Trump Studies: An Intellectual Guide to Why Citizens Vote Against Their Interests (Emerald Points) 1787697827, 9781787697829

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TRUMP STUDIES

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TRUMP STUDIES An Intellectual Guide to Why Citizens Vote Against Their Interests BY

TARA BRABAZON

Flinders University, Australia

STEVE REDHEAD

Flinders University, Australia

RUNYARARO S. CHIVAURA Flinders University, Australia

United Kingdom North America Japan India Malaysia China

Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2019 Copyright r 2019 Tara Brabazon and Runyararo S. Chivaura. Published under exclusive licence Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:978-1-78769-782-9 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-78769-779-9 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-78769-781-2 (Epub)

ISOQAR certified Management System, awarded to Emerald for adherence to Environmental standard ISO 14001:2004. Certificate Number 1985 ISO 14001

To Professor Steve Redhead, 1952 2018. This book began life with his statement, “we must never normalize this behaviour.” Steve saw the rise of Trump. May we witness the decline and understand how the aberrant, the confused, the ignorant, and the foolish were accepted, validated, and valorized.

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CONTENTS

About the Authors

ix

Introduction: Tough Knowledge and Difficult Knowing in Ignorant Times

1

1. Shadowing the Silent Majorities

33

2. The Banality of Capitalism (and Feminism)

47

3. Return of the Repressed amidst the Double Refusal

67

4. Tweeting in the Interregnum

77

5. Pens and Tower Blocks

105

6. The Banality of Racism (and Capitalism)

121

7. Intellectuals in the Interregnum

161

Conclusion: Underthink it

175

Index

197

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Tara Brabazon is the Dean of Graduate Research and Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University, Australia. She is the winner of six teaching awards and has published eighteen books and over 200 refereed articles and book chapters. Her best known books include The University of Google, Digital Dieting and From Revolution to Revelation. She is also a columnist for the Times Higher Education. Her personal website is www.brabazon.net Steve Redhead was the Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University, Australia. He was also Adjunct Professor of Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Graduate Studies, York University, Ontario, Canada. Steve published seventeen books including Theoretical Times (Bingley, Emerald, 2017) and We Have Never Been Postmodern: Theory at the Speed of Light (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011). He was editor of the Bloomsbury book series Subcultural Style and Deviant Leisure for Emerald. While Steve died in March 2018, his personal website remains at www.steveredhead.zone Runyararo S. Chivaura completed her PhD at Flinders University, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours, and a Masters from the University of Lincoln (England). Her doctoral research focused on the role of media representations and individual consumption on the symbolic formation and negotiation of identity amongst African immigrants in Australia.

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INTRODUCTION: TOUGH KNOWLEDGE AND DIFFICULT KNOWING IN IGNORANT TIMES

New phrases jut from our complicated present. Innovative tropes. Transgressive theories. Provocative slogans. Defiant knowledge. Extreme anthropology. Deviant leisure. Ultra-realist criminology. Brexit criminology. Trump Studies. Such terms and tropes open red wedges, disruptive interdisciplinarity, and dangerous intellectual opportunities. These spaces are available and ready to enter and expand by radical and progressive scholars after the Global Financial Crisis, post-Brexit, and post-Trump. At such a moment, banality rules but theory beckons. We certainly live, interestingly, in theoretical times.1 Previously we lived, theoretically, in interesting times. In the last decade, studies on and by the global left have attached themselves to ‘theory’ and ‘theorists.’ But there has also been a mining of popular culture, high and low.2 The celebrity intellectual culture which developed through the 2000s produced open access online journals devoted to theorists such as Jean Baudrillard3 and Slavoj Zizek.4 This is open knowledge in a time of commercialized 1

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research. However, these theorists also confront antagonism from within the neoliberal zombie5 higher education sector. Zizek expressed, “my anxiety about being excluded from academic apparatuses and not recognized as a ‘serious’ philosopher.”6 This book probes and challenges the separation of serious and trivial, academic and popular culture. We affirm that the nature of the interregnum in which our social, cultural, intellectual, and political lives are placed, means that the very definitions and expectations of intellectual work are transforming.7 While many of the later chapters in this book activate the theoretical conceptualization of the interregnum, it is important to place a clear definition in this introduction so that the term can bounce, jar, jab, and hook throughout the remainder of this text. In its historical and science fictional8 manifestations, an interregnum is a gap, a break, or an aperture in governmental organization and social order.9 Originally used to describe the space between the reigns of monarchs, the word also captured the social unrest in these periods,10 invoking succession wars or foreign invasions. Failed states jut from interregna.11 Powerfully, Henrique Carvalho and Alan Norrie configured this period as “between an old (the broken promise of the liberal Enlightenment) and a new (a world that is emancipated across a variety of social registers), generating a variety of morbid symptoms in the dystopic present.”12 Antonio Gramsci’s interregnum was much more precisely constituted, emerging from his writing about the ‘crisis’ in late 1920s and early 1930s Italy. There is a suspension of expectations and a parking of future hopes. In such a moment, the powerful often deploy violence to sustain some mode of order. However, a “crisis of authority” emerges.13 There are no answers. No normative parameters. Instead, there is a blockage to the formulation of solutions. It is not a surprise that Zygmunt Bauman found resonance and value in Gramsci’s

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interregnum and summoned it to explore its functionality in a period of globalization and financial crises, including the ambivalent positioning of the nation state through transnational banking failures.14 Therefore, scholars academics researchers philosophers must also be agile and move between the intricate and complex choreography danced by the powerful and the powerless, the formal and the informal, the stoic and the conversational. These are times of divided nations, where parents are separated from children in the name of immigration control,15 where social media disseminate the howling fear of those children,16 and ‘strong’ men impose those renderings of masculinity upon delicate social structures with the force of a stainless steel cookie cutter through foam. Therefore, we return to Extreme Anthropology. Deviant Leisure. Ultra-Realist Criminology. Brexit Criminology. Trump Studies. Combining high theory and high popular culture, radical, edgy, cold, and hard scholarship is emerging in and from this tough, brittle time. This potent knowledge is not budding from the Ivy League, Russell Group, or the Group of Eight universities. Instead, this dangerous knowledge is pulsing from unstable, daring institutions. Deviant Leisure emerged from Plymouth University. Ultra-realist Criminology sprang from Teesside University and now resides at Northumbria. Extreme Anthropology originated from Oslo. Physical Cultural Studies bolted from Waikato, Bath, Bournemouth, and Maryland. Sports Humanities emerged from Waseda. Post-digital studies comes from Coventry University. This is not centered and safe knowledge. This is discourse from the edges. It is pervasive and promiscuous knowledge that does not abide by disciplinary rules. It is not only highly theoretical but anti-empirical. Its relationship with science, and scientific methods, is similarly critical. While there are multiple marches for science,17 there is no

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fight or protest for thinking, learning, and intelligence. While confirming the value of empirical science is worthwhile in a time of climate change deniers, where is the public support for tough, non-empirical knowledge? In these theoretical times, theories and theorists matters. The Brexit result and the Trump victory cannot be studied in a laboratory. It is not bench-derived knowledge. The silent majority will not sit in a petri dish, waiting to be researched. Different locations, positions, and strategies are required. In such a space, Trump Studies emerges, but with a distinctive political and theoretical imperative. A significant, passionate, and powerful edition of Cultural Anthropology appeared in January 2017 to probe the intellectual, personal, and professional consequences of the Donald Trump campaign and election victory. Michael Taussig opened this edition with the phrase and discursive flourish of “Trump Studies,” arguing that “there is no normal anymore.”18 Powerfully, Taussig posed the key intellectual question: how can scholarly research engage with, understand and transform the Trump presidency? He asked, “Can Trump Studies match its object of study?”19 Similar questions and problems emerge from Media Studies, Cultural Studies and subdisciplines such as Fan Studies. The changes to media platforms are more exciting than the research tracking them. The technology is more exciting than the academic investigations into that technology. Fan behavior is more innovative and incisive than Fan Studies can capture or recognize. The intellectual problem spanning these once provocative and now weak sub-disciplines remains the understanding of the political economy in late capitalism. The meta intellectual problem is how to ‘be’ an expert in an era of post-expertise, or how to manage “the mastery of nonmastery.”20 This post-expertise ideology is also post-consciousness and post-experience. Being black, a migrant, a woman, gay, or lesbian is no

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longer was it ever? the basis of credibility and authority in academic life and beyond. This denial of Karl Marx’s mantra where life does not determine consciousness21 means that ageing white men and women ‘whiteout’ the lived experience of disempowered communities that have negotiated the daily consequences of discrimination, prejudice, and oppression. Repression and oppression are only one filament in this story. The active forgetting of the past, and the inelegant grasp of historiographical reconstructions of this past for contemporary political imperatives, means that surprise greeted the Brexit and Trump election results. Theresa May’s non victory in the 2017 election and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn were similarly bizarre and unexpected. Nancy Love expressed the paradox of this surprise. A lingering question is why so many Americans seem so surprised by Trump’s victory. When Trump referred to Mexicans as rapists, called Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas, and refused to denounce David Duke, former Grand Dragon of the KKK and Republican candidate for Governor of Louisiana, he was reaffirming the history of white supremacy in American politics and culture, or the racial formation of the United States (US) as a white nation. Surprise at Trump’s victory suggests that many Americans still deny the full extent of this history, and hence failed to realize that white supremacists were remobilizing support among disaffected and dispossessed voters.22 Similarly, the long burn of colonial England, the ‘little Englanders’ who could not manage the decline of empire and the notion that the UK is but one of many powers in Europe,

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infiltrated the Brexit referendum and the subsequent seething resentment through its implementation. Obviously, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) had kept home fires burning, or perhaps flickering, perpetuating a neo-colonial, antiimmigrant rage in the press and through layers of government. But when confronted by a choice, the majority of voters in England, rather than Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, voted for a glorious past of little England, rather than a collaborative, robust and complex European future. This book uses the odd events of the late 2010s to probe the dense and disturbing nature of knowledge, thinking, learning, the self, community, and belonging. Yes, there are answers in these pages to the key questions: why Trump and Why Brexit? But this is not an event-driven monograph. Instead, it offers new, uncomfortable and difficult knowledge that sits awkwardly in a higher education system which is empowering the boundaries of traditional disciplines, entrepreneurship and easy ideas that can transfer to industry. The scholars writing this book are black and white, male and female, and senior and junior academics. This plurality of perspective matters, as our expertise aligns into a singular project: to tether Cultural Studies and Trump Studies, to angular, disturbing, dangerous, productive, and dynamic knowledge systems. This is not following Stuart Hall’s ‘Great Moving Right Show.’23 We are now watching and living this show. This article by Hall was published in 1979. He was wrong at that time. He is right now.24 The question is what scholars will do with this reality and the visions passing before us in this ‘Show.’ We grasp Jean Baudrillard’s theorization of ‘banality’ and ‘the end of the social’ to offer a strategy to theorize the place of knowledge in anti-intellectual times. The word intellectual is used with intent and care in the subtitle of this book. It is an invasive blade of a term.

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‘Intellectual’ does align with ‘scholar,’ ‘academic,’ ‘teacher’, and ‘researcher.’ But also, the separation of the intellectual from the scholar, academic, teacher, and researcher is important. Andrew Goodwin, at the start of the 2000s, revealed the pathway to our contemporary reality, where experts are demeaned and ridiculed and universities are conveniently flat packed away from wider social concerns. This point was made for me recently at an academic conference where the audience heard from a distinguished panel of journalists and academics, who, as is usual, talked past each other about their work. What invariably happens is that the academic, eager (like me) to find ways of addressing a nonacademic audience, make all kinds of concessions to the difficulties and limitations of journalism, eager to auto critique concerning the politics of academic writing, and discuss our yearning to work as or with media producers, and so forth. We are then greeted to career histories from the practitioners, who berate the professors for using bloodless ‘jargon,’ without revealing the slightest interest in figuring out why academics use technical language, or what forms of knowledge might be produced on campus that cannot emerge in a 200-word record review. Because they operate just a little closer to the marketplace than the professors, the critics evidently believe that they are also closer to ‘the street.’25 Since Goodwin published those words, his realization has poured from academic conferences and awkward ‘dialogues’ with journalists, and into digitization and social media. The concessions made by academics have extended far beyond journalists and into ‘communities’ of bloggers, YouTubers,

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Instagrammers, Snapchatters, and Tweeters. There has been a confusion between experience and expertise, credibility and credentials. Let us provide an example of this confusion. Henry Jenkins argued that, “even at its best, the academic theorizing seemed to be reproducing concepts that the fans had themselves generated to explain their activities, placing them into more academically respectable language.”26 Such a statement muddies epistemology, ontology, and methodology. In other words, it is completely wrong. Ethnographers may watch, evaluate, and research the practices of others. Participant observation, as a method, may agitate insider and outsider status in a range of communities, but academics must not confuse text and context, banal reality and high theory. The problem with Jenkins’ argument is that it is anti-intellectual. It is assuming that people with knowledge know little. This paradox must be noted with clarity and precision. He argues that those who hold knowledge are not knowledgeable. Such an argument is disingenuous and dangerous. What has been weathered in the democratic desire to make connections beyond the gates and gardens of the university is a recognition that qualifications, credentials, and specialist knowledge hold value. Teachers and scholars have given away not only power and authority, but the value of intelligence. It is now journalists that complain about their loss of credibility through ‘citizen journalists’ and tweeters.27 They have a point. The unreflexive nature of user generated content that celebrates the intrinsic value of the digiliterate, offering their opinions to the world, has meant that the inexperienced or ill-educated attacks on others goes unmentioned. The idea that the digitally literate with time on their hands a dangerous combination in itself would abuse those with more expansive literacies, who spend their days dedicated to the education of others, demonstrates the

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social cost of these anti-intellectual times. However, the proliferation of voices and views has also enabled a suite of new documentaries and commentaries that find an audience through alternative platforms and distribution channels. For example, documentaries such as All Governments Lie28 is a reflection on and review of the career of I. F. Stone. But disintermediated media, uploaded to YouTube and then disseminated through Facebook and Twitter, also have an impact. Jonathan Pie’s Back to the Studio series of short films captures the mad as hell rage of rational people confronted with irrational political and social decisions.29 What makes Pie’s comedy remarkable is the gulf between the professional and polished journalist fair and balanced for the crosses from the studio and the not-for-broadcast feral, swearing, outraged citizen, discussing the irrationality of UKIP, Brexit, Trump, Fox News, Oprah, identity politics, and news more generally. He shouts, he bays, he ridicules, he mocks. Then he returns to the dispassionate, balanced journalist presenting facts. There is an anarchic power to the inversion that also bubbles through the pages of this book. To the readers of this volume, we ask that while considering this introduction you ponder your perspective on the concept of expertise. We all may summon glib defenses of freedom of speech. But is there a line, a barrier or demarcation that we cannot cross? Do you believe anyone has the right to say anything to anybody? Your answer, dear reader, to such a question may be tempered by Doug Newsom’s argument that “miscommunication is often the result of expectations, based, of course, on assumptions.”30 The challenge is that these assumptions are not disclosed or acknowledged. So mis/information about race, class, nation, industry, work, sex, masculinity and femininity circulate in the public discourse. This mis/information meshes with already existing ideologies that may be racist, sexist, xenophobic, or

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repressive in some form. These expectations then meet our experiences about how ‘we’ think our life should be lived. One definition of life is the management of disappointments. Political and public debates emerge when determining where that personal disappointment is lodged and how it is expressed. If it creates self-awareness and knowledge, then it can lead to a quest for self-improvement and learning. If these disappointments are blamed on the presence of others such as migrants, the gay community, or women then the resultant oppressions are damaging to individuals and corrosive to any form of consensus building that may improve health, housing, education, or the working life for the majority of citizens. The greatest gift that a life of the mind provides an individual is self-awareness that we are responsible for our own failures, inadequacies, and laziness. The greatest gift that blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts provide is the construction of endless cycles of displacement where others writers, teachers, politicians, boyfriends, girlfriends, (ex) best friends, and mothers can block the self-knowledge that we are accountable for the decisions we make in our lives. The opinion of a tweeter does not matter that much. Facebook is not a proxy for democracy. Freedom of speech for the few has suffocated the rights of the many. Academics, scholars, and teachers are implicated in this system. We as scholars have gone too far in valuing the student ‘experience’ over our responsibilities to knowledge and international standards. Education and learning are special, difficult, and important. Donald Trump did not invent misinformation online. The lack of information literacy the capacity to read, assess, sort, and sift has been logged as a challenge in the online environment for over a decade. In January 2007, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) published a report. It was titled,

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Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, and quickly became known as the Google Generation Report.31 The research team tracked the reading behavior of both students and teachers. The findings of the Report were startling and offered the clearest critique to glib phrases like the Google Generation, digital natives32 and digital immigrants. (1) There are very few too few controlled studies of information seeking behavior that is able to isolate age as a variable.33 (2) Speculation and ‘misinformation’ has been perpetrated about how young people behave in online environments.34 (3) All researchers not only ‘young people’ are skim reading research, reading abstracts rather than drilling deeper into the paper. (4) Young people are not ‘dumbing down.’ Society is ‘dumbing down.’ (5) “The information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying problems.”35 (6) “Young scholars are using tools that require little skill: they appear satisfied with a very simple or basic form of searching.”36 (7) “Digital literacies and information literacies do not go hand in hand.”37 The lack of ethnography, participant observation, and teacher-led research over the last decade to understand the inelegances and flaws of online learning has had an impact. Instead, the assumptions about digitization as efficient,

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productive, and cheap have created a university system where superficial learning, rapid degrees, and rubrics are the punctuation for undergraduate degrees. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s study in Academically Adrift has tracked the ‘progress’ of thousands of students through universities. Their results were startling. We found consistent evidence that many students were not being appropriately challenged. In a typical semester, 50% of students did not take a single course requiring more than 20 pages of writing, 32% did not have any classes that required reading more than 40 pages per week, and 36% reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week. Not surprisingly, given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured by the collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college.38 This situation was not caused by Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. It has been triggered by a reduction in expectations for higher education. Instead, academics have allowed standards to be determined by quality assurance agencies, marking rubrics, competencies, and graduate outcomes. The fixation on speed and ease is now revealing long-term consequences. Policy and funding decisions have been made on the basis of misinformation. The key finding of the Google Generation Report is that computer literacy and assumptions about it are masking other educational problems. The conversational phrasing that is deployed in the Google search engine is capping information expectations, rather than moving to

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other search engines and directories such as Google Scholar39 or the Directory of Open Access Journals.40 In other words, our inexperienced students are satisfied with the low skill base because they do not know that it is a low skill base. Because of the assumption that ‘new technology’ must be difficult and digital immigrants cannot manage it, academics have neglected building the relationship between information seeking skills and the development of knowledge.41 If we do not live in intellectual times, then what is the best description of this era, behaviors and practices? The binary opposition into which ‘intellectual’ is placed is neither commonsensical nor obvious. ‘Ignorant’ is perhaps the most obvious contender. Yet the question remains, who voted for Trump and Brexit when such decisions operated against the best interests of most citizens? Misinformation ensured that experience and consciousness have splayed, resulting in voting patterns that subvert and damage the lives of the majority of citizens. Mabel Berezin recognized the scale and scope of this historical moment. Donald Trump’s election has forced a collective reevaluation of who the ‘ordinary citizen’ or ‘forgotten man or woman’ is. Level of education distinguished Trump voters from Clinton voters. In spring 2016, Trump exuberantly shouted, ‘I love the poorly educated!’ The ordinary citizens who voted for Trump did not care about his well-documented outrageous statements.42 Reality television and celebrity culture matter to this analysis. Fame is transitory and ephemeral. It is also poorly studied at the moment, with Cultural Studies dragging a wagon of representational inelegances behind it, in the form of fan studies.43 Representation of women, citizens of color, or

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the gay community is not a priority in this desperate time. Discussions of representation can be saved for kind eras and scholars with time on their hands. An image can hurt and ridicule. Deportation, visa restrictions, sexual assault, gay suicide, and hate crimes are much more cutting to the individual and the culture. Similarly, the representation of Donald Trump is not an intellectual priority. His hair does not matter. His orange hue does not matter. His selection of sportswear while playing tennis or golf does not matter. Instead, competence and the capacity to manage a nation must be the focus. The legislative role of the president of the United States, requiring a grasp of diverse policies, laws, and local, state, and federal relationships, was not connoted as relevant by the Trump voters. A businessman who licensed his last name, bought and sold real estate and failed to develop a casino empire was recognized as qualified to run the United States, including the military, international foreign policy, and a national economy. Rural voters were significant to the Trump victory,44 but there are not enough rural citizens to swing an election. It was the level of education that was the determinant, and was particularly significant in rural Illinois, Wisconsin,45 Nevada, and Staten Island, a ferry ride away from Manhattan. While rural voters are important when thinking about these odd political results, to understand the first decades of the twenty-first century requires a careful unpicking of rurality. The nostalgia for a white rural past, that is not experiential but imagined, is pivotal to the ‘America’ summoned by Donald Trump. It is not real. It is a fictional confectionary with a bitter political aftertaste. Jason Cervone probed the powerful and confusing ideologies injecting rural regions at the moment. He has argued that clichés about rural environments being backward, populated by ‘rednecks,’ has meant that these locations are open fields for neoliberal

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‘modernization.’ The privatization of public resources is based on the ideology of “framing rural as deficient.”46 Once this lesser status is configured, then it is a simple process to summon privatized, marketized forces to solve the invented ‘problem.’ Cervone described this situation with clarity. Modernization in the neoliberal sense is an ambiguous term generally referring to corporate restructuring of rural land with an increasing use of industrial technology for greater output in agriculture, logging, mining, or whatever the local industry needs.47 For Trump supporters, the choice was clear. The proAmerican ‘Make America Great Again’ candidate was anti-globalization, anti-foreigners, and mocking of the feminine and the different. Yet he was also a figure of nostalgia. Making America great ‘again’ at a time when technology had removed an array of jobs from the economy and manufacturing was in decline, required subsidies from governments to survive. It is too simple to describe this change as the movement from the industrial economy to the ‘knowledge economy’ or the ‘service economy.’ We live in a socio-economic system where the working class are no longer required to work, and underemployment and the gig economy proliferates. Indeed, globalization in one country observed though the starkly separated lives of the Rust Belt and Silicon Valley in the United States of America, or Sunderland and Brighton in the United Kingdom, can explain the differentiation in voting patterns for Trump and Brexit.48 But there are deep, wide, and ill-focused emotional forces to understand, including anger49 and resentment. The ‘dignity’ of work50and the pseudo-Christian ideologies tethered to it, were shredded by the Global Financial Crisis, where affluent white men were

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prepared to risk the global economy for personal profit. Education matters education is integral to understanding why easy nationalist solutions soothed the brittle economic reality of globalization. Finance capitalism and real estate capitalism allowed and allow the elite to remain elite.51 Yet ‘the elite’ are not what they seem. This is not a question of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but an elaborate flock of lies, re-presentations and floating signifiers hooking and unhooking from odd signifieds in a lived simulacrum. James Ball recognized how the elites managed to wash themselves clean of oppression and discrimination in the simulacra. This was not a question of representation. This was a question of information literacy, the capacity to weigh evidence, interpret and analyze arguments, and evaluate assumptions about the self in society. Donald Trump is the billionaire son of a millionaire, who used to present and produce a huge show on US network television. Nigel Farage is a privately educated former City trader who has been a member of the European Parliament for eighteen years. Michael Gove is an Oxford-educated Times columnist and former Cabinet minister and before the final days of the Brexit campaign was regarded as a close friend of the Prime Minister. Yet all three managed to present themselves as outside the political establishment, as figures of change, and as people somehow outside of the elite. When it comes to who is and isn’t a political elite, it seems to have very little to do with the facts on the ground, instead being a state of mind.52 The capacity of the empowered to simply deny their empowerment, to pretend to represent ‘the people’ is the

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archetype of populism. This is not popular culture. This is populism. Part of the argument in these pages is to ensure a clear differentiation between these terms. Democracy and populism are distinct, and the distinction is based on representation. Democracy is based on the majority of a population voting for representatives who conduct politics in a way that ‘represents’ the people. If they fail to do so, then they are removed from office. There is accountability. Populist leaders do not require a mitigating stage of representation, no matter how flawed the proxies or process. They ‘represent’ the people without evidence or verification. It is here that the book, and the furore from, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is positioned.53 He was present in Trump’s White House or more precisely Bannon’s White House for the first 18 months in office. The book captured chaos, disorganization, and dysfunction. Wolff logged Trump’s “difficulties with reading, writing, and beyond the shock and awe close focus.”54 But the book revelations remains important for its interpretation of the media environment. Wolff argued: the media, adopting, a ‘shocked, shocked’ morality, could not fathom how being factually wrong was not an absolute ending in itself.55 Facts do not matter in a populist culture. Moral outrage about women, sex, and consent does not matter. Shame does not matter. As will be argued throughout Trump Studies, these are ‘post-content’ times. The victories of Trump and Brexit are victories of form and interface management over content and information literacies. The whining about the problems of Brexit are startling. The idea that Boris Johnson describes to The Sun “Bog Roll Brexit”56 days before his resignation as foreign secretary demonstrated that the Brexiteers

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were assuming a level of power, autonomy, and choice that does not exist. If Brexit indeed means Brexit, then adding excrement as adjectives will not enhance its meaning. Obfuscation is the point. It is not blocking the point. For example, here is the text from President Trump’s speech to the CIA on January 21, 2017. I know a lot about West Point, I’m a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically he was an academic genius and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart person.57 This statement had nothing to do with the CIA. The use of ‘I,’ ‘he’ and the deployment of the third person is important here. The focus on intelligence is significant, deploying synonyms such as “academics,” “smart” and “genius.” Therefore, it seems significant to allow the subtitle of this book to dance through Donald Trump’s description of himself: “stable genius.”58 Scholars require new, radical, edgy, and passionate methodologies, epistemologies, and ontologies to engage with this social, cultural, economic, and intellectual maelstrom. Trump Studies provides, as Bessire and Bond have confirmed, “a much-needed corrective to many conventional explanations of the contemporary.”59 Yet is Trump Brexit the burning of Grenfell high-rise flats a confirmation that the left has few solutions or answers to injustice? The surprising (non) victory of Jeremy Corbyn in the May 2017 election in the United Kingdom suggested that socialist goals and policies were re-connecting with a wider constituency. The volatility, agitation, and weirdness within the political landscape

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is clear. Donald Trump tweets. There is an ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ ringtone.60 These movements are operating in a space where scholars and scholarship are silent, decentered, and denied. Is this disconnection between politics and scholarship a recognition that ‘experts’ have failed to move to cite Antonio Gramsci from common sense to good sense?61 It is the time to reverse such a trend. It is time to take the BBC advertisement and slogan about Brexit seriously: “Brexit. Not just politics. Everyday life.”62 Therefore, to grasp tenaciously and then with tenacity the Brexit in everyday life requires deep thinking, radical interdisciplinarity, and a careful survey of the history of ideas in new times. The disconnection from participatory politics is clear. Less than one quarter of the US population voted for Donald Trump. The low voting turnout created conditions where disillusioned, white men and women could treat a presidential campaign with the gravity and significance of a tweet, responding emotionally and impulsively to deep, historical economic injustices. The necessity to understand the unemployed or underemployed white working class, which has been a key project for the film maker Michael Moore, is gritty and crucial. Significantly, Moore was one of the few voices that predicted the victory of Donald Trump because of the disconnection and dissatisfaction of white, working class men.63 Bessire and Bond recognized that: Is it not a caustic irony that the ‘working class’ emerges as an explanation of politics just after it ceases to exist as an organized force in politics.64 Industrialization was not only a way of organizing classes, but also production and consumption. During the twentieth century, the gulf between classes reduced through the rise of compulsory education and the proliferation of

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communication systems, but also other identifications such as gender, sexuality, race, and generation. The deep truth of technology that the number of workers will reduce through automation is masked by the glittering ephemera of social media. Fewer people are needed to complete the available work. Yet there are residues, legacies, and fumes. Sherry Lee Linkon summoned an evocative phrase and argument when she stated that, “‘the half life’ of deindustrialization is longer than expected.”65 Guy Standing’s conceptualization of the precariat confirms the analytical and theoretical accuracy of that analysis.66 He shows that class is not configured through a lack of education, but by job insecurity. As paid work has become more unstable, casualized and toxic, a self-help industry has expanded to manage and mitigate the dire state of employment. Caroline Webb’s How to Have a Good Day67 is an archetype of this genre. This book values priorities, productivity, resilience, energy, and intentions. She argues that it is important that we are “starting your day the night before.”68 This book argues that individuals can change their attitudes and assumptions toward work. Yet the culture, of temporary contracts and the digital pervasiveness of work through the rest of our lives, is not addressed. The assumption of such books is that if a worker can focus on “moving on”69 and providing “the positive no,”70 then a successful working life can be achieved. Attention to work, leisure, families, and socialization is important, as identity is no longer a fashionable term or focus for researchers. Identity politics rightly has been critiqued for two decades.71 The self and experience is rarely the basis of an expansive movement for social justice. With multiculturalism living on fumes and the alt-right rejuvenating the intrinsic and intransigent rights of heterosexual white men, those who are disempowered on the basis of their race, gender, sexuality, or economic conditions have few spaces to

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gain consciousness, share their histories, and resist and renegotiate power structures. Jonathan Rutherford described this environment as “an afterlife of the post-modern and post-industrial.”72 Without work and family providing the framework for identity, commodification is the inadequate replacement. Shopping is not thinking, and it is not living with consciousness and reflection. It is living in a fog of micro-pleasure, satiation until the next credit card bill arrives. The lack of constructive dialog between right and left means that alt-right ideologies white supremacy, antiSemitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, and homophobia enter popular culture and are normalized. The digitization of popular culture has increased the speed and scale of this normalization. 73 Significantly, Hugh Hefner died during Donald Trump’s first year in office. Gyorgy Toth argued that, “Hefner empowered men to cast aside the millstones of being a grown-up, and behave like boys in adult bodies with adult sex drives.”74 Women were available to date, photograph, and have sex. Marriage was the anathema, signaling an end to masculine freedom. Women who tricked men into marriage were ‘gold diggers’ and men in Hefland were best left in their single state. Feminism also matters a great deal to understanding debate, discussion, and evidence in our current interregnum. Misogyny is structural, demeaning, and washing away the feminine in favor of heteronormative, procreative masculinity. Feminism works from the assumption that the oppression of women is a universal state. Patriarchy ensures that masculine domination is perpetuated and femininity remains complex, contradictory, soft, and reactive. Women’s lives are structured through subordination, yet increasingly the nature and sites of that subordination are changing. The links between theory, politics, and identity are tenuous and

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strained. Germaine Greer, anti-Hef but just as troubling, confused ‘rape’ and ‘bad sex.’75 The 2010s were the decade that recycled Death in Venice sex, sin, and tortured desire, but in a Wikipedia, zombiefied version. Sex and death punctuated popular culture, but this was no Judith Butler Gender Trouble.76 This was sexualized violence. It was no surprise that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a book published in 1985 amidst Ronald Reagan’s America77 looped back into dominance in the first years of Trump’s presidency. In its original iteration, it was a science fiction morality tale, so embedded in the literary canon that it is taught in English curricula around the world. Rebirthed via a Hulu television series, to include the brutalizing rapes of fertile women ritualized to appear as part of a “business transaction”78 for a repressed theocracy, the iconography of the program entered popular discourse.79 On YouTube, film makers started to create composites of Trump’s presidency and The Handmaid’s Tale.80 Sex matters. The relationship between sex and politics matters. The sexualized nature of Trump candidacy and presidency was not isolated to one man. At the conclusion of 2017, a senate election was held on December 13.81 In the preceding weeks, Roy Moore had been followed by rumors of inappropriate sexualized attention to teenagers while he was a District Attorney and in his thirties. There are many significant parts to this story that are of relevance to this book. Firstly, he lost the senate election to Doug Jones, a Democrat. Secondly, after all the charges and claims against him, he lost by very little. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the race variable that was so charged during the Trump campaign came to the forefront. What was perhaps somewhat ambiguous for Trump white people voted for him was resolutely clear for Moore.

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The advantage of social media is that the voices and the views of voters are captured and heard. No History Workshop82 was required to ascertain why people voted. Now This, an online composite news service, presented a video of the reasons why white men and women voted for Moore, regardless of the charges of inappropriate contact with young women. Their answers were clear. They did not care about the charges of underage dating or sex. Indeed, it was naturalized, normalized, and parked as insignificant.83 But for one group, these charges were real and important. 63% of white women voted for Moore. 98% of black women voted for Jones.84 Therefore, race matters. Gender also matters. Sex is the marinade for both. Class remains the variable to discover, probe, pick, and understand. Trump occupies space and squeezes alternatives voices and views into unproductive boxes like “Mexicans” and “Muslims.” But further, there is a profound questioning of not only progressive politics, but also the state of political debate. While gay rights, women’s reproductive rights, childcare and environmental protection may seem to be the bedrock for social change, they are also the talisman for the disconnected and disempowered to gain from the blaming of others for their social and economic conditions. As Brandi Janssen realized, “while farmers mostly voted for Donald Trump, much of his platform is not favorable to agriculture.”85 When he focuses on jobs, they are in the manufacturing sector, rather than working through the intricate economies of rural and regional development.86 Similarly, the constituants of agricultural regions of Great Britain voted for Brexit. They gained from the Common Agricultural Policy. Therefore, why would voters vote against their own best interests? To understand selfish politics that do not operate in self-interest, it is necessary to poke and probe silent majorities.87

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NOTES 1. S. Redhead, Theoretical Times (Bingley: Emerald, 2017). 2. S. Redhead and T. Brabazon, “Dr Who: High popular culture for difficult times”, Libsyn (December 11, 2015), http://traffic.libsyn. com/tarabrabazon/Doctor_Who_-_high_popular_culture_for_ difficult_times.mp3 3. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, http://www2. ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/ 4. International Journal of Zizek Studies, http://www.zizekstudies. org/ 5. T. Brabazon, “Don’t fear the reaper? The Zombie University and eating braaaaains”, KOME, 4, no. 2 (2016): 1 16, http:// komejournal.com/files/KOME_TB%20ZombieU.pdf 6. S. Zizek, Incontinence of the Void (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017): 3. 7. We note the profoundly unhelpful monograph edited by Marc Sable and Angel Torres, Trump and Political Philosophy: Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Civic Virtual (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). While the topic had incredible potential and power, neither Zizek nor Baudrillard are mentioned. The state of philosophy in understanding contemporary events is revealed in Trump and Political Philosophy, alongside the ambivalent status of Zizek and Baudrillard as philosophers. 8. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy is set in galactic interregnum during the twenty-fifth century. 9. Z. Bauman, “Times of interregnum”, Ethics and Global Politics, 5, no. 1 (2012): 49 56. 10. A. Nuzzo, “’Living in the interregnum’: Hegelian reflections on the ‘dynamic universal”, Philosophy Today, 61, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 817 832.

