By
Biko Agozino
I
was invited by editors to respond to WolfgangStreeck’s synthesis of Marxist analysis of Bonapartism with Weberian Status
Group pluralism. Although this response was not selected for publication due to
a high volume of responses, the publishers offered to pay me for my time and I
asked them to donate it to an NGO that works to prevent mass starvation. Below
is my response to the essay:
Du Bois and Azikiwe
The
essay by Streeck provided an intriguing perspective on the emergence of
politicians that he characterized as ‘Trumpists’. However, his critical essay
is in need of more thorough conceptual clarifications to address some theoretical
inadequacies and empirical untenabilities that threaten the validity of his
analysis and the policy efficacy of the implications.
The
author uncritically presented a rehash of Marx and Weber to suggest a hegemonic
crisis characterized by the ‘death of the center-left’ that created a void to
be filled with ‘class, status and party’ in a US supposedly dichotomized
between the cities in apparent resentful polar opposition against the
hinterlands. From this he concluded that the governmentality of Trumpism is
potentially ungovernable and predicted that Trump may be forced to resign
before the end of his term.
Streeck
nearly ruined his essay from the start with the cyborg premise that ‘strange
personalities’ can be identified by the atavistic stigmata of ‘extravagant
dress, inflated rhetoric, and show of sexual power’ – gangster rap stereotypes
that Trump evidently lacks given that his corporate suit is far from being extravagant,
his rhetoric is monosyllabic, and he engaged Marco Rubio in size-of-hand
envy.
The
joke that the US had lost every foreign war since the defeat in Vietnam risks
becoming an iatrogenic war-mongering capable of goading the most powerful
military in the world (as if more excuses are needed) into the search for a
face-saving winnable war.
Instead
of jeering at Americans that they have 11 million illegal immigrants despite
their ‘elaborate immigration policies’, Streeck should have asked what fortress
Europe could learn from American pragmatism regarding the inevitability of
immigration and the need to pursue increased diversity while providing a path
to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reforms.
On
Bonarpatism, Streeck invoked The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
by Marx to remind us that Trump is not the first figure to come to power and
seek to rule as an absolute monarch to the disadvantage of the masses of
peasants who supported Bonaparte simply because they liked his ideas. Streeck
neglected to inform the readers that Marx did not intend this concrete
historical example to be overgeneralized for he counted the instances of
Bonapartism on two fingers of one hand. The concrete example was used by Marx
to show that sometimes, the infrastructural mode of production is less of a
determinant of historic outcomes than the superstructural ideology of his
much-abused architectural metaphor.
Of
course, Trump is no emperor and even if he wanted to rule the US the way that
Bonaparte ruled France, Trump has to get past the Congress with anxious eyes on
the 2018 Mid Term elections, past the courts that block his CEO style of
orders, past the critical press that reveal scoops to force sacks from the
government, and past the energized electorate ready to call his bluff from one
ill-advised Executive Order to another dead-on-arrival attempt to replace
Obamacare with Donaldon’tcare.
Streeck repeated the Orwellian fact that Trump ‘won’ the election but failed to
add that he actually lost the popular votes by nearly three million.
If
Streeck had looked beyond German Sociology in his search for a suitable
theoretical framework for the US, he could have stumbled on the theories of Thatcherism
and Authoritarian
Populism by Stuart
Hall or Intersectionality
by Kimberley Crenshaw as a more suitable paradigm for the analysis of the
politics of race-class-gender articulation, disarticulation and rearticulation
in societies structured in dominance.
Another
major weakness in the essay is the uncritical adoption of Weberian Status Group
theory to explain the election of Donald Trump despite the fact that every
status group was split between the two candidates. The error in Weberian
pluralism is that it tends to underestimate the enormous power that is held by
the military-industrial ruling elites as C.W.
Mills demonstrated in The Power Elite.
Weber
traveled to the US to interview German immigrants for his influential book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism but scandalously ended up not noticing that capitalism had
more to do with hundreds of years of the enslavement of millions of Africans as
Marx,
Du
Bois, Eric
Williams, and C.L.R.
James proved.
The
pitfalls of nationalist sociological preferences may have marred the essay
beyond redemption when Streeck asserted that ‘Trumps seem to emerge easily in
countries with a colonial past –‘. He conveniently failed to add Germany to the
list of imperialist countries despite the savage plunder by imperialist Germany
in Africa, according to Du
Bois, Azikiwe,
Nkrumah,
Fanon, Rodney
and Cesaire.
Nazism emerged from this track record as the logical conclusion to the Weberian
Enlightenment longing for rational modernization without compassion in the
administrative quest for domination, according to Zygmunt
Bauman.
Streeck
erred by concluding that only groups that wanted to use the bathrooms that
corresponded with their gender identity were interested in bathroom birther
laws. On the contrary, many Americans opposed prejudiced laws that picked on other
groups because history teaches that such authoritarianism eventually escalated
violence in society to the detriment of all. When they came for the Jews, many
said nothing because they were not Jews, then, finally …
Biko
Agozino, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, author of Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of
Imperialist Reason and writer of ‘Trumpism
and Authoritarian Populism’ in C-Theory.
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