5 If Trump and Sanders adopted some similar positions, though, they nevertheless diverged at a fundamental level. The candidates were totally opposed in their analysis of the origins of America’s problems; their solutions and the emotional-symbolic investments that drove their politics were thus entirely different. Bernie Sanders correctly argued that economic inequality and corporate power were ultimately the source of America’s plight. But Trump—a celebrity billionaire, property magnate, and entertainer, a living embodiment of the ideals of American capitalism—argued that foreigners, migrants, and leftists had caused the country’s decline. Sanders’ campaign railed against “the 1%” and “billionaires”; Trump targeted migrants, refugees, China, Mexico, and other foreign countries and non-white people. Instead of accurate economic and political analysis, Trump gave his followers a blend of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and conspiratorial ideas. His political platform, driven by envy, resentment, pride and fury, offered nothing more than spiteful domination and spurious, hateful pride.
“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” Trump said of Mexicans. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what we’re doing,” he said elsewhere. “[W]hen you’re a star they let you do it… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”6 To justify his tariffs in 2025, Trump said that other countries are “ripping us off,” but that it was now America’s “turn to do the ripping.”7 It does not take much understanding of psychoanalysis to see that the same logic of reversal animates Trump’s claims that America is being “raped”; Trump’s politics have always expressed a concealed desire to rape, to enjoy through the domination and destruction of others. Nor does it take much to see that the overt racism of his platform was in part a reaction to Obama’s Blackness. Trump, we recall, was “the high priest of the so-called birther movement” that proclaimed Obama an African Muslim instead of a legitimate American—what David Horowitz once called “Obama Derangement Syndrome.”8 (Trump also insisted in 2016 that Obama was the “founder” of ISIS.)9 His appeal was and remains transgression—a refusal to obey norms and rules which nevertheless allows him to embody his followers’ ideals.
“This is the populist backlash that unremitting globalization has historically unleashed and I had warned about,” Dani Rodrik said in 2016. “When mainstream politicians are unable to generate meaningful responses to inequality, social exclusion and insecurity, populists of various ilk gain ground.”10 While Sanders offered Americans a chance to liberate themselves and their communities from private power and crushing inequality, Trump tantalised people with the chance to preserve inequalities of power while becoming the dominators themselves. Trump eventually won the Republican primary in 2016. Sanders lost to former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The ensuing presidential race in 2016 thus occurred between “the ultimate embodiment of the US political elite” and “an outsider, a maverick unbound to the old order and ready to destroy it in favour of something entirely new.”11
Many people on the political right felt the discontent that Trump identified in 2016. Nonetheless, they believed they could not vote for him. As the author of the then-recent bestseller about despair and addiction in Appalachia, Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance had become “the country’s designated interpreter of working-class grievances.”12 Trump, he argued, was capitalising on the resentments and rage of those who felt the country was “headed in the wrong direction.”13 “I don’t think he actually cares about folks,” Vance said in 2016. “I think he just recognizes that there was a hole in the conversation… people from these regions of the country, they feel ignored. They feel left out and they feel very frustrated. And I think of course in a lot of ways they feel that way for totally justifiable reasons.”14 Elsewhere, Vance framed Trump’s rise as both a response to and expression of the American crisis of addiction. Trump is “cultural heroin,” Vance wrote, and “Make America Great Again” is a “quick high.” “[Trump] makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” Trump promises to “cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out… [but] Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.”15 Trump is “noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” he concluded in another interview. Vance even went so far as to speculate whether he was “America’s Hitler.”16 Vance, a man from white working-class origins, would of course go on to join Trump in that “dark place” as vice president in his second term.17
Other right-wing commentators who shared this discontent, however, became hysterical at the prospect of a Democratic victory. In a much-shared essay published in 2016 by Michael Anton—a former Citigroup and BlackRock director, speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch and Condoleezza Rice, two-time Trump administration employee, and eventual Project 2025 contributor—the prospect of a Clinton presidency was figured as an existential threat akin to 9/11. “2016 is the Flight 93 election,” he wrote. “[C]harge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.” Endorsing Trump, Anton’s essay claimed he was the only candidate who would challenge the bipartisan policy commitments that had resulted in “lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.”18 In tones of grandiose doom, he argued that Clinton’s victory over Trump would result in untold levels of “vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent” coming from the political right. It would also be “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda,” with its “inanities” like “32 ‘genders,’ elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, ‘Islamophobia,’ and Black Lives Matter.” If Clinton won, Anton concluded darkly, “we are headed off a cliff.”19 Much as Sanders and Trump were the “yin and yang” of the 2016 campaign, Anton’s catastrophism was the inverse of a terror the liberal left felt for Trump. “We are standing on the brink of the abyss,” Jonathan Freedland wrote shortly before the 2016 election. “And, like anyone who’s ever peered into a chasm, we are experiencing a queasy, sinking feeling.” “Civilisation is frail,” he continued. If Trump won, it “would be the start of a new age of endarkenment.”20
That “new age of endarkenment” began a few days later. Trump ultimately won the election on November 8th, 2016. In the wake of his victory, commentators argued that racism and misogyny played a central role in Trump’s success in 2016. More important, however, was his conviction that “the entire system is broken.”21 Clinton promised continuity with America’s decades of failed neoliberalism and violent imperialism; unlike Trump, she failed to countenance the extreme anti-establishment discontent that fuelled Trump’s supporters. “Trump did mobilise blue collar voters but that was not enough on its own,” Yanis Varoufakis said in 2016. “What I am astounded by is the number of Latinos who voted for him, and the people who switched their political religion from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016.” Ultimately, he said, “Clinton’s loss was caused by her failure to address the collapse of the economic status quo. A global epoch has ended… Trump said this couldn’t go on, while Clinton offered continuity—that’s why she failed.”22
Ultimately. Trump won because he represented an almost total political and aesthetic inversion of Obama, Clinton, and the establishment. White, masculine, rich, brash, nativist, transgressive, disrespectful, dishonest, unrestrained—and, of course, misogynistic and racist—Trump was politically unpalatable and unassimilable in the terms adopted by presidential candidates for decades. In all respects, that is, but one. Like his predecessors, Trump would ultimately remain a committed supporter of capitalism. Like them, he would only maintain the economic logic that underwrote his country’s discontent.
Endnotes
To manage the response to the crisis, Obama “employed Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as his economic advisers—the gravediggers of the New Deal institutions. They both served in the Clinton administration which dismantled the last checks and balances on Wall Street, including rendering the Glass-Steagall Act obsolete in 1996. So, those responsible for allowing Wall Street to run riot were brought in to fix the mess. Predictably, all they did was reinstate the privilege of the financial class.” See
See
Note, however, that the “whitelash” thesis about Trump’s victory is insufficient. Trump certainly mobilised disenfranchised white voters, as Yanis Varoufakis noted: “If you think that Trump won because there are lots of racist white Republicans out there, you are mistaken. What clinched it for him were the independents, Democrats—many of whom could not be bothered to get out of bed and vote for Hillary—and others who are not natural Republicans.” See