Politics of Identity - 4. page

Originally an article series, this category covers Stuart’s writing about identity and self-making in contemporary capitalism.

The Anglo American right are mirror-punchers, first and foremost, gay men seeking to imprison people for what they masturbate to, crybabies who hate “snowflakes,” stupid people who hate the mentally challenged, draft avoider chickenhawks, an endless queue of people demanding a participation ribbon for denouncing the Special Olympics etc.

But let us stop, for a moment, on the special hatred of the Special Olympics. Why is it that America’s conservative elite so despise participation ribbons? TARP: the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The 2007-08 financial crisis was a turning point in the discourse of the American right. As I have stated previously, this is the moment when Americans inverted their ideas about the relationship between wealth and risk. Whereas previously, wealth concentration was justified because the wealthy person had taken a risk to become so, this inverted to the idea that only poor people should be subject to risk and that wealth entitled one to riskless accumulation.

In this way, the truth that Wall Street was the Special Olympics for the rich, in which everyone got a ribbon, no matter how stupid their actions, changed from a reality that everyone denied to a putative good that was now universally recognized. But because of the mirror-punching character of the right, the Special Olympics then became a symbol of all the was wrong in the world, precisely because America’s elite saw in them a funhouse reflection of themselves and the order they represented.

Within Anglo America, this phenomenon has been felt with a special intensity in Canada. Doug Ford, the Trump clone who became premier of Canada’s Rust Belt province of Ontario through an extended and mediocre impression of Trump, first rose to national prominence as a city councillor by identifying autistic children as his personal enemies and launching a multi-year vendetta against them. This personal and specific vendetta against disabled kids has now been adopted by the People’s Party of Canada, the rising neofascist party of former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier, who has placed Greta Thunberg’s autism diagnosis at the centre of his climate change denial argument.

In this way, deserving recipients of affirmative action efforts have been foregrounded as the enemy by a plutocratic elite of economic Special Olympians who can hear the hollowness of their own self-justifying propaganda.

It is in this context that we need to think about Donald Trump’s identity politics of intelligence. For Trump, the most important way in which he uses the bully pulpit of the presidency is to declare his intelligence and mental fitness, in contradiction to what evidence would seem to suggest. And, as I suggested in my last piece, he is surprisingly successful. In fact, if we accept that what we are is purely an intersubjective judgement, he actually is the smartest man on earth because he has mobilized a whole social movement of over a hundred million people who shout this claim from the rooftops.

And we need to examine why he is successful at this. Fundamentally, it is because his project of declaring himself to be a genius is a democratic one. It includes and aggrandizes those who participate in the project of Trump’s greatness. As he declared at a pivotal moment in his primary bid, “I love the poorly educated.”

Many mistook this as Trump insulting his own base but, in fact, it was the opposite. He argued, as many have before him, that education pollutes and confuses our native intelligence, that the unschooled are the Kaspar Haeussers of politics, that their lack of information and education by a corrupt system enables them to think with greater clarity than others.

And in addition to making a claim of intelligence, not just on behalf of himself but on behalf of his movement, Trump’s normalization of troll discourse provides his base with the tools to demonstrate their intelligence.
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Trolling is the ultimate “heads I win, tails you lose” conversational game. A troll makes a dubious claim and then defends it. In the course of defending it, the troll either, through a combination of falsehood and emotional abuse, gets those disagreeing to quit the field, at which point he can declare victory both for himself and for the outrageous claim he has made. But if his interlocutors remain continent and disciplined and box him into a corner through evidence and argument, he can then declare that he never understood his claim to be true and that his true objective was to waste the time and emotional resources of those with whom he disagrees.

Trolls, then, play a rigged game that, no matter the outcome, allows them to declare themselves to be the smarter person and winner of the argument. Either they won the argument OR they “fooled” their interlocutor into believing they were dumb enough to believe the claim they had made. Either way, they showed themselves to be the smartest guy in the room.

