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| The Silver League |
“But no matter how this declaration is interpreted, from either foe or supporter, there is a Higher Import, a Deeper Voice that has faithfully in the past instructed the Chief just when, and where, and how to move."
How was Trump able to collect over 70 million votes? I'll start with an obvious if usually discounted angle. Republicans succeeded in selling themselves as the only available protection against socialism. That their party is a political shield for capitalism is beyond doubt. But the Democratic Party is one as well. It could be argued they are better at it than the Republicans. That may account for the odor of desperation that grows stronger with each recent Republican campaign.
But the peculiarity of the American two party system, its unacknowledged peculiarity, is the distribution of the country's actual situation between the parties. The party of the right is allowed to recognize a class struggle so long as it clings tightly to reaction while the party of the left is compelled to deny it while providing harbor for such demands of the working class as may be permitted by capital.
In this allocation of roles it is the Democrats who can be made to seem crooked while Republicans can boast of their simple faith in a political economy which neither party opposes. But the world that supported the American two party system is gone.
What has replaced it is a perpetual economic crisis that squeezes the working class whether voting right or left or not at all. Trump was nominated because he targeted the Republican slice of this class, identified their ideology, and used it to stampede his pale competitors. How did he do that and how, in the face of mounting failures, was he able to retain their loyalty?
The political program of the working class is socialism. The political power of the working class is their position as the co-operative labor of society. Those who reject co-operative politics can only exist politically by allegiance to its capitalist opposite, the solitary owner, the boss. Ownership of capital, whether competitive or monopolistic, cannot, through the market, attain the sort of unified will which is the desire of the individualist worker. The political boss is a political result, not an economic one. They bear the imprint of a mass political movement and arise outside the economic and government centers of capitalist power. They appear as if in opposition to them for this reason. And for this reason they can conflate the idea of financial power and socialist politics as if they are in opposition to both.
At the rally his audience embraces what they are not, Trump, to defend him and themselves against what they actually are, a working class that is threatened by the crisis of a system of production. It is those who are most remote from the centers of capitalist power, whose experience of the formations of wealth are filtered through media, that are able to think of Trump as a mogul who is on their side and bureaucrats and financiers as agents of socialism.
While socialism is their political program it is not inevitable for the working class. It arises from conscious activity up against their objective situation in capitalism. It does so in the face of the prevailing ideology. By persuasion and by coercion acquiescence always has a bid in the game. Particularly in the most private and the most isolated communities opposition to the absolute freedom of capital is muted.
Workers live and grow up in a world that requires compliance with not only the dominant relations of production but with arrays of authority that persuade, yes, but, failing that, demand obedience. In this world it cannot surprise that this demand is adopted deep within some workers' minds. They enroll in the Kleinbürger, adherents of capital without being actual possessors of capital. They are the little bosses. The idea that it is possible to socially organize humanity's work for the benefit of the mass of humanity itself, is inverted in their mind to the view that a co-operative economy on a global scale is not a solution but a grave peril.
The living experience of workers continually undermines this upside-down ideology. For that reason it requires vigilant, systematic propaganda. It requires channels of media dedicated to the purpose. And it succeeds best where the audience is most isolated.
It is also more successful with individuals who have been accustomed to bumps in their pay envelope in recognition of their race or gender or national origin. Membership in the American empire provides far less protection than it once did. If you cannot recognize that your chief vulnerability is that you don't own the means of production, that selling your labor is your only option to survive, and that the class of those that share this situation with you are your allies, then you can be convinced to declare loyalty to the boss who will happily provide a list of enemies that you can attack with impunity.
You can also be convinced that the shaking of the ground you are feeling are these enemies advancing on all sides. Where this sentiment has grown to maturity it is an easy matter to harvest votes in the millions. And where even those votes no longer sustain their party then one already knows who to enroll in the putsch.
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