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11. Thomas Plumper and Eric Neumayer construct a powerful model to assess democracy during interregna. Please refer to T. Plumper and E. Neumayer, “The level of democracy during interregnum periods: Recoding the polity2 score”, Political Analysis, 18, no. 2 (2010): 206 226. 12. H. Carvalho and A. Norrie, “’In this interregnum: Dialectical themes in the critique of criminal justice”, Social & Legal Studies, 26, no. 6 (2017): 718. 13. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, https:// archive.org/stream/ AntonioGramsciSelectionsFromThePrisonNotebooks/AntonioGramsci-Selections-from-the-Prison-Notebooks_djvu.txt 14. Bauman, “Times of interregnum”, 51. 15. Reuters, “Over 2,300 children separated from parents at U.S. Mexico border from May 5 to June 9”, Huffington Post (June 20, 2018), https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/family-separation-atborder-reunification-process_us_5b29d9cfe4b05d6c16c8c48e 16. AP, “Audio of distressed children separated from parents emerges”, Sydney Morning Herald (June 19, 2018), https://www. smh.com.au/world/north-america/audio-of-distressed-childrenseparated-from-parents-emerges-20180619-p4zmbc.html 17. March for Science, 2017, https://www.marchforscience.com/ 18. M. Taussig, “Trump Studies”, Cultural Anthropology (January 18, 2017), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1046-trump-studies 19. Taussig, Cultural Anthropology (January 18, 2017), https:// culanth.org/fieldsights/1046-trump-studies 20. Taussig, Cultural Anthropology (January 18, 2017), https:// culanth.org/fieldsights/1046-trump-studies 21. K. Marx and F. Engels, Germany Ideology Part One (1845-6), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/germanideology/ch01a.htm#5a4

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22. N. Love, “Back to the future: trendy fascism, the Trump effect, and the alt-right”, New Political Science, 39, no. 2 (2017): 263 264. 23. S. Hall, “The great moving right show”, Marxism Today (January 1979): 14 20, http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/ pdf/79_01_hall.pdf 24. Stuart Hall’s research and theory has a complex, unsettled and unsettling place in this book. We do not celebrate the “great men” of Cultural Studies or history. Hall’s work had challenges, particularly in his polemic engagements with EP Thompson, and the often ambiguous and unpredictable sorties with both Althusserian and Gramscian theory. Significantly, much of his work theorizing the political economy and early Thatcherite manifestations of neoliberalism are under-discussed in the contemporary celebrations of his work. To view contemporary renderings of Hall’s legacy, please refer to Ann Curthoys and John Docker’s “Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies, circa 1983”, Cultural Studies Review, 23, no. 2 (2017): 162 172. 25. A. Goodwin, “Drumming and memory: Scholarship, technology, and music-making”, in Mapping the Beat, Eds T. Swiss, J. Sloop and A. Herman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 122. 26. H. Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers (New York: New York University Press, 2006): 61. 27. J. Alejandro, “Journalism in the age of social media”, Reuters Institute Fellow Paper, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University, 2010, http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/ sites/default/files/research/files/Journalism%2520in%2520the% 2520Age%2520of%2520Social%2520Media.pdf 28. All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception and the Spirit of I. F. Stone (White Pine Pictures, 2017), American Anarchist (Gravitas Ventures, 2017), and The Flaw (The Orchard, 2011). 29. J. Pie, Back to the Studio, https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCO79NsDE5FpMowUH1YcBFcA

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30. D. Newsom, Bridging the Gaps in Global Communication (Malden: Blackwell, 2007): 20. 31. JISC, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, CIBER Briefing Paper (London: UCL, 2007), http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008. pdf 32. M. Prensky, Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2010): 2. 33. JISC, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, 14. 34. JISC, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, 14. 35. JISC, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, 12. 36. JISC, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, 14. 37. JISC, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, 20 38. R. Arum and J. Roksa, “College, too easy for its own good”, Los Angeles Times (June 2, 2011), http://www.latimes.com/news/ opinion/commentary/la-oe-arum-college-20110602,0,1981136.story 39. Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.co.uk/ 40. Directory of Open Access Journals, http://www.doaj.org/ 41. In Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu’s important book, Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) they argued that “Information does not, in fact, want to be free. It wants to be labelled, organized, and filtered so it can be discovered, cross-referenced, and consumed”, p. 51. 42. M. Berezin, “On the construction sites of history: Where did Donald Trump come from?”, American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2017): 1, doi:10.1057/s41290-017-0045-7.

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43. An example of this poor theorization of celebrity and fame is M. Deflem, Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 44. R. Leonard, “Why rural America voted for Trump”, New York Times (January 5, 2017), http://www.nytimes.com/(2017/01/05/ opinion/why-rural-america-voted-for-trump.html) 45. K.J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 46. J. Cervone, Corporatizing Rural Education: Neoliberal Globalization and Reaction in the United States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 24. 47. Cervone, Corporatizing Rural Education: Neoliberal Globalization and Reaction in the United States, 98. 48. This argument was incredibly well made in the “Editorial: The case of the Trump regime” in Nurse Education Today, 52 (2017): 53 56. While this made seem an odd source for a deep critique of Donald Trump, this publication argued that the policies on climate change and the health injustices manifested through the loss of Obamacare require the nursing profession to intervene in public discourse. 49. A. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 50. M. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 51. L.A. Rivera, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 52. J. Ball, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World (London: Biteback, 2017): 263.

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53. M. Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Henry Holt, 2018). 54. Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, 45. 55. Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, 47. 56. B. Johnson, “Bog Roll Brexit”, The Sun (June 23, 2018): 1. 57. Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, 49. 58. Reuters Staff, “I am a stable genius’ Donald Trump says”, Reuters (January 29, 2018), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usatrump-health/i-am-a-stable-genius-donald-trump-saysidUSKBN1FH0YX 59. L. Bessire and D. Bond, “The rise of Trumpism”, Cultural Anthropology (January 18, 2017), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ 1030-the-rise-of-trumpism 60. Skwawkbox, “Oh Jeremy Corbyn Ringtone”, Skwawkbox.org (July 5, 2017), https://skwawkbox.org/2017/07/05/oh-jeremycorbyn-ringtone-stormzy-version/ 61. I. Snir, “Not just one common sense”: Gramsci’s common sense and Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democratic politics”, Constellations, 23, no. 2 (2016): 269 280. 62. BBC One, BBC, 2018. 63. Michael Moore in TrumpLand (Dog Eat Dog Films, 2016). 64. Bessire and D. Bond, Cultural Anthropology (January 18, 2017), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1030-the-rise-of-trumpism 65. S. Linkon, “Navigating past and present in the deindustrial landscape”, Paper presented at the Working Class Studies Conference, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, June 23, 2011. 66. G. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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67. C. Webb, How to Have a Good Day (London: Pan, 2016). 68. Webb, How to Have a Good Day, 44. 69. Webb, How to Have a Good Day, 261. 70. Webb, How to Have a Good Day, 96. 71. K. Woodward, Identity and Difference (London: Sage, 1997); A. Sivanandan, Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism (London: Verso, 1990); E. Hobsbawm, “Identity politics and the left”, New Left Review, no. 217 (May/ June 1996). 72. J. Rutherford, After Identity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2007): 9. 73. S.J. Carrier, “Neo-popular culture: The alt-right cult of Trump”, The Daily Carrier (January 17, 2017). 74. G. Toth, “How Hugh Hefner’s world helped Donald Trump get into the White House”, The Conversation (September 30, 2017), http://theconversation.com/how-hugh-hefners-world-helped-donaldtrump-get-into-the-white-house-84853 75. “Germaine Greer: Most rape is just bad sex”, SBS (May 31, 2018), https://www.sbs.com.au/news/germaine-greer-most-rape-isjust-bad-sex 76. J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007). 77. M. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage, 2010). 78. This phrase was used in the novel, Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 25. 79. A. Storrie, “If the Handmaid’s tale was Scottish”, You Tube (September 22, 2017), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= gVEoQWJvLFgand; “They finally made a Handmaid’s tale for men,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciPszqk703k

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80. “Trump’s Handmaid’s tale”, YouTube (June 3, 2017), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTBfPpVblwI 81. It is significant to note that the 50 Shades of Grey franchise also released a film Fifty Shades Darker (Universal Pictures, 2017) and the novel Darker ((London: Arrow, 2017), the second book retold through a point-of-view switch to Christian Grey from Anastasia Steele. 82. T. Brabazon, “Brixton’s Aflame: Television history workshop and the other battle of Britain”, Limina, 4 (1998): 49 55, http:// www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/previous/volumes_15/volume_4?f= 73960 83. Now This, Facebook, December 13, 2017, https://www. facebook.com/NowThisPolitics/videos/1824110147620467/?hc_ref= ARR5PFwjXJw-Lt-CuiLTSuSHgk9RoOE_oTshfDcWZjl9HBOPkmHuY-uo1dmNzhckeQ 84. “Who voted for Doug Jones”, Newsweek (December 13, 2017), http://www.newsweek.com/doug-jones-roy-moore-alabama-senaterace-special-election-results-demographics-746366 85. B. Janssen, “Making rural America great again”, Cultural Anthropology (January 18, 2017), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ 1037-making-rural-america-great-again 86. P. Barlett, American Dreams, Rural Realities: Family Farms in Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); O. Gray Davidson, Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996); K. Dudley, Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 87. This book began its life appropriately considering the role of social media in its pages through two podcasts conducted by Steve Redhead and Tara Brabazon. The first was “The University of Trumpland”, Libsyn (November 13, 2016), http://traffic.libsyn.com/ tarabrabazon/University_of_Trumpland.mp3 and “Accelerated Trumpland”, Libsyn (August 20, 2017), http://traffic.libsyn.com/

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tarabrabazon/Accelerated_Trumpland.mp3. The first was recorded before Redhead’s diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. The second was recorded three weeks after his diagnosis. They were the most downloaded podcasts they ever produced. The feedback from around the world was remarkable. Therefore, a decision was made to extend these ideas, working with Redhead and Brabazon’s now completed PhD student, Dr Sunny Rue Chivaura. A refereed article was produced for the September 2018 edition of the Cultural Studies Review. This piece was titled, “Trump Studies: Silent Majorities in Theoretical Times.” This current book was completed in its full draft before Steve Redhead’s death. He read three drafts before it was sent to Emerald Publishing for review. Referee commentaries enhanced the book, as did the discussions with Dr Philippa Grand. Tara Brabazon thanks the editor, reviewers and international listeners, readers, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances for their valuable insights into this issue.

CHAPTER 1 SHADOWING THE SILENT MAJORITIES

Baudrillard died in March 2007 from cancer, but his work continued to be published a decade after his death. His posthumous publications have been significant in shifting the long-term view of Baudrillard: from a celebrated postmodern theorist (to those who have not read him) to a global scholar with a mature system of thought that made sense of modern banality. A recent posthumous publication (in a new English translation) from the 1980s, The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977 1984,1 shines a light on the politics in France (and elsewhere) from the 1970s and early 1980s. Only French language versions existed during his lifetime. This collection aligns with his illuminating but misunderstood work from the period in which he located ‘the silent majorities’ in books that summon the concept through their title, such as In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.2 He investigated the role of the masses and the “end of the social.” He predicted a moment where a Brexit or Trump could emerge. Banality refuses to cleanly hook into the hegemonic cloth.3 If scholars or citizens are interested in why the Brexit vote 33

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occurred in June 2016 in the UK,4 or why Donald Trump defied electoral odds in the USA, or why Pauline Hanson’s right-wing One Nation party called for a Royal Commission into Islam in Australia,5 then they can locate answers in Baudrillard’s texts from the early 1980s, summoning “the divine left,” “the end of the social,” and “the shadow of the silent majorities.” The chronicle of the years 1977 1984 in Baudrillard’s writings from The Divine Left shows the scale of social, economic, and political change in the years after punk. This is not postmodernism or postmodern theorizing. To cite a Steve Redhead book title, that was not ironic: We have never been postmodern.6 Perry Anderson made a clear meta-realization: “postmodernism emerged as a cultural dominant in unprecendently rich capitalist societies with very high average levels of consumption.”7 Postmodern theory was the Dynasty and Dallas of academic culture: excessive, camp, featuring big shoulder pads, thin ideas, and extreme lip gloss. Now, we require a different rendering of these theories and a re-reading of the scholars dismissed during these blindingly excessive times. What Trump Studies implements is a punk theory. This is a DIY analysis. This is maker culture. This is a garbage bag dress held together with safety pins. This is dirty, messy, and chaotic theorizing that did not nest well in the 1970s and 1980s through Baudrillard’s rise as the enfant terrible of high theory. But through the gauze of late and indeed posthumous Baudrillard, the punk energy of his concepts and paradigms provide an energetic frame to Trump Studies. Baudrillard’s mature system of thought was already in train by the time the Sex Pistols, Clash, Slits, and the foundation for new wave emerged on the scene in 1976.8 In that year, a key book in the Baudrillard oeuvre was written: Symbolic Exchange and Death.9 It was published in 1976 in French, but not really fully appreciated by English-speaking

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readers until translated. A 1993 English publication helped reorient readers, but even today his scholarship is deposited into an intellectual dustbin labeled postmodernist. Crucially, Symbolic Exchange and Death contained the theory of reversibility which would become so important to Baudrillard’s writing until his own death. As Sylvere Lotringer, publisher of Semiotext(e) and long-time friend, stated in the introduction to a posthumous Baudrillard book called The Agony of Power,10 “reversibility is the form death takes in a symbolic exchange.”11 In 1976, the year zero of punk in global popular culture, punk’s cultural stirrings were embracing antecedents that Baudrillard shared: the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry and Pere Ubu. In the mid-1970s, a Cleveland punk band emerged with the name Pere Ubu to globally popularize the drama of writer Alfred Jarry from the late nineteenth century which had so fascinated Baudrillard since the 1950s. Baudrillard’s first short book explored Jarry and Pataphysics. Cleveland musician David Thomas in 1975 named his band Pere Ubu after Alfred Jarry’s caricature king because, to Thomas, it added a texture of absolute grotesqueness, a darkness descending over everything within mid1970s America. In his own lifetime, Baudrillard never declared any awareness of this popular music culture/Ubu connection, though he did once appear in a ‘punk’ costume of his own. He wore a gold lame jacket with mirrored lapels, reading the text of his own self-penned 1980s poem ‘MotelSuicide’, backed by a rock band at the Chance Event held at Whiskey Pete’s in Las Vegas during November 1996. The only surviving photo shows the short, balding, academic Baudrillard appearing as if he was auditioning for a place in a mid-late 1970s punk band.12 Baudrillard’s attitude to power, law, culture, sovereignty, and politics changed in this mid-1970s ‘punk’ period. The agony of power was as much about the power of agony. In

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his own agonizing introduction to The Agony of Power, Sylvere Lotringer claims powerfully and correctly, that Baudrillard’s two key ideas throughout his work were that, firstly, reality had disappeared and became replaced by simulacra and secondly that there was a potential symbolic challenge in this disappearance. This mid-1970s period is crucial for understanding Baudrillard’s work for the rest of his life, and especially its political implications for the post-GFC and post-Brexit period, as we enter what Slavoj Zizek has hailed as a “new dark ages” and “trouble in paradise.”13 What can be seen in hindsight as Jean Baudrillard’s ‘post-punk’ work is revealed in The Agony of Power, a book praised from within by Sylvere Lotringer as nothing less than Baudrillard’s “final intellectual testament.”14 The Agony of Power offers a different view of sovereignty and power from the classical legal conception of power often reproduced in major tomes of legal philosophy and sociology of law. Baudrillard’s perspective is a form of the ‘patasociology’ (echoing Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics) hailed by French theorist of ‘the social’ Jacques Donzelot who worked with Baudrillard at the University of Nanterre in France. Whilst there are many intriguing books in the Nomikoi Critical Legal Thinkers series produced by Routledge,15 the orthodoxy of the ‘critical legal thinkers’ chosen on law, politics, and power contrasts strongly with Baudrillard’s radical late work on these issues, underscored by his idea of integral reality and reversibility. There are books, so far, in the series on Law by Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek, Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Niklas Luhmann, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, but not Jean Baudrillard. In this posthumous work, especially in The Agony of Power, Baudrillard offers a unique theory of power, incorporating what he calls ‘a double refusal,’ by which he means the sovereign’s refusal to dominate as well as the subject’s refusal

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to be dominated. As he conveys in another posthumous book, Carnival and Cannibal, in a passage repeated from The Agony of Power, the radicalism of his thinking is in the argument that power must to be abolished. For Baudrillard: it is power itself that has to be abolished and not just in the refusal to be dominated, which is the essence of all traditional struggles, but equally and as violently in the refusal to dominate. For domination implies both these things, and if there were the same violence or energy in the refusal to dominate, we would long ago have stopped dreaming of revolution. And this tells us why intelligence cannot - and never will be able to be in power: because it consists precisely in this twofold refusal.16 The refusal to dominate, or to exercise sovereign power according to Sylvere Lotringer, illustrates Baudrillard’s theory at its most banal. It can be seen in the agonies of those involved in the revolts of May 1968 or the activities of the self-proclaimed ‘post-political’ Italian Autonomists in the 1970s, or the failure of the Communist Party and other parts of the left in the late 1970s and early 1980s in France. They were, in Baudrillard’s theory, and enhanced by Lotringer’s interpretation, less than confident in wanting to dominate. They agonized about power, in both their resistance to sovereignty and their unwillingness to become involved in its exercise. Indeed, as Baudrillard has written emphatically, “power itself is an embarrassment and there is no one to assume it truly.”17 Banality is important to our analysis in this book, as is the double refusal. Best revealed in the horror and embarrassment of the successful Brexiteers18 and the snap resignation

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of David Cameron,19 there is both a refusal to dominate and a refusal to be dominated. The double refusal provides a framework to understand the irrationality and denial of power. Brexit and Trump’s victory confirm the change. Brexit and Trump’s election are embarrassing, shameful, banal, and ignorant moments.20 There is something sordid and impotent in these victories. The racism and xenophobia are too overt, distasteful, and grotesque. What became clear through Theresa May’s aphorism ‘Brexit means Brexit’ was that the repetition of a noun does not increase its clarity. What was also clear was Boris Johnson’s continual repetition of neo-colonial ideology. The rationale for his resignation was that under May’s rendering of Brexit, the UK was “headed for the status of a colony.”21 Therefore, the cleanest and clearest example of the double refusal is the bizarre and catastrophic instability after the Brexit vote. Boris Johnson and David Davis refused to lead a population that refused to be led, and implemented the double refusal with a neo-colonial chaser. David Frum noted similar tendencies through the Trump presidency. He argued that: The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of the law, but an accumulating sub version of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.22 This is not a Foucaultian or even an Althusserian rendering of power. This is Baudrillard’s double refusal, deploying banality or ‘sub version of norms’ to create instability,

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confusion, agitation, and a lack of focus. This is an economic system of “non regulation” rather than deregulation.23 The key questions about the instability of the 2010s were founded earlier in 2008. How did an economic system crumbled and humbled by the Global Financial Crisis survive and then continue to maintain momentum and stature? This has not been accidental or incidental. Owen Jones produced a remarkable monograph, The Establishment: And How They Get away with It. He argued that: Ever since Britain was plunged into economic disaster in September 2008, there has been a concerted attempt to redirect people’s anger both over their own plight, and that of the nation as a whole away from the powerful.24 In a nation with universal suffrage, the key question is how the powerful maintain their rule over the instruments and agents of power. One strategy is to deploy Nicos Poulantzas’s theorization of the state, to reveal how small and irrelevant issues25 mask the deep and brutalizing actions of domination.26 These trivial matters then serve to shield and decenter critical questions about the concentration of power, and injustices in housing, health, and education. For example, terrorism becomes a siren’s call that summons and justifies inequality and a restriction of migration and citizenship on the basis of religion and country of origin. Yet minor, banal issues and behaviors routinize and normalize an ideology founded on inaccuracy, error, xenophobia, confusion, and an ignorance of history. Therefore, removing shoes, belt, watches, keys, and even hair clips at an airport, queuing in odd caterpillar formations, and expecting trouble from stoic border officials align to form the trivial and flimsy framework

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that deflects and denies the foundational political and social errors that summoned such behaviors in the first place. Terrorism matters to Trump Studies. The irrationality of a War on Terror, fueled by racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, resulted in bizarre behaviors being introduced and sustained through our daily lives. Bodies are managed, identified, organized, and controlled. Fear and racism are a potent combination. When aligned with economic injustice, a culture of blame, shame, ridicule, and dense violence emerges. Timothy Snyder stated that “life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but the world reacts to what you do.”27 He also showed that “modern tyranny is terror management.”28 Summoning a fear of outsiders necessitates the creation of outsiders in the first place. At the very point that racism and xenophobia proliferate and outsiders are excluded and marginalized, the word ‘outsider’ has been reclaimed and repurposed by the alt-right. Steve Richards asked, “why have the mainstream parties on the right and left allowed the outsiders to thrive?”29 Once in power, as with Donald Trump, they cannot manage “the conundrums of government.”30 Once on the inside of institutions, they are doomed to failure because they have to manage legislation and leadership. They are not a despot or a dictator. They have to negotiate and they do not have the political capital or expertise to do so. However, the damage that can be done is malignant to democracy and intellectual life. The relationship between the alt-right and white supremacy31 is complex. It is not simply a matter that Donald Trump delayed denouncing the Ku Klux Klan and their violence.32 The blending of Christianity and apocalyptic race wars pour into a religious crusade and an online environment that allows any ideas no matter how bizarre to be published and shared. Through disintermediation, there are few gatekeepers between a racist and an audience. Blogs, tweets,

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and Facebook posts enable the development and proliferation of a discourse of carelessness (at best) or hatred and violence (at worst). From Baudrillard, we apply the double refusal and the space it creates to understand how banality operates in the justification of patriarchy, racism, colonization, and xenophobia. The unsayable becomes normalized banal and allowed to grow, thrive, and breed. Semiotic violence is contagious, virulent, and passionate in its banality. Yet Donald Trump and Brexit must not be normalized. This is not business as usual. This book stands for the exceptionalism, the oddity, and the dangers within this conjuncture. These are not ‘Black Swan’ events. Taleb shows that Black Swans are the unpredictable events that reveal a huge impact.33 We argue that Trump and Brexit were and are predictable. Where Taleb’s interpretation and concept has interpretative value is what occurs after this event. ‘We’ citizens configure narratives, explanations, and justifications that hook this bizarre moment back into the fabric of our daily lives. Such narratives provide comfort, reduce fear, and renders the random predictable. But actually a Black Swan event is catastrophic, unpredictable, and dangerous. This book stands for not normalizing, calming, or justifying these events. They were bizarre, troubling, and horrific. They must not be naturalized. Chapter 2 continues this project, by watching the uncomfortable embrace between capitalism and feminism that crushed the campaign of Hillary Clinton. The double refusal is in play. The refusal to lead. The refusal to be led. But what is introduced in Chapter 2 and seen with stunning clarity is the banality of sexism. A woman was dismissed, demeaned, and undermined for being a woman. A white

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man no matter how flawed was the naturalized and normalized vessel for power, authority, and politics.

NOTES 1. J. Baudrillard, The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977 1984 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014). 2. J. Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or The End of the Social (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007). 3. We log Perry Anderson’s scholarship on The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (London: Verso, 2017). He argues that the diffusion of hegemony has meant that in American political science in particular, it has gained, “an essentially economic field of meaning,” p. 69. In the UK, and through the work of Raymond Williams, hegemony became a system of practices and therefore enfolded effectively into Cultural Studies. 4. For example, please refer to “Brexit criminology: Crime, justice and society”, Plymouth University (April 5, 2017), https://www. plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/brexit-criminology-crime-justice-andsociety 5. AAP, “Federal Election 2016: Pauline Hanson says Islam no religion of peace,” The Australia (July, 4, 2016), http://www. theaustralian.com.au/federal-election-2016/federal-election-2016pauline-hanson-says-islam-no-religion-of-peace/news-story/ 9e7689d443ed5167785db4784553437e 6. S. Redhead, We Have Never Been Postmodern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). 7. P. Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998): 121. 8. C. Heylin, Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge (London: Penguin, 2007).

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9. J. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993). 10. J. Baudrillard, The Agony of Power (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010). 11. Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, 82. 12. The picture was used as the cover for S. Redhead, Ed, The Jean Baudrillard Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 13. S. Zizek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014): 8. 14. Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, 8. 15. Nomikoi Critical Legal Thinkers, https://www.routledge.com/ Nomikoi-Critical-Legal-Thinkers/book-series/CAV20 16. J. Baudrillard, Carnival and Cannibal (London/New York: Seagull Books, 2010): 17 18. 17. S. Zizek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism, 8. 18. “Brexit Night”, Sky News YouTube (June 23, 2016), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1ZCdYltHJA 19. “Brexit: David Cameron Resigns”, BBC YouTube (June 24, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXNV3Ad0qQ0 20. It is important to log the remarkable interpretations of these events offered by Aeron Davis in Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). He argues that “the modern generation of leaders are neither expert nor visionary; nor are they socially cohesive or in control,” loc166. He also argued that, “they are highly skilled when it comes to pursuing their self-interest. But, they are also rather less able to influence public opinion or predict the consequences of their actions,” loc 184.

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21. B. Johnson in R. Price, “Here is Boris Johnson’s full resignation letter”, Business Insider (July 9, 2018), https://www.businessinsider. in/heres-boris-johnsons-full-resignation-letter-we-are-truly-headedfor-the-status-of-colony/articleshow/64923006.cms 22. D. Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (New York: HarperCollins, 2018): xi. 23. Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, 101. 24. O. Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It (London: Penguin, 2015): xi. 25. A clear example of trivial matters becoming a sign of nationalism and/or national betrayal occurred when Black professional athletes “took the knee” during the national anthem at sporting fixtures to protest the treatment of African Americans by police. President Trump transformed this act of resistance into a wider attack on America. Once more, a nostalgic version of the United States permeated this issue. Freedom of speech is valued and accepted for some, but not others. Please refer to D. T. Pollard, Living in the Age of White Reparations: Caged Migrant Children, Kneeling Athletes & White Supremacy (DT Pollard, 2018, Kindle edition). 26. N. Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State”, New Left Review, no. 58 (November/December 1969), https://newleftreview. org/I/58/nicos-poulantzas-the-problem-of-the-capitalist-state 27. T. Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (London: Bodley Head, 2017): 33. 28. Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 102. 29. S. Richards, The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way (London: Atlantic, 2017): 11. 30. Richards, The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way, 45.

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31. To review a strong analysis of the White Power Movement before the alt-right’s rise, please refer to Pete Simi and Robert Futrell, American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). 32. J. Pace, “Analysis: Why Won’t Donald Trump Condemn White Nationalism”, AP News (August 14, 2017), https://www.apnews. com/7d824d4df86649fd98c4ba63a8015d0c 33. N. Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007).

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CHAPTER 2 THE BANALITY OF CAPITALISM (AND FEMINISM)

James Meek offered a profound narrative of the relationship between industrialization and globalization. All factories must close one day, but there’s something particularly brutal about a factory being closed because its owners have found cheaper labour elsewhere. The five hundred workers at Cadbury’s Somerdale chocolate factory in Keynsham near Bristol learned on 3 October 2007 that most of their highly paid, permanent, solidly pensioned jobs were to be moved to a new factory in Poland, not because they had done anything wrong, or because their products weren’t selling, or because the factory was unprofitable, but because their Polish replacements could do the same job for less than one fifth of the money. On the day the announcement was made, the Cadbury bosses locked the workers out and posted private security guards at the site. Apparently they feared a violent reaction, but to the shocked 47

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people of Keynsham, where the lights of Somerdale had burned for eighty years, the one-day lockout looked like an attempt to project onto a guiltless workforce an act of violence that had emerged from the company boardroom.1 Is this historical moment merely an example of water finding its own level and capitalists continuing to source profit? Perhaps what is most disturbing in James Meek’s statement about the redundancy of workers through the inequalities of international capitalism is his surprise. Capitalists will ruthlessly exploit their workforce, and when it is possible to exploit international workers to a greater degree, then they will do so. Why this brutalizing reality is still shocking remains of intellectual interest. James Meek, in talking with the laid off workers in Somerdale, not only found they had voted for Brexit, but some had joined UKIP. The freedom of movement was only part of the problem expressed by the Somerdale workers. Of greater concern was the banality of their xenophobia. Yet freedom of capital was a greater threat to a Fordist-organized workforce than could be solved by either Brexit or UKIP. The ruthlessness of capital is clear. Publishing industries have sprouted to ‘self-manage’ exploitation. Self-help is Marxism, without the Marxism. Even in the white collar workforce, a series of motivational books have emerged to help workers manage ‘assholes.’2 Yet ‘the problem’ is not individual bosses or a toxic management culture. Benjamin Noys shows that speed is actually a central concern: “our lives are too fast, we are subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more.”3 Technology has been the hope and curse of the workforce. It increases the speed for the completion of individual tasks, but it creates tasks that did not exist 30 years ago. The proliferation of email is one

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key example. Perhaps most significantly, Noys helps us to probe and ponder if labor and work can become any faster. What will be the social cost of that accelerationism? Revolt and resistance to oppressive work cultures, unemployment, low pay, insecurity, and changing family structures takes many forms. The Brexit vote is one of these answers. Guy Standing described it as “a populist vote against the insecurity, inequalities, and austerity induced by a system of rentier capitalism.”4 Scarcity in the markets is invented as part of the neoliberal project. The invention of scarcity creates desperation. Yet the excess of consumer goods, gluttony, and waste demonstrates that there is no scarcity of goods. Instead, despair emerges from an intensity of a lack not of goods but a limit to our wants. Neoliberalism has many definitions. The simplest configuration of this ideology is the predominance of the market over all other factors, determinants, models, and motivations. Profit is the goal. De- or under-regulation are the engines. Douglas Spencer confirmed that neoliberalism offers “productive models and means of power and control.”5 It is a subjectivity, a justification of power held in the hands of those who accumulate capital and away from those without capital. In response, it is a shocking time and a time of shock. Neoliberalism provided the foundation for the shock. Naomi Klein described as “an economic project that vilifies the public sphere.”6 In the gaps created in the public sphere, both greed and Trump filled the space. The solutions to this ruthlessness is the construction of a culture of blame and attacks on vulnerable migrants, workers, and minoritarian religions. These attacks on foreigners are pervasive in their banality and brutality. The disrespect and disconnection from feminism only intensifies the cruelty. The dispatch of the feminine and feminism from this xenophobic politics was best

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captured in the treatment of Hillary Clinton through her candidacy for President of the United States. As Naomi Klein confirmed, “the seething hatred she encountered that came from a deeper place.”7 This was not simplistic misogyny or ridicule of a postmenopausal woman. The rage the anger the abuse the relentlessness of attacks had different origins. The discarding of Hillary Clinton was embarrassing and hurtful. She was intelligent, experienced, and took advice. Yet she like most women attempting to reach leadership had to negotiate too many deals to reach the edge of power. While white men wear power like a suit, it is very difficult for women to dress (and address) with authority. It appears a drag act. In Hillary Clinton’s case, she needed a husband to be a former President to move her into contention. If she had not been married to Bill Clinton, would she have been considered? Further, to raise money, she took funding from finance capitalists, reified by her opponents into ‘Wall Street.’ As much a corrupt talisman as a geographical location, this affiliation meant that she not only appeared an insider, but an insider who accepted favors for power. The clichéd slogan to describe her became “crooked Hillary.” It is harder for women to position themselves into contention, and to naturalize leadership. If they do not have children, then that connotes selfishness. If they have children then they cannot commit to the job. Hillary Clinton had a child, confirming her heteronormative credentials. As Dianne Kaseman confirmed, In the past rather a childless single woman was considered to be deceptive and the childless married women was viewed as power driven and selfish, that childbearing was sacrificed for a professional life. Although the double bind is present today, it is often

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covertly hidden in discussions of the sexuality of women in public roles.8 Clinton had a child, therefore avoiding both the ‘selfish bitch’ tag and the sexual innuendo that is part of women in public leadership. But the presence of an adult daughter meant that Clinton’s age and her health became an issue. Donald Trump is older than Hillary Clinton. He is the oldest person to ever be elected as President. Yet his age was not raised as a problem. His (much) younger wife and use of the phrase ‘pussy grabbing’ was compared and rendered equivalent to Bill Clinton’s impeachment for the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal.’ The issue of consent between adults was not relevant in the attempt to create a culture of equivalence between the actions of two men. The woman who remained married to a man who had been unfaithful was treated as if she was weak and complicit. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes argued that Hillary Clinton wanted to be judged for her record and character.9 Instead, she was ridiculed for her pantsuits, unfaithful husband, and emails. Insider and outsider status danced unsteadily around the Clinton and Trump campaigns. Doug Wead stated that, People who had been overlooked, despised, stomped on, used, taken for granted. This was their moment to speak. They had been shamed into telling the pollsters that they wanted to hear, but in the privacy of their polling booths, they had struck a blow.10 This was not the authentic voice and consciousness of the working class. This was the working class out of work. But the gender question was a significant one. Morgan Godfrey aligned these causes, confirming that “Trump’s appeal is as much about racial and gender grievances […] it speaks to the middle class whites who went to sleep in one country and

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woke up in another.”11 Women were not included in Wead’s analysis of the overlooked, despised, stomped on, and taken for granted. Instead, Trump, with his multiple marriages, infidelities, and sexist language, was validated as a leader of these outsiders. His exploitation of women was overlooked, a banal inconvenience that did not stop his run for President. Conversely, his exploitation of women was an advantage, a ‘breath of fresh air,’ keeping women in their place, below mediocre masculinity. Clinton’s deployment of gender in her campaign was complex. She was a woman and indeed a postmenopausal woman. She dressed carefully and neutrally. She moderated and lowered her voice. She moderated her emotions. In comparison to Donald Trump’s often wild and excessive style, it was Clinton that embodied masculine ideology. The rationale for her decisions was that the intersection between gender and leadership is unpredictable, complex, and confused. The areas in which women have gained leadership are health and education sectors, with the majority of hospital directors, vice chancellors of universities, and principals of schools still men. The issue is not and never has been that there is ‘something’ about women’s voices or views, fueled by biology, that renders their perspective special, distinctive, or different from men. A much more complex series of questions and answers are required beyond vagina-centric philosophies. 1992 was the Year of the Woman, but the phrase glass ceiling first appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 1988. The key question is why, decades after these interventions in injustice, are women still configured as a special case. Why are women’s qualifications, experience, and expertise invisible to patriarchal leadership structures? Whatever the achievement, and in Clinton’s case her career was remarkable, it can be crushed, crumbled, and undermined by boorish sexism. In 1998, Amy Black and Stanley Rothman reported that what “contributes

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to the under-representation of women in leadership positions is women’s lack of educational opportunities compared to men.”12 There are now more women in university degree programs than men. The issue is the subject-based distribution of those degrees, with women dominating health, education, and the humanities in a time when ‘science’ is reified to summon innovation, intelligence, and change. As women surmount their supposed weaknesses in patriarchy, new barriers, borders, and injustices are built. Women are now educated at the highest levels of universities. Between one-quarter and one-third of women in each generation since the Second World War do not have children. So there is a considerable minority of women that are both well-educated and do not have children, therefore circumventing the excuses of ‘family’ responsibilities to block women from the highest levels of leadership. Indeed, there is a direct correlation between the level of education held by a woman and the number of children she has. The greater the educational attainment, the fewer the children.13 Yet still, women remain a profound minority in national parliaments, and corporate and public leadership roles. The reasons that women should be in representational politics arch from biological determinism through to a simple argument for social justice.14 Because women possess a vagina does not make them better or greater than a man. However, the socialization of women, and the treatment of femininity in patriarchy, means that women have a distinctive lived experience to men. Discrimination and sexualized violence impact on women more than men. Therefore, there may be alternative views and voices based on consciousness, not biology. The notion of women possessing a distinctive leadership style is part of this continuum. Women supposedly coordinate, cooperate, and build consensus.15 However, there is nothing intrinsic that links women to particular behaviors.