In this way, whenever a member of the Trump movement arrives at a family gathering or appears in social media parroting a demented claim by the president, they have already won. Either they have fooled people into the belief that they are not smart when, in fact they are, or they have won the argument outright, albeit by brute force, again showing them to be the smartest. In this way, the smarter you appear to be, the smarter you are and the stupider you appear to be, the smarter you are.

In this way, the Trump movement is an identitarian one, but one built around the identity of “smart person” or “very stable genius.” In this way, the Trump movement is a true movement because it entails not just an allegiance but a praxis that shapes both action and thought, like the Ghost Dancers or the Iron Shirt Qi Gong masters of the Boxer Rebellion. The Enlightenment episteme was not governed by intelligence more than any other but it was one governed by claims of intelligence. During the Age of Reason, true or false, claims to have the right to govern one’s fellow citizens and, to an increasing extent, claims about one’s own personhood inhered in intelligence. We were an intelligence-worshipping society, if not an intelligent one, discourses about animal rights, abortion, racial equality were governed by claims of intelligence.

And, when we found ourselves still admiring things like charm, strength or toughness, we redescribed these attributes as “the seven intelligences.” One was not longer agile or strong; one was “kinesthetically intelligent.” But we still understood that this framing was, itself, a claim for the supremacy of that special quality that lets one do crosswords or sudokus at a certain speed. In this way, intelligence became a hegemonic power that oppressed those who had consistently been evaluated as not intelligent.

When Trump rails against “elites,” he does not mean other rich men like himself. He means professors, writers, artists and, most importantly, technocrats, people who use their identity as “intelligent” to exercise social power over others. Anti-intellectual movements have been a common phenomenon in the United States but Trump’s possesses an audacity, ambition and reward that no other has accomplished. Rather than fighting through the dungeon to the gigantic treasure chest full of intelligence that others have been guarding, one gets to the final battle, defeat the dragon and then opens the treasure chest and, instead of destroying it, distributing it to everyone who has been denied their fair share.

In this way, the Trump movement, like the Germanic peoples who beset fourth- and fifth-century Rome, they have unintentionally upended an order that they merely came to plunder.

It is at this moment that we must confront the most unpleasant and problematic element of identity. While one’s identity is primarily intersubjective i.e. governed by the opinion of the crowd, some part of it remains objective, inherent in a judgement by the physical world, rather than the self or the crowd. Otherwise Donald Trump is the smartest man on earth.

Thank you to all my supporters for tolerating this lengthy hiatus in the writing of my blog. It has been an emotionally challenging little while as I have left my college and university employment, moved to a small city at the fifty-fourth parallel and started a new radio program there. I have also had some serious writers’ block, not to mention some genuine fear that I would phrase this piece too imprecisely and cause needless hurt.

Let us, for a moment, imagine Donald Trump as a tragic figure. How might we tell his story?

Trump is the culmination of a multi-generation project by a lineage of bourgeois Rhineland Germans to enter the American elite. Frederick Trump came to America in 1885 during the First Gilded Age to make his fortune. He soon found that the East Coast had its own establishment, descended from English and Dutch immigrants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who already enjoyed their own high society scene complete with local customs and manners. Recognizing that he could not easily break into this elite with the modest fortune he had, he decided instead to head West to the periphery of the American Empire during the Closing of the Frontier.

There, he established not-entirely-respectable businesses, running hospitality, drug and sex work businesses that functioned parasitically on the various booms and rushes of the North American Northwest through the early twentieth century. But by 1905, he was ready. Full of Klondike Gold Rush and sex-trafficking loot, he returned triumphantly to New York City to finally incorporate the Trump family into the most prestigious regional elite in the US, the New York elite, who had finally eclipsed the old pseudo-aristocratic planters of the Virginia and the Carolinas and the Puritan-descended Congregationalist nabobs of New England.

