Afterword: Sanders, Clinton, and Trump

Abstract

American capitalism is continually threatened by democratic ingressions, forces for equality. The welfare state capitalism of Bernie Sanders caused a feverish overreaction, an overkill with extreme prejudice that annihilated the intrusion, illustrating Marx’s observation that economic systems will reflexively conspire to protect themselves and engage in all manner of defense mechanisms to do so. The removal of Sanders produced a desperate battle of behavior: vulgar Trump versus polite Clinton. The figure of Trump incited a second grand desublimation—the first was provoked by Ronald Reagan —that discharges repressed sadistic urges. The rhetoric of Trump taps into the general dissatisfaction and anger felt by working class whites and harnesses regressive oedipal urges into a symbolic rebellion, a diffuse antiauthoritarianism, while at the same time embodying hegemonic male authority in itself. The neoliberal American body politic senses the pathogenic threat to its integrity and produces antibodies to neutralize the pathogen and digest it into the system. It then transforms the pathogen into a politics of identity and behavior in order to protect its inegalitarian economy from further threat.