Friday, November 11, 2016

Trump and Chinggis Khaan – travels in neoliberal reality

People vote with their hearts not with their wallets.  They cast their votes to express their emotions rather than maximize their economic interests.  It is so, because unless they are businessmen expecting kickbacks from supporting a particular candidate, the outcomes of elections either have no impact whatsoever on the economic situation of the great majority of voters, or the impact is so minimal, so removed in time from the election, and so manipulated by political spin that the connection between the two is lost for most people. 

On the other hand, the emotional gratification from the election outcome is real and instant.  It is the same kind of gratification as one provided by a football game.  “Our” team won, so “we” can vicariously bask in that victory.  In the everyday life, “we” may be nobodies living dull uneventful lives, bossed around at work doing menial tasks, ridiculed by those with higher social standing, and derided by the elite media.  However, on that one night “our boys” kicked ass, and that victory gave “us” a sense of pride and respectability, a vicarious act of humiliation of those who humiliate “us” in everyday life – the bosses, the snobs, the elites. 

I realized that when a while ago I visited Ulaanbaatar, arguably one of the least glamorous capitals of the world.  Mongolia is dirt poor and heavily dependent on the outside world.  In the past it was the Soviet Union, today it is foreign mining companies.  Almost everything (save local cashmere) in the stores is imported schlock and sold at outrageously inflated prices, even by the American standard.  The city itself is pretty drab, a fine example of the nondescript Stalinist architecture built on the cheap.  And there is virtually nothing outside the city, save the truly astonishing desert landscape. 

The center of this rather depressing city is occupied by modern government buildings adorned by statues of the national heroes, including a monumental statue of Chinggis Khaan.  In fact, the local veneration of this historical figure becomes immediately apparent upon arrival, as the Ulaanbaatar international airport is also named after Chinggis Khaan. 



Understanding Chinggis Khaan is the key to understanding Donald Trump. Chinggis Khaan may appear rather odious to a European traveler, but he is a local boy who once kicked ass of those who today the Mongolians, hat in hand, ask for assistance.  The image of the fearsome leader who once terrified Russia and Europe vicariously compensates for the deficiencies and humiliations that the modernity dealt to this impoverished desert country.  Likewise, Donald Trump may be a boorish troglodyte to the polite Ivy League educated professionals, but for the unwashed ‘deplorables’ humiliated by the “new global economy’ he is a local boy who outfoxed the ‘liberal elite.’

Unlike the Mongolians, the humiliation of the non-college credentialed Americans is more symbolic than economic.  Their standards of living may be stagnant, but they are still decent by the world standards.  Not as high as those in the “socialist” European Union, but head and shoulders above those in Mongolia and, for that matter, most “Global South” countries.  What has changed is the conditions of their work.  Gone are the days when a person with a high school diploma could obtain a decent job for life that provided decent living standards for the entire family.  Gone are the days where children were looking up to their working class parents as examples to follow. 

Back in the old country, I remember my best primary school friend Pawel, a son of a factory worker, who saw his father as his role model and wanted to become a factory worker himself.  Upon graduation from the grade school, our ways parted – he went to a trade school while I went to a college bound high school.  But our friendship did not end then.  We were still hanging out together, and I pretty much envied his working class status, making things instead of pushing paper, the ability to control heavy machinery, the shop floor action instead of classroom boredom.  At one point, bored with high school drudgery, I decided to join my friend at the shop floor.  My friend quickly taught me how to operate a lathe, but soon the instructor became suspicious and asked if I was enrolled in the school.  I replied that I was a high school student but I was contemplating transferring to a vocational school.  The instructor did not buy it, of course, and ordered me to go back to my high school. 

