Explaining the explanations (or, neither their crises nor their normality!)
I’ve often had a strong gut-level suspicion that the pandemic would have played out differently if we weren’t in the Trump years. What I don’t mean is that the failures of pandemic management are Trump’s fault. Abby Cartus has a great essay on how partisan differences fail to explain pandemic management failures. It’s here - https://web.archive.org/web/20230304161021/https://www.pestemag.com/large-scale-medicine/partisan-pandemic-cottage-industry - and I recommend it highly. What I mean instead is that the set of political coordinates or ready to hand scripts and thought-stopping cliches and ideological maneuvers (and so on) that proliferated in the Trump years - proliferated specifically among the Democrats and their base - have played a really destructive role. (I nodded to this briefly in one of the older pieces I recently archived here, my short take from the Law and Political Economy blog where I said the Biden administration was going to use the Supreme Court’s shooting down the workplace vaccine mandate as a convenient foil through which the administration could pretend that an unpopular course of action it approved of was in fact forced upon it by conservatives.)
Before I go on, I should also say that this gut-level suspicion is in tension with my more reflected-upon and worked out view, which is that the pandemic and how it’s played out is fundamentally a matter of pressure arising from social patterns that run very deep within capitalism. I’d point to the rest of the world, in that the pandemic’s a clusterfuck literally everywhere. And at the same time, in some countries, the state’s approach to managing that clusterfuck has been even worse than in others. The US is one of those places where the ghouls in charge opted for intensifying the clusterfuck hardcore and making excuses. That’s all to say, the pandemic would have been a nightmare of death and disablement under even the best possible version of capitalist society, and at the same time, we have not been living under the best possible capitalism and the Biden administration absolutely has blood on its hands for its choices. I find it hard to maintain both of those thoughts.
Getting back to where I started, Cartus is right to reject the partisan explanations of the pandemic and again I encourage everyone to read her essay. What I’m speculating about here is sort of like an attempt to explain the partisan explanations, or really it’s me gesturing in that direction - having an explanation of the dynamics of electoral political culture in the US from 2010 to present would, I think, give us some resources and insights into the origins of some ready to hand ideological resources that Biden and his ilk have used to get away with killing a lot of people. Actually explaining this is beyond me. I think it would probably take someone who is conversant in contemporary political science and also possessed of a deeply critical marxist outlook, which I suspect is a vanishingly small number of people.
One thing that’s on my mind in this a lot is the way that Trump can be blamed by liberals in a way that deflects all responsibility from Biden, ideologically. That seems to have not stop working on a certain type of liberal, a type there seem to be a great many of in the US. A closely related thing that’s on my mind is the liberal side of partisan polarization. Hilary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment springs to mind. I get the sense that a lot of liberals have deeply written off other Americans who they believe are irredeemably conservative, and not only in the sense of (correctly) coming to doubt that those conservatives can be moved by rational argument and so on, but much more problematically of withdrawing moral concern for those people’s well-being. I’m unsure about how widespread or sincere this is, but I have seen a lot of really ugly liberal online responses to natural disasters in so-called red states, with people say things like “serves them right for voting Trump” and “maybe this will teach them to believe in climate change” and so on. That withdrawal of moral concern serves the state insofar as it makes the abandonment of some populations to their fate as discarded (as surplus, in the language of Health Communism, which I’ll make another plug for). Of course, the right has done this as well, this isn’t unique to liberals.
The thing is, the liberals have the upper hand in two important ways. One, very simply, they have the White House and Senate and a lot of other public offices. Two, the media is more friendly to the Biden administration that it was to Trump. Over all, generally speaking, Trump seemed to be roundly hated by a great deal of official institutional authorities (and to an important degree, fair enough, I hate him too!) and he seemed to lack the skill and organized personnel to build a consensus among various political forces. Biden, on the other hand, is far less hated in those circles and is far more skilled and has a much more effective organization when it comes to building a consensus and organizing various political forces. Put simply, and I admit being both a little vague and overstating somewhat, things are far more in lockstep under Biden and were far more chaotic under Trump. To a lot of liberals that is itself an unqualified good about Biden, and there’s an important degree of truth to that, but on the other hand the chaos under Trump was a limiting factor in him accomplishing his agenda and the return of order under Biden is a facilitating factor in Biden accomplishing his agenda. That’s a major problem given how bloody that agenda is.