Even so, let us be clear that Frederick Trump did not die a millionaire, even. He had taken tremendous risks to create a small real estate empire that he could bequeath to his son to carry out the multigenerational project of entering the New York elite. At this point, it might be helpful to recall to concept of the “base unit” as explained in previous blog posts. For the Trumps, the base unit is not the individual, the person. The base unit is the lineage, as Donald Trump, himself, has stated on many occasions. The patriarch of the lineage is simply the part of the collective body that speaks for it, that represents it and its multigenerational objectives to the world.

Frederick Trump Jr. built a true real estate empire in New York from his father’s half-dozen properties. But this work was work that was begun with his hands. It was not primarily speculation that made the original increases to the Trump fortune but work in the building trades. Frederick Jr. was a carpenter, plumber, mason and electrician. Unlike a true member of the ruling class, he used his body, its energy, its strength, its dexterity, to build the Trump real estate empire.

Let us imagine that as coarse and rough as the hands of Frederick Sr. had been, the hands of Frederick Jr., were tougher, more leathery, more calloused, more scarred. The thing about class, before the 1990s was that it was like karma. There was no “instant class” in America any more than “instant karma” was the animating principle of the Vedic worldview. The wealth one attained in life did not determine one’s own class but one’s children’s.

By all accounts, Frederick Jr. was a truly bright man, a fast learner, someone who could have obtained a merit-based degree and would have, had it changed his own personal class. But the point was to truly change class, to change the class of the lineage not merely its current head.

The person who was to be a true, soft-handed, degree-educated, refined member of the haute bourgeoisie, the first Trump of the ruling class was a boy named Donald, who was born in 1943, the anointed future head of the Trump empire.

The problem is that there was something wrong with the boy, something obvious from the beginning, the restlessness, the lack of restraint, the self-pity, the narcissism, the oversensitivity, the negligible attention span. As great believers in eugenics, the Trumps found their lineage plans stymied by the fact that the boy could not sit still, was oversensitive and, by all accounts, was not too sharp – by half!

While he might look the part, with a tall body and the blonde hair and blue eyes, the brain was a disappointment. It was not to say that the boy was entirely stupid—his strange affect made it hard to tell if he was lying or telling the truth; he lacked any sense of morality and a conventional sense of shame; and these things combined to make it hard for him to discern truth from falsity. But he was not the ubermensch who had been expected. Frederick Jr. did his best to season the boy. Private school was not enough so it was off to military school. There was the brutal verbal scolding and domination, the violence and threats thereof. A terrified Donald could follow orders; but it was not the sort of creature who knew when it was its turn to speak, which fork to use or how many lines or shots was too many.

Donald was likely rescued from military service in Vietnam because of his father’s fear of how he might demonstrate cowardice or indiscipline rather than any real fear for the young man’s safety.

Nevertheless, it was too late to put off the anointing of the Trump lineage’s kwisatz haderach. Donald was to be the first Trump to enter the New York elite. The problem was that, upon his graduation from the least prestigious of the Ivy League institutions, the University of Pennsylvania, complete with a sealed transcript of dubious grades, he failed to do so. It is not that Donald did not work as a CEO of a major real estate businessman, so anointed by his terrifying mobbed-up dad with the calloused hands. It is not that he was not fabulously rich. It was not that he was not famous.

Or rather, maybe it was because he was famous. Donald attempted to join the New York elite beginning in 1968, at the age of twenty-five. Back then, this meant a performance of etiquette with precision, dignity and a certain subtlety. During the Cold War, Anglo masculinity, especially in the New York and international scenes was still governed by a single master attribute: restraint. The ability to not speak, to not gesture, to feign disinterest, to feign not noticing, to master others by exhibiting the most self-control, this was the masculinity in which the Nelson Rockefellers of the world traded; this was the age of the Kennedys, when one showed measured politeness on a cocktail of intravenous meth and quaaludes and a quart of single malt. Donald was a loudmouth, a boor, a man not invited to parties when men far less wealthy and less white, but more restrained were. Or worse yet, he was invited to parties as a conversation piece, a curiosity, the person about whom everyone was laughing behind his back.

