Lumpen Bourgeoisie

Discussion

Trump as an expression of the Lumpen Bourgeoisie. Alex Callinicos uses Mike Davis' concept for an explanation of the class dynamics behind Trump's victory and defeat:

"Trump is no fascist, but an adventurer, who has parlayed his celebrity business dealings and media stardom into at least the appearance of great wealth and used this image to reach a wider audience for his far-right account of the US being screwed by globalisation and, more concretely, by its allies and by China.63 His relationship to big capital has been far from straightforward. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale School of Management claims, “I would bring Donald Trump to our CEO summit years ago and the top tier CEOs would say, ‘Don’t bring him in here. We don’t consider him a top CEO.’” When he told the president this after his 2016 election victory, Trump replied, “Well, they’re all coming by to see me now”.

Even in the White House, however, he remained problematic for big capital. His most distinctive economic policies—trade wars with China and the EU, and repatriating the global supply chains developed in the neoliberal era—clashed directly with the interests of the main US transnational corporations and banks.

Trump’s class base came from elsewhere, as Mike Davis explains in a brilliant sketch of the social geography of Trumpism:

If Reagan came to power aligned with a historic anti-union offensive led by the Business Roundtable—a coalition of Fortune 500 corporations—Trump came to the White House thanks to the love of Jesus and a motley crew of what Sam Farber refers to as “lumpen capitalists”. Of course, defence contractors, the energy industry and Big Pharma pay the dues to the White House, as is always the case when the Republicans are in power. But the donor coalition that financed the revolt against Obama and united behind Trump after the defeat of Ted Cruz in the 2016 primaries is largely peripheral to the traditional sites of economic power. In addition to family dynasties…such as the Kochs, who have been around since the days of Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society, Trump’s key allies are post-industrial robber barons from hinterland places like Grand Rapids, Wichita, Little Rock and Tulsa. Their fortunes derive from real estate, private equity, casinos and services ranging from private armies to chain usury.65

These “lumpen-billionaires”, as Davis also calls them, are dependent on the domestic market, and indeed often on federal and state governments, as is shown by the telling example of Forrest L Preston’s Life Care Centers of America, the largest nursing home chain in the US and the site of numerous Covid-19 deaths in spring 2020.66 Confrontation with the manufacturing and trading giants of Asia and Europe probably did not affect their interests very negatively and may even help smaller industrial firms. Transnational big business, by contrast, went along with Trump because he cut taxes, promoted deregulation and inflated a stock-market bubble. As the Financial Times Lex column sourly put it after the assault on the Capitol:

Mr Trump repeatedly staked his presidency on rising financial markets, tacitly inciting Wall Street and better-off Americans to ignore his creeping illiberalism because they were getting rich in the process. Business grew weary of his capriciousness on tariffs and trade with China.

But Mr Trump largely gave corporate America what it wanted. Emerging markets have typically had the same flavour: a political state that is untidy or corrupt but where commerce and capitalism still flourish.

But in the longer term what was significant about Trump was less his ambivalent relationship with big capital than his transformation of right-wing politics in the US, starting with what Davis describes as “his rapid takeover and ruthless cleansing of the Republican Party in 2017–18… Trump’s nuclear advantage was his astounding popularity at the base, a frenzy routinely stoked by evangelical leaders, Fox News and, of course, his endless tweets”.68 Moreover, we now see that the famous Republican base is not just a mass of passive worshippers. Trump has given national leadership, media attention and political legitimacy to a plethora of far-right groupuscules, ranging from the “patriot” militias that started to emerge in the 1990s to the QAnon conspiracy theorists. Pete Simi of Chapman University says: “He’s kind of an ink blot of sorts where a lot of these different segments of the far right—and into the mainstream—are able to project on to him their hopes and fears and anxieties and frustrations”.

The relationship between Trump and the far-right grassroots is an interactive one in which he cultivated and mobilised them to help him win a second term. Key signposts included: Trump’s responding to the clash between the “Unite the Right” rally and anti-fascists (in which one of the latter died) in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 by saying “there were very good people on both sides”; his encouragement of far-right groups who last summer and autumn protested against the lockdowns and clashed (sometimes fatally) with BLM protestors; his call to the fascist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in the 30 September presidential debate; and, last but not least, his speech to the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on 6 January that lead to the storming of the Capitol.

In all these interventions Trump was trying to help himself rather than trying to create a new political regime, but he also helped the far right crystallise as a movement. It is important to stress here that, for the groups involved, the assault of the Capitol was a success, even if it did not save the Trump presidency. Even though the power of the federal government is now being deployed against the “insurrectionists”, the martyrs that the FBI and the courts will create can feed the mythology surrounding 6 January. Colin Clarke, a domestic terrorism expert at the Soufan Group, told the Washington Post, “The fact that the Capitol police allowed this to happen can be called a security breach or an intelligence failure, but these people do not look at this as a failure. They look at it as an overwhelming success, and one that will inspire others for years”.70

The assault on the Capitol nevertheless led to a real rupture between Trump and the US ruling class." (http://isj.org.uk/implodes-catastrophe/)