Richard Nixon represented the narrow interests of middle America’s shopkeepers (the Silent Majority) by being born into their camp and then climbing up the political ladder to the pinacle using grit, smarts and moral rectitude all the while working dutifully within the established two party system. Trump, with no political resume to speak of, has successfully courted the same voter constituency that supported Nixon even though, unlike Nixon, he was born into a much more elevated and envied society that is made up of one part mass media celebrity and one part affluent elite. Nixon gave his supporters assurance through his negative acquisition of what was collectively aspired to (a man of integrity will scorn media). Conversely Trump gives assurance by displaying that he is already living the dream and that as a maverick (very media savy) entrepreneur he will play economic hardball prioritising their parochial interests above all others. His moral authority is formed around his ambivalent relationship to the established two party system whereby he daily channels/tweets the collective mistrust, frustration and anger of his supporters. He passes along their inner world view, from issues of race, gender equality, the welfare state and global military and economic dominance and includes simplistic legislative (strong-man) fixes.
I noticed that the author was born in 1951 and that there were no comments. Both resonate. The approach is a demographic fit. Marxism, Freud, Nixon, are all of a time. Are these useful tools to deal with the Trump moment?
I don’t know, but i don’t see any particular article in the LARB to have a huge following. This one also has the quality of a certain well-meant, but incoherent analytical framing. This is a product of the particular theoretical resources utilized that also do not leave much to briefly say.
I think it is correct to say that the majority of those voting for Trump were petty bourgeois expressing similar self-centred, panicked anxiety as those who voted for Nixon. Nixon characterized as the petty bourgeois superego of the time makes some sense, but even then, he was associated with dirty tricks beginning with his HUAC days, most famously, Watergate as well as the the use of racially coded political language in the Southern Strategy, later elevated to extreme mendacity by Lee Atwater and Roger Stone who worked on Trump’s campaign.
So there is a direct continuity for me here, not a complimentarity, especially in the rapacious behaviour of what is classically defined as petty bourgeois: enough to yearn, sufficiently fragile to lose. Add to this the increasing diminishment of general wealth alongside the concentration of personal wealth, the shift in ethnic demographics, and I believe, the simultaneous gain in social status for groups outside the former status quo [i.e. Mostly male whites], as well as cultural commodification whose spiritual bankruptcy relies for success almost strictly on shock and scandal, and you get a level of impulsive, violent hysteria in the petty bourgeois that makes of Trump its precise expression.
White men behaving badly. Plus ca change……
Maybe this is aspirational thinking, but this latest immigration debacle may prove to be the undoing of Trump and his sympathizers and possibly the downfall of the Republican (or New Nationalist) party. It’s one thing to field (and even get elected) progressively whackier and wackier presidential candidates, but the abject meanness of people like Jefferson Sessions, Corey Lewandowski, and Stephen Miller make this moment feel like the tide is turning. Oh hope.