That sinking feeling you have? Focus on it. Don’t push it away. Don’t reach for your phone or for some other quick distraction. Face the feeling. Breathe it in. Let it gnaw at you. Now, isn’t it interesting that it doesn’t sting the way it once did? Isn’t it interesting how used to it you’ve become?
Insofar as we think about history, we would like to believe that when one epoch jumps to the next, we experience a kind of release, a catharsis, perhaps even a sense of joy. In the US, our collective memories tend to cling to moments like the end of World War II, the mass celebratory outpourings on city streets, elated that the killing has ended and that fascism has been defeated. In Europe, it signalled rebuilding and the advent of the welfare state. In the US, an industrial boom, and, for a short time at least, an explosion of militancy in workplaces and unions. The tyrants abroad had been defeated. Now it was time to conquer the ones at home.
A different era could be signaled by a change in the confidence and direction of that category we called “the masses.” But the timbre of January 20th shows that these shifts can just as easily instill dread and torpor. It isn’t just in what Donald Trump said, though his belligerence is chilling. Neither is it just the knowledge that, unlike last time around, he will have capable loyalists around him who can carry out a profoundly reactionary agenda. Not to mention the support of the richest tech barons on the planet.
It is that, perhaps for the first time, he was able to say “I won” and mean it. By more than two million votes, he won. This was no Brumaire in the style of Louis-Napoleon. There was no coup. Trump’s margin of victory may have in the end been far slimmer than initially thought, resulting more from an exhausted and demoralized electorate than wide approval for his policies, but it was still a very real and very thorough victory.
Though there is sure to be plenty of bluff and bluster during the second Trump administration, as there was before, Trump’s inaugural address required far less of it than the first time around. Which made it all the easier to outline the horrors of (at least) the next four years and put them in motion with impressive speed. Most hoped the events of 2016 to 2021 would be a blip. Instead, they were a prelude.
A prelude for what? The details will of course make themselves clear in the coming weeks and months, but mass deportations, attacks on trans people, belligerence abroad that may or may not include full-on invasion are all on the table. There’s been plenty of back-and-forth about Elon Musk’s gesture and whether it was a full-on Roman salute (it quite obviously was, no matter what the spineless ADL says), but there is a tendency to get so wrapped up in the aesthetics of Trumpism that we weirdly miss the substance such gestures stand in for.
In terms of characterizing the next four years (at least), John Ganz’s description is probably the most sensible:
If you want an analogy for the present state of America it’s perhaps not an out-and-out fascist regime, but a Vichy regime. It’s partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist catch-all. It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat: of the slow and then sudden collapse of the longstanding institutions of a great democracy whose defenders turned out to be senile and unable to cope with or understand modern politics. It’s a regime of born exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism: the loss of faith in the old verities of the republic… It’s a hybrid regime: a coalition that includes the fascist far right, of course, but also technocratic modernizers who might have once called themselves liberals, the big industrialists, and old social conservatives.
It is worth considering Ganz’s mention of defeat. If you question whether the liberal center has been defeated, then I question whether you paid attention at all in the last election. Liberalism clearly had no clue how to oppose Trumpism. It had no agenda, no vision, not even a viable candidate able to articulate anything of substance. It leaves behind no meaningful legacy likely to withstand the next several years. Its major figures, those who spent Trump’s first term at the self-appointed leaders of #resistance, who called him a fascist during the election season, are now bending the knee to him. Pathetic.
To liberalism’s left is mostly confusion. It’s evident in the response to the inauguration itself. No protests, no demonstrations, no marches. The one rally that did happen on the same day as the inauguration itself in DC was a collection of the same anemic clusters of leftist groups, gathering far away from the inauguration itself, unable to do much more than scream.
Compare these to the demonstrations eight years ago during Trump’s first inauguration, the utter pandemonium that protesters were able to produce. Entrances to the National Mall were blockaded by protesters. Richard Spencer got slugged. Or, going even further back, the chaos at the inauguration of Bush the Younger. Eggs lobbed at the motorcade, so much uproar that Bush himself cowered in his limo. Neither stopped a new president from being elected, but they did hit home that their legitimacy was shaky at best. No such protests this time around. Say it’s because of the cold. Fine. It’s a comforting excuse.
Pull back the scope. On the other side of the country, a large swathe of Los Angeles is ash. Halfway around the world, Gaza is in ruins. Trump takes credit for the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but Netanyahu is already seeing to it that the peace will be brief. Even if the war in Gaza is over, the war against Palestine will take other forms, likely worse than what we’ve already seen. You can get away with genocide now. In both cases – LA and Gaza – large numbers of people cheer, seeing the carnage as some sort of just dessert for the undeserving.