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Bypassing reified, simplified, and unproductive discussions of biology and socialization, the greater issue is what happens when a nation does not mobilize and deploy fully the talents of half of its population. These nations must be less competitive when compared with the nations with fewer barriers and limitations restricting women’s education, work, and life choices. The contest between Trump and Clinton was a modern and public research project on the nature of leadership. Cindy Simon Rosenthal argued that, “leadership does not spring solely from personality, but rather depends on organisational position and culture.”16 Donald Trump actively critiqued her argument. His personality mattered, as did his antagonism to the political ‘establishment.’ He was not nested in Republican values or the institution. Therefore, the new modality of discussion about women in leadership, after Clinton’s loss, must not focus on women’s competence, intelligence, or experience.17 Ironically, women’s competence, intelligence, or experience were configured as irrelevant by the American voters. The rules have now transformed. No matter how educated or articulate a woman, an inexperienced man, expressing overt racism and sexism, can win. Women’s mistake was to play by the master’s rules and assume that education, experience, and expertise mattered. Actually, a boorish, mediocre man can beat a brilliant, well prepared woman who has concluded her child-rearing responsibilities. That is the stark and scorching truth of the patriarchy spurting from Trump Studies. Qualifications are not enough. Experience is not enough. Expertise is not enough. Xenophobia is required. Joan Kirner and Moira Rayner realized that, “one of the greatest mistakes women can make is to assume that good intentions and hard work will be rewarded. They won’t. You need power, to make a difference.”18 Women are rewarded

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by the patriarchy for performing traditional, disempowered feminine ideologies. Women who are heterosexual, procreative, and slot into secondary and support roles do not dislodge normative masculinity. Any movement outside of this narrow channel of femininity is critiqued, attacked, and undermined. The presidency is a masculine model of power and confirms women’s inability to assume leadership. Through 45 presidencies, for a woman not to claim one election victory demonstrates the truth of this maxim. Tanya Fitzgerald realized that leadership is not “personal attributes.” Instead, leadership is “relational.”19 Men in power are acceptable and the default. Men are in power because women are not. To focus on an individual man who occupies leadership is part of the justifying narrative of neoliberalism. As Tanya Fitzgerald realized, “The retreat to individual responsibility is inextricably linked with new forms of management that promote individualism, self-reliance, efficiency and mutual obligation, and competition in the marketplace.”20 In such a framework, equality is reduced to a “lifestyle choice.”21 Trump Studies at its best, offers an alternative theorization. Equality of opportunity and outcomes is not a lifestyle. It is not a choice. It is a consciousness and a decision. An effective proxy in ascertaining a feminist workplace is discovering women in positions of power,22 rather than a few isolated unicorns. Socially just leadership incorporates women and men of diverse ages, qualifications, ethnicity, and races. Leadership, as Laura Hills realized, “is difficult to study.”23 But there is one truth. In its most relaxed, uncontested and natural form, it replicates nineteenth century colonial structures. A white, heterosexual, and procreative man is the most natural vessel into which leadership can be poured.24 Therefore, women are foreign, disconnected, and unfamiliar when coveting leadership roles. The fit is

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unfamiliar. While such incongruity is difficult to manage in education, health, and retail, where men still dominate leadership positions, in a presidency that dissonance is almost impossible to manage. If a lab experiment could be conducted comparing an even-tempered female leadership contender and a rude, brash, and ill-considered male leadership contender, then the results could not have been more telling than the 2016 United States Presidential Election. To describe patriarchy as ‘a system’ is too benevolent. It is a brutalizing, unjust, and cruel mode of communication whereby the feminine is denied, discarded, and disrespected at every turn. Allowing business as usual or water to find its own level will not create change. Clinton’s method of remaining even and considered as her opponent threatened to put her in jail and mentioned her husband’s infidelities in a public debate did not create a pathway to power. Deeper, harder, and tougher interventions are required, to fight, to speak, to challenge, and to probe. The challenge for women post-Clinton is what more could a woman do to be successful? After her loss, articles and blogs emerged expressing desolation and despair.25 If Clinton was unable to attain power, then what hope exists for other women in a diversity of fields? Claude-Helene Mayer and Sabie Surtee describe the “self-perceptions of leadership of women.”26 The lack of space for women to be successful is well captured by the movement of clichés since the 1980s. The glass ceiling has been replaced by the glass cliff. When women are granted leadership roles often at a difficult time for an organization or in a housekeeping role to clean up a system, structure, or strategy these are referred to as ‘glass cliff’ roles.27 They are fixed term positions, rendering the manager deeply unpopular because they are cleaning up budgetary or structural issues, and do not progress to any other post or role.

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The only hope is to jump from glass cliff to glass cliff posts, through precariat positions,28 and attempt to gain stability. How women let alone men visualize and label themselves as leaders remains a challenge in the literature.29 Leadership is context specific, and digitization has in particular transformed communication systems, skills, and relationships. Yet Jane Edwards confirmed that “sexism is a driver of discriminatory practice.”30 Hillary Clinton’s failure to gain power emerged in an age and environment where women have been visible in popular music in particular. Adele, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Lorde, and Lady Gaga confirm that feminine diversity is not only acceptable, but popular. In the 2016 Superbowl half time show, Beyoncé choreographed a celebration of the Black Panthers.31 Yet this success in popular culture has not fed into formal political roles in the United States. There are connections between pop and politics. Both Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton have been described as “scorned women” who have gained success. Adele reprimanded Donald Trump for using her music in his campaign.32 Women gain positions of power like Theresa May and Jacinda Ardern when men have made mistakes and resigned. Significantly, both these women gained power in the United Kingdom and New Zealand when men stepped away from power and left a triage of twisted policies, procedures, and problems. Boris Johnson stumbled away from power after creating a miscalculation of Gallipoli proportions. However, like Churchill after Gallipoli, his is a transitory fall. Men remain the default: the keeper of power. Mistakes are made. White men in power are resilient. Ardern created a left wing coalition with the national protectionists, New Zealand First. They were unified in government through the desire to ‘protect’ New Zealand. From the right, this similar tactic has been seen in the Austrian elections of 2017. The OVP, the People’s Party, configured a new

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right coalition. Sebastian Kurz became the leader at 31 years old. The party was composed of Austria’s conservatives. They joined with the FPO or Freedom Party, the far right party in Austria, who won 26 per cent of the vote. Therefore Austria is like an inverted Aotearoa/New Zealand, summoning conservatives and populists. Instead of representing two sides of the argument on the right, they joined together. The main unifying issue was immigration and both these right wing parties made it their main focus for the coalition. This was distinct from Aotearoa/New Zealand where economic protectionism was the imperative. Such political instabilities are confronting. The diversity, complexity, and difficulty within contemporary popular culture, belies the domination of white men in positions of power. The femininity that is configured and performed is neither a pleasant traditional femininity, nor an activist feminism. Doctor Foster, a BBC series with seasons in 2015 and 2017, presented the narrative of an unpleasant woman, committed to her child, but violent, vindictive, jealous, and unforgiving. Doctor Foster makes Fatal Attraction look like a preschool tuckshop. In the age of #metoo, where women admit and share sexual violence and assaults, Doctor Foster’s attempts to fight against life’s supposed unfairness, while drinking heavily through the process and using her son as a pawn in revenge against a former partner, does not configure a pleasant or nurturing femininity. The feminist point through such ambivalent popular culture must be emphasized. Clinton lost. An ill-qualified man beat her. That is not unusual. What is remarkable is that overt sexism and racism were used to do it. Women are considered for political roles when they are the last ‘man’ standing. In the case of Trump, through buffeting attacks, he stood. No place for women was available. Through that volatile vista while campaigning, Donald Trump used many

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descriptions of women generally and Hillary Clinton specifically. One of the most evocative and strange was the description of Clinton during the final few minutes of the third Presidential debate on October 19, 2016 as a “nasty woman.”33 In response, #nastywomen emerged as a trending hashtag on Twitter. Nasty Women T-shirts emerged for sale, with proceeds to Planned Parenthood.34 In fact, Clinton was not nasty. She was discussing tax, and the importance of improving social security programs by increasing the tax on the wealthy. So “nasty woman” became the sexist equivalent of Trump’s racial slur, deploying the phrase “bad hombres.”35 Since that utterance, the phrase has been used by women to speak and write back to men. ‘Nasty’ remains an evocative word. It is not kind, loving, caring, and compassionate, the ideological cluster associated with heteronormative women. Intriguingly, Clinton performs many of these conservative ideologies. In the book reviewing the disastrous 2016 campaign, Clinton was not nasty, angry, bitter, staunch, or stroppy. She was soft, thoughtful, and tragically mediocre. After reading Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened,36 readers do question if she would have made a good President. Yes, she would have been superior to Donald Trump. But this woman was and is traditional and of her generation. The book read like a self-help cleansing ritual, rather than a political and personal discussion of ‘What happened.’ Bizarrely, Clinton confirmed that after the loss, “I prayed.”37 She summoned the full Oprah Winfrey gratitude journal with the maxim, “It’s up to us to make the choice to be grateful even when things aren’t going well.”38 Praying and gratitude are not the intellectual skills required to understand and evaluate an intricate series of political events. But this book bizarrely was not written by a woman who seemingly wanted to be President. It did not summon

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complex and intricate feminist politics, or progressive political discussions about the distribution of wealth, the decline in manufacturing and the changing positioning of the United States in the world. Instead, procreative, heteronormative, and middle class femininity was affirmed and re-established as of value. She stated that, “Becoming a mother was the fulfilment of a longheld dream.”39 Her relationship with Bill Clinton was also mentioned. While confirming her right to a private life and the curiosity about why they have remained married, her explanation is stunning in its banality. I still think he’s one of the most handsome men I’ve ever known. I’m proud of him. Proud of his vast intellect, his big heart, the contribution he has made to the world. I love him with my whole heart. That’s more than enough to build a life on.40 It would have been much more effective in the election memoir not to discuss her love for her husband or that he was handsome and clever. It would have been more honest and interesting to explore how Bill Clinton’s infidelities hampered her capacity to sharply and cleanly cut away the cancerous tumor of misogyny that grew and spread through the body politic during the 2016 election. Bill Clinton’s infidelities were the political mistakes that kept on giving. They shredded his political legacy. They crushed his wife’s capacity to fight hard and effectively against misogyny in her own campaign. Their impact on their daughter’s public role is yet to be seen. His ‘big heart’ damaged progressive politics for a generation. Hillary Clinton’s relationship with her own femininity and wider feminism is complex to evaluate. She recognizes that being a woman had an impact on her career and capacity to

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gain and maintain senior public roles, but her analysis is naïve. I think there’s another explanation for the scepticism I’ve faced in public life. I think it’s partly because I’m a woman.41 It’s not easy for any woman in politics, but I think it’s safe to say that I got a whole other level of vitriol flung my way. 42 It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. 43 The response to such statements can only be mock irony: ‘You think so, Mrs Clinton? You think being a woman has impacted on your life?’ Her ‘analysis’ here is either naïve, ridiculous, or a platitude. She offers no complex feminism or theorization of the patriarchy here. It is not potent, intricate, or showing any consideration of the changing configuration of femininity in neoliberalism. There is no acknowledgment of the declining manufacturing sector, and the growth in real estate and finance capitalism. Firstly, she rendered her understanding of what happened to her as personal. It is also significant to notice the caveats in her commentary. The multiple “I think” that she has used in these extracts adds passive voice to a gentle rebuke of a system that mauled her. These phrases are not calling out sexism or misogyny. Instead, she individualized her treatment. She softened the

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critique by rendering it her opinion. She ‘thinks’ this may be the reason for what happened to her. The key question that she does not answer is why women confront scepticism in public life. Why does having a vagina or more appropriately not having a penis impact on the political credibility, expertise, and capacity of a person to lead? What is significant is that while Trump sexualized, ridiculed, and demeaned, Clinton was disconnected, cool, and calm. She wanted to appear as a woman in leadership. Yet leadership is an ill-fitting coat worn by women. It looks unnatural and it drags in the dirt. Therefore, an intricate theorization of power is required. Why was Clinton’s expertise refused? Why was a ‘businessman’ and ‘reality television star’ rendered qualified at this moment of economic challenge and pulverized social structures? Indeed, why did a reality television star become President at the point that the genre is declining in screen schedules? Answers to these complex questions about power punctuate Chapter 3.

NOTES 1. J. Meek, “Somerdale to Skarbimierz”, London Review of Books, 39, no. 8 (April 2017): 4. 2. R. Sutton, The No Asshole Rule (London: PIatkus, 2010). 3. B. Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Alresford: Zero Books, 2014): x. 4. G. Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (London: Biteback, 2016): xv. 5. D. Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (London: Bloomsbury, 2016): xiii.

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6. N. Klein, No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics (New York: Allen Lane, 2017): 29. 7. Klein, No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics, 85. 8. D. Kaseman, “Beyond the double bind: Women and leadership”, Women and Language, 21, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 10 22. 9. J. Allen and A. Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (New York: Crown, 2017). 10. D. Wead, Game of Thorns (London: Biteback Publishing, 2017). 11. M. Godfrey, “Our dangerous Donald Trump interregnum”, Stuff (November 10, 2016). 12. A. Black and S. Rothman, “Have you really come a long way? Women’s access to power in the United States”, Gender Issues, 16, no. 1 2 (Winter-Spring 1998). 13. “Education level inversely related to childbearing”, Washington Times (May 9, 2011), https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/ 2011/may/9/education-level-inversely-related-to-childbearing/ 14. A fascinating rehearsal of these arguments, twenty years before the presidency of Donald Trump is Barbara Burrell’s “The political leadership of women and public policymaking”, Policy Studies Journal, 25, no. 4 (Winter 1997). 15. An example of an affirmation of this leadership style is Malcolm Jewell and Marcia Lynn Whicker, “The feminization of leadership in state legislatures”, PS: Political Science and Politics, 26, no. 4 (December 1993). 16. C. Rosenthal, “A view of their own: Women’s committee leadership styles and state legislatures”, Policy Studies Journal, 25, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 585 600. 17. For example, Andie Moss and Laurel Rans focused on how women can gain the ‘competence’ for leadership and understand their “gaps” in expertise. Please refer to A. Moss and L. Rans,

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“Executive leadership for women”, Corrections Today, 59, no. 7 (December 1997). 18. J. Kirner and M. Rayner, The Women’s Power Handbook (Ringwood: Penguin, 1999): 3. 19. T. Fitzgerald, Women Leaders in Higher Education: Shattering the Myths (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014): 4. 20. Fitzgerald, Women Leaders in Higher Education: Shattering the Myths, 29. 21. C. Teelken and R. Deem, “All are equal, but some are more equal than others: managerialism and gender equality in higher education in comparative perspectives”, Comparative Education, 49, no. 4 (2013): 522 22. This point is made by Helen Thompson, Andrea Sant Hartig and Diane Thurber in “Designing a woman-friendly workplace: A prognosis and prescription for institutional health at the University of Guam”, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 10, no 4 (May 2009). 23. L. Hills, Lasting Female Educational Leadership: Leadership Legacies of Women Leaders (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013): 17. 24. Many of these assumptions bubble through the leadership literature. Luke Williams configures a model of leadership that requires social influence, support of others, drive and strategies for decision making. What is left off his list is as stark as what is continued within it. Please refer to L. Williams, Leadership: How to Lead, Inspire, Attract, and Succeed in Life (MindCandyInc, 2014). 25. S. Chira, “Feminism lost: So now what?”, New York Times (December 30, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/ opinion/sunday/feminism-lost-now-what.html 26. C. Mayer and S. Surtee, “The leadership preferences of women leaders working in higher education”, Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies, 4, no. 1 (2015): 612.

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27. K. Caprino, “The ‘Glass Cliff’ phenomenon that senior female leaders face today and how to avoid it”, Forbes (October 20, 2015), https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2015/10/20/the-glasscliff-phenomenon-that-senior-female-leaders-face-today-and-how-toavoid-it/#5efdd14779c6 28. G. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 29. H. Ibarra, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). 30. J. Edwards, “Narrating experiences of sexism in higher education: a critical feminism autoethography to make meaning of the past, challenge the status quo and consider the future”, International Journal of Qualitative Studies, (2017): 2. 31. J. Elgot, “Beyonce unleashes Black Panthers homage at Super Bowl 50”, The Guardian (February 8, 2016), http://www. theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/08/beyonce-black-panthershomage-black-lives-matter-super-bowl-50 32. M. Train and A. Jamieson, “Adele tells Donald Trump to stop pinching her songs for his campaign”, The Guardian (February 1, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/01/adeledonald-trump-songs-campaign 33. N. Woolf, “‘Nasty woman’: Trump attacks Clinton during final debate”, The Guardian (October 20, 2016), https://www. theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/20/nasty-woman-donald-trumphillary-clinton 34. “Nasty women T-shirts”, https://www.omaze.com/made/nastywoman-3 35. “Donald Trump: We need to get out ‘bad hombres’”, CNN YouTube Channel (October 19, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AneeacsvNwU 36. H. Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened (London: Simon and Schuster, 2017).

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37. Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened, 32. 38. Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened, 34. 39. Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened, 150. 40. Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened, 101. 41. Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened, 120. 42. Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened, 126. 43. Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened, 136.

CHAPTER 3 RETURN OF THE REPRESSED AMIDST THE DOUBLE REFUSAL

The double refusal a denial to dominate and a denial to be dominated occupies our current period. The question is how to define or describe this time. Usefully, it may be described as an interregnum, following on from Gramsci. Before moving into a discussion of this term and its applications, it is important to theorize why Donald Trump was able to summon, frame, and succeed in this time of gaps, pauses, endings, refusals, and instability. The rise of the right generally and the alt-right specifically has masked two parallel processes. Trump was able to capture and tame the two key political streams of the 2010s. These two processes are linked to political ideologies. They are: (1) neoliberalism and globalization and (2) economic nationalism/protectionism. The populist argument emerging through the recent period (Donald Trump, Brexit, Marine Le Pen, and Pauline Hanson) has been rhetorically pressed into favoring the second process and ideology. The neoliberal globalists from the center and left are represented by politicians like Emmanuel Macron1 and Justin Trudeau.2 They 67

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built a relationship between neoliberal globalism and specific social movements such as feminism, anti-racism, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights. But the former neoliberals and globalists from the right (Theresa May, Angela Merkel, and Malcolm Turnbull) swung toward the center3 and promised what used to be seen as social democratic programmes which help their populations survive the current dark times, austerity policies, and the continuing effects of the 2007/8 Global Financial Crisis. Trump and others who were elected on the populist manifesto managed the contradictions of both ideologies. Such disconnection is best viewed when Donald Trump shredded the trade relationship between the United States and Canada. Basing his comments on the incorrect premise that the United States was in deficit in this relationship, he questioned the loyalty and relationship with Canada and personally attacked Justin Trudeau, blaming him for Trump not signing a G-7 agreement. The New Yorker captured the irony of the week where Trump was photographed with Kim Jong Un, celebrating his leadership, while attacking Canada and the Canadian Prime Minister.4 Subsequently, Canadian economic policy retracted to its own nationalism in response.5 As Guy Lawson argued, American ignorance about Canada has long been a fact of life and an eye-rolling joke for Canadians. But with the election of Trump, Americans’ lack of knowledge suddenly appeared to the inner circle of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to be a geopolitical threat. What was most troubling was less that Trump lacked a sophisticated understanding of Canada-United States relations but that he apparently deliberately didn’t care to develop one. He seemed to treat facts as negotiating tools, as if conducting diplomacy with

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an ally was the same as a brass-knuckled, zero-sum Manhattan real estate transaction.6 Famously, Trump bragged about his ignorance of the trade balance between the United States and Canada during a fund raising event. His lack of expertise his capacity to not understand that the United States had a trade deficit with Canada rather than the inverse was a matter of ridicule and laughter for him. Again, these are the mistakes that scholars, journalists, and citizens have made: the assumptions that facts and accuracy matter. They do not. Lawson’s point is an important one. The truth of the ‘real estate’ economy, military, social structures, and immigration numbers does not matter. The capacity to leverage the lies to sell/win, is the key. That is why Trump referred to Trudeau in a tweet as “dishonest and weak,” and Peter Navarro, a Trump aid on Trade, stated there was a “special place in hell” for Trudeau and any leader who “tries to stab him [Trump] in the back on the way to the door.”7 None of this verbiage is real or accurate. Canada is an ally of the United States. Both national economies are intertwined and dependent on the other for goods, services, and employment. These are facts. They do not matter. However, what was clear is such a seemingly aberrant, confusing, and bizarre confrontation where none was required was Donald Trump’s disconnection from the Center Left and Center Right neoliberal projects. Upon Trump’s election, Slavoj Zizek termed Trump merely a centrist liberal.8 This was incorrect. However, Nancy Fraser, more accurately, described his election as “a collapse of neoliberal hegemony.”9 Her other example of this collapse was the Brexit result. Brexit involved an argument between the ‘Blairite’ Tories (Cameron, Osborne) and the ‘Powell-lite’ Tories (Johnson, Gove). May straddled the two positions, opportunistically assuming the Prime Ministership

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after Brexit. When all the men refused to lead, an impotent pre-Brexit government was run by a woman. In the 2017 New Zealand election, the twin processes neoliberalism and globalization on one hand and economic nationalism and protectionism on the other explained the surprising outcome of the vote. Bill English had served in the National government of New Zealand for a decade, but only very recently as Prime Minister as a result of long time PM, and former banker, John Key’s resignation in 2017. English promised business as usual at the election. The Nationals are a neoliberal globalist party that won the most votes and most seats at the election but not an overall majority. The conservative New Zealand First party led by Winston Peters held the balance of power between the Nationals and the New Zealand Labour Party, itself with a new leader Jacinda Ardern. As a result of talks between the two main parties and New Zealand First, Winston Peters elected to form a government with Labour (and the Greens) to oust Bill English’s government. Peters proclaimed that capitalism was not serving the New Zealand people and should find ‘a human face’ when justifying his decision to allocate the government benches to New Zealand Labour. A centrist Labour Party and a very small, conservative New Zealand First party formerly agreed on such issues as immigration and foreign investment. Protectionism, nationalism, and populism won the day once again over the globalist neoliberals who in the New Zealand case failed to move quickly enough to the center ground of policy in order to counter the wave of protectionism and populism. These are ideological arguments within the right: neoliberalism versus protectionism. Therefore, the left needed to develop an argument to completely separate from these two poles of debate. In such a context, Wolfgang Streeck described “The Return of the Repressed.”10 He argued that

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the battle between neoliberals and protectionists globally is set to last many years, with great global uncertainty and danger to follow. He calls it an interregnum, borrowing the term from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Gramsci confirmed that, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”11 This is a key and important term to reclaim and apply. Scholars gain from understanding these ‘morbid symptoms’ and interpreting this gap or cessation in conventional discourse. This is not a war of position. This is a deathly vacuum that kills the ideas and the people that enter this space. The morbid vacuum was described by Zygmunt Bauman as a separation of power and politics, or “institutional disparity.”12 Such an argument was based on Giorgio Agamben’s analysis that showed the interregnum is a suspension of social, political, or legal systems in anticipation of new systems, structures, and rules.13 For these Gramsci-enabled scholars, the interregnum is more than the cessation of routine. It is the destruction of one framework and a pause before a new system emerges. Importantly for this book and the understanding of this current period, the double refusal exists in the interregnum. The ruler does not rule. The ruled do not wish to be.14 John Urry’s Global Complexity is particularly relevant to and resonant in the interregnum. There is much work to do in the space between globalization and neoliberalism. Too often, one term is collapsed slammed into the other. Neoliberalism is certainly global and globalizing, but globalization is much wider, larger, and more expansive than neoliberalism. In the metaphoric body of globalization, neoliberalism is only a fingernail. But it is sharpened and shaped to injure. Attention to globalization separated from neoliberalism is the vital strategy to reconstruct the Left. What is required is a

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better more effective and socially just globalization. Slavoj Zizek’s book, The Courage of Hopelessness,15 provides a grounding for this movement and momentum in the interregnum. The Left summoned by Corbyn and Sanders was progressive, but this progressivism must not be overstated. Both men were traditional social democrats from the Bennite wing. The move to the right has been so great that these men are regarded as ‘revolutionary.’ Yet Corbyn was a ‘leaver’ on Brexit and has not reversed the process. Corbyn was always a critic of the EU and was a reluctant remainer (if anything) in the Referendum vote in the UK. He has always been part of the left wing argument in the UK which saw the EU as a part of the drive toward a neoliberal superstate. So his argument is not either of the right-wing arguments: populist/nationalist or globalist/neoliberal. His argument is part of a long standing left wing position which attempted to develop a new socialist future for the UK. Corbyn joined parliament in 1983. Ten years before, the left in the Labour Party were against the European Union. They wanted no part of a NATO-style supra-organization. Corbyn is still of that view. Therefore, many problems and irreconcilable contradictions are ahead for the Left. Global governance remains important, limiting military and economic expansion and deep social, cultural, and linguistic injustices. Colonization was a globalizing force of oppression, destroying the languages and intricate social relationships of indigenous people. To ensure that colonizing, militarized power is limited, global governance is required. A main perhaps the pivotal conceptual theorization for the Left is with regard to revisionist understandings of post-manufacturing class. Social justice is integral to globalizing left politics. Unfortunately, for the last 20 years (at least), and perhaps dated from the failed revolutions of 1968, identity politics has sandbagged and suffocated the left. Class-

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based analysis in Trump Studies and in the consideration of both Trump and Brexit has been poor, as the Left has abandoned the working class in both the United States and the United Kingdom over the last 40 years. The hotspots of this neglect are the Rust Belt in the US and Sunderland in the UK. The racism of the working class is rooted in the Rise of the Right. This movement was brutally and razorly mapped and analyzed in Hall, Winlow, and Treadwell’s book.16 What such a theoretical and institutional vacuum demonstrates is the few options available to Hillary Clinton for managing neoliberal globalization and nationalist protectionism. Her husband had deregulated the banks, freeing international capital. This decision was the foundational moment for the Global Financial Crisis. Therefore, trying to find a workable globalization from the center left that was feminist, antiracism, pro-gay, pro-abortion, and regenerative of disempowered working class regions, was not possible through the haze (and hazing) of Trump’s hyper-protectionist ideology.17 A remarkable reconfiguration and reimagining emerged through the triumphant defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, where he won the British election while losing it. Not having to manage gender or race-based variables being a white man he was able to present a socialist and anti-austerity agenda. The modality through which Trump chose to express this agenda was remarkable. Twitter mattered to the US election in a way never seen in international politics.18 But Trump’s use of Twitter was also aligned with his public speaking mode and style, saying the unsayable. The vocabulary choice was also profound. Name calling of opponents, abusing a woman’s weight, and discussing sex tapes were part of a wider linguistic portfolio of shaming, blaming, and abuse. It is rare to hear such parataxis in public discourse. The use of phrases and clauses without grammatical alignment and often without connection yet presented in a sequence was a stark

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differentiation from Obama who pondered and considered each word with caution and reflection. Described as “the crisis in our public language”19 by a former Director General of the BBC, Thompson argued that there was a gulf between the language and world view offered in policy and by the public. Yet this gulf or separation was not new to the 2010s.

NOTES 1. Robert Peston’s analysis of the Emmanuel Macron was potent, describing him as the “anti-Trump.” He stated, “As if the world had not become weird enough, then along came Emmanuel Macron, another outsider, but the anti-Trump. Proudly internationalist, this Europhile, young former banker trounced both the usual French political suspects of left and right, and the extreme illiberalism of Marine Le Pen, to become French president,” from WTF (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2017): 2. 2. The potency of neoliberalism in these regimes means that we critique

but also acknowledge our dissonance from Rune Stahl’s

Economic Theory, Politics and the State in the Neoliberal Epoch, Doctor of Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, 2018. However, the importance of the interregnum in this theorizing is key. Stahl states, “while the hegemony of neoliberalism is severely challenged, no clear alternative has yet emerged,” p. 14. 3. The Australian Liberal Party confronted a series of internal conflicts through 2017 and 2018 between the center right members with progressive

liberal

social views about gay marriage in

particularly, and the old style conservatism with Christian-inflected views about women and the GLBTI community in particular. 4. A. Borowitz, “Kim Jong Un offers to host peace talks between United States and Canada”, New Yorker (June 11, 2018), https://

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www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/kim-jong-un-offers-tohost-peace-talks-between-united-states-and-canada 5. E. Alini, “Buy Canadian”, Global News (June 28, 2018), https:// globalnews.ca/news/4298091/buy-canadian-guide-pitfalls-trade-wartrump/ 6. G. Lawson, “First Canada tried to charm Trump. Now it’s fighting back”, New York Times Magazine (June 9, 2018), https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/magazine/justin-trudeau-chrystiafreeland-trade-canada-us-.html 7. D. Dale, “’Special place in hell’: Trump aides hurl insults at Trudeau in unprecedented U.S. attack on Canadian leader”, The Star (June 10, 2018), https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/06/ 10/special-place-in-hell-canada-us-relations-reach-new-low-astrump-aides-heap-insults-on-trudeau-to-impress-kim-jong-un.html 8. “Slavoj Zizek: Donald Trump is really a centrist liberal”, The Guardian (April 28, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2016/apr/28/slavoj-zizek-donald-trump-is-really-a-centrist-liberal 9. N. Fraser, “The end of progressive neoliberalism”, Dissent (January 2, 2017), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/ progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser 10. W. Streeck “The return of the repressed”, New Left Review, No. 104 (2017), https://newleftreview.org/II/104/wolfgang-streeckthe-return-of-the-repressed 11. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971): 276. 12. Z. Bauman, “Times of interrugnum”, Ethics and Global Politics, 5, no. 1 (2012): 49 56. 13. G. Agamben, Stato di Eccezione (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).

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14. Zygmunt Bauman recognized the ambivalence of power in the interregnum in his discussion of sovereignty. He did not connect it with Jean Baudrillard’s double refusal, but theorizations of risk. Please refer to Bauman, “Times of interrugnum”, 51. 15. S. Zizek, The Courage of Hopelessness (London: Penguin, 2017). 16. S. Hall, S. Winlow and J. Treadwell, The Rise of the Right (Bristol: Polity Press, 2016). 17. There are many consequences for protectionism and antiglobalization. One clear impact is for international public health. Please refer to I. Macgregor-Bowles and D. Bowles, “Trump, Brexit, right-wing anti-globalization, and an uncertain future for public health”, Public Health, 4, no. 2 (2017): 139 148. 18. For an analysis of online campaigning, please refer to “Online campaigning in the 2016 USA elections approach”, SEA

A comparative

Practical Application of Science, 5, no. 13

(2017). 19. M. Thompson, “From Trump to Brexit rhetoric: how today’s politicians have got away with words”, The Guardian (August 27, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/27/fromtrump-to-brexit-rhetoric-how-todays-politicians-have-got-awaywith-words

CHAPTER 4 TWEETING IN THE INTERREGNUM

The BBC program Doctor Who was first broadcast on the day of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Since that time, it has provided a morality play through war and peace, where good and evil blur, merge, and detonate. The 12th Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, was the ideal actor to occupy this role in the interregnum. Stroppy, argumentative, disconnected, brash, and angry, he did not wear a fez or romance his companions like his two previous regenerations. Instead, war, racism, retribution, and mercy were recurrent themes, as can be seen in the dialogue below: The Doctor: Human society is […] stagnating. You’ve stopped moving forward. In fact, you’re regressing. Bill: No, wait. What about free will? You believe in free will. Your whole thing is You made me write a 3000-word essay on free will!