So we have liberals in greater power and with ideological resources to hand for minimizing deaths - the dead are Republicans, they had it coming; for denying responsibility - the population let the state down by not getting vaccinated (I’ve often thought that liberal talk about the unvaccinated has echoes of Brecht’s poem satirizing Stalinism in power: “After the uprising of the 17th June / The Secretary of the Writers Union / Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee / Stating that the people / Had forfeited the confidence of the government / And could win it back only / By redoubled efforts. / Would it not be easier / In that case for the government / To dissolve the people And elect another?” https://allpoetry.com/The-Solution In an other timeline the pandemic minimizers are all functionaries and courtiers in a global Stalinist dictatorship, the sort depicted in the sample in Ministry’s “Faith Collapsing” in the sample "there have been spontaneous demonstrations of Party workers voicing their gratitude and joy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68DJCaqEpDc) and blaming the unvaccinated - who, after all, have sometimes voted wrongly! the scum! - for insufficient vaccination which in turn obfuscates c0mpletely, in the liberal imagination, that vaccination is a state-provided service that has been under-resourced and not really committed to. In short, Trump and his ilk, (who are genuinely awful and evil, to be clear) have served as a source of ready excuses so that nothing is ever the fault of Biden and his ilk (who are genuinely awful and evil, to be clear) and so that the people harmed by Biden’s pursuit of his agenda can be dismissed as outside a lot of people’s sphere of moral concern.
Within the talk of some circles I’ve been in or around, the Trump administration was a kind of crisis and the Biden administration was a kind of resolution to that crisis. I’m skeptical of that talk but I’m not entirely sure so I’ll say “crisis-like” to hedge my bet. Within that framework, the crisis-like quality of the Trump administration served to politicize pandemic management. This also fits with a pattern identified by the scholars Pinar Donmez and Eva Zemandl, namely that around the world the liberal center has taken up a posture wherein nothing is possible and governance is a technocratic ostensibly apolitical process of administering social life - in a word, a posture of depoliticization. (I wrote about the Biden administration as depoliticizing social murder in one of the pieces I archived here the other day and as I noted a while back in a post here, Steve Kettell and another scholar wrote about the UK government’s approach to depoliticizing the pandemic. In my short essay I drew on some work by Peter Burnham on depoliticization, work developed to analyze New Labour in Britain. Donmez, Kettell, and Burnham are all in the Open Marxism tradition, I put some files together of work in that tradition a while back in a post here.) Under those conditions, politicization in a leftward - meaning emancipatory, humane - direction is relatively blocked, leaving the right as doing more politics - in the sense of unfixing elements of the world that the depoliticizing center (your Bidens and Blairs and so on, who are objectively very conservative) depicts as frozen. Domnez and Zemandl’s paper on that is here: https://openresearch.ceu.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.14018/12653/cps-working-paper-state-crisis-and-politization-2015.pdf?sequence=1
Again I want to be clear, Trump’s a monster. The rightward politicization he represents is deeply inhumane and bloody. In any case, the kind of crisis resolution that Biden represents for a lot of people is his blocking that rightward politicization and returning to a more extensive posture of depoliticization (and remember, depoliticization is a way of politicking, and the depoliticized politics that Biden represents is also deeply inhumane and bloody). That crisis-resolution character of the Biden administration has been part and parcel of their depoliticizing the pandemic, its harms, and its management. And what I said above about the red state/blue state divide, “deplorables”-talk and so on, those phenomena are on the one hand products of the conflict between these different visions of how to conduct statecraft in a capitalist society and on the other hand are resources for the liberal side in carrying out that conflict, resources which in turn have been repurposed mitigate the pandemic and pandemic management as a problem for Biden and co.
