The Meaning of Trump
()
About this ebook
The election of Donald Trump was a shattering moment to the political sensibilities of America; immediately sending the country into a frenzy of commentary, critique, and a never-ending media coverage that has bordered on the absurd. But the question still remains: what does it all mean? The Meaning of Trump is an ideological critique that sees the election of Donald Trump as a completely natural progression to the general trajectory of digitized technologies, neoliberalism, and a new breed of financialized capitalism; destructive global forces that know no party affiliation or national boundary. Although Donald Trump is undoubtedly the symptom that has exploded to the surface after nearly four decades of failed policies and broken promises by both Republicans and Democrats alike, his election can also be seen as an existential fork in the road for both the United States and even humanity itself. What path is taken still remains to be seen.
Brian Francis Culkin
Brian Francis Culkin is a writer, theorist, and film director with a reputation for delivering thought provoking political & social commentary. He is the author of Postscript on Boxing, a book that chronicles and comments upon the simultaneous collapse of the industrial economy and the sport of boxing in response to the rise of the networked economy and globalization, There is no such thing as Boston, a deeply reflective meditation on contemporary urban gentrification in both Boston and the world and Conversations on Gentrification, a further exploration of gentrification as both an urban fact and as a concept that helps to explain the nature of 21st century life. Brian lives in Massachusetts, USA.
Related to The Meaning of Trump
Related ebooks
The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Beyond Capitalism?: The Future of Radical Politics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnder the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPolitics of Indignation: Imperialism, Postcolonial Disruptions and Social Change. Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How the Establishment Lost Control Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNegative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNever Ending Nightmare: The Neoliberal Assault on Democracy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRevolutionary Keywords for a New Left Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAngels and Demons: A Radical Anthology of Political Lives: A Marxist Analysis of Key Political and Historical Figures Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What Is Post-Modern Conservatism: Essays On Our Hugely Tremendous Times Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What's Left of the World: Education, Identity and the Post-Work Political Imagination Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRadical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNight of the World: Traversing the Ideology of Objectivity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWorking the Aisles: A Life in Consumption Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Dog Days Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUncertain Futures: An Assessment Of The Conditions Of The Present Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAlphonso Lingis and Existential Genealogy: The First Full Length Study Of The Work Of Alphonso Lingis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Serf's Journal: The Story of the United States' Longest Wildcat Strike Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOfficious: Rise of the Busybody State Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLong Struggle: The Muslim Worlds Western Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTime's Lie: The Narrativisation of Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHungry Capital: The Financialization of Food Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish and Unhappy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Continental Realism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Can The Market Speak? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Embrace of Capital: Capitalism from the Inside Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLevinas Unhinged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
American Government For You
Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Fear: Trump in the White House Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Why We're Polarized Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The U.S. Constitution with The Declaration of Independence and The Articles of Confederation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An Introduction to Legal Reasoning Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/525 Lies: Exposing Democrats’ Most Dangerous, Seductive, Damnable, Destructive Lies and How to Refute Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Treating People Well: The Extraordinary Power of Civility at Work and in Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Profiles in Courage: Deluxe Modern Classic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Awakening: Defeating the Globalists and Launching the Next Great Renaissance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the President's Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown: Verses for a Despotic Age Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Meaning of Trump
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Meaning of Trump - Brian Francis Culkin
First published by Zero Books, 2018
Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford,
Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK
office1@jhpbooks.net
www.johnhuntpublishing.com
www.zero-books.net
For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.
Text copyright: Brian Francis Culkin 2017
ISBN: 978 1 78904 046 3
978 1 78904 047 0 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933757
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.
The rights of Brian Francis Culkin as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Stuart Davies
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY, UK
We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.
Contents
Introduction
The meaning of Trump
1. The transformation of global capitalism
2. The discourses of Trump
3. Trump and the resistance
Epilogue
About the author
Endnotes
Bibliography
Introduction
In the past century, we thought democracy and socialism had defeated nationalism. Wrong.¹
Franco Bifo
Berardi
In Kevin Kelly’s recent book The Inevitable he presents a forecast of 12 trends that will emerge in the coming decades from the continued expansion of digital technologies and globalized capitalism.² Although Kelly is often unabashedly optimistic when commenting upon the potential socioeconomic and cultural effects this ongoing information revolution will have, he nevertheless acknowledges a certain existential crisis that this very same transformation is now producing, and will further produce. It is an impending, irreducible crisis that essentially divides humanity into two overlapping and competing factions; two factions that Kelly terms The People of the Book and The People of the Screen.