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The Doctor: Yes, well, you had free will, and look at what you did with it. Worse than that, you had history. History was saying to you, “Look, I’ve got some examples of fascism here for you to look at. No? Fundamentalism? No? Oh. Okay. You carry on.” I had to stop you, or at least not stand in the way of someone else who wanted to. Because the guns were getting bigger, the stakes were getting higher, and any minute now, it’s gonna be “Goodnight, Vienna.” By the way, you never delivered that essay. Bill: Because the world was invaded by zombie monks!1 In the 2017 season, his last, fascism was a recurrent trope, with the series commencing with zombie monks and concluding with ruthlessly invading cybermen. But the Doctor’s ‘advice’ to humanity which has always been a part of the program where the alien Time Lord ‘preaches’ humanitarian values was much more pointed and brutalizing through this regeneration. The stupidity and inability of humans to learn from past experience was the recurrent trope of Capaldi’s tenure as the Doctor.2 The capacity to manage and understand dead systems and ideologies and failed policies requires a process of learning, of reflecting on failure and grasping the reasons for it. Robert Reich, the former US Labor Secretary, produced a film in 2014, titled Inequality for All,3 and continues to post short videos explaining concerns and concepts on his Facebook page.4 Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, released An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.5 Popular culture is available to confront, interpret, analyze, and debate. Yet the impact of economic amnesia, the active

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forgetting of the Global Financial Crisis and how it was created, remains difficult to comprehend. Information, spreading from popular culture to intricate academic discourses, is available. Although rarer, so is the inverse: academic material is moving into popular culture. Yet, the systems, people, and ideologies that created this international meltdown are still circulating, working, receiving bonuses, and being promoted. Is neoliberalism dead? No. It remains a failing system which has dominated the globe since the early 1970s. Scholars have a key and pertinent role: we must critique the political economy with the staunchness of Karl Marx during the industrial revolution. “A critique of political economy” was the subtitle of Marx’s three volume timely masterpiece Capital, first published in the mid-nineteenth century.6 One of the most important inheritors of Marx’s legacy is his countryman, sociology professor Wolfgang Streeck. Streeck’s recent books Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism7 and How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System8 are analytically forensic and reveal the texture of the current post-crash condition. The ‘delayed crisis’ and the ‘failing system; are crucial terms for us in our present political and economic dilemmas. The end of neoliberalism has certainly been predicted and as Colin Crouch argued in his book The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism9 rumors of its demise have been premature. Streeck is strong on his views of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 and 2008, which he labels The Great Recession. It is a useful reminder that the rise of the right we are now experiencing across the globe was fueled by the Global Financial Crisis a decade ago. The Global Financial Crisis was not created or caused by a few individuals. As Gillian Tett has shown in her remarkable study of derivatives trading, she demonstrates that “dancing around the regulators”10 magnified the direction of market trends. Derivatives trading is important in

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interpreting how a GFC could happen, as it enables traders to forget about the wider context of finance and the people that existed behind the bonds and the trades. Significantly, the deep critiques of the GFC did not stick or transform. Therefore, when Trump entered power, the narratives encircling regulation had reverted back to anti-statism. Christopher Whalen realized that: Perhaps the biggest change for all financial services companies and professionals in 2017 is that the political narrative regarding financial regulation has shifted from a punitive, anti-business focus to a more traditionally conservative agenda focused on growth and jobs.11 Growth and jobs as a focus justifies implicitly a range of shortcuts in finance and real estate capitalism. Blame is a complex and in the end a pointless imperative. Unless it codified and captured consciousness, then it can be skewed to attack the disempowered. Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, and James Treadwell have written and published a remarkable ethnographic study of the English Defence League (EDL), revealing the rise of English nationalism and its impact on the working class. The political economy and the political culture in tandem have engineered a disconnection between citizens and a consciousness of the injustices they confront. A bleak social environment is masked by bizarre reality television like Keeping up with the Kardashians and the banal and tortured Real Housewives franchises. Alcohol use, the proliferation of online pornography, cheap flights on Ryanair, and celebrity gossip passing as ‘entertainment news’ all align to pull attention away from understanding the economic, political, and social system. Anger manifests toward the wrong targets. As

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Winlow, Hall, and Treadwell confirmed, “capitalism had become so triumphant, ubiquitous and unchallengeable that it was commonly understood as a non-ideological fact of life.”12 The institutional amnesia about the Global Financial Crisis means that the reality of the British economy and the inequalities that created it are hidden. The domination of the market above all other concerns created the excesses that enabled the GFC to occur, and without the required corrections, it will occur again.13 The unemployed and underemployed the men and women no longer required to perform work cluster in deindustrialized towns and cities. The anger and frustration instead of being targeted at the people who created those conditions are focused on antiimmigration and Islamophobia. How the white working class understand what Winlow, Hall, and Treadwell describe as “growing marginality and redundancy”14 was through racism “the new proximal enemy” rather than “the distant systemic enemy.”15 Those who voted to leave the European Union lived in deindustrialized regions. But the gap between the leavers and remainers emerged through the issue of class. Such a differentiation is pivotal to the interpretative parameters and trajectories of Trump Studies. Winlow, Hall, and Treadwell revealed that, on balance, it appears that the British population would have been marginally better off if they had decided to stay in the EU. Most academics and journalists, and many educated Remain voters, could see this, and they voted in accordance with their own economic self-interests.16 The gauze through which to theorize this paradox remains the ideological splinter applied in this book: (1) neoliberalism and globalization and (2) economic nationalism and

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protectionism. Theresa May’s failure to maintain power, credibility, and control occurred because she could not balance these forces. Upon commencing her role as Prime Minister in 2016, she expressed her supposed ‘commitment’ to social justice, but she did not maintain this approach in the days and months before the snap election of 2017. Donald Trump and others around the world who were elected on the alt-right populist manifesto have a foot in both camps. Theresa May, as an opportunist Conservative leader of a minority Tory government was in a similar position after her failed electoral experimental grab for more power in 2017. She had to resort to an alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland to cling to minority power. She was quoted in the hours after the election, “we have got to make sure Jeremy Corbyn is not Prime Minister.”17 While the election of Donald Trump and the national economic suicide of Brexit are important examples to probe and explore in this book, the profound miscalculation of Theresa May in the 2017 election completes the triumvirate of miscalculation, error, and a misunderstanding of power. Attempting to create a ‘mandate’ for ‘hard Brexit,’ she failed. She was always going to fail. Considering 52% of the United Kingdom voted for Brexit, with 48% voting against Brexit, it would not take much analysis or basic mathematics to recognize that a clean and clear result on a post-Brexit future would not be delivered at the ballot box. Indeed, she did not win a majority. As Tim Ross and Tom McTague realized, we need to “understand what led Theresa May to gamble her career and the country’s future on a snap election in the spring of 2017 and why her bet backfired.”18 But further, and connecting with the project of this book and Trump Studies more generally, Ross and McTague probed “why did none of the political parties truly see what was happening?”19

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The key point is that while the Conservatives did not win a majority, neither did Labour. That is the interregnum. The refusal to govern. The refusal to be governed. While the election was configured as a Corbyn triumph, he did not win a majority of seats. He lost. May and Corbyn were an odd and piquant combination of leaders to fight an unnecessary election. Tim Shipman believed that May revealed “pathological caution.”20 Conversely, through two years of poor poll numbers, Corbyn and his supporters never questioned or diminished their beliefs. Corbyn remains an interesting figure in the interregnum. He has not moved or changed his political perspective. His critiques on austerity, anti-statism, and low taxation levels for the affluent have not altered throughout his career. What has rendered him fashionable and successful is that the Blairite third way policies, shared on the left and the right, have proved unsuccessful. Further, his commitment and integrity have drawn a large group of young followers, formalized through Momentum, the Jeremy Corbyn support group. But further, his pacifism in a time of hyper-terrorism found a resonant and willing constituency. As Ross and McTague confirmed, In the midst of a terrorism crisis, the traditional party of law and order was losing ground to a man who had voted against every piece of anti-terrorism legislation since he was first elected to Parliament in 1983. Written off at the beginning, Corbyn was suddenly in the game.21 This was a startling moment of difference between the parties. The left-leaning parties have since September 11 been forced to move to militarist options in the light of

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terrorist acts. Corbyn’s stance was a key first moment in a different way of managing xenophobia and violence. The instability of this ideological divide is clear. The now deposed Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal/National Coalition government in Australia self-consciously adopted Labor’s policies on education and other areas in order to both neutralize a center-right Labor party under Bill Shorten on the one hand and the new-right populism of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation far right party on the other. Two odd issues emerged in Australia, fragmenting the right. The first was the initial refusal by the Turnbull neoliberal government to conduct a Royal Commission into the banks.22 The tidy relationships between the Centre Right and finance capital could not be disturbed without seismic effort. Secondly, the issue of samesex marriage was volatile and confusing for the ‘liberal’ party, featuring a sizeable minority of religiously conservative members. They attempted to first block a direct conscience vote by parliamentarians on this issue and secondly after the overwhelming majority of Australians voted for same-sex marriage, bizarre issues were selected to both slow and stymy its progress, including the rights of bakers, florists, and wedding planners to refuse cooking, decorating, and organizing for gay clients.23 These widely disparate ‘controversies’ and perspectives emerged from the same ‘liberal’ party. From these wedge issues, the initial refusal to govern not to not hold a Royal Commission and not to vote on gay marriage was critiqued. A referendum and Royal Commission were held after months of delay, denial, and confusion. Similarly, Perry Anderson has labelled the emergence of Emmanuel Macron and his En Marche party as part of what he calls ‘the French Spring.’24 Macron’s victory over the far right Marine Le Pen in the 2017 Presidential elections and his party’s subsequent victory in the parliamentary elections was

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seen by Perry Anderson as a new variant of neoliberalism in France. Through these intricate political renegotiations, populism undergirds the understanding of Donald Trump and the movements to the right. When a political figure becomes populist, particular attributes follow, such as criticism of ‘the elites,’ antipluralism and a reified and simplified version of identity politics.25 The fixation on ‘radical Islam’ which has become a cliché rather than an adjective and noun or a compound noun creates an imaginary threat to another ambiguous phrase, ‘liberal democracy.’ Populism is important, as it formulates a corrosive fracture in the body politics, summoning a fiction of ‘the people’ against ‘the elites’ and ‘radical Islam.’ Some media platforms capture and perform this simplicity, with great effectiveness. Twitter’s 140 now 280 characters enabled the creation of simple enemies and basic communities. The commitment to direct representation the disintermediation of Twitter allowed Donald Trump to create simplistic slogans and share them without question, critique, or censorship. Make America Great Again embodies this principle. The phrase is empty of meaning. It is a like a rolling stone that gathers texture and speed through movement. It also feeds off Donald Trump’s prior career as a businessman, particularly failures in Atlantic City where reports have claimed Trump was seemingly prepared to blame others, including two executives who had died in a plane crash.26 Trump was an anti-establishment candidate. Douglas Kellner described him as capturing “the Worst of the Worst of American culture.”27 For Kellner, this ‘worst’ is “American narcissism, stupidity, boorishness, sexual predation, phoniness, mendacity, villainy, kleptocracy, nepotism.”28 Recognizing these attributes, to understand Trump’s success in campaigning, both on and offline, it is imperative to explore his communication systems. Sarah Ahmadian,

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Sara Azarshahi, and Delroy Paulhus demonstrated how the verbal and non-verbal modes of communication he deployed “have been linked directly to social dominance.”29 The researchers demonstrated how grandiosity and informality were deployed by Trump, both modes that operated incredibly well via Twitter. While Facebook requires the building of social relationships and engagement, Twitter is focused on topics and subjects. Therefore, for political communication, Twitter is ideal. Because of the limitation of space, aggressive, simple, and self-important phrases can be used and then disseminated to followers. This creates a modality of extreme confidence and also a hardening of extreme views. But the range of Trump’s commentary from Meryl Streep to footballers ‘taking the knee’ and the supposed sex tapes of those who argue against him provide an operatic narrative that carried a xenophobic and nationalist ideology. Brian Ott labeled this reality as “the politics of debasement.”30 Because of the truncated nature of a tweet and the prevalence of hashtags, simple ideas proliferate through the platform at speed. Provocatively, Ott confirmed that, “one can philosophize about Twitter but not on Twitter.”31 That is an important maxim for Trump Studies in terms of platform and interface management. Tweets can be used as source material, but the analysis must be conducted through another medium. Significantly though, Trump is able to mobilize a simple and short communication mode a single sentence to intervene in the news cycle. ‘New media’ as a phrase and description is a misnomer. All media clash, dialogue, and merge. So CNN cited Trump’s tweets. Why such composite journalism and media merging matters is that Twitter is conversational in tone and requires little work or thought to interpret. Short words as has been seen throughout Trump’s Twitter discourse with the use of words like ‘bad’ and ‘sad’ are encouraged because of numerical

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restriction of characters. But so is ‘I.’ The narcissism of Twitter is clear. Twitter is not one ‘thing’ or one mode. For example, Hilary Clinton used Twitter differently. Studies have been conducted comparing the two, but also evaluating how male and female politicians deploy Twitter. The differences are remarkable and provocative, and timely to consider within the lens of Trump Studies. Clinton focused on content, and delivering original content to followers. Three quarters of her Tweets were constructed in this way. Jayeon Lee and Youngshin Lim discovered in their research that “women candidates discuss political issues more actively than their male counterparts to demonstrate their expertise.”32 Because leadership, and particularly political leadership, is coded as heterosexual, procreative and masculine, women and men outside of these categories have to work harder to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise. Indeed their competence is in question. A white, middle aged man in a suit is given credibility, time, and space by default. They do not have to prove their competence. It is part of their Goffmanesque presentation of self.33 Therefore, the default credibility given to Donald Trump meant he could create jazz-like interludes through extemporizing. Clinton had to spend time proving competence, that was taken for granted in the case of Trump. Therefore, he could summon unusual and provocative ideological riffs about race, women, sport, and entertainment. Even when the video revealing he “grabbed them [women] by the pussy,”34 his credibility was not damaged. He went on to win the presidency. Conversely, Trump described the infidelities of Clinton’s husband, which supposedly had a bearing on her life and her capacity to be President.35 Further, while Trump’s treatment of women was not supposedly serious, Clinton’s emails were worthy of an investigation and public discussion by the FBI Director James Comey.

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These are not transitory events. Upon entering office, Trump’s engagement with female politicians and the partners of male leaders was remarkable. Indeed, the level of excitement Donald Trump expressed when greeting Brigitte Macron was startling in its ineptitude and inappropriateness. As Janet Street-Porter revealed, Confronted with a glamorous woman in a short dress, though, he’s in his comfort zone and knows exactly how to respond. Meeting the wife of the French President for the first time at Les Invalides in Paris, Trump kissed Brigitte Macron on both cheeks, then grabbed her hand and blurted out “you’re in such good shape”, turning to her husband to reiterate “she’s in such good physical shape”, as if discussing a Miss World contestant or a prize heifer.36 Aggression, anger, sarcasm, petulance, and confidence: these characteristics punctuated Trump’s campaign and presidency. The question is why these often problematic traits were successful for Trump and not others. Becky Choma and Yaniv Hanoch studied the press around Trump, particularly from Republicans, and discovered that “authoritarianism has been identified as a key catalyst.”37 Through Twitter and live rallies, Trump could say the unsayable and dominate analog and digital space. But the audience for Trump sociologically was complex and disturbing. The New York Times reported that “demographically, Trump supporters tend to earn less money and are less educated.”38 Digitization also matters to this story, as the anonymity of the online environment allows violent attacks to be perpetuated behind the safety of a screen.39 This is a perfect storm. These men and women understand the catalog of despair about their life and

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income. It is a life of disappointment, an underemployed life in a post-work age, without higher education to enable alternative choices, with cheap and simple digitized interfaces to express their anger, disappointment and displaced blame. This division on the right between neoliberals and protectionists has complex refractions. As Anthony Barnett’s online publication Blimey, It Could Be Brexit40 clearly demonstrated and as confirmed in this book, Brexit essentially involved an argument between the ‘Blairite’ Tories and the ‘Powell-lite’ Tories. Put another way, these two processes and ideologies are actually arguments, clearly, within the right neoliberalism versus protectionism. The left needs to develop an argument completely separate from these two poles within the right. Wolfgang Streeck’s description remains accurate: “The Return of the Repressed.”41 The battle between the neoliberals and protectionists is a Game of Thrones saga that will bubble through the coming decade, with international uncertainty and danger to follow. Steve Redhead described this as a “dangerous modernity.”42 Streeck, like Gramsci, settled with interregnum. Significantly, these debates about intricate inflections of power emerged in 2017, the 100 year anniversary of the Russian revolution. Or, two revolutions as it turned out: February and October (or March and November, depending on the calendar chosen). Many commemorative books emerged that twinned these theoretical times: 1917 and 2017. It was Lennon (John) not Lenin (Vladimir Illyich) who provocatively goaded on the Beatles’ White Album, ‘You say you want a revolution.’ But since the incomplete revolution of May 1968, the year the White Album was released, there have been few signs of revolution. Indeed and importantly proclamations of revolution have more recently come from the new- right. Donald Trump supporters at Breitbart, the far right website formerly run by his

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(former) adviser Steve Bannon, saw his election as a revolution from the right and a surprising one at that. Alternatively, Trump’s assault on the US presidency and the White House military and state power could be seen as more of a silent coup d’état. The number of generals in Trump’s cabinet demonstrate the intense military inflection. Brexit, driven by the right wing forces of UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) and the EDL (English Defence League), is already fundamentally changed post-imperial Britain. Marine Le Pen picked up 11 million votes for the far right in the French Presidential election. This rise of the right globally was the story of the 2010s. But events, dear boy, events.43 As the author Richard Seymour argues in his book on the UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, there is a “strange rebirth of radical politics” underway in Britain and abroad.44 The UK snap election in 2017 resulted in a Tory minority government and made Theresa May a simulacrum (in Jean Baudrillard’s terms) of a Prime Minister. There had been no need to go to the country for three more years under the fixed term of five years parliamentary legislation. The Arsenal-inspired football chant ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn,’ almost became an alternative national anthem in the summer of 2017 after Corbyn-led Labour picked up dozens of seats amid predictions of a terminal meltdown for the old party.45 Once more, the predictions of a Labour electoral wipe out were wrong, as they were wrong on Brexit and wrong on Trump. These moments are what Trump Studies can theorize: the double refusal. Yet Trump Studies is not a predictive paradigm. But it enables an explanation for the complex spaces of silence, refusal, surprise, and despair. Jeremy Corbyn is a key figure in understanding the convoluted configurations of power, resistance, and refusal that we summon in Trump Studies. Tony Blair, in response to Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership success, could only

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respond that he was “baffled” and “not sure I fully understand politics right now.46 Yet there was much to Corbyn that was predictable and understandable. A Bennite, he argued that the Left’s historic weakness since the 1960s would be stemmed by reinvesting in social democratic values, rather than moving to the right, as had been actioned by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The fear campaigns about raising taxes and migrants were less successful in the 2010s, because of a radical disconnection from ‘big media.’ The disintermediated media landscape, first perpetuated by blogs in the late 1990s, means that most citizens, most of the time, can disconnect from traditional television and newspaper news. This has problems: opinion and subjectivity replace fact and objectivity. However, journalists did not demonstrate their value and values through the twenty-first century in offering a viable alternative. There was little to save and little to value. The t-shirt slogan of ‘fake news’ promulgated by Donald Trump is not accurate. That is not the problem. It is composite news. Few journalists discover new stories. The bulk of print and broadcast media replay, reissue, and reshape already existing stories. It is ambulance chasing, but with facts. It is not ‘fake.’ It is boring, repetitive, irrelevant, and inelegant. Simon Sinek argued that, “bad decisions are made on false assumptions.”47 The challenge is that we journalists, citizens, and scholars are not aware of false assumptions. With a lack of independent and verified evidence, the false and true cannot be determined. Yet intelligent analysis and commentary are not only based on available source material. There has never been higher quality material available to more citizens than in our present. The challenge is that the glut of material digitized, disintermediated, and deterritorialized requires high levels of information literacy to sort, sift, rank, and evaluate. James Ball, in his book PostTruth, described “how bullshit conquered the world.”48 He

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recognized that a key tactic used by Donald Trump was to generate a sheer quantity of information that includes “halftruths, untruth, and outright spectacular mendacity.”49 This witch’s cauldron of nonsense was heated by a series of separate but mutually reinforcing ideologies: disrespect of the (illdefined) “elites,” disrespect of the (ill-defined) “experts,” disrespect of the (ill-defined) “media,” and the assumption that through all the smoke and fire from Trump and Brexit, that Clinton and the Remainers would actually win. The scale of the lies includes the slogan that featured on the side of a bus that if the UK left the European Union, that £350 million per week would return to the National Health Service. This was a lie. Yet the poor voting decisions and consequences made on the back of this lie were never tethered or linked to the Vote Leave campaign. The lie did not matter. The power of the lie is integral to summoning Trump Studies. The traditional press is not innocent in this narrative. The tabloidization of the media, which increased through the twentieth century,50 and illegal practices such as phone tapping of ‘celebrities’ meant that the very definition of ‘news’ was transforming. Tabloidization is a cultural movement that is difficult to date with precision, but has grown enormously through the 2000s. The result of a shift from ‘hard’ news to celebrity and lifestyle pieces has reconstructed the relationship between media and audiences. The growth in celebrity culture since September 11 is odd. The desire to see how ‘the other half’ or ‘the rich and famous’ lives raises a series of ambivalent questions. Does ‘lifestyle’51 become an aspiration in a post-work age? Significantly, since the Global Financial Crisis, even cooking, music, and design shows are in decline. Post Kardashians, an incompetent, mediocre self is all that is required to market and consume. Significantly, the popular cultural breakthrough series leading into and through Brexit, alongside Trump and May’s

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impotent election victories, were odd, expansive fantasies: Game of Thrones and Outlander.52 Both are based on fantasy novels in the fashion of Tolkien and Pratchett. Yet the difference is the role of romance, sex, and scale. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is the basis of Game of Thrones. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander shapes the television program of the same name. Women dominate the iconography and plot of both series. Outlander follows the narrative of a Second World War nurse, Claire Randall who walks through a stone circle near Inverness and is transported to 1743 Scotland. Married in both timelines, an epic romance is configured between Randall and Jamie Fraser, continuing to find each other through time and space. The backdrop of Culloden and its consequences on the Highlands is a setting for the plot, but offers little political resonance about colonization and war. Much more engaged in these topics is the series Game of Thrones, which is a television saga spanning the 2010s. With the focus on control of the Iron Throne in Westeros, battling families attempt to claim power. The disconnection from post-Fordist capitalism, through time traveling romance and bone-crunching violence and sex means that there was little attention to the shifts in work, leisure, and lifestyle.53 There is a reduced capacity to judge, weigh, and evaluate. Digitization and social media only intensify these tendencies. If a journalistic story written in response to a tweet is given the same weight as an investigative piece that has taken weeks or months of research, then the capacity to activate information literacy and sort relevance and importance is hampered. Confusion is a powerful political tool. It is used by the disempowered to wedge credibility from the empowered and create space for doubt. Two key examples of the political use of confusion both involve Barack Obama. It was simple for white men to use this strategy against a black man, because power is so rarely held by citizens of color.

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Therefore, white men could simply create confusion to discredit him. The ‘birther’ movement, where Obama’s citizenship was questioned, is one clear example. Another is the confusion between and the language is important here The Affordable Care Act and Obamacare. Creating affordable health care a motherhood ideology was rendered debatable by nick-naming the scheme after a black President. Digitization and the explosion of information has inhibited the capacity to generate clarity. The proliferation of information is not the only issue. Twitter creates a lord of the flies, a swarm, a mob, that builds a fortress around nonsense and trolling of those who counter and question. Popular culture at its best is diverse, provocative, and interesting. It enables many voices, views, and perspectives. Yet the rise in populism remains a key moment of change. With declining faith in institutions, education, and experts, populism ensures that strong leaders offering messiah ideologies to ‘save’ a country often from its own citizens who are not white, male, or heterosexual provide the easy answers to questions that no one was asking. Social media is sharing media. We have friends on Facebook. Because they are our friends, they hold similar views to us.54 They share a post. We reshare it. Information moves through networks of likeminded people. It may not be factual information, but it is loaned credibility by friends rather than experts. We have become a chain of customers sharing impressions rather than a community of citizens interpreting facts. In such a depressing and debilitating context, James Ball offers one clear piece of advice: “teach media literacy in schools.”55 Media literacy, part of the wider media education movement, has a long history. The key transformation through Cultural Studies was, as David Buckingham confirmed, “to begin with what students already know, and with their existing tastes and pleasures in the media, rather than

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assuming that these are merely invalid or ‘ideological.’”56 Valuing personal views is important. But it is not an end point or a mid-point in the development of a rational policy for social and economic development. Recognizing the diversity of perspectives, views, and approaches is the valuable skill. Experience and expertise are fickle mistresses. Experience is based on what a person decides is relevant in their context and environment and renders it significant. Winifred Gallagher argued that, “your experience largely depends on the material objects and mental subjects that you chose to pay attention to or ignore.”57 Attention particularly with its attendant verb ‘paying attention’ is the foundation of the ideologies of individuality and freedom. We ‘choose’ to ignore facts, realities, discourse, and ideas that unsettle us, trouble us, or question our perspective on the world. It is much easier to choose to ignore the other and the disturbing, and focus on the pleasant, the affirmative, and the clear. We do not have much control over the sensory input that enters our bodies through the skin, eyes, and ears. But we do have control of how we sort and prioritize that sensory material. That is corporeal literacy and creates our attention and focus. We choose to focus on the easy or difficult, the pleasant or confronting. Cal Newport argued that the great thinker commits to deep work, while “network tools are pushing our work from the deep toward the shallow.”58 It is easier to read a tweet than a book. It is easier to scroll through Facebook than complete an assignment for a university course. A culture locked in a cascading, digitized Baudrillian simulacrum means that we continually ‘learn’ the easy and the pleasant, best captured by the Orwellian phrase ‘entertainment news,’ rather than probing the profound changes to the economy through finance and real estate capitalism. Significantly, through public meetings like his mentor Tony Benn Jeremy Corbyn was able to offer an alternative

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voice, view, and mode of expression. Corbyn spoke at rallies during the era where PowerPoint and autocues had squeezed the art of public speaking into a test pattern of uniform banality. Instead, Corbyn used this alternative mode of analog communication, conveyed to a wide digital audience via mobile phones, to convey an anti-austerity policy. He was able to cut through banality with analog skill and digital interfaces. The key challenge remains hegemony and consent. A book published by Verso, written by New Left Review’s long time editorial board member and historian Perry Anderson, is The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. It was based on a long essay published in 1976, when Gramsci’s influence on the European West was at its height.59 Discipline after discipline succumbed to Gramsci’s seductiveness. After all, the origins of Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 1970s was always as much about Antonio Gramsci as, for instance, figures like the French theorist Louis Althusser. The new version of Anderson’s book has a fascinating, reflexive preface by the author filling in the gaps between 1976 and 2017. It also features an English translation of a remarkable report on Gramsci’s prison talks in the early 1930s near Bari in Italy by a fellow inmate Athos Lisa. Gramsci was a powerful and influential speaker for a gathering of political prisoners. Indeed, Antonio Gramsci is one of history’s forgotten political prisoners. Gramsci, having been involved in the Communist International in the early 1920s following the Russian revolution and the PCI (the Italian Communist Party), he was effectively framed and put in prison in Italy where he wrote his masterpiece The Prison Notebooks.60 Although Gramsci did not invent the term, he is most famous for his development of the concept of hegemony. Jean Baudrillard confirmed that hegemony is different from domination.61 Baudrillard wrote, “in order to grasp how

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globalization and global antagonism works, we should distinguish carefully between domination and hegemony. One could say that hegemony is the ultimate stage of domination and its terminal phase.”62 Along with the republication of The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, Perry Anderson and Verso have also published a companion study called The HWord.63 Gramsci understood this dichotomy of domination and hegemony and how hegemony could be used in alternatives to, as he saw it at the time in the 1920s and 1930s, international bourgeois rule. Dying in 1937, he did not live to see it. But as the Russian revolution stalled and eventually failed, and its expected global influence was met by ruthless fascism and reaction, Gramsci expected hegemony to be a significant world-wide process in the battle for the future and the eventual overcoming, in Baudrillard’s words, of the “agony of power.” Significantly, Baudrillard died after September 11, but before the Global Financial Crisis. Yet always with Baudrillard, his concept of hyperreality provides traction for analysis. Born in 1929, a year of catastrophe for capitalism, Baudrillard became a legendary global celebrity intellectual superstar during his lifetime. In other words, he became part of what he refers to as the hyperreal. Baudrillard’s friend Paul Virilio developed an “aesthetics of disappearance” in his own oeuvre,64 but Baudrillard’s radical notions differ significantly from the Virilian perspective. In many ways, Baudrillard set up his own disappearance several times in his life and even after his death. Baudrillard was lecturing at the University of Nanterre in 1968 when the events of May 68 erupted. He stayed at Nanterre for 20 years, eventually leaving French academia in the mid-1980s. In the mid-1970s, he had written ‘Forget Foucault’ which when published had landed him (eventually) in trouble with Michel Foucault himself. Significantly, Foucault’s theories particularly with

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regard to the state and neoliberalism are being revisited 65 and assessed. The familiarity of Foucault in graduate programs in the United States has meant that his more uncomfortable antiregulatory, anti-state theorizations have been marginalized in comparison to his discussions of law, sexuality, and the archeology of knowledge. Particularly, Daniel Zamora expressed his concerns for the ‘last’ Foucault. He stated that, “the ‘last’ Foucault of the early 1980s is surprising in his thinly veiled sympathy for, and minimal criticism of, emerging neoliberalism.”66 Foucault’s antagonism to the state made culture and society vulnerable to the market. Foucault created complex and intricate theorizations of power. His theorizations of the political economy were less convincing.67 Baudrillard developed his intellectual career in the time of internationally booming interest in Foucault. Instead, Baudrillard undertook a singular and distinctive path. He was separate and separated from much of the intellectual class in France as he started to write and produce theory differently from other scholars. The mid-1970s were a watershed but there were more disappearances. After leaving university life in 1986, Baudrillard used his 1980s ‘disappearance’ to publish myriad works of theoretical complexity until his death in 2007, all in the name of a radical outsider not a university intellectual. These political debates and theoretical movements, or lack thereof, since Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were enabled through the lack of a genuine left. Neoliberalism and financialization have not and will not deliver social justice. In recognition of this reality, Bernie Sanders erupted through the political process, as did Jeremy Corbyn. These two figures shredded the delicate dance between center right and center left, but also rendered Donald Trump’s interregnum volatile and unstable. The double refusal the denial to

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dominate and the denial to be dominated was best captured by Jeremy Corbyn’s (non-victory) victory in the May 2017 General Election. Pilloried by the press, he managed to deliver strong public speeches and worked well with individuals, while maintaining his 30 years of commitments to peace, redistribution of wealth, the National Health Service, housing, and free education. While the ‘victorious’ Theresa May summoned armed police on the streets of British cities to manage bombings and vehicular threats in Manchester and London in 2017, the Grenfell Tower fire performed more than any other social event the disregard and neglect of public good, public housing, and the poor. Such a stark realization confirmed by horrific deaths and the shroud of a burnt building in the middle of London meant that Jeremy Corbyn could maintain the higher ethical ground and confirm peace, cooperation between communities, and the necessity for a greater good in life and politics. This disparity was best captured on the weekend of June 24 26, 2017. Theresa May was at a military event in Liverpool. Jeremy Corbyn was at Glastonbury. This is interregnum politics.

NOTES 1. “The Lie of the Land”, Doctor Who, BBC, original broadcast (June 3, 2017). 2. “The Doctor’s Speech”, Doctor Who YouTube channel (August 17, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJP9o4BEziI 3. Inequality for all (72 Productions, 2014). 4. The Reich Report, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/ reichreport/ 5. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (Paramount, 2017).

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6. K. Marx, Capital, Vols. 1, 2 and 3 (Harmmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 7. W. Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London: Verso, 2014). 8. W. Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso, 2016). 9. C. Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). 10. G. Tett, Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe (London: Little, Brown, 2009): 26. 11. R. Christopher Whalen, “Financial regulation in the era of Donald trump”, Networks Financial Institute (March 2017), https:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2934880 12. S. Hall, S. Winlow and J. Treadwell, The Rise of the Right (Bristol: Polity Press, 2016): 13. 13. A powerful discussion of how anti-government forces enabled an unregulated market, please refer to Nancy MacLean’s fascinating analysis of the life and career of James McGill Buchanan, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Melbourne: Scribe, 2017). 14. Hall, Winlow and Treadwell, The Rise of the Right, 83. 15. Hall, Winlow and Treadwell, The Rise of the Right, 116. 16. Hall, Winlow and Treadwell, The Rise of the Right, 203. 17. T. Ross and T. McTague, Betting the House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election (London: Biteback, 2017). 18. Ross and McTague, Betting the House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election, ix. 19. Ross and McTague, Betting the House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election, xii

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20. T. Shipman, Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem (London: William Collins, 2017): xxiii. 21. Shipman, Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem, 302. 22. G. Brown, “Banks royal commission: Malcolm Turnbull has lost control of Coalition, Bill Shorten says”, The Australian, November 30, 2017, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationalaffairs/malcolm-turnbull-orders-banks-royal-commission/news-story/ cdd24d850bf0f872d9205b27da3886ce 23. L. Yaxley, “Same-sex marriage: Push to let florists and bakers discriminate against gay weddings dropped”, ABC News (November 27, 2017), http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-27/push-droppedto-let-florists-and-bakers-discriminate-ssm/9197448 24. P. Anderson, “The French Spring”, New Left Review, no. 105 (2017). 25. J. Werner Muller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016): 3. 26. T. Gallagher, “President-elect Trump: Is the past prologue?” Society, 54 (2017): 10 13. 27. D. Kellner, American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascent of Donald J. Trump (Rotterdam, Sense Publishers, 2017): xv. 28. Kellner, American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascent of Donald J. Trump, xv. 29. S. Ahmadian, S. Azarshahi and D. Paulhus, “Explaining Donald Trump via communication style: Grandiosity, informality and dynamism”, Personality and Individual Differences, 107 (2017): 51. 30. B. Ott, “The age of Twittter: Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement”, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34, no. 1 (2017): 59 68. 31. Ott, “The age of Twittter: Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement”, 61.

