The long view

Presidential candidates always get a boost from a week in the limelight at their nominating conventions and the non-stop worship of their distinguished persons from a streaming claque of boosters. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Trump’s political stock is perking up from its persistent doldrums, a trend that is striking anguish into the hearts of many distressed citizens. That patriotic glow eerily lighting up Trump’s face, engineered by his shameless hijacking of the White House for his partisan aims, may fade in a few days. On the other hand, given the remarkably suicidal hero-worship Trump elicits from his thoroughly tribalized minions, it may not. The implosion of Trumpism is inevitable; whether or not it occurs by Nov. 3 remains to be seen.

But if we cast a dispassionate eye over the upheavals of the modern era, say the last few hundred years, a triumph of one or another faction that looks overwhelming in the moment often turns out to be fleeting. For example, I’ve been learning about the provocatively instructive year of 1830 in France. After the trauma of the 1789 Revolution and the Terror, followed by 20 years of continental warfare that finally concluded at Waterloo, the restored Bourbons thought they had things pretty well in hand. Louis XVIII, a modestly enlightened monarch, followed by his reactionary absolutist brother, Charles X, reigned as in the old days: the nobles occupied their estates (although not always the same ones they’d lost), and the peasants and urban underlings had to put up with them. Fifteen years went by, and the revolutionary fervor seemed a distant memory.

But the 1820s were not the 1780s. The urban liberals and mercantilist bourgeoisie chafed under an anachronistic regime transplanted from the era of agrarian feudalism. Charles X, sure that he was boss for life, overplayed his hand, provoked the July 1830 revolution, and suddenly found himself boarding a ship for exile. And that was merely one more chapter in the topsy-turvy and often murderous battle of wills and interests among the various sectors of French and European society.

We Americans tend to think we’ve escaped all that, at least since the Civil War days, and to a large extent we have. There are movements and tendencies, waves of support for a variety of causes, reforms and rollbacks, and sometimes ugly incidents seasoned with random violence and the firing of weapons. But the underpinnings of our polity, the grinding monotony of our reliably duopolous structure of government, has undergone no serious challenge in 150-plus years.

That may change. There’s no telling what the cult now surrounding Trump will do, having long abandoned any pretense of trying to represent the majority of the nation (as opposed to the majority of white people). Trump’s stoking of racial divisions is playing with fire in a gunpowder factory. We gaze fondly on the era of Martin Luther King, Jr., (whom Trump & Co. love to quote), which now reassuringly looks like a troubled time with a happy ending, a civil rights bill, black faces on TV and in the movies (not just as maids), and the consignment of “colored” drinking fountains to history museums.

But there is an important difference between the mid-20th century and our times: in the 1960s modern industrial capitalism could credibly promise to fulfill most people’s needs most of the time. Its current replacement, the dictatorship of the rentier class, cannot. In recent weeks both the London stock exchange and its U.S. counterpart have scaled record heights at the precise moment in which unemployment in both countries reached similarly record levels and economic activity plummeted by unheard-of percentages. Financial assets are now completely decoupled from the real economy; zombie corporations deep in insolvency abound, fed by never-ending Ponzi streams of cash from the Fed.

As competition in key sectors is crushed by gigantism, the presumptions of “market equilibrium” lose all meaning, except as religious tenets deployed to legitimize ever more thorough looting by the financiers and their Beltway toadies. Amazon bleeds and destroys all commercial activity not feeding its bottomless money pit as Bezos’s ballooning fortune exceeds most countries’ GNP. Private equity seizes viable concerns, strips their assets in ways that would make Tony Soprano envious, and tosses the eviscerated shell onto the corporate scrap heap along with its workers. Trillions in illicit loot are squirreled away through “offshore” computer trickery.

Post-capitalist rentier exploitation is so dominant that the system is unable to achieve “price discovery” whereby market forces set reality-based values on financial assets, and its ever-tinier set of plutocrat puppeteers is uninterested in channeling capital toward productive capacity as the real money is to be made in hyper-leveraged arbitrage and other manipulations of computer keystrokes. The official economists no longer even bother to perform hypocritical nods toward providing employment as a policy goal and now openly encourage “essential” workers to march obediently to their deaths in service to an economy that can get by with fewer and fewer of them. Unproductive grandmas are told to take one for Team Youth, and destitute families facing eviction and hunger are forced to wait while Congress goes on holiday.

In short, the Trump cult is a perfect example of what one astute observer of his times termed the “great variety of morbid symptoms” that appear during the interregnum when old systems enter into terminal decline and their replacement remains invisible. In our case, the morbid symptoms proliferate in plain view, many of them quite alarming given their potential to produce harm. But while trying to stay out of the line of fire, much of the disturbing madness is merely the manifest death throes of decadence rather than a permanent new feature of our landscape. It’s at times like these when we need the long view.

It would be foolhardy to predict how all this will play out and simple-minded to think that an election will do much to right the ship of state aside from bringing a brief moment of existential relief. I for one remain uncharacteristically optimistic, even in the face a renewed mandate for Trump, unlikely though that seems. I’m old enough to remember Richard Nixon sweeping to a 49-state reelection in 1972 and forced out of the White House two years later. Neither Trump nor Biden can resist the pressures bubbling up from below; those forces are the architects of our future, not the clapped-out figures that dominate our rickety state.

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