The People of the Book, for Kelly, are simply those individuals, organizations, and ideologies that still maintain a fidelity to the various forms of culture and economic production that were inherent to humanity prior to the widespread arrival of digital technologies: a reverence for printed books, newspapers, and periodicals; an allegiance to the rule of law as well as to classic interpretations of ethics and morality; and a desire to engage in an economic system that is local in its operation and analog
in its underlying logic – such as a small farm or a productive factory.
On the contrary, The People of the Screen are those who have rather adopted the ideologies and practices that have emerged over the past decades in response to both the proliferation of networked technologies into our social and cultural spaces as well as widespread economic globalization. The People of the Screen prefer to perform their labor while connected into a global network; they gravitate toward digital content in lieu of the written word; they tend to reject traditional norms and values in favor of a pervasive social fluidity; and they are often urban based and individually centered versus having historical ties to a local community or an allegiance to a defined family network:
But today most of us have become People of the Screen. People of the Screen tend to ignore the classic logic of books or the reverence of copies; they prefer the dynamic flux of pixels. They gravitate toward movie screens, TV screens, computer screens, iPhone screens, VR goggle screens, tablet screens, and in the near future massive Day-Glo megapixel screens plastered on every surface. Screen culture is a world of constant flux, of endless sound bites, quick cuts, and half-baked ideas. It is a flow of tweets, headlines, Instagrams, casual texts, and floating first impressions. Notions don’t stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves. People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth. Fixed copies don’t matter as much as flowing screens. Screen culture is fast, like a 30 second movie trailer, and as liquid and open ended as a Wikipedia page.³
One cannot help but notice a profound contradiction when we apply Kelly’s dichotomy of contemporary subjectivity onto the cultural symbolism of Donald Trump. That is to say, by all accounts, Donald Trump is the very definition of a Person of the Screen
: a Reality Television star who lives out much of his social existence as a public spectacle and media sound bite; an individual who communicates his most intimate and personal ideas through his social media feed; and a person who happily allows his own image to be endlessly circulated through the machinery of the global media apparatus.
Yet, and strangely enough, Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the core of his political platform was in many respects addressed to what now comprises the disintegrating population of The People of the Book: the everyday, working-class Americans who were ultimately drawn to his message for the very reason that they have been progressively left behind by the economics and technology that defines contemporary screen culture. This is not to say, by any stretch of the imagination, that Trump supporters were actually conscious of this disjuncture; that they abstained from participating in the emergent screen society and instead read Dickens by night and the daily newspaper by morning over a cup of coffee at the family breakfast table.
But that is the whole point.
In other words, both Trump and his supporters, for the most part, did not even know what their problem was or what it was they even wanted. All they could ultimately articulate was a pervasive feeling of frustration and resentment — often encapsulated in one-line slogans such as Draining the Swamp
— that was to be effectively channeled at the state of contemporary identity politics, contemporary media practices, and the contemporary economic system that has ravaged their small communities and towns over the past several decades. Their recourse was thus to gravitate toward a political message that promised them a return of collective national identity, a return of law and order, and a return to an industrial-based economic system that was once the base of their collective livelihood.⁴ In short, what they were promised was a return to the past; a past that once existed in their minds prior to the rise of digital technologies and neoliberal globalization. One can only marvel at the fact that this very political and spiritual message — that of a collective return to a set of traditional socioeconomic practices and national purity — was delivered by a Tweeting, Reality Television star.
Liberal critics have categorically and consistently dismissed the resurgence of populist discourse in American politics that Trump’s rise signifies — a trajectory that can be gauged in recent years from the evolution of neoconservatism, to the Tea Party movement, to Trump’s brand of nationalism — as a dangerous and reactive stance against both cultural and economic progress. They have made the claim that this