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32. J. Lee and Y. Lim, Gendered campaign tweets: The cases of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Public Relations Review, 42, no. 5 (December 2016): 849 855. 33. E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Random House, 1956). 34. B. Jacobs and S. Siddiqui, “‘You can do anything’: Trump brags on tape about using fame to get women”, The Guardian (October 8, 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/07/donaldtrump-leaked-recording-women 35. R. Revesz, “Donald Trump says he will get ‘nasty’ about Bill Clinton’s ‘infidelities’ at the second presidential debate”, The Independent (October 1, 2016), http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/americas/donald-trump-bill-clinton-hillary-affairsinfidelity-second-presidential-debate-nasty-a7341061.html 36. J. Street-Porter, “Donald Trump’s patronizing comment about Brigitte Macron shows he sees women as no more than accessories”, The Independent (July 14, 2017), http://www.independent.co.uk/ voices/brigitte-macron-good-shape-donald-trump-comment-melaniatrump-emmanuel-macron-france-a7841496.html 37. B. Choma and Y. Hanoch, “Cognitive ability and authoritarianism: understanding support for Trump and Clinton”, Personality and Individual Differences, 106 (2017): 287. 38. T. Edsall, “The great trump reshuffle”, New York Times (May 2, 2016). 39. A. Nagle, Kill all Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester: Zero Books, 2017). 40. A. Barnett, Blimey, It Could Be Brexit, https://www. opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-mackay/blimey-it-could-be-brexitbook-so-far 41. W. Streeck, “The return of the repressed”, New Left Review, no. 104 (2017).

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42. S. Redhead, Paul Virilio: Theorist for An Accelerated Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 43. This phrase is

obviously

attributed to Harold Macmillan.

Its authenticity is frequently questioned, R. Harris, “As Macmillan never said”, The Telegraph (June 4, 2002), http://www.telegraph.co. uk/comment/personal-view/3577416/As-Macmillan-never-said-thatsenough-quotations.html 44. R. Seymour, The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (London: Verso, 2016). 45. “Jeremy Corbyn, Glastonbury”, 2017, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=UVGFi8balOM. Please note, at the conclusion of his speech, the chant greets his exit from the stage. 46. “Jeremy Corbyn, Glastonbury”, 1. 47. S. Sinek, Start with Why (London: Penguin, 2011): 13. 48. J. Ball, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World (London: Biteback, 2017). 49. Ball, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, 3. 50. G. Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: SAGE, 2004) 51. N. Maycroft, “Cultural consumption and the myth of lifestyle”, Capital and Class, 28, no. 3 (2004): 61 75. 52. Three Outlander series were released up to the publication of this book: in 2014, 2016, and 2017. 53. Although politically conservative, Andrew Keen noted the impact of privacy being lost through online information trading in The Cult of the Amateur (New York: Doubleday, 2007). 54. G. Sykes and D. Matza, “Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency”, American Sociological Review, 22, no. 6 (1957): 664 670. 55. Sykes and Matza, “Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency”, 260

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56. D. Buckingham, Media Education (Cambridge: Polity, 2003): 14. 57. W. Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (New York: Penguin, 2010): 1. 58. C. Newport, Deep Work (London: Piatkus, 2016): 7. 59. P. Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (London: Verso, 2017). 60. A. Gramsci, Selections from The Prison Notebooks, https://archive.org/stream/ AntonioGramsciSelectionsFromThePrisonNotebooks/AntonioGramsci-Selections-from-the-Prison-Notebooks_djvu.txt 61. J. Baudrillard, The Agony of Power (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2010): 33. 62. Baudrillard, The Agony of Powe, 33. 63. P. Anderson, The H-Word (London: Verso, 2017). 64. P. Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). 65. D. Zamora and M. Behrent, Eds, Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 66. D. Zamora, “Foucault, the excluded, and the neoliberal erosion of the state”, in D. Zamora and M. Behrent, Eds, Foucault and Neoliberalism, 64. 67. Stuart Elden stated that “the history of subjectity, or a genealogy of the subject, is perhaps Foucault’s major concern in this decade”, from S. Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade (Cambridge: Polity, 2016): 205.

CHAPTER 5 PENS AND TOWER BLOCKS

Foucault, as always, is definitive in his theorizations of history’s polarities and extremes. However, if the nineteenth century was the time of revolutions and knowledge constitution about them, then how will the twenty-first be categorized? The twentieth century was the era of war, violence and genocide, and knowledge constituted about them. Perhaps the twenty-first century will be the era of self and selfabsorption, and knowledge constituted about them. Selfishness, cruelty, brutality, and banality are the tropes of the first two decades of this stillborn century. Conservative governments in the United Kingdom maintain complex alignments and negotiations with the working and lower middle class.1 With each subsequent government spanning from Margaret Thatcher’s three terms, the disconnection from the north meant that national representation in any form was unstable. The Thatcher years transformed the south into a complex political space of hyper gentrification and bone-chipping poverty. There remains deeply entrenched racism, through the legacy of colonization and the divisive assumptions derived from the nineteenth century of the deserving and undeserving poor.2 The Conservative Party 105

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was built on the exclusion of the other, racialized, poor, or non-British. In the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy on June 14, 2017, these unspoken assumptions from the Conservative party became more obvious. This was observed in Theresa May’s response to the fire,3 how the local council managed its aftermath,4 and the silencing of the voices of those affected. But it is the return to the nineteenth-century divisions between the deserving and undeserving poor that are of most interest to Trump Studies.5 From the 1970s, precariousness increased. Daniel Briggs and Ruben Monge Gamero confirmed that “permanent jobs and secure family life have liquidized, now replaced by a world of temporary contracts, part-time work, and unemployment.”6 This culture of dependency created a series of outcomes, including drug dependence.7 Hopelessness and unstable social structures generate problematic social and spatial outcomes. Housing estates have a complex history. The movement of people from estates to tower blocks captures a deep history of neglect, fear, structural unemployment, and racial injustice. While the council estate could be the font of humor, from Vicky Pollard in Little Britain and its Manchester manifestation Shameless, the tower block is distinct. As Lynsey Hanley confirmed in her remarkable history, “the right to a secure place to sleep is now negotiable, due to a combination of long-term political neglect and, since 2010, an unchecked market.”8 Grenfell confirms this abandonment, where cheap housing and disrepair of the tower block killed its residents. Grenfell captured and demonstrated, in the middle of London, the cost of austerity politics, outsourcing, and deregulation. London remains a (place of) Big Capital.9 It is a city of billionaires and affluent apartments but also housing crises for the unemployed, underemployed, and working poor. As Anna Minton asked, “how did we get to the point, where

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house prices and rents are unaffordable for the majority?”10 The challenge remains how a workforce can operate in London. Wages cannot fund the expenses of transportation and the residency required to earn a living, particularly as social housing declines. The housing crisis is not a cliché. Lives are shredded. Intricate political economies are crushed. Working environments are being hollowed of innovation, spark, and potential. What has happened to London via real estate capitalism is the visible undergarment of the dark days ahead for second and third tier cities.11 The choices about where to live and work are being removed from citizens, residents, and denizens through the neoliberal movement of capital, worsened by neglectful urban planning policies. That is why Grenfell Tower burnt like a savage birthday candle. Three months after the tragedy, only two residents had been permanently rehoused and 20 survivors had attempted suicide.12 News cycles end. These tragedies continue. This was, as Iain Sinclair described, “The Last London.”13 He believed this desolate, discarded, disrupted, postcolonial city triggered his need to, “teach myself the grammar of a terminated city in which every sentence begins with a confident clearing of the throat.”14 It remains a city of memory and alienation, but also shadows and injustice. Sinclair aligned the global rise of Trump with this betrayed London. The ground is darkened by the long shadows of half-built vanity towers, investment silos and the flickering nuisance of sunbed clowns with sharky grins poking their thumbs at us from screens and hoardings. In Smart City, Donald Trump is a good thing. He makes the fault line visible. The goldtopped King Ubu of the internet has been generous enough to embody all the creeping horrors of corporate opportunism, all self-serving, reflex

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mendacity of political operators with a more emollient pitch. The man is visible. He is loud enough to be heard across oceans.15 Urban regeneration has been the code for 20 years to signal a transitory boom in building construction. Even Richard Florida the management consultant arguing for the Bohemian Index16 and the Three Ts (technology, tolerance, and talent) argued that urban regeneration failed, creating ‘the new urban crisis.’17 He believed that London has split into two cities, “one of them has too much money and the other has nowhere near enough.”18 Florida’s solution to this new rendering of Disraeli’s two nations repeats what caused the crisis in the first place. Deploying anti-statism and antiregulation, he stated that, “our great urban centers can no longer look to national governments for top-down solutions; they will have to address the crisis themselves.”19 The point is, Florida’s ‘creative class’ failed. The privatization of cities has benefited the group described by Florida as “affluent and highly educated whites.”20 Beyond inflated management consultancy, Florida was wrong in his strategies for urban planning. Considering the current crisis, he is still incorrect in his solution. Trump Studies offers distinct solutions to Richard Florida. This paradigm is not ‘about’ an individual man. Donald Trump, as Sinclair confirmed, makes fault lines of class, race, gender, age, and greed, visible. Trump Studies details a desolate loss of thinking, interpretation, analysis, discussion, and evidence. It frames injustice without qualification or excuse, and offers theories of how and why disempowered citizens’ vote and act against their own best interests. Described as “anti-welfare common sense,”21 the division between the deserving and undeserving poor, white and black, working and not working, has re-emerged in public discourse.22 Yet

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employment has never been more volatile and variable. The precariat rules.23 Such instability can be justified by phrases like a portfolio career or the gig economy. However, the truth is that labor surplus creates underemployment, instability, and despair. It also has an impact on health, housing, and education. The irrationality of anti-statism will summon profound changes in housing, health, education, energy policy, and transportation infrastructure development. Assuming that profit-seeking agencies and organizations can manage aged care or childcare is inaccurate. Anti-statism has an expansive impact on people’s daily lives, with shocking results. Underregulation in health and housing will kill citizens through neglect or criminal damage. The Global Financial Crisis was used as a cover to a ‘roll back’ of the state. Anna Minton realized that “whole sectors of society fail to ask questions about disturbing practices.”24 At a certain point, profit is just profit. There is no mystery in the paradox that supposedly in a time where ‘happiness’ is so important,25 mental health concerns are running at record levels. What of education? This is not an information age or a learning culture. As George Monbiot stated, “the collapse of popular education movements left a void filled by marketing and conspiracy theories.”26 Education, teaching, and learning are important because they demand that we as citizens read, think, interpret, and analyze. Henry Giroux has recognized the profound connection between education and the election of Donald Trump. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it clear that he liked the illiterate masses and that once he assumed the presidency, he would appoint a range of incompetent people to highranking positions that would ensure that many

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people remained poorly education, uniformed, and impoverished.27 Xenophobia creates cultures of domination that ridicule, attack, and undermine. It is built and fed on ignorance. Racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and nationalism are irrational. There is nothing that renders a British citizen better than a Tongan or Singaporean citizen. Yet colonization justified an invasion and occupation based on the irrationality of a racial hierarchy. Why education is valuable is that history is taught not as a predictive lesson, but as a context to understand past injustices and their manifestations in the present. It is simple and dangerous to argue that profit is a benevolent guide through progress. The survival of neoliberalism after the Global Financial Crisis which proved its errors and flaws demonstrates that hyper-capitalism, based on finance and real estate capitalism is not rational. In actuality, the profiteering bankers failed because of their greed and the state taxpayers’ money was brought in to keep the financial sector in operation. The state subsidized the failures of the market. Yet since that time, the support and respect for the state has declined and the bankers are back. But now, the state has less money to fund health, housing, and education, and the banks are more confident. This means that state services decline and real estate and finance capitalism are their inadequate replacement. As Polly Toynbee and David Walker confirmed: when their credit ran out and their financial nakedness was exposed, the bankers in the Canary Wharf skyscrapers turned automatically to the government; they were ungrateful then and since, perhaps because they were witnessing a fundamental

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truth, that private profitmaking depends on public power.28 Yet this is simply one variable in a wider story of antistatism. The de-professionalization of state workers is part of this narrative, with Michael Gove the minister of postexpertise confirming that teachers do not need university education. They can learn about learning in a classroom. Gove argues that it is a ‘craft’29 not a knowledge system. However, teaching is more than tips and tricks and classroom management. Content expertise cannot be falsified. Neither can literacy or numeracy education. The anti-statism infuses major challenges on the rules, parameters, and structures of society, with most consequences for the poor and disempowered. On June 14, 2017, the Grenfell Tower Block in West London caught fire. A total of 71 people died, including a stillborn baby. Of the 129 flats, people died in 23 of them. The fire is believed to have commenced via a fridge-freezer, but the rapid speed of its proliferation was caused by the cladding. Since 2013, the Grenfell Action Group had publically conveyed concerns about fire safety. The refit of the building, which was completed in 2016, was put out to competitive tender, with Rydon’s bid beating Leadbitter’s because of cost.30 One variable in the reduction of the tender was the use of cheaper cladding that was not fire resistant. The cladding was not the only concern. The tower block had a single central staircase. Grenfell is now the structural fire in the United Kingdom with the most deaths since the beginning of the twentieth century. The Bradford City stadium fire in 1985 killed 56 people. What value is placed on the men, women, and children who died and survived the Grenfell fire? Grenfell Tower’s positioning in the borough of Chelsea and Kensington offered a powerful image of ‘non-belonging.’ It was an erect eyesore

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that permeated the windows of the mansions surrounding it. Grenfell manifests a series of tragedies that have been brought on by a socially detached Conservative government. What is to blame here is not only the £1 cladding to render the building more esthetically pleasing to affluent neighbors, but the systemic refusal to acknowledge the voices of the disempowered, poor, racialized, and foreign. As the Mayor of London at the time, Sadiq Khan stated, “Those who mock health and safety, regulations and red tape need to take a hard look at the consequences of cutting these and ask themselves whether Grenfell Tower is a price worth paying.”31 Tower blocks in most metropolitan cities in the United Kingdom were built as a means of accommodating the increasing population requiring social housing. This form of structural/political discourse not only placed the state as an authoritarian voice but explicitly highlights the disproportionality of power.32 Similar to what was observed in the Hillsborough disaster, first-hand accounts of those who were affected went unheard and held very little importance to the inquiry. Please note this meeting will be held entirely in private session, pursuant to Standing Order 31.01, in the light of the risk of disruption (as witnessed on Friday 16 June) and consequent security and public safety concerns. As such it will be open only to council members, support officers and invited guests. The public minutes of this meeting will be published, in due course, on the council website.33 In the search for truth, how can victims of tragedy be also regarded as disruptive to the process? The fact that the victims of the tragedy would only be permitted to access the information of the inquiry that was being held by the Council

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that cladded the building with flammable tiles, after it had been edited and posted online on an unspecified date clearly presents the truth process as not transparent.34 In the politics of the marginalized, the disempowered, voiceless, and poor serve very little purpose to dominant institutions. Prior to becoming Prime Minister, Theresa May held the position of Home Secretary. She imposed some of the toughest measures to stop immigration to the United Kingdom from specific countries and to deny those with pending asylum hearings from attaining permanent British residency. In reference to a 2016 Immigration Act, she stated she wanted to “create a hostile environment for illegal migrants” by employing measures that would require landlords to verify immigration statuses of all prospective tenants. 35 All these exclusionary measures were manifested in the burning of Grenfell Tower. After the blaze, the Council attempted to establish a missing persons list using government records. Tenant accounts were not considered. However, large numbers of supposedly undocumented immigrants, visa over-stayers, and those who had been subletting would not appear on the list making the official missing/death toll difficult to confirm.36 In delving deeper into the value placed on these victims, we draw on the notion put forward by Stanley Cavell of ‘soul blindness’. Cavell maintains, when an authority sees another human being as less than human, in terms of their treatment, attitude or practice toward them, the authority is demonstrating that it is justifiable to treat them like a ‘slave’ or as being subhuman. The authority is seen as not wanting to acknowledge that these others also go through the same pain and suffering as they do. What he is missing is not something about slaves exactly, and not exactly about human beings. He is

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rather missing something about himself, or rather something about his connection with these people, his internal relation with them so to speak.37 Throughout the Brexit campaign, there was a championing of ‘British values’ and jobs. Yet the championing of the residents of Grenfell Tower did not blend into this ideology. They did not fit into the Conservative mould of what it means to be British. As Garner confirms: The role and position of migrant labour in late capitalism as well as the political and legal contradictions around citizenship and settlement in Britain have been important objects of concern.38 Stuart Hall remains an intellectual guide through Grenfell. He recognized a “long, continuing process of disidentification.”39 The colonial and the postcolonial are not selfsustaining or separated entities. Indeed, in the UK, the historic scars between Wales and England, Scotland and England, and Ireland and England remain vivid and clear, opening to the air when discussions of Welsh language support, Scottish Independence, or managing the Irish border between the North and Eire after Brexit emerge.40 To understand the United Kingdom is to understand the divisions and discords within it. Hall offered a clear survival guide as a migrant and black man moving through the UK: “in order to survive and to navigate my way through daily life I had to become a practical reader of England, of Englishness particularly in relation to what was unconscious, or disavowed or couldn’t be put into words.”41 To grasp Grenfell is to read Englishness at its most brutal, brutalizing, and ruthless. This is colonialism from within, a brittle and cold recognition that poverty is a racialized category manifesting through housing injustice in the largest cities of

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the UK. The poor must be hidden, masked, and cladded. Their daily struggles are not addressed or managed, but shielded from view. This injustice was suddenly visible, a blackened candle, a reminder of race, poverty, and neglect.

NOTES 1. S. Hall, “The great moving right show”, Marxism Today (1979): 14 20 and S. Winlow and S. Hall, The Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-Class Politics (Bristol: Polity Press, 2016). 2. K. Marks, “Margaret Thatcher an 'unabashedly racist': The view of the Australian Foreign Minister”, The Independent (April 11, 2013), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/ margaret-thatcher-an-unabashedly-racist-the-view-of-the-australianforeign-minister-8567946.html; J. Swaine, “Margaret Thatcher complained about Asian immigration to Britain”, The Telegraph (December 30, 2009), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ margaret-thatcher/6906503/Margaret-Thatcher-complained-aboutAsian-immigration-to-Britain.html; M. Thatcher, “Rather swamped“/Interviewer: G. Burns,” World in Action (Vol 1) (Manchester: Granada TV, 1978), The Telegraph; “Enoch Powell’s 'Rivers of Blood' speech”, The Telegraph (November 6, 2011), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-PowellsRivers-of-Blood-speech.html 3. L. Hughes, “Theresa May accused of failing to show ‘humanity’ during Grenfell Tower visit”, The Telegraph (June 16, 2017), http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/16/theresa-may-failed-showhumanity-grenfell-tower-visit-saysmichael/ 4. R. Mason and H. Sherwood, “Grenfell Tower fire: May accepts Tory-led council did not help quickly enough”, The Guardian,

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https://www.theguardina.com/uk-news/2017/aug/23/grenfell-towerfire-may-accepts-tory-led-council-did-not-help-quickly-enough 5. K. Bridges, “The deserving poor, the undeserving poor, and classbased affirmative action”, Boston University School of Law, Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper No. 16 30 (August 15, 2016). 6. D. Briggs and R. Monge Gamero, Dead-end Lives: Drugs and Violence in the City Shadows (Chicago: Policy, 2017): 36. 7. Briggs and Monge Gamero, Dead-end Lives: Drugs and Violence in the City Shadows, 257. 8. L. Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (London: Granta, 2017): 236. 9. A. Minton, Capital: Who is London for? (Milton Keynes: Penguin, 2017). 10. Minton, Capital: Who is London for?, 25. 11. T. Brabazon, City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay (Berlin: Springer, 2013), http://www.springer.com/earth+sciences +and+geography/geography/book/978-94-007-7234-2 12. S. Clare, “Grenfell Tower: 'Twenty suicide attempts' since fire”, BBC News (September 5, 2017), http://www.bbc.com/news/uk41148877 13. I. Sinclair, “The Last London”, London Review of Books, 39, no. 7 (March 2017): 7 11. 14. Sinclair, “The Last London”, 7. 15. Sinclair, “The Last London”, 7. 16. T, Brabazon and S. Mallinder, “Branding Bohemia: Community literacy and branding difference”, City & Time, 3, no. 2 (2010), http://www.ceci-br.org/novo/revista/docs2008/CT-2008-132.pdf 17. R. Florida, The New Urban Crisis (London: Oneworld, 2017). 18. Florida, The New Urban Crisis, xii.

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19. Florida, The New Urban Crisis, xv. 20. Florida, The New Urban Crisis, 71. 21. T. Jensen and I. Tyler, “Benefits broods: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare common sense”, Critical Social Policy, 35, no. 4 (2015): 1 22. 22. J. Hudson, N. Lunt, C. Hamilton, S. Mackinder, J. Meers and C. Swift “nostalgia narratives? Pejorative attitudes to welfare in historical perspective: survey evidence from Beveridge to the British Social Attitudes Survey”, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 24, no. 3, 227 243. 23. G. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 24. A. Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City (London: Penguin, 2012): xiii. 25. W. Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (London: Verso, 2015). 26. G. Monbiot, How Did We Get Into This Mess? (London: Verso, 2017): 9. 27. H. Giroux, The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2018). 28. P. Toynbee and David Walker, Dismembered: How the Attack on the State Harms Us All (London: Guardian Books, 2017): 9. 29. M. Baker, “What makes good teaching?” BBC (November 24, 2010), http://www.bbc.com/news/education-11835087 30. J. Wilmore, “Grenfell Tower Rydon replaced Leadbitter as contractor”, Construction News (June 16, 2017), https://www. constructionnews.co.uk/best-practice/health-and-safety/grenfelltower-rydon-replaced-leadbitter-as-contractor/10020848.article 31. S. Khan, “Revealed: The tower block fire warnings that ministers ignored”, The Guardian (June 17, 2017).

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32. R. Ford and M. Goodwin, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (London: Routledge, 2014). 33. J. Hardy, “Grenfell Tower Fire: Survivors banned from Kensington and Chelsea Council meeting”, Independent (June 29, 2017), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grenfelltower-latest-fire-survivors-banned-kensington-chelsea-councilmeeting-a7814061.html 34. T. Brabazon and S. Redhead, “Hillsborough and Grenfell: Connected stories of injustice”, Libsyn (July 2, 2017), http://traffic. libsyn.com/tarabrabazon/Hillsborough_and_Grenfell_-_connected_ stories_of_injustice.mp3 35. A. Travis, “What does Theresa May’s record as home secretary tell us?” The Guardian (July 18, 2016), https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2016/jul/18/what-does-theresa-mays-record-as-homesecretary-tell-us 36. M. Bulman, “Grenfell Tower Fire: Undocumented migrants could still be missing”, Independent (June 19, 2017), http://www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grenfell-tower-fire-disasterlatest-residents-families-victims-homeless-immigration-statusmigrants-a7798051.html 37. S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 376. 38. S. Garner, Racisms: An Introduction (London: Sage, 2017): 21. 39. S. Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (London: Penguin, 2017): 3 40. The territorial border between the EU and the United Kingdom rests between Northern Ireland and Eire. The management of this territorial border was under-discussed both during and after the referendum. But for the Irish, this result meant Connelly

to cite Tony

“The border is back in Irish politics”, Brexit & Ireland

(London: Penguin, 2017): 381. Also, because the service industries

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were invisible during the campaign before the referendum, the impact on the knowledge economy, the training sector, and the creative industries was under-discussed. Therefore, Eire in particular is managing deep challenges in the service sector as much as beef. 41. Connelly, Brexit & Ireland, 203.

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CHAPTER 6 THE BANALITY OF RACISM (AND CAPITALISM)

It is intemperate and incorrect to suggest that every individual who voted for Donald Trump is racist and ignorant and each person who voted for Hillary Clinton is benign, vegan and progressive. In our analysis, we are attempting to understand the moment, the intellectual framework and the cultural momentum that enabled the election of Trump. How does the double refusal apply to this context? In this book, we probe the assumption that Brexit voters and Trump voters had an identity to protect. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia are (merely) attendant othering strategies to tightly align whiteness and nationalism. The banality of that identity, which removes the complex histories of whiteness, colonizers and the ‘middle class’ (rather than ‘working poor’), created a ‘values- driven’ movement. These values are nostalgia, nationalism and colonial order. These are ranked

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of higher importance than multiculturalism or globalization. Doug Kiel described this movement with clarity: The shift from an Obama presidency to Trump demonstrates that social justice can be sidelined when people who call themselves white prioritize their own needs over the needs of others.1 This was a whitelash. The idea that after the Global Financial Crisis a businessman active in real estate would be considered a possibility for president of the United States demonstrates that the wound seared by the collapse in the economy had been masked and the pain medicated. Unemployment was managed effectively by Obama. But the structural problems of finance capitalism and real estate capitalism unbalancing the global economy into unpredictable and volatile cycles meant that the ‘threat’ of nations that maintained a balance in the manufacturing of industrial and post-industrial goods like China, Germany, India, and Mexico was agitated by Trump. Donald Trump spoke of protectionism and the greatness of the United States. There is no excuse for racism or ignorance to create that greatness. However the denial and displacement of the often uncomfortable theorization of whiteness is not assisting an analysis of why Trump or Brexit emerged. Instead, it is necessary to probe whiteness, to understand disappointment and the politics of despair. This problem was predictable. Multiculturalism was an unstable, soft and weak ideology. It was either a celebration of cultural diversity or a policy mechanism for elites to maintain power over institutions while playing cultural games on the periphery. In such a model, race and ethnicity are reduced to ‘culture’ rather than structural injustices and discriminations that emerge in education, health and the workplace. It

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is an integrationist agenda. The idea that multiculturalism is critiqued by conservatives is foolish, as it is a conservative ideology that shapes difference and diversity in a way that is suitable and palatable for the empowered groups. The majority constructs minorities in a way that is suitable to the powerful, thereby blocking structural change. Nations such as Australia marginalize and minimize brutal colonization and the white domination of political, media and sporting organizations through attacks on migrants. Through the recent history of Australia since 1901 when Federation was enacted, anti-immigration was marinated into anti-Asian ideologies. Since September 11, Islamophobia has offered a biting and virulent replacement. Multiculturalism was and is too soft an ideology to manage the political buffeting of racism of this scale. The question is how diverse nations can create discourses of difference that operate both within a framework of national governments and the mobility of globalized finance capitalism. There are many answers to the questions Why Trump? Why Brexit? Robert Samuels has offered a psychoanalytic perspective, probing conservatism, liberalism and neoliberal populism after Trump’s election. While this approach and suite of theories reveal profound limitations, Samuels shows how “victim identification is one of the strongest political forces in the world today.”2 These are “fantasies of victimhood”3 that feed into a conservative backlash. Neoliberal conservatives apply a reified, twisted and eugenicist mode of evolutionary theory, whereby the free market rather than nature selects winners and losers.4 In light of the events of November 8, 2016, when Donald Trump won the race for the United States presidency, scholars must ponder Trump’s positioning within the global shift to the right. In doing so, we situate Donald Trump in the histories of race, global politics, and banality in order to reveal

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how and why his election victory confirms the deep fracture in leftist politics. The election of Donald Trump solidifies that the shift to right wing political ideas is not coming or emerging. It is here. We wish to be clear: Trump is not the carefully calculating, natural leader of the Right. Controversial as it might be to state, Donald Trump was a chancer who captured conservative anxieties about the weak and weakening ties between nationalism, whiteness, and power. Prior to 2012, Trump was never a voice of the Right. He had been aligned with Democratic political views.5 Donald Trump as an unwitting, ignorant vessel, filled with racism, fear and loss, was a response to President Barack Obama as much as a threat to the American political system. We choose to maintain this argument for reasons that are twofold. Firstly, there is danger of over-philosophizing Trump as a lone calculating and executing individual. Instead Trump should be viewed as a puppet albeit a powerful one - in the larger context of global politics. Secondly, by using President Barack Obama and his “powerful symbolism of black advancement,”6 we can come to understand the steady rise of the Right. Gilroy noted that a new type of racism was arising in political discourse. He argued that it avoided being recognized as such because, “it is able to line up ‘race’ with nationhood, patriotism and nationalism […] homogenous in its whiteness yet precarious and perpetually vulnerable to attack from enemies.”7 The disdain for outgoing President Obama slots into this fear. He was the enemy within. He was Christian, successful and heteronormative. He was the Sidney Poitier of politics. He fulfilled all the requirements of the American Dream: success on white terms. Yet his skin his packaging summoned fear, confusion, anger and irrationality. The delusional narratives about his birth certificate

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highlighted the irrationality created when white citizens are led by a successful black man. In this bleak time for American politics, scholars must not deflect what it meant for Trump to succeed Obama as President. Barack Obama embodied the loss of power from whiteness, which was particularly poignant for the far right wing of the Republican Party. His messages of hope and change were motivational, passionate and eloquently delivered. However it was the body from which these views were expressed that highlighted the decline of white power. President Obama’s election came on the heels of the Global Financial Crisis, which emerged from the neo-liberal and anti-regulatory Republican administration that developed a bailout package to large banks because they were ‘too big to fail.’ In the minds of some economic and socio-political scholars, Obama was heralded as the savior of the American economy.8 Perhaps the expectations stacked upon him were unrealistic in both foreign and domestic policy, yet he was seen as a beacon of change when compared to the serious economic and military errors made by the previous Republican government. Trump’s now infamous campaign tagline of empowering the white working class seems like a twisted joke considering it was people like Donald Trump who benefited from the declining financial power of the blue collar workers. As Robert Peston confirmed, I have to distinguish between my own horror at Trump’s divisive, hate-generating rhetoric and narrow nationalism on the one hand, and the motives of those who backed him. The point is that the crisis for white Americans in its declining industrial heartlands is even more acute than in England’s, manifested in epidemics of opioid and

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alcohol abuse, worsening suicide rates, a reversal of decades of people living longer. And Trump appeared to listen to them in a way that Hillary Clinton did not. He spoke their language.9 In 2007, the working class were not angry with the Democrats but instead demanded to know how their Republican government had failed them. Nine years later the message has been manipulated and blame removed whited out - from the Republican government and placed on the Democrats. This inversion was irrational, but potent in its banality. For the first time in the history of American politics, the dominant white population was being ruled by the ‘lesser’ race.10 As expressed by Boris Johnson, America was being ruled by a former colonial subject. Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.11 This crystalized the narrative of white America: these men and women no longer had control of their own country. Obama was the manifestation of past injustices that aligned, regrouped and gained power. His black body carried colonial history. In this context, racism could no longer be minimized, displaced or disguised as a dog-whistle. It was overt and nasty: ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Take our country back.’ The ‘Again’ in the MAGA slogan matters. The criteria by which America was ever ‘great’ are debatable. Arshad Imtiaz Ali, the day after the 2016 US Presidential election, taught a class at George Washington University. The resultant discussion in that classroom was prescient and important.

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The students recognized the animus toward nonwhite bodies was not a rupture in American political and social life but rather the continuation of a society that has not addressed its material gains from genocide, chattel slavery, colonial, and imperial projects, as well as from its racism, discrimination and violence […] They feared that the Trump presidency would embolden white racism, give voice to white supremacy, and allow white violence against minority and vulnerable populations, and it has done so. Their fears were real and well-founded.12 To manage such damaging social conflicts, a return to a soft, individualized, neoliberal multiculturalism will not suffice. Instead, deep, attacking, and radical theorizing is required to demonstrate the consequences of the double refusal. The refusal to lead and be led resulted in an erasure of to cite Foucault “subjugated knowledges,”13 but also the erasure of humanity and citizenship from subjugated people. What makes the United States unusual is that liberalism has remained the punctuation for significant historical moments in the nation’s history, beginning with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Freeing three million slaves destroyed the foundation of the southern economy. This new social and economic order was enforced by the Union Army. This was the first of a series of liberal responses to structural injustices. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal in 1948 that offered universal health care, John Kennedy’s New Frontier that guaranteed federal funds to create a post-segregation education system, and Johnson’s Civil Rights Act in 1964 all created, built and captured a distinctive pathway through

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liberalism. Obama’s presidency built on this foundation. But the key sociological absence in this history is a discussion of the white working class, a group that was socialized through American history to feel powerful through the color of their skin, but was socially, geographically, and economically immobile through a lack of education and regional injustices. Bonnie Greer captured the impotency of this group and how Trump was able to summon them for one last presidency. Liberalism has become the consensus, the voice of reason, the beacon of civilization itself. But it forgot another group, just as needy, whose skin colour gave it privilege and safety, but not mobility. For them, liberalism took its eye off the ball. Now the American white working class is being conned by the present occupant of the Oval Office with promises of the return of ‘King Coal,’ steel plants, shipping, the land itself. But the future is robotics, AI, nanotechnology, biotechnology and other technologies beyond the imagination of most of us. This reality, along with ageing demographics, means that time is literally running out for ‘Trump’s America’ and its equivalents in the UK and Europe, as indeed the arrival of Emmanuel Macron already suggests.14 ‘Protecting’ borders and pretending that the Fordist industrial revolution is still a functional model for production is not only nostalgic, but wrong. Similarly, the assumption that Christian white people are better, greater, more intelligent and benevolent than atheists and members of other faiths and races is not only ignorant and foolish, but enacts active forgetting of the white Catholic who promulgated a genocidal final solution through Europe. Christianity has been

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summoned to justify more wars and violence than Islam could ever muster. When Theresa May could only form a government through a partnership with the DUP, the political arm of the Unionist organization, this corrosive reality became clear. The political problem or issue is never the alleged terrorism. The problem is race. White Protestants with a history of hate speech from Northern Ireland are worthy of a coalition, risking the highly volatile peace process in Ireland as Brexit negotiations re-evaluate the territorial border with the Republic. Such an unthinkable coalition required some groundwork during the Brexit campaign. Trump’s victory was not an isolated ideological car crash. In light of the United Kingdom Brexit vote, the role of Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), requires attention. He was fighting for the same social group and ‘problem’ as Donald Trump: the loss of white power.15 After championing the controversial, xenophobic and racist vote, he travelled to the United States and actively endorsed Donald Trump. It is startling that such a minor figure gained such a profile. He reclaimed profoundly racist ideas back into British politics.16 It was Enoch Powell-esque. Unlike other conservative British politicians before him such as Margaret Thatcher, Nigel Farage was (re)activating the white men’s burden. Both Farage and Trump have been accused of overt and damaging racism yet they have risen in profile, steering a significant turn in global politics. In their rhetoric, both Trump and Farage fought to maintain the power of a white identity that was supposedly in danger of being compromised by progressive views. On his own, Nigel Farage would have stayed a minor figure. But the Brexit vote, supported by Aaron Banks, a diamond mine owner, and Andy Wigmore, former aide to senior conservative politicians, created what Banks supposedly

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positively described as “The Bad Boys of Brexit.”17 The book presents the fazing, adolescent behavior of these three men. They are rude, crude, nasty, racist, and do not care about the impact of their actions on others. These men would be white trash. But, as millionaires and billionaires, they can pay others to take out their trash. Banks is intentionally and overtly antagonistic and xenophobic. I’m clear how we can help win the referendum: by acting as the provisional wing of the Brexit campaign, doing and saying the things that, as leader of Britain’s third biggest political party, Nigel can’t. I’ve told him my priority will be to put immigration at the heart of the debate and engage millions of voters who dislike and distrust the political classes.18 The acceptability of using ‘the provisional wing’ in a Brexit discussion, noting its bloodied history in the Troubles, is the equivalent of applying the purges to a discussion of transportation systems or flying the Confederate flag in the southern United States. The culture of equivalence that anything can be said with brutality as its propelling punctuation was the engine of these uber-Brexiteers. Farage created a false equivalence between the experiences of the colonizer and the colonized, minimizing the profound damage enacted to the languages of Indigenous peoples, faith structures, family structures, and relationships with the land. This false equivalence balances the ‘benign and really rather good’ parts of colonization which significantly are not mentioned by name and the people who are still reconciling themselves with the consequences of invasion, genocide and dispossession.