Something sadistic and cruel has been unleashed, and it doesn’t turn on the victory of one man. Trump may be incapable of seeing himself as “part of” anything bigger. But on some level, he understands the same wave that installed the likes of Orban, Modi, Netanyahu, Milei, Meloni, Bongbong Marcos. It allows the Freedom Parties of both Austria and the Netherlands to participate in government. It has the far-right waiting in the wings in France, Germany, and the UK while their governments falter. The traditional parties, including those nominally associated with the left and workers movements, are directionless, falling apart, sometimes devouring themselves rather than turning outward and taking the risk of reinvention.
Three things are certain. First, the age of neoliberalism is over, at least as it has been a project of the political center. Second, whatever comes next will be the initiative of some of the most venal and merciless people to collectively occupy the world stage in some time.
Finally, if both of these are true, then that means we have failed. We have lost. It may not be a permanent defeat, but it is a defeat: pronounced and deep. Let that sink in. And that feeling? The sinking? The certain dread? It doesn’t feel quite as sharp or painful because we’ve been losing and failing for some time. On some level, we expect it.
We’ve heard a lot about dealignment lately, normally in relation to the collapse of the traditional mainstream parties or the mass abandonment of their voter base. It’s a useful concept, though it has its limits in explaining the why behind it. Class, as E.P. Thompson and others remind us, is not a thing or a position. It is a process, and an unstable one at that. Classes and masses are assembled through broader social phenomena that push and pull on the shape of our lives. We are constituted, rearranged, smashed, scattered to the wind, and reconstituted as those phenomena also change and shift.
We often forget just how radically this amorphous thing we call neoliberalism has reshaped life. The privatization and commodification of anything that does or does not move. The remaking of government and state toward the maximization of profit. These have real implications for our livelihoods of course, but we have a tendency to think of “livelihood” sheerly in terms of our ability to put a roof over our heads. We don’t think of our livelihoods as social, possessing psychological valances that cripple us if they aren’t collectively met. If we are all entrepreneurs, if our lives are to be increasingly lived through an online second life that helps us monetize every aspect of ourselves, if this is how we derive meaning for ourselves, then the need to actually reach out and touch someone else, to see them for who they are, is negligible. The consequences to our mental health are just collateral damage.
It was only a matter of time until this decay in social cohesion allowed for all manner of historical detritus to (re-)emerge. The social landscape is filled with figures as lonely and isolated as they are dangerous. Dishonest and desperate influencers. Conspiracy theorists. Lone wolf shooters. Stochastic terrorists.
Even the trope of the Great Man, long out of fashion in serious historical inquiry, seems to be making a return. A recent online essay in The Point illustrates how many Trump supporters – particularly young men from varying class backgrounds – project their own aspirations for success and greatness onto him.
“And then this guy comes on to the stage,” says one, “eschewing all of these norms that people expected him to follow, just going out there and saying, ‘I’m a winner, the people who are running this country are doing a bad job, I’m the only one who can fix it, put me in there and I can make America great again.’ I looked up to Trump when I was little in the same way that maybe a kid in France might’ve looked up to Napoleon two hundred years ago.”
This is, to be clear, pure ideological nonsense, another iteration of what Walter Benjamin described as the aestheticization of politics. It is potent nonetheless. In a world where meaning itself seems to collapse, the idea of history’s strongman, a hero for the ages, someone able to singularly bring themselves to greatness, is an attractive one. Next to this, the liberal appeal to statistics and expertise doesn’t have a shot.
The question now is as follows. If every social, economic, political, and cultural development over the past forty years has aimed to lionize the individual, to atomize, to dissolve the very bonds of what we understand as society, then are collective ideas, solutions that foment solidarity and cooperation, possible? A simple answer to this is they have to be. Particularly in the face of an unravelling climate and the very real possibility of the planet no longer able to sustain a complex human society. As we’ve already seen, it will be the most deprived and destitute who will be the most vulnerable as wildfires, floods, extreme temperatures and crop blights become a daily feature. Staving off climate catastrophe is inextricably bound up with eliminating inequality.