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But then the cultural moment shifted and Donald’s luck began to turn. Yale graduate George W Bush Jr. affected a fake Texan accent to win a gubernatorial election and suddenly the world of the American elite began to change. No longer were restraint, self-control, subtlety and superficial respect for women conservative values; they were now liberal values. Restraint, politeness, subtlety were not the way a member of the elite won a Republican nomination; they were how people entered the liberal elite that was seizing control of the Democratic Party.

Al and Tipper Gore, the jumped-up Tennessee cracker vice-president were abstemious, respectable people. Hillary Clinton, the scorned wife with the frozen blonde hair was the embodiment of restraint, refinement and education. Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s culture had turned to the archetype of the cowboy, the ultimate twenty-first century gender play drag act, in which refined, bourgeois, fragile men costume themselves as coarse working men whose hands are not soft.

But the problem with the project of a lineage is that it is not directed by the current patriarch. It is directed by the old man buried in the basement. Frederick Sr. and Frederick Jr. are dead; they cannot imagine the America of the present, in which the elite has become so plutocratic and ossified that it just bails itself out and gives itself awards for bad judgement as it drinks its own bathwater. They still yearn for an elite that demanded a mastery of etiquette, a control of the body, perfect diction and spelling, not “hamberders” and “covfefe.”

And so poor Donald is conflicted. He figured that by becoming the most powerful man on earth, who can destroy all creation with the simple touch of a button, that he could push his way into the New York elite. Somehow, Barack Obama, the negro who could hold his coke in a way Trump never could, was able to engage with this elite. Somehow Hillary Clinton, the scorned wife from Scranton could get behind the velvet rope and he could not, even after beating them and their party in a US presidential election. People whose parentage, gender and race should have placed them far below Trump in the great American chain of being were included and he was not.

When Donald looks at Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the other late additions to the New York elite he despises and envies, he sees intelligence, education and self-control, the very things that would allow him to fulfill his lineage’s mission. And in their place, he has only power and popularity. So, he uses the presidency’s power to assert this: “I am a very stable genius.”

He can do this on Twitter because, contrary to a lot of nonsense floating around, it is conservatives who are the true masters of identity politics. For Donald, it is enough to assert it himself. It is unclear whether he even understands that other people are, in fact people. He may live in a solipsistic micro-universe. For him, it is enough to proclaim that he is a “very stable genius” to make it so, in the cultural moment in which we currently exist.

And the thing is that he is succeeding.

This is true, first of all, because late capitalist ideas of identity are subjective, not intersubjective. By this I mean that the self one imagines being in a masturbatory or other fetishistic fantasy is the self that one truly is. This is not just played-out on liberal Tumblr among whatever they call the kids younger than Millennials. This is the self of the visioning board, the self one who converts to The Secret believe in. The true self, in the late capitalist formulation, is the photo one posts on the aspirational visioning board. (Visioning boards are a craft item the author of The Secret encourages people to fashion, depicting images of the things to which one aspires, which will be brought into being through a meditative practice.)

So, in Trump’s mind, he is sophisticated, brilliant, self-controlled, thin, larger-handed, etc. And that, in and of itself, is sufficient. If he identifies as intelligent, who are we to tell him he is not? Unlike transracial white black Tumblr bloggers, Trump has no use for prefixes. He is not a trans-genius. He is a genius. Full stop.

But let us suppose that we think about identity not in the way late capitalism tells us it operates but the way human beings continue to operate it. One’s identity remains, despite the best efforts of the neoliberal order, intersubjective: one’s identity is an agreement between the self and the crowd about who one is. And the crowd has all kinds of demands. No one understands the scale of these demands better than transgender people. The crowd demands lots of surgery to change the shape of bodies, a pharmaceutical regime to increase or reduce the coarseness of one’s hair, the adoption of often-exaggerated mannerisms associated with stereotypical gender norms and, of course, a complete overhaul of one’s wardrobe. Even then, such agreements are tough to negotiate and many people with trans identities, despite their most diligent efforts, cannot achieve crowd buy-in, irrespective of their internal feelings or massive investments in social persuasion.