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It’s just that you know people emerge from colonialism with different views of the British. Some thought that they were benign and really rather good, and others saw them as foreign invaders that kept people suppressed. Obama’s family come from that second school of thought and it hasn’t quite left him yet.19 In such a statement, race is seen to “perform a double function.”20 Firstly, it signifies the geographical origins but perhaps more in line with Cultural Studies analyses, it also responds to Obama’s blackness as an othered and othering identity that gained power. The superiority of the white race is confirmed only through a colonial gauze. Farage viewed Barack Obama through a colonial lens, therefore deeming him inferior and dangerous. Barack Obama presented a direct contestation to white superiority. Obama through his presidency challenged what it meant to be black in the United States of America. The multiple mentions by Trump of ghettos21 and crime in Chicago were an attempt to wrestle the ideology from blackness as power to blackness as problem. Through his visible difference, Obama also “called into question the dominant coding” of what it meant to be American.22 The fact that Farage and Johnson had to position Barack Obama in colonial history reveals that race and cultural background play a pivotal role in who can hold power without questioning birth, religion or qualifications. In the construction of American identity, Pehrson, Brown, and Zagefka maintain that nationhood becomes linked with essentialist racial definitions, which summon an anti-immigrant prejudice.23 It is simple to suggest that Donald Trump maintains the usual narratives of white man’s power. Yet Obama does have a legacy. Because of his intelligence, he was able to transform

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the ideologies of a black man holding power. That meant that when President Trump mis-spoke or extemporized, he confronted commentary about this mental health. Martin Amis described Trump’s “naked manifestions of advanced paranoia.”24 Conversely, President Trump confirmed through Twitter that he was a “very stable genius.”25 After using this phrase on Twitter, a range of t-shirts, mugs and hats featured this slogan.26 These items were not supporting the President. Instead, they mocked him. Whiteness started to lose its unquestioned grip on rationality and logic. Understanding the differences between a white man and a black man, and how intelligence, rationality, logic and argument operated, remains a key project in Trump Studies. Barack Obama fueled the destructive merging sparks of whiteness, nationalism and racism. Reviewing Trump’s campaign as compared to Obama’s previous campaigns, Trump did not emphasize issues of policy and governance.27 Instead, his focus was more on nationalist sentiments and how he could be seen as the savior of the white race. The multicultural nature of the United States was viewed as a danger to the imagined singular whiteness that narrativized the nation’s origins and actively erased Indigenous dispossession. In such a narrative, multiculturalism reduces the grip of whiteness on the structural power of governance. As Gilroy confirmed, “We are living through a profound transformation in the way the idea of ‘race’ is understood and acted upon.”28 This has been seen in countries such as Australia with the reemergence and re-election of the right-wing nationalist party One Nation, in France with Marine Le Pen being a serious contender for the French presidency, and in the United Kingdom with the controversial Brexit vote. As a direct response to strengthen and perpetuate a singular bundling of nationalism and racism, invented fears and threats pull voters into ignorance and irrationality.29 Race and racism are now

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being viewed as something that has to be preserved through regular, banal, and everyday topics of conversation. As introduced earlier in this book, Stuart Hall termed this process ‘the great moving right show.’30 Hall argued that the, Radical Right does not appear out of thin air. It has to be understood in direct relation to alternative political formations attempting to occupy and command the same space.31 Political discourse, summoning fear, and horror toward the visible other,32 has damaged the multicultural project, which was a ‘small l’ liberal and progressive policy, rather than a radical change. Kovel argues that the more abstract the language that is used to describe minorities in society, the more alienated and dehumanized they are, and the easier it is to control the types of discourse that they occupy.33 What is startling is the similarity of language deployed in this racialized project, even when statements are separated by place and time. Compare Margaret Thatcher’s commentary before her election as Prime Minister with Michael Fallon’s words nearly 40 years later. People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.34 The Germans haven’t seen our proposals yet and we haven’t seen our proposals yet, and that’s still being worked on at the moment to see what we can do to prevent whole towns and communities being

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swamped by huge numbers of migrants. In some areas of the UK, down the east coast, towns do feel under siege, [with] large numbers of migrant workers and people claiming benefits, and it’s quite right we look at that.35 The hostility toward outsiders who do not respect ‘the British character’ either take the work or claim benefits that should be preserved for British-born citizens. Clearly, nationalism requires racism to create the boundaries, borders, and frames in place, through the porous mobility of globalization. Australia had its own Nigel Farage, but significantly these virulent ideologies were packaged into a white woman who ran a fish and chip shop. The Pauline Hanson ‘phenomenon’ commenced on September 10, 1996 when she delivered her maiden speech in the Australian parliament. Elected as the Federal member for Oxley, this Queensland seat was previously held by Labor. Although she was the endorsed Liberal candidate for the seat, she was disendorsed for her racist statements before the federal election. She ran as an independent and was still elected into office. She traded on her lack of education and ignorance. In a famous 60 Minutes interview,36 she did not know the meaning of ‘xenophobia,’ a word that is the foundation of her policies. Why her ignorance is important, she criticized immigrants for their (lack of) English language skills. She is anti-intellectual and antieducation. Because of her lack of research she made mistakes. She argued that, “some of these economists need to get their heads out of textbooks and get a job in the real world. I would not even let one of them handle my grocery shopping.”37 Her enemies are clear: fat cats, bureaucrats, and dogooders. Her allies are also clear: the ‘ordinary taxpayer’ and the ‘silent majority.’ Such rhetorical phrases are required as they are the only evidence she has.

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Pauline Hanson’s One Nation ideology has a ‘plug in and play’ modality, where speeches can be separated by 20 years and the feared other in one context can merely be replaced by another disempowered target. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.38 Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.39 The word ‘swamped’ is a racist talisman, an epistemological power surge. It summons a swarm, but is also coloractivated. Whiteness is swamped infiltrated by color. Because Pauline Hanson’s ideology has not been critiqued for two decades these two speeches were separated by 20 years - and indeed has been incorporated in some form through both major political parties, an assumption has remained: white Australians have the right to determine who enters the nation. The issue is not an immigration policy. The concern is xenophobia playing the race card in Australia knowing that it feeds the deep historical paranoia. Significantly, Donald Trump did not use the word ‘swamped.’ Instead, he used ‘infest.’ Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!40 To use the language of infestation allow levels and strata of humanity to be created. White Americans can enact behaviors on other humans because they ‘infest’ the country. The

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nouns that dance around infestation are disturbing: rodents, cockroaches, wasps and cane toads. Like ‘swarm,’ such words attempt to render the human an animal and supposedly requiring less rights. So children can be separated from their parents. Border walls can be built. This is nostalgia, a restoration of an America that never existed. The race issue summoned by Hanson, Farage, and Trump is not actually about race. It is about class. It is no surprise that these surprising electoral results have emerged from the voting practices of the older working class. The manufacturing sector in these nations has been destroyed by deindustrialization. These groups have the least resources to manage a new, flexible workplace. To make matters worse, the older working classes are no longer represented by any of the major political parties. There is no language of class or class dissatisfaction. Hanson, Farage, and Trump developed and perpetuated a new language of dissatisfaction, by locating an enemy, a justification, a reason why this group of working class men had their identity threatened and displaced by a new industrial order. That is why blame is displaced, away from understanding manufacturing, class, rurality and regionality, and toward blaming disempowered and disenfranchised groups. These vary in each nation, but the summoning of Islam, Mexicans, Asians, youth, women or Indigenous people opens a grave into which to bury an intelligent conversation about the changes to work, leisure, family, education, and life. Such sentiments fused when Nigel Farage and Donald Trump met. Trump expressed his enthusiasm obviously through a tweet. Many people would like to see @Nigel_Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job!41

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The use of phrases like ‘many people’ summons a consensus where none exists. In these comments, fierce effort is being exerted to protect whiteness from the un(der)defined other migrants - who corrode national whiteness.42 The fact these words are being repeated in an almost viral fashion shows the banality of racism. When repeated often enough, even racism becomes acceptable. Twitter is the enabler to this conversation. Charles Krauthammer described Trump’s “need to dominate every news cycle feeds an almost compulsive tweet habit.”43 Language truncation, the use of images and hashtags, results in inappropriate, inaccurate or misjudged commentary in 140 now 280 - characters. White people are ‘swamped.’ Decades of accepting this language has created Donald Trump and enabled xenophobic tweets. He summoned a campaign and presidency that was littered with xenophobic comments that were unchallenged. Through this great moving right show, the appointment of Steve Bannon as White House Chief Strategist was the most concerning of all the President choices. Steve Bannon’s career was as a successful businessman and rogue political force. He entered the Trump campaign when it was floundering.44 Joshua Green probably described him best: “a brilliant ideologue from the outer fringe of American politics and an opportunistic businessman whose unlikely path happened to intersect with Trump’s at precisely the right moment in history.”45 When answering the question how could Donald Trump become President a foundational component of that answer must be Steve Bannon. He had been looking for a puppet to mouth populist nationalist ideologies. He had two false starts in this quest. He made a documentary on Sarah Palin and championed Michele Bachmann for a period. But what the history of Steve Bannon shows is that Trump would not have been elected without him. Bannon was able to summon deep racial

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anger toward the Obamas and create a ‘Great’ America of white, Christian workers. Summoning good and evil, heroes and villains, his work on Breitbart showed the changing nature of news, not as facts, but as an endlessly unfolding soap opera. Trump’s lack of control of himself, ideas, history or politics was used for a time to create drama. However this was difficult to manage. Green confirmed that Trump “thrashed around like a loose firehose.”46 What Bannon gave to Trump was permission to be aggressive, angry, flippant, nasty and dominant. This was style, not substance. This was affect not thoughtfulness. While such tropes may operate in a campaign, in a presidency, the thrashing firehose shook itself off its fixtures. Steve Bannon survived seven months as Special Adviser in the White House of President Donald Trump. Add to this short period the six months he performed as chief of the successful Trump Presidential campaign in 2016 and he held the media spotlight for just over a year. In the contemporary accelerated culture, a year is a very long period in power. On leaving the White House, Bannon returned to the far-right website Breitbart where he was Chief Executive for a few years before he took on a formal role for Trump. For Breitbart, a website full of white supremacy, fascism, and racism, the Trump presidency was a ‘revolution from the right.’ Bannon has proclaimed his intention to continue this revolution from outside the White House. After the release of Fire and the Fury, he was also removed from Breitbart. In this ruthless political game, they cannibalize their own staff. Eminent ultra-realist criminologist Professor Steve Hall has labelled Steve Bannon as an ‘anarcho-capitalist.’47 This is the most accurate categorization of Bannon whose right-wing thinking has been developing apace over the last decade into a finely honed groove of new right ideology. Bannon believed

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that the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 and 2008 was something of a watershed, and something for the new populist right (energized by the Tea Party and many other far right organisations in the US)48 on which to make a stand. Bannon believes that a ‘great reset’ of global capitalism is urgently necessary in the wake of the GFC. This great reset has come from the new right, which is why Bannon himself (and other Presidential advisers such as Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka who remained in the White House) were always on a collision course with Republican leaders such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. These traditional Republican leaders gel much more with the militarism of the retired Generals with which Donald Trump surrounded himself and the representatives of ‘Big Oil’ like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, formerly of Exxon Mobil. Globally, the main contemporary arguments within the right are the two ideologies mobilizing and duelling in the United States. Bannon represents the new right nationalists (protectionists) and many of Trump’s speeches on the campaign and since he became President expressed this position. What Slavoj Zizek calls Trump ‘defecating in public,’49 displaying his vulgarity, blatant sexism, and racism, fits into the populist nationalism discourse and is electorally successful, given the large section of the population in the United States alienated from particular renderings of a ‘mainstream.’ But Trump, with a foot in both camps, is also partially a part of the other right discourse too, the neo-liberal, globalist tendency which for decades has dominated globalized politics and was symbolized by Presidents such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton, if she had won the presidency in 2016, would have maintained this line of neo-liberal globalism. This continuation of the tendency of a world led by neo-liberal globalism for Slavoj Zizek50 would have been worse for international relations

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than a Donald Trump victory with Steve Bannon at its head. Ironically with Bannon departed from the White House, there is now more of a chance of Trump (pushed from behind by Generals and family members) taking the neo-liberal globalist route with all the danger that entails for North Korea, Iran, and Syria. This accelerated culture is also a time of accelerated war. It is the Cold War conducted by tweet,51 rather than diplomatic missions. Instead of the Berlin Airlift, we have micro-reporting from CNN and Fox. This is the postindustrial military complex. Violence and the threat of a winnable nuclear war as a tautology or paradox becomes a legitimate employment strategy. With the factories closed, the armies are recruiting. It is important to unpick and examine the ‘alt-right’ and even ‘nationalism’ in this new context. Michael Barkun recognized that this political movement in 2016 and 2017 was not business as usual, or even business as unusual. The 2016 election was notable for many things, but one feature that distinguished it along with the early days of the Trump presidency was the extraordinary role played by fringe elements, individuals, and ideas. By the ‘fringe,’ I mean ideas, beliefs, and organizations that have been ignored, rejected, marginalized, or that have voluntarily separated themselves from the dominant society. Virtually by definition, these are outsiders, made up of those systematically excluded from access to any influence on mainstream cultural and political life. Remarkably, the Trump campaign and the administration that followed brought this pariah realm into the mainstream, with yet unclear implications for the likelihood of violence later on.52

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Barkun argued that the changes in communication infrastructure enabled structural movements between ‘the mainstream’ and ‘the fringe.’ While we would argue that these categories were rarely this seamlessly separated, even in an analogue age, there is no doubt Trump fed the impression that he was an outsider and Steve Bannon brought fringe ideas to him, which he expressed as a mouthpiece. Trump is certainly racist, xenophobic and ableist, expressing prejudice toward Hispanics,53 Muslims,54 and citizens with an impairment.55 Donald Trump has a complex personal history. As someone with four draft deferments who has mocked a prisoner of war and former Presidential candidate, he also has declared bankruptcies and moved through multiple marriages. David Johnston showed that Trump had discussed the possibility of running for President since 1985, with profit a motivating force.56 He was continuing his family history in this regard, with Woody Guthrie writing and recording a song about Donald Trump’s father, Fred, titled “Old Man Trump.”57 This is an unusual profile for a Presidential candidate and highly distinct from Barrack Obama. From these personal experiences, Trump’s success raises two key questions about whiteness and the working class. Importantly though, the white working class in the rust belt were not his only constituency. White women of all classes voted for him, alongside the college educated. African American voters proportionately stayed away from the polls, but obviously the majority of the population also did so.58 Whiteness is more than the exclusion of blackness. Whiteness is continually reinforced as the normal or the acceptable way of being, while black is a ‘problem.’ Trump summoned a politics of grievance, rather than solutions. There was no audacity of hope, but angry howling at perceived injustice emerging through ‘fake news,’ ‘positive discrimination,’ feminism, and alternative modes of masculinity

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beyond the heteronormative and procreative. To observe how these perceived injustices were applied, Larry Schweikart, member of the Trump campaign, stated without footnote or reference, Over the next six years, it became virtually impossible to criticize Obama or his policies without risking charges of racism. In fact Obama was very much a ‘ruling class’ president, having attended an Ivy League college, and having received special considerations and favors throughout his career because of his race. He had very little in common with the millions of Americans who worked fortyhour-a-week jobs or ran their own small businesses, or who served in the military.59 The idea of a black man having intelligence, working hard, striving, and succeeding had no place in such an ideology. His actual life history includes being the child of a single mother, born into a mixed race family, with a commitment to education and community service. Such an empowering narrative did not function for the alt-right. Race was pivotal to the Trump victory. He was an answer (back) to Obama. This was a relational, fortress whiteness that drowned difference in its moat. It is clear that the removal of a black President has unleashed a buffeting of racialized irrationality. Schweikart broadened his critique beyond Obama to the wider fight for black rights. Black Lives Matter had no interest whatsoever in all ‘black lives,’ only in the relatively small number of blacks killed in police shootings that they could turn into anti-cop propaganda60

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This statement confirms the challenge in responding to the Trump discourse. While there appears to be nodes of reason, commentary and evidence-driven debates in some of these arguments, the jump to racist, sexist and homophobic ideology is rapid and ruthless. Black men have been killed by police when they have committed no crime. This is not ‘anti cop’ propaganda. This is a recognition that black men are killed at a higher rate than white men by the police.61 The hard ideological lines maintained on gun freedom and immigration control was undergirded by a disrespect of men and women with alternative lives outside of heteronormative, procreative, white experiences. Joel Pollak and Larry Schweikart stated that, “Trump was the best candidate possible for the times, while Clinton was possibly the worst.”62 Beyond hyperbole, what did this statement mean and most importantly - was it accurate? Whiteness matters here. George Lipsitz’s evocative resophrase the possessive investment in whiteness63 nates with the Trump victory. Lipsitz argues that this possessive investment emerges through the collision of “public policy and private prejudice.”64 The reinvigoration of nationalism as a white colonizing project is key to Trump’s victory and Brexit. Making America Great Again and ‘Taking back’ Britain from Europeans is a way to invest and align two seemingly disparate ideologies: protectionism and neoliberalism. Joel Pollak, member of the Trump team, stated that “to Trump supporters, the candidate was the antidote to the twenty-five-year consensus in Washington about free trade, open borders, and transactional politics.”65 The alternative protectionism, walls and unbridled ideology is attempting to continue economics undergirded by wild finance and real estate capitalism. Both are founded on the free movement of people and capital.

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Other ideologies are also attendant, including militarism, war, corporate elitism and Christianity. Henry Giroux has been particularly expansive about the transforming nature of war. He stated that, war has been redefined in the age of global capitalism. This is especially true for the United States. No longer defined exclusively as a military issue, it has expanded its boundaries and now shapes all aspects of society.66 This ‘war culture’ summoned by Giroux is not only the sale of armaments, the stockpile of weapons and the movement of military personnel around the world. It is the creation of a culture of fear, terror, violence, aggression, and armed masculinity. Donald Trump’s statement which is not hyperbolic but seemingly accurate that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any votes”67 embodies this ideological shift. A man, leveraging to become President of the United States, summons violence, masculinity, and guns into a tight popular package. Evangelical Christianity also matters to this conversation. John Fea, an historian who is also an evangelical Christian, wrote a powerful analysis of why evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. Summoning a deep clustering of American history, religion and politics, he showed by 81% of white Evangelicals voted for Trump.68 The Trump mantra ‘believe me’ offers an evidential base of faith, not accuracy. What is fascinating is the infidelities, the affairs, even the ‘pussy grabbing’ incident did not shake their commitment. So personal ‘moral’ lapses were not relevant to this group of evangelical voters. Summoning the politics of fear and the promise of a return to a white, Christian golden age, he was ‘believed.’ This is the bitter aftertaste of Make America Great

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Again. The ‘again’ signifies a past of Christian, white supremacy. Donald Trump and his casual commentaries around race during the campaign and his presidency have a context. For generations, white nationalism in the United States was aligned with the Ku Klux Klan. But the key point often forgotten about the Klan is that racism was shameful and conducted under hoods. These hoods in a digital age have now transformed. In the cascading simulacra, the hoods are screens and racism proliferates through online trolling, stalking, and the actions of automated bots. In analogue life, the unsayable can be said in public. More significantly, the undoable can be done. The complexity of race, religion and self-entitled whiteness was knotted into one murderous event. Dylann Roof, a selflabelled white supremacist, gunned down nine black parishioners during a session of bible study at the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston in June 2015. The murdered all suffered multiple gunshots at close range. This event erupted in an historically significant black church. This violent crime stemmed from the removal of a Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse and was intended to be the trigger of a much larger race war in America. Roof presented a website manifesto and photographs of himself with the Confederate flag. The Council of Conservative Citizens and their website were influential in Roof’s radicalization. They condemned the murders but significantly stated that the killer had “legitimate grievances” against black citizens.69 What is significant is a separation of ‘god’ and ‘guns’ was enacted through this event. This violent act was not justified through religion, but racial hatred, with parishioners being killed in their own church. President Obama delivered a eulogy at one of the funerals and public discussions were held about the role of the Confederate flag in public life.

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After Charleston, August 2017 saw an escalation of publically performed white nationalism in Charlottesville, Virginia. The scale of the differing response between Obama and Trump’s presidency is stark. The node of contention in Charlottesville again was the removal of Confederate monuments, a statue of Robert E. Lee, but the divergent responses were profound. Chanting around the statue included “white lives matter”70 and the protesters included Richard Spencer, white nationalist and accredited with inventing the term ‘altright’ and David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Race and nationhood danced around these monuments. It was the largest group of white nationalists joining together in the 2010s, labelled “Unite the Right”71 and the governor declared a state of emergency. A group of protesters challenged the white nationalist group, it appears relatively peacefull, until a Dodge Challenger hit a car, reversed, and then drove through the anti-racist protesters. The driver was James Fields, a 20-year-old man from Ohio. The protester killed was Heather Heyer. Significantly, the white nationalists ignited literally the violence by walking on the University of Virginia campus with torches. The issue is not the racism, or the protests, or the violence. Certainly they are to be condemned. The challenge is that a culture of equivalence was created by Donald Trump. Straight after the event, he described the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”72 By such a statement, anti-racist protesters were as criminal as a racist rally protecting Confederate statues, walking to the event with Nazi symbolism. Two days later, he returned to this theme: “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.”73 The problem with saying that ‘right now’ is the nub of this book. Donald Trump pretended he was courageous, that he

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had bravado, that he said the unsayable. What is actually happening is a political leader created a culture of equivalence between racists and anti-racists, and justified the killing of a woman by one of the racist protesters with his car. This is the banality of racism. This is the culture of equivalence between disparate ideologies where ranking, judgment, expertise, analysis, and evidence is required to differentiate their place, role and function within social structures. Whiteness is seen as a race in peril that has to be upheld by its racist past in the Charleston and Charlottesville context. To remove the Confederate monuments is to erode white power. Particular symbols invoke specific resonances within society, in the critiquing of these images and particular discourses it is essential to understand how society aids in shaping these symbols. White nationalists resurrected Nazi symbolism, including swastikas, Hitler salutes, and KKK regalia. Following the death of Heather D. Heyer, it took the President three days to denounce racist groups, which was quickly followed by statements (again) creating a culture of equivalence between those carrying Nazi symbols and those protesting their right to carry Nazi symbols. I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane. You had a group on one side and group on the other and they came at each other with clubs there is another side, you can call them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. You had people that were very fine people on both sides. Not all those people were neo-Nazis, not all those people were white supremacists. Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E Lee. So this week, it is Robert E Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming

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down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?74 Never in the history of the United States has a President publically described Neo-Nazis as ‘fine people.’ This is telling of the type of the administration that is in office. It has rooted itself in savagery aligned to colonized people and minorities.75 Even more unsettling is the steady acceptance of the violent discourse as the banal passing of everyday life. Where is the panic? How are the racialized others treated in light of this context? It is in the racist’s best interest to demonise the other. By the President creating a culture of equivalence between Confederate and anti-Confederate protesters, he is summoning a tight framework through which racism is to be discussed. In Trump’s comparison of the removal of Confederate statues to removing those of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, this creates a vivid message that indicates the robbing of a nation’s history by dissatisfied others, trivialising the event. These excesses of ideology are tightly hemmed into a normative pattern of business as usual. Intentionally in this book, we have not mentioned Bakhtin and the carnivalesque to describe either the times or the resistance to them.76 The interregnum is much more accurate and analytically useful. Also, it is important not to minimize or shirk from the horror of the injustices, violence and brutality. Chris Hedges courageously does not divert his gauze from the discomfort, disquiet or danger. Where was this moral outrage when our privacy was taken from us by the security and surveillance

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state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3 million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people of color? Why did they not thunder with indignation as money replaced the vote and elected officials and corporate lobbyists instituted our system of legalized bribery? Where were the impassioned critiques of the absurd idea of allowing a nation to be governed by the dictates of corporations, banks and hedge fund managers […] Where was their moral righteousness when the United States committed war crimes in the Middle East and our militarized police carried out murderous rampages? What the liberal elites do now is not moral.77 Morality is in the eyes and behaviour of the beholder. However, Hedges’ attack on the ‘liberal’ third way apologists for centre right politics from the centre left was well aimed and targeted. How much ambiguity, clichés of being ‘too big to fail’ and attacks on the disempowered can be tolerated before the sheen of civility is removed from the centre left? Significantly, two successful left wing leaders Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand offered a radical break in this centrist consensus to critique and manage the excesses of the alt-right and religious fringe of traditional conservative parties. Militarism matters to this discussion. This is a time of corporate and corporatized war. Trump’s initial cabinet appointments were filled with Generals, such as John Kelly, James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, alongside corporate investors and CEOs like Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross and Rex Tillerson. There is money to be made from armaments, war and militarism. But it is the wider culture of violence,

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domination and repression that is more difficult to study. When life and politics is simplified to good and evil, soldier and enemy combatant, police and protester, then unregulated violence becomes the normalized response. Further, Twitter encourages short, easy words and summons small, othered worlds. Similarly, irrationality matters to this discussion. Climate change is not a ruse. News is not fake. Obama did not bug Trump Tower. But racism is based on a fundamental irrationality that people of color are less worthy of respect than white citizens. Once more, a hierarchy of humanity is established. However there is a problem, because the US military is composed from the diversity of the population. The black soldier, so evocatively analysed by Roland Barthes in Mythologies78 in the context of French nationalism, has not been so effectively summoned by Donald Trump. Racism saturated his nationalism, weakened it and rendered it as saggy as a bloodied flag. When violence is normalized, it is justified. It is activated to create band-aids and tourniquets for weeping wounds in civil society, such as inequality, homelessness, unemployment, underemployment and low wages. Indeed, civil society becomes a misnomer as ruthlessness, brutality, and semiotic violence proliferate. It is part of the long term movement since the Second World War from a welfare state to a warfare state.79 Nancy Love even described this tendency as “trendy fascism.”80 The question remains. What is the place of scholars and scholarship, academics and university, in this fight against fashionable fascism? Doing nothing is not an option. Sitting through irrelevant meetings, hitting ‘reply all’ to insipid emails justifying low level research because it is ‘partnered with’ (insert paid for) by industry, is not enough to summon and structure an intellectual life. What do we stand

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for? How much can we stand? The Chapter 7 ponders, probes, and provokes the intellectual in the interregnum.

NOTES 1. D. Kiel, “Whiteness and the lengthening arc towards justice”, Cultural Anthropology (January 18, 2017), https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/1038-whiteness-and-the-lengthening-arc-toward-justice 2. R. Samuels, The left and right after Donald Trump: Conservatism, Liberalism, and Neoliberal Populisms (Palgrave: Macmillan, 2016): 7 3. Samuels, The left and right after Donald Trump: Conservatism, Liberalism, and Neoliberal Populisms, 7 4. Samuels, The left and right after Donald Trump: Conservatism, Liberalism, and Neoliberal Populisms, 14 5. D. Eggen and T. Farnam, “Trump’s donation history shows Democratic favoritism”, Washington Post (April 36, 2011), https:// www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd= 6&ved=0ahUKEwiPjuGdg7_QAhXqJcAKHWj-Dq8QFggwMAU& url=https%3A%2F%2FError! Hyperlink reference not valid.favoritism%2F2011%2F04%2F25%2FAFDUddtE_story.html& usg=AFQjCNEKfjLZUxsChm6TEZch9LkxlHC74A&sig2= sQBCe9fZ65tMcEgH7kWkeA 6. C. Anderson, “Donald Trump Is the Result of White Rage, Not Economic Anxiety”, Time (November 16, 2016). 7. P. Gilroy, “Race, culture and difference”, in Race, Culture and Difference, Eds J. Donald and A. Rattansi (London: Sage, 1992): 49 62 8. W. Harrell Jr, A “21st Century Economic Agenda for America: Barack Obama’s Pre-Presidential Economic Jeremiads”, Canadian Review of American Studies, 41, no. 3 (2011): 299 324 and R.

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Kelley, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands: US History and Its Discontents in the Obama Era”, Journal of American Studies, 45, no. 1 (2011): 185 200. 9. R. Peston, WTF (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2017): 24 25 10. W. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Grove Press Inc, 1967) and F. Fanon, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man”, in Cultural theory: An Anthology, Eds I. Szeman and T. Kaposy (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2011): 422 431 11. B. Johnson, “UK and America can be better friends than ever Mr Obama… if we LEAVE the EU”, The Sun (April 22, 2016), https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source= web&cd=1&ved= 0ahUKEwiqneGA1LzQAhXKKsAKHWcWA5EQFggbMAA&url= https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thesun.co.uk%2Farchives%2Fpolitics% 2F1139354%2Fboris-johnson-uk-and-america-can-be-better-friendsthan-ever-mr-obama-if-we-leave-the-eu%2F&usg= AFQjCNFVqq9IrmMSRCCW-pcSe-qCkdP04Q&sig2=0v-khvu5WVQs_Yk0mCOSA&bvm=bv.139250283,bs.1,d.d24 12. A. Ali, “Trumpal fears, anthropological possibilities, and Muslim futures”, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 48, no 4 (2017): 386 392 13. M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972 1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977): 87 14. B. Greer, “The Trump presidency: just an interregnum”, Prospect (May 18, 2017), https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ magazine/the-trump-presidency-just-an-interregnum 15. P. Cap, The Language of Fear (London: Palgrave, 2017) and D. Loewenthal, “Brexit, psychotherapy and moral psychology: individualism versus the common good”, European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, 18, no. 3 (2016): 203 208. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642537.2016.1215812

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16. R. Ford and M. Goodwin, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain: Extremism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 2014) and S. Winlow and S. Hall, The rise of the Right: English nationalism and the transformation of workingclass politics (Bristol: Polity Press, 2016) 17. A. Banks, The bad boys of Brexit: tales of mischief, mayhem and guerrilla warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London: Biteback, 2017) 18. Banks, The bad boys of Brexit: tales of mischief, mayhem and guerrilla warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign, 5 19. B. Johnson, in A. Asthana and B. Quinn, “London mayor under fire for remark about ‘part-Kenyan’ Barack Obama”, The Guardian (April 22, 2016), https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=& esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0ahUKEwjT_Mu1bzQAhWDL8AKHe4SD6AQFggsMAM&url=https%3A%2F% 2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fpolitics%2F2016%2Fapr%2F22% 2Fboris-johnson-barack-obama-kenyan-eu-referendum&usg= AFQjCNFzFoKRqwqUnsBzpcDuCuJoDLyCsQ&sig2=ir_ ahFYiKc3p5pQpcBUaIQ&bvm=bv.139250283,bs.1,d.d24 20. S. Hall, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, The State and Law and Order (London: The Macmillan Press, 1978): 347 21. J. Diamond, “Trump refers to ‘ghettos’ in discussing AfricanAmerican issues”, CNN.com (October 27, 2016), http://edition.cnn. com/2016/10/27/politics/donald-trump-ghettos-african-americans/ 22. S. Hall, “Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities”, in Theories of Race and Racism, L. Black and J. Solomos (London Routledge, 2000): 144 153 and J. Solomos, “An Appreciation, Stuart Hall: Articulations of race, class and identity,” Ethnic and racial studies, 37, no. 10 (2014): 1667 1675. 23. S. Pehrson, R. Brown and H. Zagefka, “When does national identification lead to the rejection of immigrants? Cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence for the role of essentialist in-group

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definitions”, British Journal of Social Psychology, 48, no. 1 (2009): 55. 24. M. Amis, The rub of time (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017): 45 25. AP, “Donald Trump insists ‘I’m a very stable genius”, The Australian (January 7, 2018), http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ news/world/donald-trump-insists-im-a-very-stable-genius/news-story/ 127bea4d974e75bacd6b52a300cf836d 26. “Very Stable Genius”, Amazon.com, https://www.amazon.com/ s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=stable +genius 27. David Frum, in Trumpocracy: the corruption of the American Republic (New York: Harper Collins, 2018), stated that “President Trump may not have had policy ideas in the conventional sense. But he had a sure grasp of the emotions that impelled the Republican voting base”, 49. 28. P. Gilroy, “The Crisis of ‘Race” and Raciology”, in The Cultural Studies Reader, Ed. S. During (London: Routledge, 2007): 264 282 29. David Cay Johnston, in It’s even worse than you think: What the Trump Administration is doing to America (New York: Simon And Schuster, 2018), stated that “Trump’s short attention span, combined with his lack of knowledge about world history and events, clouds his actions in Washington”, 79. 30. S. Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show”, Marxism Today (1979): 14 20. 31. Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show”, 16. 32. A. Martinez, “Monstrosities in the 2016 Presidential Election and Beyond: Centring Napata and Intersectional Feminist Activism”, Women’s Studies in Communication, 40, no. 2 (2017): 145 149 33. J. Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

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34. M. Thatcher, “World in Action”, Vol. 1, Interviewed by G. Burns, Granada TV (London, January 27, 1978). 35. R. Syal, “British towns being ‘swamped’ by immigrants, says Michael Fallon”, The Guardian (October 26, 2014), https://www. theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/26/british-towns-swampedimmigrants-michael-fallon-eu?CMP=share_btn_link 36. “Please explain”, Daily Mail Australia, ND, http://www. dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1304414/Please-explain-PaulineHanson-responds-xenophobia-question.html 37. P. Hanson, “Pauline Hanson’s 1996 Maiden Speech to Parliament”, Sydney Morning Herald (September 15, 2016), http:// www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/pauline-hansons1996-maiden-speech-to-parliament-full-transcript-20160914-grgjv3. html 38. Hanson, “Pauline Hanson’s 1996 Maiden Speech to Parliament”. 39. J. Butler, “Pauline Hanson Says Australia In Danger Of Being ‘Swamped By Muslims”, Huffington Post Australia (September 14, 2016), https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s& source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjgjri NwbzQAhUHCMAKHR8uBucQFggoMAM&url=http%3A%2F% 2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com.au%2F2016%2F09%2F14% 2Fpauline-hanson-says-australia-has-been-swamped-by-muslims% 2F&usg=AFQjCNHpFF_n3Q0uW8iAYWdYU1HGc4BH_w&sig2= iItFh1Cq2SHD8RUK53IdVg 40. D. Trump, from D.T. Pollard, Living in the age of white reparations: caged migrant children, kneeling athletes & white supremacy (DT Pollard, 2018): 25. 41. D. Trump, “Farage”, 2016, https://twitter.com/ realDonaldTrump/status/800887087780294656 42. S. Cheryan and B. Monin, “Where are you really from?: Asian Americans and identity denial”, Journal of personality and social

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psychology, 89, no. 6 (2005): 717 730, T. Devos and M. Banaji, “American = white?”, Journal of personality and social psychology, 88, no. 3 (2005): 447 466 and S. Sinclair, J. Sidanius and S. Levin, “The Interface Between Ethnic and Social System Attachment: The Differential Effects of Hierarchy-Enhancing and HierarchyAttenuating Environments”, Journal of Social Issues, 54, no. 4 (1998): 741 757. 43. C. Krauthammer, “Donald Trump’s childish tantrums threaten to derail his presidency before it has even begun”, The Telegraph (January 13, 2017), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/13/ donald-trumps-childish-tantrums-threaten-derail-presidency-even/ 44. J. Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2017): 3. 45. Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, 21. 46. Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, 209. 47. Steve Hall’s twitter handle was @ SteveHall5582. Significantly, Professor Hall left Twitter in October 2017 because of the cascading abuse he received from the Alt-Right in the United States and the United Kingdom. 48. T. Skocpol and V. Williams, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 49. S. Zizek, The Courage of Hopelessness (London: Penguin, 2017). 50. Zizek, The Courage of Hopelessness. 51. The Cold War, in and of itself, was a key moment for not only American foreign policy, but intellectual culture. Louis Menand stated that, “the Cold War changed almost everything about American intellectual life”, from The metaphysical club (London: Flamingo, 2002): 438.

