Resentiment

There are volumes being written on the roots of Trumpism. This will just be a quick survey of what I have found valuable. Wendy Brown just published a speech she gave called: Apocalyptic populism in which she identifies Trump as an antidote for perceived white male castration. As a reaction to the discourse of privilege, these perceptions of persecution have attached themselves firmly to the sub-conscious of Joe Everyman left behind by de-industrialization, left feeling impotent by feminism, and left feeling racially embattled by rising numbers of black and brown people.

Annie Kelly has an article in the same periodical (Eurozine) looking at the rise of the so-called "alt-right". She too finds the challenge to white masculinity at the root of this phenomena and I think it is a large part of the cultural anxiety that animates the current populism seen throughout many of the western liberal democracies. Of course Muslim societies are going through their own radical reactions to modern feminism and challenges to cultural identity. I find both analyses compelling and would add here the notion of jouissance as described by Jodi Dean, that is, the obscene enjoyment many feel seeing a wrecking ball smashing up prohibitions and shouting the things no one would whisper.

And then we might add in the ties to a growing libertarianism which sees these same threats in economic terms, as threats to market "freedoms" and individual liberty by an ever-encroaching state. Into this mix I think we should further add Southern Anxiety, a particular resentment arising from the legacy of slave-holding, the Civil War and the modern civil rights movement.Here is where Pat Buchanan meets James Buchanan ( the Chicago School economist, not the idiot President) meets Dukes of Hazard. Southern culture on the skids and taking the whole planet with it.

All this begs the question: Is there a way the anti-capitalist left could tap into this resentment and re-direct it in a positive direction? How could feminism become less threatening to the wounded male ego? We know that the German leftist party Die Linke lost votes to the ethno-nationalist Right in the recent election, but is this a reversible trend? Could chauvinists be turned against their true oppressors, the very market forces they have been taught to worship?