But when we imagine the reshaping of identity to be a shared late capitalist project containing both liberalizing forces and supposed forces of reaction, we see something extraordinary with Trump’s trans-genius identity: he appears to pass the intersubjectivity test. The fact is that more people believe he is a genius than believe almost anyone else is. His base, a solid one third of the American people, over a hundred million souls believe that he is a genius, likely the smartest person ever to hold the office of US president.

Except that he does not. Trump can go a lot of places where he really is a very stable genius, just not the ones he wants. He still cannot be a very stable genius at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He cannot be one on Martha’s Vineyard or in the Hamptons. While an epistemologically-divided America can permit Trump to be a genius; the very nature of its division makes it impossible for him to be one in the only places that matter to the Trump lineage.

Yet within that tragedy is a story of generosity and emancipation. Trump may not have achieved geniushood. But he has made it possible for millions of others to do that very thing. More on that in my next post.

[Today, I am opening a Patreon page to support this blog because you will be getting five articles per month henceforth. Please consider supporting my work and the distinctive historical analysis I bring to my writing here – S.P]

In the Mike Leigh movie High Hopes (1988), Rupert, a character representing nostalgic, as opposed to Thatcherite, Toryism explains the greatness of the British Empire that he hopes to see restored: there was “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.” This is an effective characterization of the Second British Empire that emerged following the recognition of the American republic in 1784 and entered into terminal decline following the outbreak of the First World War, two hundred and thirty years later.

Unlike the First British Empire (1536-1783), in which great expense and brutality were undertaken to convert Irishmen into Protestant Englishmen, in which legal differences between the English and Scots were systematically worn down, in which a million colonists on the Atlantic Seaboard originally rose up over their inequality with the Englishmen of the Eastern Hemisphere, the Second British Empire rejected assimilation as a doctrine. The reason America had risen up was because its residents had come to understand themselves to be entitled to the same rights as those of Great Britain.

So, the Second British Empire became all about difference. Welsh, Scots and Indians were to be understood as colonized peoples and, at the same time, colonizers on behalf of the British: distinct, inferior, yet powerful colonized peoples. The Welsh were massively over-represented in the colonial administration of India, the Scots in British North America and the Indians in the administration of Africa. One colonized people managed another at the level of the imperial state.

But below them were hierarchies of the colonized, recognized and supported by the imperial state. In this way, the British abandoned the project of Protestantizing Québec and instead empowered local bishops to sit at the top of a theocracy that ran Lower Canada until 1960. In India, dozens of principalities and emirates dominated or snuffed-out by the Mughal Empire regained a nominal independence under the British East India Company and, later, the British Raj, each with its own prince, courtiers and set of laws. The “trucial states” of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai and less-remembered names were monarchies selected by the British to rule their populations independently but backed by the power of the Royal Navy.

The Second British Empire was based on the understanding that hegemonic power arises from recognizing as many kinds of people and as many kinds of peoples as possible and, wherever possible, making their elites not competitors but collaborators in a vast and elaborate system, one offering “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.”

These ideas did not come to the British Empire out of nowhere. They came from the systems of government developed by the Ottoman Empire, the first modern state more committed to systematizing than erasing the traditions and hierarchies of the past. The Ottoman Empire had succeeded in claiming the title both of Caliphate and Roman Empire during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries by modernizing and systematizing the things that had made medieval Islamic civilization the juggernaut that it had been: religious diversity, cosmopolitanism and hierarchy.

The Ottomans were the one modern state that sought to reinvigorate a legal principle of the Ancient World: personality of law. From Spain to France to England to Japan, the other ascendant states of the early modern world were interested in processes of assimilation, homogenization and the tying of law and culture to geography. These states assailed minority languages and religious difference in an effort to forge the first true national identities.