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52. M. Barkun, “President Trump and the ‘Fringe’”, Terrorism and Political Violence, 29 (2017), 437. 53. C. Moreno, “9 Outrageous Things Donald Trump has said about Latinos”, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ entry/9-outrageous-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-latinos 54. A. Vitali, “In his words: Donald Trump on the Muslim Ban, Deportations”, NBC News, http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016election/his-words-donald-trump-muslim-ban-deportations 55. “Donald Trump criticized for mocking disabled reporter”, Snopes, http://www.snopes.com/2016/07/28/donald-trumpcriticized-for-mocking-disabled-reporter 56. D. Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016). 57. W. Guthrie, “Old Man Trump”, woodyguthrie.com, http:// woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Old_Man_Trump.htm 58. The complex relationship between the black community and African Americans was explored by Louis Prisock in African Americans in Conservative Movements: The inescapability of race (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 59. J. Pollak and L. Schweikart, How Trump won (New York: Regenery, 2017), p. 53. 60. J. Pollak and L. Schweikart, How Trump won (New York: Regenery, 2017), p. 147. 61. “Fatal Force”, Washington Post, 2017, https://www. washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/ 62. J. Pollak and L. Schweikart, “Epilogue”, ibid., p. 246. 63. G. Lipsitz, The possessive investment in whiteness: from identity politics (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2006). 64. Lipsitz, The possessive investment in whiteness: from identity politics, 14.

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65. J. Pollak, How Trump Won: the inside story of the revolution (Washington DC, Regenery, 2017): xvii. 66. H. Giroux, “White nationalism, armed culture and state violence in the age of Donald Trump”, Philosophy and Social Criticism (2017): 2, http://doi.org/10.1177/0191453717702800 67. D. Trump, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue”, YouTube (September 16, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= lkz7xgsPGmQ 68. J. Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Grand Rapids: Qilliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018): 89. 69. C. Thompson, “Group that may have influenced Charleston Killer: He had some ‘legitimate grievances’”, Talking Points Memo, June 22,2015, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ccc-dylannroof-legitimate-grievances 70. J. Heim, Tweet @JoeHeim (August 12, 2017). 71. J. Hanna, K. Hartung, D. Sayers and S. Almasy, “Shame on you”, CNN (August 13, 2017), https://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/12/ us/charlottesville-white-nationalists-rally/index.html 72. M. Astor, C. Caron and D. Victor, “A guide to the Charlottesville aftermath”, New York Times (August 13, 2017), https://nyti.ms/2vvN4ZQ 73. D. Trump, from L. Nelson and K. Swanson, “Full Transcript”, Vox (August 15, 2017), https://www.vox.com/2017/8/15/16154028/ trump-press-conference-transcript-charlottesville 74. D. Trump, “Trump Press Conference Transcript” (August 15, 2017), https://www.vox.com/2017/8/15/16154028/trump-pressconference-transcript-charlottesville 75. A. Czajka, “The African Orient: Edward Said’s Orientalism and ‘Western’ constructions of Africa”, The discourse of sociological practice, 7, no. 1 2, 117 123 and L. Back and J.

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Solomos, Eds, Theories of race and racism (London: Routledge, 2000).. 76. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1941). 77. C. Hedges, “Donald Trump’s greeted allies are the liberal elites”, Truthdig (March 7, 2017), www.truthdig.com/report/item/ donald_trumps_greatest_allies_are_the_liberal_elites_20170305 78. R. Barthes, Mythologies: Roland Barthes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). 79. C. Boggs, Origins of the Warfare States; Wold War II and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2017). 80. N. Love, “Back to the Future: Trendy Fascism, the Trump Effect, and the Alt-Right”, New Political Science, 39, no. 2 (2017): 263 268.

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CHAPTER 7 INTELLECTUALS IN THE INTERREGNUM

Much of Trump and Brexit can be described as an antiintellectual turn in politics and daily life. Intelligent people, offering evidence-driven commentary and contributions to debate, were dismissed as irrelevant. There is a reason. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are irrational. The only way to enable these discussions is to dismiss intelligence, scholarship, and evidence. Michael Gove captured this remarkable turn in public discourse on Sky News on June 3, 2016. I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms, saying they know what’s best and getting it consistently wrong.1 Such statements remain extraordinary because, what is the alternative? The silent alternative floating around Gove’s argument is that governmental decisions should be based on people without expertise offering opinion based on little except reified, sheltered, and selective personal experience. 161

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That break in logic, argument, evidence, and intelligence is required to enable the irrationality of Trump and Brexit. It is expected in a neo-liberal age that ‘voters’ would behave selfishly, or at least in their own best interests. Yet the areas of the UK that most gained from European subsidies voted to leave. The areas of the United States most impacted by Trump’s version of finance and real estate capitalism from the rust belt voted for him. In this context, Ian Dunt’s commentary is convincing. At the core of Britain’s current dilemma is a refusal to engage with objective fact. The debate about Brexit was lost, almost as soon as it began, in a tribal and emotional dogfight which bore little relation to reality. 2 The key debate was a racist one: freedom of movement. The British voter wanted the right to live in Spain, Portugal, France, or Germany, but did not wish European workers to have the right to live in the UK. The European Union is run by four freedoms: goods, capital, services, and people. These four freedoms cannot be separated. Cornwall cream cannot be sold without tariff in France while blocking French workers from managing a Manchester bar. As shown by Gove’s comments, ‘the expert’ is a problem. People who hold knowledge are a problem. It is no surprise that in the early months of the Trump presidency, the University was a focus of his wrath, blocking the freedom of speech by students, and academics who support anti-racist and feminist views. Much of this problem in the UK and the US was caused through a distaste for the word ‘intellectual.’ Stuart Hall recognized this problem. The word ‘intellectual,’ though properly recognized in France, is still something of a joke in the more

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philistine sections of the British intelligentsia and more generally in public culture. The idea of an intellectual suggests too much posturing, and isn’t empirical and home-grown enough for native sensibilities.3 Hall has recognized the multi-phasic nature of the problem. People who think are dangerous echoing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when describing Cassius but further, any non-empirical thought is even more threatening. That is why the affirmation of ‘science’ while valuable in countering religious fundamentalism is also an antiintellectual act. The empirical can spill into empiricism with ease, denying the context, the funding sources, and the rationale for the research in the first place. So defense funding can be justified. Research into domestic violence is harder to validate as important when science research is the cream of all scholarship. Research at the bench is framed as more significant than the field or the desk. Also, an intellectual culture is an international culture, with ideas moving and agitating and resonating in a diversity of trans-local and trans-regional locations. The attacks on universities and university teaching and research is to be expected. Universities are one of the few remaining locations where intelligent people gather to discuss ideas. That is why non-empirical spaces of scholarship must remain open. Razmig Keucheyan realized that, A new critical theory is a theory, not merely an analysis or interpretation. It not only reflects on what is, by describing past or present social reality in the manner of empirical social science. It also raises the issue of what is desirable. As such, it necessarily contains a political dimension.4

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With investigative journalism and community activists disappearing from our media and streets, it is left to the scholars in the humanities to create space for alternative ideas, views, and arguments. That is why universities are under attack from the alt-right. The alt-right are selective when lodging their attacks on scholars in the humanities because they most threaten the ideology they configure. In nations such as Australia, the humanities is managed and controlled through the restriction of research funding. There is no humanities or social science-focused grant agency. Instead, there is one organization, the Australian Research Council (ARC). Scholars in the humanities must compete with lab-based and clinical sciences for funding, that is justified through ‘the national interest.’ Funding controls critical thought in Australia, because so much of the institutional funding requires research funding as a proxy for ‘quality’ that staff without research grants will not be hired. Other national systems are less ruthless and economically driven, but the attacks on the critical humanities scholar remain pervasive. Keucheyan affirms that “what is required is the emergence of a globalization of critical thinking uncoupled from its Americanisation.”5 If we can action this project, then there is a pathway out of Trump’s America, using Trump Studies as its trope. Such a project requires a commitment to intellectual life. Such a project requires a commitment to the intellectual in universities. But these ideas and people must roam extensively, disconnecting globalization from Americanization and creating an innovative “geography of thinking”6 that challenges accustomed social structures.7 In intellectual life and life more generally nationalism is a damaging and debilitating ideology. Benedict Anderson’s intricate historical theorization of ‘imagined communities’8 was more than a cliché or motif. He demonstrated the role of language, religion, the military, education, and law in

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summoning arbitrary and artificial barriers, borders, and limitations. The European Union is an imagined community. So is Welshness, Englishness, and Scottishness. The arrogant assumption that Britain is somehow better than other members or the European Union posed profound consequences for the Brexit ‘negotiations.’ The British like Amerians are not great, special, distinctive, or worthy of special attention or relationships. Negotiations end badly when the British position is based on their ‘special place’ in the world. Most of the time in politics, the simplest explanation is the best one. And the simplest explanation is that the Brexit ministers have come to believe their own nonsense.9 Article 50 is the punishment clause from the EU. It is meant to be a warning to any member nation considering leaving the Union. It is also incredibly complex. There could never be a single Brexit. It required very specific changes and challenges for administration, law, and economics. After half a century of enmeshed European, English and Welsh, and Scottish laws, simple repeals and reorganizations could not suffice. The ‘Great Repeal Bill’ created a cascade of consequences that will take decades to correct. Michael Ashcroft and Kevin Culwick showed the assumptions behind British dominance and Brexit: Three things conferred clout, people thought: size, wealth and being a longstanding part of the European establishment. In other words, Germany ran the show.10 Whether or not Germany ‘ran the show,’ alongside the idea that this is a rational reason to leave, demonstrates the presumption that Britain should ‘run the show.’

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The key problem that has been deeply under-addressed in Brexit negotiations is Ireland. While the focus has been on Scottish nationalism, actually the external land border between the EU and the UK in Ireland is the most complex node of negotiation. After the careful freedom of movement initiatives since the Troubles, there will be seismic consequences to Northern Ireland and Eire relations postBrexit. This is a colonial discussion that is jutting sharply through discussions of Europe. The EU created a civilized structure of discourse for the island of Ireland. Now, the border will be agitated once more and the bloodied past may be reclaimed in the present. Then there is trade. The Brexiters argued that if Britain leaves Europe, then trade will open up with the rest of the world. Actually, leaving Europe is an active blockage for trading with the rest of the world. Free trade negotiations with Australia, New Zealand, or Canada cannot commence until after Britain has left the EU. Brexit was so stunning because citizens did not act in their own best interests. Craig Oliver, the Director of Politics and Communications for David Cameron, confirmed that, “our campaign was based on the simple proposition that electorates don’t vote against their own pockets.”11 Reflecting on the failure of this project, Oliver could only offer that, “we struggled to communicate a complex truth in the face of simple lies.”12 Yet Cameron’s truth with Brexit is much more complex. In 2007, he gave a “cast iron guarantee” to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Referenda had been held previously. After Ted Heath’s Britain moved into the Common Market, 67% of the voting population confirmed in 1975 that they wished to stay in the EEC. Significantly, instead of posing a question on the Lisbon Treaty, an ‘all or nothing’ question was posed to the population. This summoned the Eurosceptic forces in the Conservative party.13 Significantly, the Brexit confirmed after

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the referendum was of a much greater scale and severity than predicted or perhaps even desired by the Brexiteers.14 Because of the vote and because of how it was framed, all the dog whistle topics erupted during the campaign. With UKIP’s profile strengthened through the campaign, saying the unsayable about immigration, more reasoned discussions that did not activate xenophobia and nationalism became lost in a debate where bizarre equivalences were enacted, particularly with regard to the cost of EU membership and funding for the NHS. These dog whistles summoned a very complex group of just-majority voters,15 carefully configured by Tim Shipman The referendum represented a revolt of the provincial classes ignored, maligned and impoverished against the cosy metropolitan consensus on Europe, the benefits of immigration and the belief that national economic prosperity trumps personal experience of hardship.16 The problem is that this group will only suffer further through disconnection from the EU. Costs of basic goods will increase and tariffs will be imposed on British goods. Elizabeth Warren, in response to the Brexit-Trump nexus, stated that “the truth is that people are right to be angry.”17 Those who enacted the Global Financial Crisis through their greed and carelessness have not only fled responsibility, but gained from public subsidies of their excesses. Private profit was propped up by public subsidies of risk.18 Yet other variables such as deindustrialization, pollution, neglect of former industrial heartlands, increased cost of education, and the structural inattention to both preventative health and primary care, has meant that righteous rage has been displaced into improper blame. The phrase ‘too big to fail,’ which was used

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to justify public bailouts of privately run corporations, now applies more widely to the United States. Put more brutally, David Cay Johnston described this culture shift as “bankers before brains.”19 If the lessons of the GFC are learned, then this time, there will be a realization that the US can fail, and the world will recover. Donald Trump signifies this interregnum, where US military, economic, and political power has declined. Trump, who holds no government experience, displays an uneven temperament. He appointed his family into key positions and is the ‘outsider’ to manage this culture of angered, ill-focused blame. Brittany Packnett was clear: “White people handed us Donald Trump. White people did this.”20 White people angry, frightened, and xenophobic white people are managing the consequences of decolonization and postcolonialism. The clichés of our language it is as clear as black and white, black sheep, white wedding demonstrate the connotations buried deep in our language. The clustering of nationalism, protectionism, militarism, and Christianity means that anyone that operates outside of these parameters, no matter how judiciously or carefully, is ridiculed and harpooned with a breath-taking harshness. The treatment of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Opposition Leader in the UK, demonstrates that the pillorying of Hillary was not simply a gendered outlier attack. His anti-racist activist career, fighting apartheid, alongside his pacifism means that he like Hillary was attacked on both the left and the right. The Blairites in his own party did not serve on his front bench. The Conservatives abused his suits, his speech, and his gentle but considered commitments. The Daily Mail screamed a headline on June 3, 2017, less than one week before the British election. “Corbyn’s Nuclear Meltdown,” featured on the first page and emerged because, “Jeremy Corbyn last night refused to say whether he would defend Britain from

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nuclear attack.”21 The assumption that there is a way to defend any nation or person from a nuclear attack is muted. But significantly, on page two, the Crown Prosecution Service charging Craig Mackinlay, a Conservative candidate with electoral expenses fraud, did not result in the newspaper attacking the candidate, but the CPS. The headline “Why now?” did not probe the spending of taxpayers’ money, but simply undermined the credibility of the CPS.22 Jeremy Corbyn has managed a scale of personal attacks equivalent to Hillary Clinton, which is rare treatment for a heterosexual, white man. But he has a policy that is even more dangerous than Clinton’s portfolio: pacifism and deep caution when considering military solutions. The avoidance of facts and interpretations that bleed credibility from irrational arguments must also be addressed. One of the finest titles of an academic article that captured the tenor of our times and the work required of scholars is from Stefan Pfattheicher and Simon Schindler. They probed, “Misperceiving bullshit as profound,” and discovered that “individuals who were more politically conservative had a higher tendency to see profoundness in bullshit statements.”23 Their study looked at the capacity of particular individuals to not only see truth in nonsense, but profundity in nonsense. They used their analysis to make a wider point about causality and correlation, offering a meta-analysis about the importance of critical engagement and interpretation.24 Keucheyan argued that, “the task of critical thought […] is to make a new sense of temporality emerge.”25 Scholars do not accept the truth. They do not allow tweets to pass without comment. The transformations of capitalism what Sam Sellar and David Cole described as “an endless now”26 reconfigures notions of the working day, alongside expected roles and responsibilities. While Trump mentions ‘American jobs,’ there is no attention to the impact of automation and

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post-Fordism or the knowledge economy. Jobs are not only moving off shore. Jobs are disappearing.27 Woven through such changes are the accelerations of technology and globalization. Nick Land referred to this convergence as “techonomic time.”28 Violence has been justified since September 11 as preventing terrorism. Obviously, it provides the context, frame, and ignition for terrorism. Yet in such an environment, the brutal murder of Jo Cox is important. A Labour MP, white woman, and mother, she was killed not by a follower of Islam, a migrant, a refugee, or a radical, but Thomas Mair. Mair was a Nazi sympathizer who was aggrieved by Cox’s support for refugees. He appeared at her constituency surgery in Birstall, shot her with a shotgun and repeatedly stabbed her. A white man killed a white woman for her support of refugees. That is not fake news. That is frightening. This is a tragic story. But Thomas Mair’s words after shooting Cox remain resonant and gritty in their horror: “Britain first. Britain will always come first.”29 Britain the United States Australia New Zealand Canada must not come first and allow the global issues of climate, work, homelessness, and injustice to remain a suppliant to raw, vulgar nationalism. Trump Studies stands as an intellectual reminder that the cult of personality, conducting foreign policy via Twitter, and fetishizing arbitrary borders to configure social and economic policy is not and has never been enough for democracy, let alone scholarship.

NOTES 1. M. Gove, “Gove: Britons have had enough of experts”, You Tube via Sky News (June 13, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA

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2. I. Dunt, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now (Kingston upon Thames: Canbury Press, 2016): 18. 3. S. Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands (London: Penguin, 2017): 13. 4. R. Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today (London: Verso, 2014). 5. R. Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today (London: Verso, 2014): 255. 6. Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, 3. 7. Etienne Balibar provides an inspiration and model for such thinking throughout his career. As one example, please refer to E. Balibar, L’Europe Amérique, la guerre: Réflexions sur la médiation européenne (Paris: La Découverte, 2003). 8. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 9. Dunt, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now, 153. 10. M. Ashcroft and K. Culwick, Well, You Did Ask: Why the UK Voted to Leave the EU (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016): 29. 11. C. Oliver, Unleashing Demons: The Inside Story of Brexit (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2016): 11. 12. Oliver, Unleashing Demons: the Inside Story of Brexit, 11. 13. T. Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class (London: William Collins, 2016): xxi. 14. Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class, xxiv. 15. It is also significant to note that the ill-managed public discourse and the offering of inflammatory commentary has also been deployed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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16. Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class, 578. 17. E. Warren, “Remarks to the AFL-CIO Executive Council”, from D. Johnson and V. Merians, What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2017): 13. 18. A fascinating analysis of this process is T. Reifer, “Lawyers, guns and money: Wall street lawyers, investment bankers and global financial crises, late 19th to early 21st century”, Nexus: Chapman’s Journal of Law & Policy, 15 (2009-10): 119 133 19. D. Johnston, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018): 194. 20. B. Packnett, “White people: What is your plan for the Trump presidency?” from D. Johnson and V. Merians, Eds, What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2017): 35 36. 21. J. Groves, “Corbyn’s nuclear meltdown”, Daily Mail (June 3, 2017): 1. 22. J. Stevens, “Why now? Fury as CPS charges Tory MP days before election”, Daily Mail (June 1, 2017): 2. 23. S. Pfattheicher and S. Schindler, “Misperceiving bullshit as profound is associated with favorable views of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism”, PLoS One, 11, no. 4 (2016), http://journals. plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153419 24. Their final paragraph states, “the present work shows that political conservatism is positively related to seeing profoundness in pseudo-profound bullshit statements. It may be that this finding and the present research in general has an impact on some conservatives in that they might evaluate statements more critically. We invite individuals to start with the present contribution”, Pfattheicher and

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Schindler, “Misperceiving bullshit as profound is associated with favorable views of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism”. 25. R. Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory (London: Verso, 2013): 248. 26. S. Sellar and D. Cole, “Accelerationism: A timely provocation for the critical sociology of education”, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38, no. 1 (2017): 38 48. 27. “BMW joins Airbus in Brexit jobs warning”, i (June 23 24, 2018): 1. 28. N. Land, “Teleoplexy: Notes on acceleration”, in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationists Reader, edited by R. Mackay and A. Avanessian (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014): 511. 29. T. Mair in B. Cox and D. Aitkenhead, “There’s a whole bunch of what ifs”, The Guardian Weekend (June 3, 2017): 18.

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CONCLUSION: UNDERTHINK IT

Ladies and Gentlemen the 45th and final president of the United States of America.1 The President Show (2017)

Much of my professional life has been concerned with the politics of who we think we are.2 Stuart Hall

Donald Trump does not matter. Trump is to the presidency as 50 Shades of Grey is to pornography: weird, unintentionally funny, and all the body parts are in the wrong place. Trump Studies matters. But the future matters even more than burgeoning disciplines or edgy theory. Trump Studies will always transcend the man whose interregnum presidency provided the label. King George III was mad, but his madness became a wider clichéd description of insanity in power that transcended his rule. The President Show

the great simula-

crum text of the Trump’s term in office, introduces him as

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“the final president of the United States of America.” Donald Trump is the President of ‘the post.’ He is the orange rather than white

walker, presiding over zombie capital-

ism. He is the facilitator of what Mark Fisher described as “the slow cancellation of the future.”3 The future present and the past

like the

does not disappear in an instant. The

past was solid. The present is liquid. The future is gas. To understand Donald Trump requires a Trump Studies fueled by Jean Baudrillard. This book has summoned unpopular theory to understand an unpopular yet populist President. Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation4 was published in 1981, and is often cited as the key book in theorizing postmodernity,5 by displacing the often inaccurately labelled economic determinism of Marxist thought. Most importantly, this book analyzes knowledge, truth, and falsehood. It opens with a quote from Ecclesiastes; a fake that generations of naïve scholars have restated as a truth. The quote from Ecclesiastes/Baudrillard provides the basis of this new model for literacy: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth

it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.

The simulacrum is true.”6 He confirmed that “something has disappeared”7 and “the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials.”8 He located a system of signs composed of “a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences.”9 Therefore, the simulacrum is not an illusion, mask, or disguise. Instead, it is the loss of the real. The intellectual task emerging from Baudrillard’s hypotheses and arguments is to conceptualize the abstraction, which seems an appropriate use of Ecclesiastes/Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, there is a three-layered way to think about life: the real, the representation, and the simulacra.10

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Jean Baudrillard’s Theory of Simulacrum Simulacrum

Representation

Real

This means that an action, event, or text is not only immediately represented through media, but is inevitably and rapidly re-represented. It circulates as a dis-anchored signifier (form). That means that information content is disconnected from context and temporarily hooks into ephemeral media to only unhook and continue moving. The consequences of such decontexualization are that celebrities, magazines, and consumerism become a proxy for the real.11 The news is not real. It is a representation of the real. There is no real news or fake news. There is only representation. Yet most of us are spending more and more time in the simulacrum, the representation of the representation. Life is real. But tabloidized media mean that most of us, most of the time are living through and with other people’s representations. These signifiers without anchorage to a context circulate through the simulacrum. These texts bounce around the digitized, convergent, accelerated environment. This is a post-information literacy. A tweet is as valued as a scholarly monograph. This is enabled by the flattening of post-Google culture, enacted through disintermediation and deterritorialization. This Baudrillard model does not stop at the rerepresentation. On the first page of Simulation, he argued that

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the simulacrum creates and implements its own referential system: the hyperreal.12 This hyperreality is constituted within the simulacra and does not require anything external or contextual to provide meaning and authenticity.13 In other words, the rerepresentations appeal to other re-representations for credibility and verification. If it is on Twitter, then it must be true. What the hyperreal configures is a system whereby representations talk amongst themselves,14 disconnecting further from any notion of the real. The simulacrum becomes the real for the next cycle of significations. It is a cascading model. The simulacrum in one era becomes the real in the next. This means that transitory and ephemeral celebrity culture becomes the anchor

the real

for the next representation and simulacrum. Twitter is the great signifier of the simulacrum. An event happens. It is reported online. It is then commented on via twitter and blogs. The comment culture

and the linkage of social networking sites

captures this connected model of media literacy, without ever anchoring to earlier knowledge, references, or history. The linking and sharing is all that matters. Instead, the mashup uses other re-representations as textual fodder to create something new. This vertical tumbling of real, representation, and simulacrum is accomplished at great speed. This movement and change was described by Baudrillard as “replacing.” Nazism, the concentration camps or Hiroshima […] did all those things really exist? The question is perhaps an intolerable one, but the interesting thing here is what makes it logically possible. And in fact what makes it possible is the media’s way of replacing any event, any idea, any history with any other.15

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This remains a controversial and disturbing passage from Baudrillard. In the wrong hands, he could appear a holocaust denier, but his argument is much more complex. He explains how and why Holocaust deniers are possible or indeed Charles Darwin deniers or the flat earth movement. Baudrillard describes this process as being based on the media ‘replacing’ ‘re-placing’

or as we would prefer to rewrite it

events, ideas, and history. Therefore, it is the

reorganization of images that creates the culture of equivalence, that any set of facts is as important as any other. Even a lie is as important as a truth when replaced. Donald Trump tumbles through the real, representation, and simulacrum, but at great speed. The Cascading Simulacrum. The President Show (simulacrum)

Alec Baldwin as Trump on Saturday Night Live (representation)

Donald Trump as President (real)

Donald Trump as President (simulacrum)

Donald Trump on the Apprentice (representation)

Donald Trump (real)

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Through this cascading model,16 the simulacrum itself is layered and textured. It appears to replicate the fabric of life and experience. Actually, signifiers float and bounce. Simulacra re-intermediation takes place via social networking. This re-intermediation via social networking constructs layers in the simulacrum rather than reconnecting with ‘the real.’ This cascade increases in speed. This is the Trump model of the presidency. This has been a presidency on speed, or perhaps meth. The soap opera on crack that has been the Trump presidency, the Brexit negotiations, or race and national debates about citizenship in Australia have sourced endless content from the ever-inking well of despair, disappointment, lost hopes, and broken and banal lives. While this catalog of emotions sounds like the lyrics of a Celine Dion song, as we argued earlier in this book, the definition of ageing is managing disappointments. The challenge of this generation is that expectations of a ‘lifestyle’ through a clean, pleasant, automated working environment, Oprah-enabled honest relationships, plentiful and tasty food, and a meaningful existence have been completely unmet. Hopes have been shattered. The question is where this disappointment is lodged. Who is to blame when white men and women who have carried the assumptions of power, beauty, and normality on the surfaces of their skin do not fulfill the personal expectations of their lives? The hardest decision is to blame yourself, look in the mirror and consider that perhaps other people were smarter, better, more rigorous, and harder working. The easiest decision is to externalize the guilt, blame, and shame of failure through racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or ageism. This manifests through blaming a particular race, religion, generation, ethnic group, or gender for ‘national failures’ through the loss of industries, work, and manufacturing.

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INTELLECTUAL CULTURE In the post-future present, where conservatives summon a postmodernism that never existed, the figure of the public intellectual remains pivotal and enabling. The subtitle of this book was intentional. There was and is a desire to summon the intellectual. Not the academic. Not the scientist. Not the expert. The intellectual. The intellectual is interdisciplinary, stretching, and pushing boundaries of information, knowledge, and influence. It is a role of inspiration and aspiration, analysis and motivation. Edward Said was clear on these functions. The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public […] the intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles; that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behaviour concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.17 There is little room for the dissenting, critical intellectual in our universities. Even less room exists beyond them.18 Richard Posner argued that academics have become “a safe specialist.”19 Scholarly objectivity can conflict with the public intellectual role. Our knowledge of the world must be tempered by the desire for political change.20 Such an imperative is rendered more complex when citizenship is confused and conflated with media audiences. Richard Butsch offered the complex relationships between a bad audience operating in a binary opposition with good citizens.21 Bad audiences howl

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at fake news, giggle at Justin Trudeau memes and wait for another Trump micro-soap opera tweet. Significantly, the intellectual life is an organized life, enabling the society that we serve to organize thoughts through considered leadership. This is not the work of fascism or propaganda but offering an argument for consideration, debate, and commentary. James Schall described this project through a question: “how do I go about knowing?”22 Knowing begins with living, gaining consciousness about the self. Yet remaining within the self, the singular view, is experiential. To gain expertise requires gathering information from beyond the self, through communication and also reading. To be committed to reading is to commit to a disciplined, considered engagement with ideas. Reading and writing develop a mode of organization of thoughts, alongside considered examination of our lives in a wider context of both geography and history. Reading necessitates detachment, silence, and the weighting of evidence. We do not only communicate with friends and members of our family. We widen our view and summon a vista of difference and compassion. Through reading, thinking, writing, and scholarship, we summons a rich interior life. But it also transforms the conditions of an exterior life. As A.G. Sertillanges confirmed, “an intellectual must be an intellectual all the time.”23 This way of approaching the world is not a tap to turn on and off. It is a waterfall. And yet. And yet. Intellectuals are overthinkers in underthinking times. Indeed a beer advertisement appeared in Australia during Donald Trump’s first year in office. The slogan of the Carlton Dry campaign was ‘underthink it.’24 Brilliantly funny and capturing the worst archetypes of Australian nationalism laziness, drinking, mateship, and collaborative mediocrity the advertising executives featured in the advertisement (a fine simulacrum moment in itself)

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hold a 30-second meeting where they come up with a selfevident slogan and then immediately opened a beer in celebration of their banality. They congratulate each other. Another victory of mediocrity over creativity. Time to drink a beer. To add context to this already revelatory commercial and slogan, this meeting is held in the ‘Underthink Tank.’ The advertisement recognizes and celebrates the value of underthinking. The self-evident, the inane, the simple are of value and are valued in a mediocre age. What happens if we underthink outside of a beer commercial? Rigor is lost. So is verification. Accountability. Complexity. The difficult. While it may be possible for older generations to ‘underthink’ climate change, underfund health and education services, ignore regional decline and the election of legislators who cannot legislate, there are other challenges washing through the undercurrent. These are about learning, education, and information literacy. Steve Fuller argued that, “any idea worth thinking can be conveyed at any length to an audience.”25 While such a proposition is debatable, the attempt to render the complex accessible without corroding its meaning remains incredibly valuable. This is not simply a discussion about the past and future. Fuller also makes another significant point about the next generation. He states, I would also like to offer a word of advice to academics: even if you have personally lost the urge to be an intellectual, you are nevertheless seeding the next generation of intellectuals.26 What makes higher education distinct from further education is that the teachers of knowledge are also the researchers, writers, and creators of knowledge. In universities, we teach the knowledge that we are actively involved in creating. Yet

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the blurring of these two sectors has emerged at the same historical pivot as ‘teaching-only’ positions have emerged in universities, alongside the adjunct academy. Universities are eating their own young. That is why this book committed to generational succession planning of intellectuals, with a Baby Boomer, a Generation Xer, and a Generation Y coming together to craft a new approach in a difficult time. While recognizing the importance of generational transformation, this book has not provided a gentle guide through contemporary life. Instead, it is hard, harsh, direct, and clear in these brutalizing times. The intellectual in the interregnum must channel the best models and examples of interrogative, interventionist scholarship through history. The injustices confronted by the different and defiant intellectuals remain noteworthy and myriad. Standing for what is right requires courage. Doing so from a disempowered position is an act of profound bravery.

ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS While many adjectives have been attached to the word ‘intellectual’ in this book, perhaps the organic intellectual is the most appropriate. Indeed, one of the surprises of this book is that Antonio Gramsci featured so strongly, both in his theorization of the interregnum that provided the conceptual foundation for fine scholarly work since his death, but also his theorization of the intellectual. Perhaps this strange mashup of theorists should not be so surprising. Gramsci was imprisoned for his beliefs by the Benito Mussolini regime. His ideas were too radical too dangerous to soak into the fascistic rendering of civil society. Intellectuals develop and disseminate ideas. But intellectuals traditional intellectuals emerge from

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dominant groups, are validated for their intelligence via examinations and assessments used to test the mastery of dominant knowledges like history, languages and the sciences, and are then employed by a university to teach, research, and perpetuate these dominant ideas, spreading them to the next generation. Therefore, for Gramsci, an alternative mode of intellectual was required: the organic intellectual. This category of scholar emerges from a non-traditional social group, one that rarely makes it to or succeeds within higher education. Derived from the working class or other disempowered communities they are not a ‘trusted’ voice for the dominant. They are separate and separated. Yet the language they speak and the space they summon is outside traditional scholarship. The question, raised by scholars like Aaron Samuel Zimmerman is how education in universities can mobilize the organic intellectual and develop organic intellectual practices.27 This necessity transcends the relative safety of the phrase “public intellectual.”28 While the public intellectual may operate in ‘the public good,’ the argument from Gramsci is this mode of work still maintains homogeneity, consensus, and rationality, blocking the consideration of hard alternatives. Research is based on conducting a literature review or a systematic review, assessing already existing knowledge, using agreed and tested methodologies, and extending knowledge, just a little bit. But what if the literature was wrong? What if the wrong research questions are being asked? What if researchers are providing the research that the powerful the funders the grants agencies want to discover? Much of traditional education is repetitive, cumulative, and coordinating and controlling existing ideas. Education undergirds ‘commonsense.’ But the organic intellectual is different. It is an unstable identity and contingent. It is not a comfortable space. These

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intellectuals move into spaces rarely considered to house knowledge. Their identity is relative, liminal, and precious. Gramsci argues that education formal learning involves repetition, accumulation, and control of current and new ideas. That means the truths of our time survive far longer than is rational, logical, or beneficial. For Gramsci, education must be more. It is disruptive and challenges the status quo. Differences, uncomfortable, challenging, and provocative differences bubble through life, so that they rarely settle in the scholar’s toolbox. Identities start to bubble and chafe and challenge. The role of the organic intellectual is not to insert this newly legitimized knowledge into academic life, but to demonstrate that the truths that we take for granted need to be justified, explained, and revealed, rather than assumed. The organic intellectual is a maker and a communicator, intervening in practice and theory. Common sense is suspended and the provisional nature of truths, rules, theories, and histories is revealed. Trump Studies requires organic intellectuals to operate within it. Climate change, pollution, water security, food security, energy security, underemployment, unemployment, and a casualized economy require careful, respectful, attention. To understand Trump or Brexit, this book could have explored celebrity culture, voting patterns of rural Americans, or the disconnection of the white working class from progressive political parties. Yet this is the work of traditional intellectuals. Such analytical tools require the acceptance of this state of affairs as normal, as business as usual. This is not business as usual. This is not simply another President of the United States, just like Brexit is not simply another moment in the complex history of the United Kingdom and the united Europe. The organic intellectual problematizes this common sense. Racism and sexism must never be normalized. If we accept statements about Mexicans,

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people with a disability, women, or people with intelligence, then we are complicit in the disempowerment of others. The organic intellectual crafts and indeed carves a separate space, grinding out a location beyond common-sense, and beyond business as usual. The organic intellectual allows all of us who come from a place where educational success was not expected, assumed, or even applauded, to be remarkable and craft spaces for difference. Not denying who we are, but using who we are our truths, our injustices, our prejudices, our discriminations to make a better knowledge, a tougher knowledge, a more rigorous knowledge and yes, a more inclusive knowledge. The Trump era demands a surgically precise intervention. The divisions between rich and poor, citizens and foreigners, able and disabled, valued and discarded are stark and damaging. It is not a Fabian-driven fantasy to hope that education can transform consciousness. Learning can enable social change or, at least, social awareness and consciousness. But hegemony in either its Gramscian or Poulantzian configuration drags ‘progressive’ thinking to the dominate ideologies of the day. The clawing back the colonization of differences minimizes discomfort and disquiet. Normalizing ideologies are pervasively damaging, crimping, cutting, and crushing differences that summon histories of colonization, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia. Traditional intellectuals are part of the ‘system,’ offering information that is palatable to grant and funding agencies. Conventional research receives funding to reinforce the status quo. Promotions and appointments are made on the basis of such funded research. Yet radical, punchy, difficult research cannot be funded. Gramsci’s organic intellectual does not fit into a ‘system.’ Aaron Samuel Zimmerman captured this distinction with great punch: “traditional intellectuals are rarely as

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independent or autonomous as they believe they are.”29 Standardization, rather than standards, are affirmed. Trump Studies at its best prises open the interregnum to reveal the chaos, ambiguity, liminality, and confusion. But it is also a trope and anti-disciplinary paradigm to manage micro-moments of meaning. While outside of Cultural Studies and more aligned with self-help and management consultancy, Chip Heath and Dan Heath did confirm The Power of Moments. Derived from the Malcolm Gladwell school of writing where anecdotes and stories replace analysis and interpretation, their work does hold empathic power in cold, nasty, and debilitating times. They state that, “moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance.”30 More Oprah than Althusser, they do recognize the value of creating form, intent, consciousness, and texture around key moment. In the interregnum, transitory slithers of insight and reflection are all that is available for analysis. The Annales School’s longue durée31 is not available for consideration. Instead how we shape, probe, and connect moments into tissues of connectiveness and meaning become significant. Only then can the shock of an individual tweet be streamlined into a meaningful micronarrative. There is no ‘normal’ or ‘stable’ system of governance and behavior to return to after the fissures and subsidence permeating the 2010s slow to a trickle of disgust, horror, confusion, and alarm. The double refusal means that the reasons are never clear as to why these aberrant events and leaders emerged. Brian Culkin stated, “Both Trump and his supporters, for the most part, did not even know what their problem was or what they even wanted.”32 No one could deliver on a desire or hope that was never articulated. The dog whistles of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia flood the space. Screens matter to this conversation. Trump’s background on television groomed him for his

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bright, toxic half-life on Twitter. His ‘Life on the Screen’, without Turkle’s scholarship or optimism, meant that a new form of social life could be summoned. It is easy to be hateful, rude, and disrespectful behind the social prophylactic of a screen. It is much harder to express racism on a bus, train, or a restaurant. When these events do emerge, the perpetrator is now filmed via mobile phones and their offence shared widely. They are shamed. But Twitter in particular allows short, offensive t-shirt slogans of hatred to gain a wide audience, with few consequences. Before social media, citizens held extreme views. They were managed by the legal system or socially isolated for aberrant behavior. Through digitization, deterritorialization and disintermediation, those individuals with extreme views find each other. Communities form that naturalize and normalize particular languages and behaviors. The next step is that these shared extreme ideas then become more extreme. This is a technique of neutralization,33 used to justify the unjustifiable through language such as ‘everyone does this’ or ‘most people think this way.’ This is how populism disconnects from popular culture. Empty slogans like ‘Make America Great Again’ are repeated so often they are naturalized and neutralized. They block questions like was America ever great? What is ‘greatness’ in a nation? Why is nationalism a functional model for social, economic, or political organization? If America was great, then is it useful for the world if they are great again? These questions are blocked; the technique of neutralization and populism carry extreme views and render them more extreme. Who will intervene in this process, returning evidence, debate, discussion, alternatives, and thinking to such a cascade of ignorance and xenophobia? In past moments of crisis, scholars have provided the answers, or at least provoked the important questions. But

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universities are in trouble. The humanities are in trouble. Cultural Studies is in trouble. It has been in trouble for two decades, romanticizing the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, refusing to conduct the heavy lifting on the political economy to ensure that the creative industries’ theorizing was tempered by social justice imperatives. But most importantly, basic theorizations of texts replaced intricate engagements with context. Ben Highmore asked, “what would a Cultural Studies look like that made space for failure, for work that meandered, for work that over-reached itself?”34 This would be a Cultural Studies that cared for theories of reality, rather than representation, and found the political economy in popular culture, rather than the titillation in a tweet. This problem pre-dated Donald Trump. But if Cultural Studies is to be renewed, then Trump Studies will have to enable it. The problem is an American one. When Cultural Studies permeated the US academy, it was carried through the huge Routledge 1992 book Cultural Studies edited by Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler.35 The seeds of the problems revealed in the subsequent decades were present in this volume: romanticizing a past that never existed, undertheorizing politics and resistance, over-working representation and most importantly validating identity politics. Cultural Studies theories transcended personal experience and arched to complex explanations for social justice beyond the experience of the researcher. Books such as Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed36 demonstrate the pathway from critical theorizing of society to an inward focus on the self. This book, written before September 11, summoned basic and flawed theorizing from Fredric Jameson and Michel Foucault. We do not require a theorizing of the self. We require theories that transcend the self and propel scholars and citizens to knowledge beyond experience.

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When reading this book, it is clear with poignant clarity what happened to Cultural Studies. As US scholars colonized it, all its complexity and explanatory power was slopped into the bucket of identity politics. Cultural Studies was never identity politics. It was always more. It demanded more of us than a fixation on our ‘self’ even a disempowered self. Until Cultural Studies moves beyond identity and ‘representation’ the paradigm will not survive, let alone renew. It is time to get hard, get difficult, and get complex. There was a pre-US Cultural Studies. It is time to claim back this paradigm. There is little space for difficult knowledge in universities that is not disciplined by finance capitalism and reified vocationalism. The convergence of education and training, teaching and learning, knowledge production and knowledge dissemination means that the role of popular culture as an enabler of ideas, debate, and discussion is decentered and displaced as trivial, banal, and irrelevant. That is the cost of populism. It blocks a considered discussion of thinking and thoughtful popular culture. Decades ago, Simon Frith and Jon Savage predicted our problem: “what is at issue is ‘popular culture’ how we should think about it, how we should study it, how we should value it.”37 The division between journalists and academics means that expertise and audiences are in flux. There are many audiences and many literacies that are available to deploy. But scholars researchers intellectuals are necessary. Frith and Savage confirmed that “it is time to reclaim pop from the populists: they have said much of nothing, but their chit-chat will poison the air.”38 Populist cultural chat now corrodes the planet and occupies our parliament. Trump Studies is a restoration, not of a nostalgic white history of domination and comfort, but of Cultural Studies. This is a risky, defiant, and courageous Cultural Studies,

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poking a finger in the eye of those in power. It affirms theory cut free from unproductive and reified empiricism. We were reminded by bell hooks that, “we are told by gatekeepers, usually white, often male, that it will be better for us to write and think in a more conventional way.”39 Resistance may emerge from oppression. But the margin marginal

and the

is more than a metaphor. It is a space of separa-

tion. Intellectual ideas can operate and be agitated from the margin and enable a future of our choosing.

NOTES 1. The President Show, http://www.cc.com/shows/the-presidentshow 2. S. Hall, Familiar Stranger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017): 63. 3. M. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero, 2014): 2. 4. It is important to note that the first references of and to the simulacra by Baudrillard was in J. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993). The French edition of this work was published in 1976, leading into Simulations in 1983. 5. Further, theorists of The Matrix film series transfer the ‘postmodern’ label from Baudrillard to the films. For example, Dino Felluga states that “Morpheus invites the viewer to see The Matrix as itself an allegory for our own current postmodern condition, for according to Baudrillard we in the audience are already living in a “reality” generated by codes and models; we have already lost all touch with even a memory of the real” D. Felluga, “The Matrix: Paradigm of Postmodernism or Intellectual Poseur?” from G.

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Yeffeth, Ed, Taking the Red Pill (Chichester: Summersdale Publishers, 2003): 87. 6. J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995): 1. Within In Fragments: Conversations With Franc Ëois L’Yvonnet (New York: Routledge, 2004): 11, Baudrillard describes this ‘invention’ as “Borges-like.” 7. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2. 8. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2. 9. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2. 10. We have built this three-layered model from Baudrillard’s four stage process between the original and the copy. Those four stages are: (1) the copy is a reflection of the original, (2) the copy masks/ transforms/perverts the original, (3) the copy masks the absence/loss of reality, and (4) the copy has no relationship with reality and operates with authenticity

in the simulacrum. The first three stages all operate

in the ‘representation,’ each formulating a different strategy for disconnection from the real and the original. The fourth stage is the simulacrum. This model real’ and ‘the simulacrum’

which shows a complete separation of ‘the confirms that there is no relationship

between these states. There is a disconnection. Please refer to J. Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 11. 11. We log the influence of both Fred Inglis’s A Short History of Celebrity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010) and Graeme Turner’s Ordinary People and the Media (London: SAGE, 2010) to this modelling. 12. J. Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983): 1. 13. Gary Genosko captured this argument well: “In Baudrillard’s terms, every time there is signification, there is lying, for the reason that what is real is an effect of the sign, and thus, every referent is an alibi: signification simulates reference to a real state because no real state corresponds to the sign,” from G. Genosko, Baudrillard and Signs (London: Routledge, 1994): 41.

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14. The statement here also aligns with what Baudrillard described as “the fractal” in Fatal Strategies (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990). 15. J. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil (London: Verso. 1993): 91. 16. This cascading model also enables the application of Baudrillard’s realization that the simulacrum is leaky. He stated, “perfect extermination [of the real] could only be achieved if the process of virtualisation were fully realized. This is not the case”, J. Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000): 63. 17. E. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994): 11 12. 18. J. Michael, Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals and Enlightenment Values (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000): 5. 19. R. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 20. C. Gattone, The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 21. R. Butsch, The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics and Individuals (New York: Routledge, 2008): 2. 22. J. Schall, “Foreword”, A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions and Methods (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1987: 1946). 23. A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions and Methods, 67. 24. Carlton Dry, “Underthink it”, YouTube (July 31, 2017), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MdAhVetBq8 25. S. Fuller, “How to be an intellectual”, BRLSI (March 9, 2005), https://brlsi.org/events-proceedings/proceedings/25114

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26. Fuller, BRLSI (March 9, 2005), https://brlsi.org/eventsproceedings/proceedings/25114 27. A. Zimmerman, “The role of organic intellectuals in the era of a Trump Presidency”, Berkeley Review of Education (January 27, 2017), http://www.berkeleyreviewofeducation.com/cfc2016-blog/ the-role-of-organic-intellectuals-in-the-era-of-a-trump-presidency 28. We do note the important work of Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood in reclaiming the phrase “public intellectual” for geography scholars. Our critique of their argument is that the public discussions of traditional academic ideas reinforces hegemony. There is a requirement to move outside of dominant, public discourse to both create and summon alternatives. Please refer to D. Alderman and J. Inwood, “The need for public intellectuals in the Trump era and beyond: strategies for communication, engagement, and advocacy”, The Professional Geographer (2018), http://doi.org/10.1080/ 00330124.2018.1452617 29. A. Zimmerman, “The Role of the Organic Intellectual in the Era of a Trump Presidency”, Berkeley Review of Education (January 27, 2017), http://www.berkeleyreviewofeducation.com/cfc2016-blog/ the-role-of-organic-intellectuals-in-the-era-of-a-trump-presidency 30. C. Heath and D. Heath, The Power of Moments (London: Bantam Press, 2017): 16. 31. F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World of Philip II (London: Fontana, 1986). 32. B. Culkin, The Meaning of Trump (Winchester, Zero Books, 2018): 51. 33. G. Sykes and D. Matza, “Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency”, American Sociological Review, 22, no. 6 (1957): 664 670. 34. B. Highmore, “Out of Birmingham: Towards a more peripatetic cultural studies (A writing experiment)”, Cultural Studies Review, 23, no. 1 (March 2017): 5.

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35. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler, Eds, Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 36. C. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 37. S. Frith and J. Savage, “Pears and swine,” from S. Redhead, Ed, The Club Cultures Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 7. 38. Redhead, The Club Cultures Reader, 17. 39. b. hooks, Yearning (Boston: South End Press, 1990): 129.

INDEX Adele, 57 Agamben, Giorgio, 36, 71 Ahmadian, Sarah, 85 Allen, Jonathon, 51 with Parnes, Amie, 51 Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, 51 Althusser, Louis, 6, 36, 38, 96, 188 Anderson, Perry, 96 97 The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, 96 97 The H-Word, 33, 97 Annales School, 188 Ardern, Jacinda, 57, 70, 149 Arum, Richard, 12 with Roksa, Josipa, 12 Academically Adrift, 12 Ashcroft, Michael, 165 with Culwick, Kevin, 165 Well, You Did Ask: Why the UK Voted to Leave the EU, 107 Atwood, Margaret, 22 The Handmaid’s Tale, 22

Australia, 34, 84, 123, 132, 134, 135, 164, 166, 170, 180, 182 Australian Research Council (ARC), 164 Austria, 58 OVP (The People’s Party), 57 Kurz, Sebastian, 57 Azarshahi, S., 86 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 148 Rabelais and His World, 148 Ball, James, 16, 91, 94 Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, 16, 91 Banks, Aaron, 129 “The Bad Boys of Brexit: …”, 130 Bannon, Steve, 90, 137, 138, 140, 141 Barkun, Michael, 140 “President Trump and the ‘Fringe’…, 140 Barnett, Anthony, 89

197

198

Blimey, It Could Be Brexit, 89 Barthes, Roland, 150 Mythologies, 150 Baudrillard, Jean, 6, 33, 34, 35, 36, 41, 90, 96, 176, 179 The Agony of Power, 35 37, 97 Carnival and Cannibal, 37 The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977 1984, , 33 Fatal Strategies, 178 Simulations, 176 Symbolic Exchange and Death, 34, 35, 176 The Transparency of Evil, 178 Bauman, Zygmunt, 2 3, 71 “Times of Interregnum”, 2 Behrent, Michael, 98 with Zamora, Daniel, 98 Foucault and Neoliberalism, 98 Benn, Tony, 95 Berezin, Mabel, 13 Bessire, Lucas, 18 19 Beyoncé, 57 Black, Amy, 52 with Rothman, Stanley, 52 Have you really come a long way?, 53 Blair, Tony, 90, 91, 98

Index

Blairite, 69, 83, 89, 168 Bond, David, 18 19 Brabazon, Tara, 1, 22 23, 107, 113 “Brixton’s Aflame: Television History Workshop and the other Battle of Britain”, 23 City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay, 107 with Mallinder, S. “Branding Bohemia: community literacy and branding difference”, 108 with Redhead, Steve “Dr Who: High Popular Culture for difficult times”, 1 “Hillsborough and Grenfell: connected stories of injustice, 113 Breitbart, 89, 138 Brexit, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 23, 33, 38, 41, 48, 67, 69, 70, 73, 82, 89, 90, 92, 114, 122, 129, 130, 143, 161, 162, 165, 166, 180, 186 Briggs, Daniel, 106 with Monge Gamero, R., 106 Dead-end Lives: Drugs and Violence in the City Shadows, 106

Index

Brown, Gordon, 91 Brown, R., 131 Buckingham, David, 94 Media Education, 94 Butler, Judith, 22, 135 Gender Trouble, 22 Cadbury Somerdale Chocolate Factory, 47 Cameron, David, 38, 69, 166 Capitalism, 41, 47 62, 70, 81, 97, 121 151 Carvalho, Henrique, 2 “In this interregnum: Dialectical themes in the critique of criminal justice”, 2 Cavell, Stanley, 113 The claim of reason: Wittgenstein, skepticism, morality and tragedy, 113 114 Chivaura, Sunny Runyararo, 32 Choma, Becky, 88 Churchill, Winston, 57, 126 CIA, 18 Climate change, 4, 15, 150, 186 Clinton, Bill, 50, 60, 98, 139 Clinton, Hillary, 41, 50, 51, 57, 59, 73, 87, 121, 126, 139, 169 Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened, 59

199

Cole, David, 169 with Sellar, Sam, 169 “Accelerationism: a timely provocation for the critical sociology of education”, 169 Comey, James, 87 Corbyn, Jeremy, 5, 18, 19, 72, 73, 82, 83, 90, 91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 149, 168, 169 Crouch, Colin, 79 The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, 79 Cultural Anthropology, 4, 18, 23, 122 Cultural studies, 4, 6, 13, 32, 94, 96, 131, 188, 190, 191 see also Fan studies Culwick, Kevin, 165 with Ashcroft, M, 165 Well, You Did Ask: Why the UK Voted to Leave the EU, 165 Davis, David, 38 Death in Venice, 22 Deleuze, Gilles, 36 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), 82 Deviant Leisure, 3 Directory of Open access Journals, 13 Discrimination, 5, 16, 53, 127, 141 Doctor Foster, 58 Doctor Who, 77

200

Capaldi, Peter, 77 Donzelot, Jacques, 36 Duke, David, 5, 146 see also Ku Klux Klan Dunt, Ian, 162 Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now, 162 Economic Nationalism, 67, 70, 81 EDL (English Defence League), 80, 90 Edwards, Jane, 57 Engels, Friedrich, 5 England, 5, 6, 114 European Union, 72, 81, 92 Extreme Anthropology, 1, 3 Facebook, 9, 10, 12, 41, 78, 86, 94, 95 Fan studies, 4, 13 Farage, Nigel, 16, 129, 130, 131, 134, 136 Fatal Strategies, 178 Felluga, Dino, 176 Feminism, 21, 41, 49, 60, 68 Fields, James, 146 see also Heyer, Heather Fisher, Mark, 176 Ghosts of my life: Writings…, 176 Fitzgerald, Tanya, 55 Women Leaders in Higher Education, 55

Index

Ford, Robert, 112, 129 Foster, Doctor, 58 Foucault, Michel, 97, 98, 105, 127 Fraser, Jamie, 93 Fraser, Nancy, 69 “The end of progressive neoliberalism”, 69 Freedom of speech, 9, 10, 39 Frith, Simon, 191 with Savage, Jon, 191 “Pears and swine”, 191 Frum, David, 38 Fuller, Steve, 183 “How to be an intellectual”, 183 Gabaldon, Diana, 93 Outlander, 93 Gallagher, Winifred, 95 Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, 95 Game of Thrones, 89, 93 Gamero, Ruben, M., 106 with Briggs, Daniel, 106 Dead-end Lives: Drugs and Violence in the City Shadows, 106 Garner, Steve, 114 Racisms: An Introduction, 114 Genosko, Gary, 178 GFC (Global Financial Crisis), 1, 15, 39, 68, 73, 79, 81, 92, 97, 109, 110, 122, 125, 139, 167

Index

Gilroy, Paul, 124, 132 “The Crisis of ‘Race’ and Raciology”, 132 “Race, culture and difference”, 124 Giroux, Henry, 109, 144 “White nationalism, armed culture and state violence in the age of Donald Trump”, 114 Globalization, 3, 15 16, 47, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 81, 97, 122, 170 Godfrey, Morgan, 51 Goodwin, Andrew, 7 Goodwin, Matthew, 112, 129 Google Generation Report, 11, 12 13 see also Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future Google Scholar, 13 Gore, Al, 78 An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, 78 Gorka, Sebastian, 139 Gove, Michael, 16, 69, 111, 161 Britons have had enough of experts,” You Tube, 161 Gramsci, Antonio, 19, 67, 71, 89, 96, 97, 184, 185, 186

201

Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2 Green, Joshua, 137 Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, 137 Greer, Bonnie, 128 “The Trump presidency: just an interregnum”, 128 Greer, Germaine, 22 Grenfell Tower, 99, 106, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114 Guattari, Felix, 36 Hall, Steve, 6, 73, 80, 81, 138 with Winlow, S and Treadwell, J, 73, 80, 81 The Rise of the Right, 67, 73, 79, 81, 105, 129 Hall, Stuart, 6, 73, 114, 133 Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, 114 “The Great Moving Right Show”, 6 Hanley, Lynsey, 106 Estates: An Intimate History, 106 Hanoch, Yaniv, 88

202

Index

Hanson, Pauline, 34, 67, 134, 136 Heath, Chip, 188 with Heath, Dan, 188 The Power of Moments, 188 Heath, Ted, 166 Hedges, Chris, 148 “Donald Trump’s greeted allies are the liberal elites”, 149 Hefner, Hugh, 21 Heyer, Heather, 146 Highmore, Ben, 190 “Out of Birmingham: Towards a more peripatetic cultural studies…, 190 Hills, Laura, 55 Lasting Female Educational Leadership, 55

Janssen, Brandi, 23 Making rural America great again, 23 Jarry, Alfred, 35 Jenkins, Henry, 8 Johnson, Boris, 17, 38, 57, 126 Johnston, David, 141, 168 The Making of Donald Trump, 141 Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), 10 Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, 11 see also Google Generation Report Jones, Doug, 22 Jones, Owen, 39 The Establishment: And How They Get away with It, 39

Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, 11 Inglis, Fred, 177 A Short History of Celebrity, 177 Instagram, 12 Intellectual Culture, 1, 140, 163, 181 184 Interregnum, 2, 3, 21, 67, 71, 72, 77 99, 148, 151, 161 170, 184, 188 Islamophobia, 21, 40, 81, 123

Kaseman, Dianne, 50 Kellner, Douglas, 85 American Horror Show: Election 2016…, 85 Kelly, John, 149 Keucheyan, Razmig, 163 164, 169 The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory, 169 The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, 163 164

Index

Kiel, Doug, 122 “Whiteness and the lengthening arc towards justice”, 122 Kirner, Joan, 55 Klein, Naomi, 49 50 No is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics, 49 50 Kovel, Joel, 133 White Racism: A Psychohistory, 133 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 5, 40, 145, 147 Duke, David, 5 Kurz, Sebastian, 58 see also OVP, the People’s Party Lady Gaga, 13, 57 Land, Nick, 170 “Teleoplexy: notes on acceleration”, 170 Lawson, Guy, 68 Lee, Jayeon, 87 Lennon, John, 89 Le Pen, Marine, 67, 84, 90, 132 Lim, Young-shin, 87 Linkon, Sherry Lee, 20 Lipsitz, George, 143 The possessive investment in whiteness:…, 143 Lorde, 57 Lotringer, Sylvere, 35 37 Love, Nancy, 5, 150

203

“Back to the Future: Trendy Fascism, the Trump Effect…, 150 Luhmann, Niklas, 36 McConnell, Mitch, 139 McMaster, Herbert R., 149 Macron, Emmanuel, 67, 84, 128 En Marche party, 84 Macron, Brigitte, 88 McTague, Tom, 82 83 with Ross, T., 82 Betting the House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election, (London: Biteback, 2017), 82 Mair, Thomas, 170 Make America Great Again (MAGA), 126 Martin, George R.R., 93 Marx, Karl, 5, 79 Capital Vols 1, 2 and 3, 79 Matrix, The, 176 Mattis, James, 149 May, Theresa, 57, 68, 82, 83, 90, 99, 106, 113, 129 Mayer, Claude-Helene, 56 Media literacy, 94, 178 Media Studies, 4 Meek, James, 47, 48 Merkel, Angela, 68 Miller, Stephen, 139

204

Misogyny, 21, 50, 60 61, 121 Mnuchin, Steven, 149 Moore, Michael, 19 Moore, Roy, 22 Mother Emanuel AME Church, 145 Navarro, Peter, 69 Neoliberalism, 6, 49, 55, 61, 67, 71, 79, 81, 85, 89, 98, 110, 143 New Zealand, 57, 58, 70, 149, 166, 170 Ardern, Jacinda, 57, 70, 149 Key, John, 70 New Zealand First, 57, 70 see Peters, Winston New Zealand Labour Party, 70 Newport, Cal, 95 Deep Work, 95 Newsom, Doug, 9 Bridging the Gaps in Global Communication, 9 Nomikoi Critical Legal Thinkers, 36 Norrie, Alan, 2 “’In this interregnum: Dialectical themes in the critique of criminal justice”, 2 Northern Ireland, 6, 82, 114, 129, 166

Index

Obama, Barack, 74, 93, 122, 124, 125, 131, 132, 139, 141, 150 Obamacare, 15, 94 Oliver, Craig, 166 Ott, Brian, 86 “The Age of Twitter”, 86 OVP, the People’s Party, 57 Parnes, Amie, 51 Paulhus, D., 86 Pehrson, S., 131 Peston, Robert, 125 Peters, Winston, 70 Pfattheicher, Stefan, 169 Physical cultural studies, 3 Pie, Jonathan, 9 Back to the Studio, 9 Poitier, Sidney, 124 Pollak, Joel, 143 How Trump Won: The Inside Story of the Revolution, 142 with Schweikart, L. “Epilogue”, 143 Popular culture, 17, 21, 22, 57, 78, 79, 94 Post-digital studies, 3 Poulantzas, Nicos, 39 “The Problem of the Capitalist State”, 39 Powell, Enoch, 69, 89, 129 Protectionism, 58, 70, 73, 82, 89, 122, 143, 168

Index

Racism, 38, 40, 41, 58, 73, 77, 81, 110, 121 151, 161, 180, 186, 187, 188 Ranciere, Jacques, 36 Randall, Claire, 93 Rayner, Moira, 54 Reagan, Ronald, 22 Real, 14, 127, 176, 177, 179, 180 see also Representation; Simulacrum Redhead, Steve, 1, 23, 32, 34, 89, 191 with Brabazon, Tara “Dr Who: High Popular Culture for difficult times”, 1 “Hillsborough and Grenfell: connected stories of injustice, 113 The Jean Baudrillard Reader, 35 Paul Virilio: Theorist for An Accelerated Culture, 89 Theoretical Times, 4 Reich, Robert, 78 Inequality for All, 78 Representation, 13, 14, 16, 17, 85, 176, 177, 178, 179, 190, 191 see also Real; Simulacrum Richards, Steve, 40 The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way, 40

205

Roksa, Josipa, 12 with Arum, Richard Academically Adrift, 12 Roof, Dylann, 145 Rosenthal, Cindy, 54 Ross, Tim, 82, 83 with McTague, Tom Betting the House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election, (London: Biteback, 2017), 82 Ross, Wilbur, 149 Rutherford, Jonathon, 21 Ryan, Paul, 139 Said, Edward, 181 Representations of the Intellectual, 181 Samuels, Robert, 123 The Left and Right after Donald Trump:…, 123 Sanders, Bernie, 72, 98 Sandoval, Chela, 190 Methodology of the Oppressed, 190 Savage, Jon, 191 with Frith, Simon “Pears and Swine”, 191 Schall, James, 182 Schindler, Simon, 169 Schmitt, Carl, 36 Schweikart, Larry, 142, 143 with Pollak, J. “Epilogue”, 143 Scotland, 6, 93, 114

Index

206

Sellar, Sam, 169 with Cole, David “Accelerationism: a timely provocation for the critical sociology of education”, 169 Sertillanges, Antonin, 182 Seymour, Richard, 90 The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, 90 Shipman, Tim, 83, 167 Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem, 83 Simulacrum, 16, 90, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182 see also Real; Representation Sinclair, Iain, 107 108 “The Last London”, 107 Sinek, Simon, 91 Start With Why, 91 Snyder, Timothy, 40 On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 40 Somerdale, 47, 48 Spencer, Douglas, 49 Spencer, Richard, 146 Sports Humanities, 3 Standing, Guy, 20, 49, 57, 109 The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class, 20 Streeck, Wolfgang, 70, 79, 89 Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, 79

How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System, 79 “The return of the repressed”, 70 Street-Porter, Janet, 88 Surtee, Sabie, 56 Swift, Taylor, 57, 108 Taussig, Michael, 4 Tett, Gillian, 79 Thatcher, Margaret, 105, 129, 133 Thomas, David, 35 Thompson, Mark, 74 Tillerson, Rex, 139, 149 Toth, Gyorgy, 21 Treadwell, James, 73, 80, 81 with Hall, S. and Winlow, S., 73, 81 The Rise of the Right, 73 Trudeau, Justin, 67, 68, 69, 182 Turnbull, Malcolm, 68, 84 Tweets/ Tweeters, 8, 10, 19, 40, 86, 93, 95, 137, 177 Twitter, 9, 12, 59, 73, 85, 86 87, 88, 94, 132, 137, 150, 189 Ubu, Pere, 35 UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), 6, 9, 48, 90, 129, 167 Ultra-realist criminology, 3

Index

Universities, 7, 12, 52, 53, 163, 164, 181, 183 184, 185, 191 Bath, 3 Boston, 106 Bournemouth, 3 Coventry, 3 Illinois, 20 Maryland, 3 Nanterre, 36, 97 Northumbria, 3 Oslo, 3 Plymouth, 3, 34 Teesside, 3 Virginia, 146 Waikato, 3 Waseda, 3 Urry, John, 71 Virilio, Paul, 89, 97 The Aesthetics of Disappearance, 97 Wales, 6, 114 War on Terror, 40 Warren, Elizabeth (Senator), 5, 167 Wead, Doug, 51 Game of Thorns, 51 Webb, Caroline, 20 How to Have a Good Day, 20 Whalen, Christopher, 80 White nationalism, 40, 145, 146 Wigmore, Andy, 129 Winfrey, Oprah, 59

207

Winlow, Simon, 80, 81 with Hall, S and Treadwell, J, 73, 80 The Rise of the Right, 73 Wolff, Michael, 17 Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, 17 Xenophobia, 21, 38, 39, 40, 41, 48, 110, 121, 134, 135, 167, 180, 188 Zagefka, H., 131 Zamora, Daniel, 98 with Behrent, M. Foucault and Neoliberalism, 98 “Foucault, the excluded, and the neoliberal erosion of the state”, 98 Zimmerman, Aaron Samuel, 185, 187 188 Zizek, Slavoj, 1 2, 36, 37, 69, 72, 139 The Courage of Hopelessness, 72 Incontinence of the void, 2 Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism, 36