In absolute material terms, there are more people working for a wage than ever before, even if that dismal wage is scattered through a thousand different apps and algorithms that label us associates or partners or independent contractors. Despite and because of all this, the idea of a “masses” seems relatively abstract. Marx wrote about the difference between a “class in itself” and a “class for itself,” the first being a class that shares a common outlook and rough set of grievances, the second being a class able to actively pursue its interests through struggle. The first is rudimentary, the second more advanced, more able to vie for its vision. The fact is that, at this moment, we barely have a class in itself, let alone one for itself.
This is not to say that the class doesn’t exist in objective terms, or that there aren’t significant pockets of class consciousness in American society. Undeniably, there are more leftists and socialists – in the United States and around the world – than there were a decade ago. But we are operating in a context without our own rudders and moorings, a context of social and ideological desiccation that exists well beyond mere membership lists, one that it has taken us thirty years to fully face.
Decades that might have been spent actually fighting have instead been spent coming to grips with how cosmically fucked we are, how unprepared for the monumental challenges. It’s not just sinking. It’s the feeling of having a cannonball chained to your waist.
When we say that our sense of possibility has become unmoored, we mean it. The massive shifts in economic and social life brought on by neoliberalism were also accompanied by geopolitical changes, most significantly the collapse of “actually existing” socialism. By the time the Soviet Union had dissolved, its stodgy model of socialism had ground to a moribund halt. Same with its Eastern Bloc satellites.
Nonetheless, their end, as Enzo Traverso put it, “broke the dialectic of the twentieth century.” Whatever massive flaws and inequities the Soviet model had at its core – and they were indeed massive – they kept alive the idea of a more equal and egalitarian vision that could viably push against the wars and deprivations of capitalism. The present, however imperfect, managed to be incomplete, built from the past but pointing to something as yet fulfilled.
In other words, past and future interact, related by a symbiotic link. Instead of being two rigorously separated continents, they are connected by a dynamic, creative relationship. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nevertheless, this dialectic of historical time seems exhausted. The utopias of the past century have disappeared, leaving a present charged with memory but unable to project itself into the future. There is no visible “horizon of expectation.” Utopia seems a category of the past — the future imagined in a bygone time — because it no longer belongs to the present of our societies. History itself appears as a landscape of ruins, a living legacy of pain.
Our directionlessness, our torpid and melancholy attachment to old formulae, are borne of these ruins. It wasn’t just an alphabet soup of different left groups kept alive and vibrant, each with differing and sometimes silly distinctions of socialism. It was unions, solidarity networks, clusters of anti-racist and feminist groups, anticolonial movements. Spend even a cursory amount of time with any group of people working for liberation, and there was a very good chance that their idea of a better world involved some version of socialism. It may be a wildly different understanding of socialism than the next person’s version, but they would at least hold the principle in common. What’s more, they would be able to enter spaces and grasp infrastructures where they were able to act on that vision.
Those exist today, but they are smaller, shallower, more disconnected and less effective than they were even in the Bad Old Days of the 1980s. It was during that same decade that the ideological coordinates of neoliberal capitalism were diffused farther and wider. Thatcher and Reagan’s attacks on the very idea of a collective public good were thorough. Thorough enough to leave entire cities and nations stripped bare, and to be embraced by the rest of the political mainstream. There was no alternative, no future outside of capitalism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, our historical horizons were curtailed even further: the end of history. In the following decades, with the climate fraying at the edges, “no future outside of capitalism” came to be a fait accompli, easily shortened to “no future.”
The much-mourned Mark Fisher also saw this. The “slow cancellation of the future” he called it, evident in mainstream politics, privatized social life, and a culture bereft of new ideas. It was a hallmark of his Capitalist Realism, the enclosure of our political and social imaginations, cutting us off from a utopian horizon.
But Capitalist Realism was published fifteen years ago. Since then, futurity has returned to the public discourse, kept buoyant by the gleeful cruelty of the rising far-right. Its visions of shuttered borders, hoarded resources, vast wastelands populated with the exiled and locked out: to many, these are indeed utopian. As China Mieville points out, utopia for some can be dystopia for others.
This is not to say that the thrust of Fisher’s argument has gone out of date. Our imaginations are still stunted. Yes, there are visions of the future on offer, but if anything they are even more shaped by the primacy of profit, by fear of the unwashed horde rather than the promise of the masses, by Great Men and sacred individuals. If anything it is a future more thoroughly shaped by the logic of capitalism.
In the midst of this, today’s anti-capitalist left is profoundly disoriented, our sense of proportion and continuity thrown off. Between immediate action and vision, there seems to be a complete divide, embodied in the orientation of different groups and organizations, sometimes within different wings of the same group, and even in the same individual.