But the Ottomans took the opposite approach, instead reinvigorating institutions and practices that had atrophied in the Middle Ages. Self-government rights for linguistic minorities were restored. The milet system, whereby religious minorities governed themselves, was established throughout the Empire, granting Nestorians, Chalcedonians, Orthodox and Catholic Christians different governments. The court of the Caliph drew Egyptian Copts and Albanian Muslims, with powerful government positions carefully doled-out to those who sat atop various hierarchies representing ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. There were different streams for civil service and mercantile jobs based on region, language and religion. In the Levant, Orthodox Greeks were preferred for civil service posts, Sunni Arabs for mercantile monopolies and oligopolies, but the same did not hold true in Egypt or Albania. The Ottomans, more than any empire before or since, nailed the “politics of representation.”

Underpinning this was the principle of “personality of law,” the idea that the laws that applied to a person were not the derived from the polygon in which one was standing, etched onto the surface of the planet (the way the law works today) but rather from what sort of person one was, a Christian or a Muslim, a Turk or an Greek, a speaker of Arabic or Serbo-Croatian. This proved a highly effective means of social control. Because every group in the empire was “represented,” there was an elite to which every Ottoman could aspire, and there was an elite willing to defend the Ottoman state in order to safeguard its privileges, its representation.

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Before resuming the history lesson, let me be clear about what the politics of representation is not; it is not affirmative action. Affirmative action programs are necessarily part of larger state-led efforts to make sure that all participants in the workforce are treated fairly and that all parts of the workforce are representative of the population as a whole. The politics of representation does the opposite. By creating token elites from every group, it seeks to quiet the voices of non-elites by co-opting them into identifying with “their” elites in their putative competition for influence with “other” elites. Will the next vizier be a Copt or a Greek? And when the former succeeds, this politics sells this as a victory for the million Coptic fellahin toiling in cotton fields throughout the Nile Delta. That is why affirmative action works against any job being viewed as the province or specialty of one particular religion, gender or ethnicity but instead tries to create the most representative, mixed group possible in all jobs at all levels.

What once was the politics of affirmative action in the 1970s has, just like the rest of America’s welfare state in the ensuing forty years, been slowly turned into its opposite, cosmetically similar and yet for opposing purposes, with opposite functions. The Third Wayers who remade the Democratic Party and its trade, welfare and criminal justice policies under the Clinton Administration were also key agents in the transformation of affirmative action from a legal practice focused on working people to a symbolic discourse focused on elites.

The vision of diversity espoused by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is the modern politics of representation: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. In this politics, America’s first black president could preside over a net annual transfer of wealth from black America to white America, with black Americans poorer relative to whites and more segregated relative to whites than at any point in the preceding forty years. That is why America is hitting a forty-five year nadir in reproductive freedom following the first major party candidacy for the presidency by a woman and her victory in the popular vote. It is because when you conflate justice for groups with symbolic and elite representation of their elites, those groups don’t just fail to benefit. They lose.

The idea that the composition and conduct of a royal court determines what happens in the world below is a myth with long legs: Oberon and Titania’s court in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arthur and Guinevere’s in the grail stories, the Jade Emperor’s in Chinese myth, etc. We love those old myths and have been seeking to shoe-horn them into reality since Procopius blamed Justinian and Theodora for the Darkening of the Sun. But it’s just sympathetic magic: a theory of cause and effect that seems aesthetically intuitive but is actually bullshit.

Many things can cause an elite to be demographically representative of the population it purports to represent; one is a successful program of affirmative action and economic equality. Whatever legitimate criticisms we make of Fidel Castro’s Cuba when it comes to democratic rights and freedom of speech, by 1991, Cuba’s Communist Party had come to reflect the population below it in terms of racial representation because this diversity arrived from below. Black Cubans achieved parity as hotel managers before they achieved it in the Party. But although this representation has been maintained at the party level, that representation was no safeguard of equity below. Two generations of Cuban leaders have had to sacrifice economic equality for success in the tourism economy and have exiled black Cubans to the back of shop after shop. In this way we can see that diversifying those in authority has no causal relationship to diversity or fairness below. But diversifying below almost always is expressed in diversity above.