Years later I traversed central Pennsylvania with my ex who was a social worker.  We visited a number of little towns – some, like Bellefonte, incredibly cute and catering to tourists and the faculty of the Penn State University located in the nearby State College, but most other were shitholes with no charm and no economy.  Their occupants were mostly working class retirees too poor to live elsewhere, while the young people either left or worked a few menial service jobs that were still available.  Altoona, once the “railroad capital of the world” is now a sleepy small town served by one crappy Amtrak train per day that few people ride.  As a son of Polish immigrants who grew up in one of those shitty working class towns near Pittsburgh and later became a journalist explained to me, far from looking up to their working class parents, the young people do everything to distance themselves from them and escape the hopelessness of life in their towns.  This situation is not unique to Pennsylvania, of course, and one can see plenty of such places across the Northeastern rust belt – Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia.

The electoral map shows that this is the inhabitants of these shitty, hopeless towns who delivered Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, and with them the nation, to Donald Trump.  Most of the people whom I met in my travels to these places were not racist deplorable monsters as the Clinton campaign portrayed them.  To be sure, they did not have the eloquence of college educated professionals, and what they said could be rather offensive to the liberal sensibilities.  But if you listened to them instead passing a judgment, you would soon discover that it was their fear and their despair that was talking rather than racism and bigotry. 

A West Virginia roofer, whom I once met in a laundromat in Baltimore, started the conversation with a long diatribe denouncing Blacks, but when instead of joining him I just shook my head, he opened up and told me his story.  He came to Baltimore from one of those shitty working class towns looking for work, and what he saw scared him.  At that time, Baltimore resembled a war zone – you could hear shootings and police helicopters almost every day.  I can only imagine what an uneducated person from a sleepy small town, whose image of a big city is based on TV actions shows, must have felt.  At the end, he felt ashamed of what he initially said, asserting that he was not a racist.  I believed him, but I also knew that when he returned to his shitty West Virginia town, he likely used the same racist language with his buddies.

Portraying Trump voters as deplorable bigots is no different from portraying Mongolians erecting the statues of Chinggis Khaan as bloodthirsty savages.  It is based on a profound misunderstanding of human psychology and the emotional function that figures like Trump and Chinggis Khaan play.  This function is very similar to that played by religion. To quote Marx: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”  By erecting the symbols of the “glorious past” –or for that matter “glorious future” – in which “our boys” kick ass of those who we think humiliate or inflict pain on us today, we create a parallel universe, an alternative reality in which our pain and humiliation is vicariously avenged and erased.  From that point of view, voting for Trump has the same emotional roots as women dressing in pantsuits and voting for Clinton to vicariously avenge gender discrimination. 

By the same token, people who live full and rewarding lives, professionals who find their work fulfilling and their future bright, employees who do not have to justify their existence to stave off being made redundant, workers proud to be role models to their children – do not need such emotional surrogates to alleviate their humiliation and suffering.  Work is not only the activity to which virtually all of us devote most of our time (and increasingly so), but what also defines who we are and where we stand in society, neoliberal identity politics notwithstanding.  Give people decent and fulfilling jobs – and they will identify with them.  They will think of themselves as writers, artists, doctors, professors, teachers, engineers, technicians and skilled workers.  Give them shitty, meaningless jobs on which they are constantly bossed around and asked to justify their existence, or take their jobs away altogether – they start identifying themselves by whatever is left of their socially constructed humanity – being Black, being American, being Christian, Muslim or Jewish, being a woman, or even being a redneck. 


Those who try to link the rise of populist reaction and reverence of “strong man” figures like Trump, or for that matter Chinggis Khaan, to economic hardship look in the right direction, but do not see the right thing.  It is not the economic conditions per se, but the human conditions of producing economic output that have degraded.  In the era of unprecedented economic prosperity, the work of most people has been degraded to meaningless drudgery, menial tasks, uncertain, precarious status, bullshit performance evaluations, and longer working hours.  And to what end?  To enrich a few entrepreneurial shysters who are not accountable to anyone and call people whose work they exploit moochers.  Unless this changes, the dissatisfaction and humiliation of the toiling masses will find periodic outlets in populist outbursts and seemingly irrational rejection of technocratic managers in favor of charismatic leaders offering illusory promises of avenging that humiliation.

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