On one end, the compulsion to zoom intently on the immediate horror. Don’t you see how bad it already is? it implores you. We must act now! All action, no thought. Just the hope that a radical enough gesture might shake everyone out of their complacency, without any consideration for their ideas or the slightest notion of what we might take action for.
On the other end, only an allegiance to the magnificent ends, less a utopian vision than a static fetish. The impulse to write off any rupture as too safe or too reformist. To apply litmus tests to allies and comrades. It is striking how alike these two ends are, for they both have no patience, no willingness to get entangled in the messiness of people’s ideas as they struggle to understand an existence that doesn’t make sense. Neither seem to provide people with much in the way of a meaningful place in history.
How, we might ask, does vision inform strategy? And vice versa? How does the smallest scale of fight reflect back to us the possibility of a fundamentally different order? It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to ask these questions.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the era of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn is over. So is the effervescent space provided by these electoral movements, essential though they were in injecting talk of socialism back into the culture. We are left no option but to start over, to go back to the drawing board, to take fearless inventory of the gaps in our praxis hitherto filled by their momentum.
What we lack, more than anything, is a long memory. Generations of leftists and revolutionaries knew how to nurture their visions of socialism through their actions and interweave their most fulsome hopes into their daily lives whenever possible. If capitalism has a longue duree, then people’s sense of historical purpose was able to both encompass and transcend their individual lives.
This includes their defeats. The history of the left is full of them. Crushing, brutal defeats, far greater than the ones that we can remember. The kinds that leave people broken. Mass revolts failed, communes fell, global wars and waves of repression shattered millions of lives. And somehow, they managed to carry on, to rebuild lives and relationships, to find new places to plant flags and foster belief in liberation.
The most successful of these efforts would keep whole communities, even whole classes, together. They kept the defeated sane and comfortable in the knowledge that they might have the strength to push back once again. Sometimes these later struggles even won. Many did so without the buoyancy provided by an actually existing example of communism.
They also, quite often, did so without much of any social infrastructure other than the ones they made. Reading groups, social clubs, sports leagues, arts and culture groups – all of which naturally required a face-to-face interaction separate from any algorithmic mediation – had to be built from scratch. Little wonder that many of them carried with them an implicit, albeit frequently vague and sometimes contradictory, shared belief in the necessity for socialism. Though anyone who considered these formation the actual motor of social change was sorely mistaken, they nonetheless played an essential function in providing an incomplete experience of a way of life far more cooperative and rewarding. They were an essential part of the class’s infrastructures of dissent. They also provided places to reflect and heal during times of retreat. This is how a class isn’t merely articulated from the outside, but articulates itself.
In a recent post on the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the UK, Jonas Marvin argues that without these kinds of cultures and infrastructures providing much in the way of ballast or counterbalance, we are lost. “We need an agenda that is not simply reactive but begins to rebuild politics, a sense of counterculture and organising habits in our communities,” he argues. He is also unequivocal that a new party of some sort – a mass vehicle that is able to coalesce the imagination of a class. Notably, he stresses that this organization, whatever shape it may take, cannot survive on dry materiality alone.
Forging a new political vehicle may also offer us an opportunity to do something that the right, both here and in the US, has proven so scarily successful at: remaking humans, or providing working class people the structures, tools and ideas to remake themselves and their lifeworlds around them. To sustain this, we must take seriously what the right does so well. We must reckon with the reality that people’s understanding of the world and how they relate to one another is increasingly mediated by the raw materials of culture that are unevenly scraped together to cultivate one’s sense of self, one’s subjectivity.
Meeting this psychic need is something the left has neglected or dismissed for way too long. It’s understandable why this has happened. For decades, it’s been all we can do to keep the most threadbare shadows of organization intact. That hasn’t been enough. While we’ve harped on the most material, often mind-numbing (though undoubtedly necessary) questions of political economy, the different sectors of the far-right have learned how to echo people’s desires in a grotesque but palpable way.
This is what’s going to characterize the coming years. The political force such visions are able to muster have started to answer the question of what comes after neoliberalism. Hence the defeat. Again, there is no reason to regard this defeat as inevitable or permanent, but we must at the very least acquaint ourselves with it. It has, after all, already acquainted itself with us.
As for the sinking feeling, it’s just history. We can participate in it or not, and it’s going to hurt either way. The only difference is whether the hurt proves worth it.
Header photo is sourced from National Archives and Records Administration.