Of course, the transparency, the hollowness, the cynicism of the Ottoman politics of representation wears people down and angers those who see that it does nothing materially for the lives of ordinary people. In the nineteenth century, a Turkish nationalist movement emerged in the Ottoman state, demanding that, as creators of the Empire, Turks- all Turks- should enjoy superior political and economic authority. The Turkish nationalists focused their sense of injustice on the minority groups that they believed enjoyed greater power and opportunity than ethnic Turks. Because every group in the Empire was headed by corrupt elites, examples of Arabs, Greeks, Copts and Albanians screwing good, honest Turkish people out of their birthright abounded. Of course, this new Turkish nationalism led to Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and others seeking better deals outside the Empire, which in turn provoked the pogroms of the 1910s and 20s for which the term “genocide” was invented.

Today, America stands somewhere similar. Donald Trump’s agenda is that of the Turkish nationalists of the nineteenth century: to cleanse the elite of minorities and restore them to their proper place either at the bottom of society or outside of it altogether, behind walls or prison bars. The Democratic Party’s decision to respond with the politics of representation sealed its fate and caused it to lose in 2016. Whatever movement triumphs over Trumpism, it will not be the defenders of a corrupt and broken status quo, but one that offers a more compelling and inclusive idea of universality: one pulling a thread through Americans, as workers, as citizens.

Within the US Democratic Party, there is only one candidate who stands for that. And my American friends, you should back him. He is here to smash capitalism, not fix it. And that is what all Americans need. What keeps Hispanic communities from being raided and terrorized is not a Hispanic Secretary of Labour—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people safe from police violence and wrongful imprisonment is not a black Attorney-General—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people from being segregated into inferior housing is not a black Secretary of Housing—America has one right now under Donald Trump. What keeps women’s reproductive rights safe is not a female Secretary of Health—American had one under Obama. The only force capable of fighting racism, authoritarianism and misogyny is socialism—and not the elite espousal of socialism, but its socialist enactment, the mobilization of millions of people across differences of sexuality, race, religion and gender.

What matters and must matter is that Donald Trump is opposed by a politics of equity and equality, not the broken and corrupt neo-Ottomanism of a place for everyone and everyone in their place.

To date, debates about whether a vote for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders is a feminist vote have centred around policy differences between the two candidates and have compared the two candidates’ platforms and records, and Sanders’ record is clearly superior when it comes to the issues. Left uncontested until now, however, is the idea that electing Clinton would be a victory for feminism at the level of symbolic discourse, that the election of a woman over a man would, at least symbolically, strike a blow for feminism and against patriarchy. This was a view that I myself held. But now I am not so sure.
In 1986, Ann Richards was elected governor of Texas. A feminist, pro-choice Democrat, Richards faced all the usual character attacks one might expect and then some. That was because she was a divorced, recovering alcoholic who refused, on dozens of occasions, to deny second- and third-hand claims that her past drinking had been matched by an equally prodigious cocaine habit. In this way, she challenged, in every way, the double standards of respectability women face on a host of questions concerning personal and familial morality and lifestyle. Four years before William Jefferson Clinton was nominated to run for president, Richards had given the keynote address to the Democratic convention that nominated Michael Dukakis.

When asked about being the first female governor of Texas, Richards was quick to correct her interlocutors and remind them that she was not, in fact, the state’s first governor due to a long-standing tradition in hyper-patriarchal Dixie. Ma Ferguson, wife of former governor James Ferguson, had been elected Texas governor sixty years previously. That is because the culture of the former Confederate States of America is not only highly conservative with respect to racial issues; this extends to class and gender politics as well. And that is why, as soon as women gained the right to vote in the South, the region’s planter aristocracy began dodging term limits and corruption charges by using their wives as electoral proxies through whom they could hold onto power, skirting the spirit of the law.