The political theorist Nicos Poulantzas wrote an essay called "The Political Crisis and the Crisis of the State,” it’s in the Poulantzas reader. I can take or leave a lot of what I’ve read by him but this essay is great and I recommend it highly. In it, Poulantzas points out that political crises can serve to shore up the hegemony of the state at the same time that they harm specific politicians and administrations. He writes that political crises, especially when “slackening in certain aspects, play an organic role in the reproduction of class domination” insofar as they “can establish the way (sometimes the only way) for the restoration of an unsteady class hegemony and the way (sometimes the only way) for a transformation-adaptation of the capitalist state to the new realities of class conflict.” (This is on page 297 in the Poulantzas reader.) This seems to be what happened in the shift from Trump to Biden. Trump was inadvertently a vehicle for strengthening the power of state personnel over society by virtue of the reactions he engendered and the actions he facilitated on the part of the people who beat him, and a significant thread in those actions has been leaving people to die from covid.
If you’re keeping up with the blog (and you better be! eat your vegetables, they’ll put hair on your chest!) you’ll know I’ve been captivated lately by Raymond Williams. I need to get to bed so I won’t dig in here but I think the above could illuminatingly be rephrased in his vocabulary of dominant, residual, and emergent ideologies or cultures and how the dominant is both internally conflicted and tends to try to incorporate residual and emergent opposition. I’m not sure if I’ll get around to that, though I do plan to keep reading Williams at my glacial pace and to say more about Williams in relation to social murder. I’m going to drop a bit from a free write I did the other day at the bottom of this. In it I mention capitalism being a dynamic system imposing instability on people. The tendency of the system to commit the social murder of many people is one example of that violent dynamism and instability. That means the tendency to social murder is an important factor in (and to an important degree plays out partly via) the conflictual relationships between dominant and emergent cultures and ideology and in the internal dynamism of the dominant ideologies. This paragraph is not quite a promissory note but not entirely a non-promissory note either.
Speaking of promissory notes, I had originally planned to type some here about Michael Heinrich’s account of the capitalist state from his book on the three volumes of Marx’s Capital as some friends recently reminded me of it and I think it’s relevant but it’s late and I have to sleep. I recommend the chapter highly, it’s online here: https://libcom.org/article/state-and-capital I do plan to return to that when time and energy permit and the spirit is so moved.
Alright gang, I’m out. These are fucking awful times, so good luck and keep on trucking.
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Bit from the free write I mentioned: The literary critic and cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams argued that any dominant ideology or culture tends to have other ideologies outside itself that it relates to, other ideologies of two basic kinds: long persisting ideas and practices - Williams calls them residual - and new ideas and practices currently developing - Williams calls those emergent. (The conceptual distinction is very easy to make but in practice telling the difference between an old culture and a new one is not always so easy, because new ideas may be expressed in old terms, and new terms may express variations on old ideas.) The dominant ideology relates to the residual and emergent ideologies in a few basic ways. Nondominant cultures or ideologies are either alternatives to the dominant, which can at least temporarily coexist in a live or let live kind of way, or are opposed to dominant, making coexistence more conflictual. Often the elements of alternative and oppositional outlooks become incorporated into the dominant ideology, but not always.
This can be read as if dominant ideologies or culture are static or reactive and as if all emergent cultures are necessarily outside of the dominant or necessarily opposed to domination. That is inaccurate. New developments in culture are certainly not necessarily progressive or emancipatory simply because they are new. Nor do new developments only occur ‘from below’, so to speak. Domination is a social relationship with both dominant and subordinate people, and both the subordinated and the dominant are capable for having new ideas and practices.
Furthermore, in capitalism dominant cultures or ideologies are particularly dynamic because capitalist society involves an important degree of dynamism and social instability. Social tendencies such as competitive pressures on businesses mean that dominant cultures and ideologies in capitalism tend to have two important traits. One, they can include a great deal of disagreement among the dominant with each other. Two, dominant actors can come to undermine patterns of relationships with their subordinates, even if those relationships were already favoring the dominant.