Such arrangements were public and blatant. Speaking to audiences of Klansmen and religious conservatives, disqualified male politicians could travel from town to town, proudly proclaiming that if their wives were elected, their regimes would continue without the slightest interruption. To such audiences, these claims seemed reasonable because, in a highly patriarchal society, it is inconceivable that a good wife or daughter would be anything other than a simple extension of her man’s will. This was the campaign of legendary segregationist governor George Wallace for his wife Lurleen in 1966. While she stayed home, her husband went back to the hustings to remind voters that she would rule in name only; he would be calling all the shots. And true to his word, upon “her” victory, he did just that.

And this sort of thing is not unique to Dixie. In 1970, social conservatives in India turned out to elect Indira Gandhi at Prime Minister precisely because they understood her personhood to be wholly subsumed in the greatness of her late father, Jawaharlal Nehru who had ruled the nation from 1945 to 1964. Next door, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter Benazir succeeded him in a similar fashion in 1993. What we have often missed, watching such elections from the Northern US or from Canada, is that periodic election of a great man’s daughter or widow, functions to reinforce the greatness of a patriarchal lineage, showing that a man’s greatness is such that he can rule through a minor proxy from a sickbed, prison cell or even beyond the grave. However autonomous these individuals are, once elected, their election campaigns rely not just on exploiting but reinforcing popular beliefs about the inferior and subordinate character of women’s agency in religious, conservative, traditionalist societies.

For all the legitimate criticism Margaret Thatcher might face for her policies, her election in 1979 showed women in modern democracies that effacing of their own agency and deliberately campaigning in the shadow of a man was not the only route to national leadership. Thatcher helped blaze a trail for governor Richards, as well as for tough, independent national leaders of the right and the left, like Angela Merkel and Julia Gillard.
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More than that of any other self-styled progressive in the industrialized world, Hillary Clinton’s so-called feminism is based on a retrograde political understanding of the meaning of gender in the public square. As I first observed in 2008, Bill Clinton, as any good campaign surrogate should, tailors his message to his audience when speaking for this wife. And, the more conservative and Southern the state, the more he speaks not of “she” but “we,” when it comes to the next Clinton White House. It is actually this phenomenon that has given rise to claims by analysis that the Clinton campaign has an African American “firewall.” Whereas the overwhelming majority of white voters in the South who identify as conservative and evangelical are diehard Republicans, the same is not true of black conservative evangelicals, who remain a major constituency for the Democrats. It is that demographic phenomenon that is conferring Hillary Clinton’s lead in South Carolina: a bloc of conservative evangelicals are, once again, hearing from her husband about how a victory for her is really a victory for him.

Clinton, herself, relies on this kind of thinking, as she has since beginning her first presidential run in 2006, by emphasizing how her “experience” distinguishes her from other candidates. Yet, curiously, the record, the experience she most frequently references—and the record and experience her adversaries are most likely to attack—are initiatives associated with her husband’s presidency. Holding no office other than “First Lady,” a royal consort equivalent office that reminds us that the US has not conducted an overhaul of its constitution since the 1780s, she claims credit for any major law passed in the US by dint of her husband’s signature appearing on it.

The move that Clinton is making here is not some clever feminist tactic to stick it to the man; it is an affirmation of the ancient English legal doctrine of “couverture” in which a man’s legal personhood wholly subsumes the personhood of his female dependents, his wife and daughters, who only cease to be part of his legal body through his death or their marriage to another man. Her claims of an ontology coterminous with her husband’s from 1993-2000 should be enough to sicken, never mind discourage, the deeper thinkers in modern feminism.

Compare this to her reluctance to take credit for the policies of the cabinet in which she served from 2009-12, her indifference to the accomplishments of Senate Democrat majority in which she served with Bernie Sanders from 2006-08, and the bizarre patriarchal traditionalism of her campaign is thrown into sharper relief. Ultimately, Clinton is claiming that her experience as a part of her husband is actually more real than her experience as an autonomous political actor.

In this light, we must ask whether, even in a symbolic universe of rhetoric, position, titles and ceremony, a Clinton victory will be a step forward, sideways or backwards for women in America and throughout the democratic world.