Race, Gender, and Political Culture in the Trump Era

The Fascist Allure

Christine A. Kray, Uli Linke, Christine A. Kray, Uli Linke

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000432596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

This book demonstrates the fragility of democratic norms and institutions, and the allure of fascist politics within the Trump era.

The chapters consider the antagonistic cultural practices through which divergent political machinations, including white (patriarchal) nationalism, are staged, and examine the corresponding policies and governing practices that threaten the civil rights, security, and wellbeing of racialized minorities, immigrants, women, and gender nonconforming people. The book contributes to social theory on nation-building by delineating processes of exclusion, intimidation, and violence, with a focus on rhetoric, performance, semiotics, music, affectivity, and the power of media. Various chapters also analyze creative, restorative, and at times unruly practices of community building, which reknit the social fabric with expansive visions of the polity.

This anthropology-led volume incorporates contributions from a number of disciplines including sociology, American studies, communication, and Spanish, and will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities.

PART I
Love and patria

1

Love politics

The nation form and the affective life of the state

Uli Linke

DOI: 10.4324/9781003034810-1

Donald Trump is a lost soul. [He] has the most limited vocabulary than anyone in the history of the presidency. And so, there are many words Donald Trump does not understand, words of all sizes. But the single most important word Donald Trump does not understand is one we all understand. [A]nd, very sadly for him, it’s possible that he has never felt this in his entire life: Love! Love is the single most important word that Donald Trump does not understand. It seems [he] was never taught anything about love. Donald Trump is a man who does not know what it is to love or be loved. He has no comprehension of the concept of Christian love or romantic love or marital love. He does not now, never has, and never will understand the word love, and so he feels nothing when he separates children from their parents at the southern border…. The most dangerous thing about the most dangerous president that this country has ever had is that Donald Trump feels nothing.

Lawrence O’Donnell, The Last Word
(MSNBC Live) February 6, 2020

The country is crying out for leadership. Leadership that can unite us [and] bring us together. Leadership that can recognize the pain and deep grief of communities that have had a knee on their neck for too long…. We are all called to love one another as we love ourselves. That’s hard work. But it’s the work of America—[to] make possible this nation’s path to a more perfect union…. This is the United States of America.

Vice President Joe Biden

(CNN) Philadelphia, June 2, 2020

Described as incompetent, unfeeling, and empathically impotent, the former celebrity mogul Donald Trump has habitually ghosted the halls of the White House while indulging in plush life at one of his golf resorts. After the 2016 electoral win, the office of the US presidency came to be occupied by a “reactionary fantasist” (Sullivan 2017), whose boundless self-obsessions with power have energized public debates and grassroots movements on racial justice, women’s rights, and gender inequalities (Bonilla-Silva 2019; Carruthers 2019; Kray, Carroll, and Mandell 2018; Lebron 2017; Mandell 2019; Maxwell 2020; Smith 2018). The public spectacles of “transgression, excessive opulence, and civil lawlessness” that Donald Trump, the 45th US president and commander-in-chief, instigated by his norm-breaking attitudes and actions must be understood “as part of a long history of white privilege and hypocrisy” (Goldstein and Hall 2017, 402–403). With a focus on this legacy of whiteness and race, this chapter explores the paradoxical entanglement of tropes of nationhood, love, terror, and masculinity.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the sources and emblems of political power have once again been locked in corporeal practices: blood-right, white supremacy, racial violence, male dominance. The aggrandizement of the president’s body continually fed on the denigration of the racialized body as it was criminalized, medicalized, dehumanized, and rendered disposable (Alexander 2020; Bobo 2017; Butler 2018; Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2020). Donald Trump, an autocratic leader, an aspirant king, imagined a lineage of his blood-heirs to the seats of political power, while caging and stealing migrant children at the southern border (Soboroff 2020). In Trump’s fortified America, racialized human beings—Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian—inspired an intense apprehension, generating both fear and resentment, making them targets of street violence and state terror: dispossessed of rights, they have been brutalized, silenced, and murdered (Hannah-Jones 2018; Peeples 2020; Washington Post Database 2020). Drawing on anti-racist, postcolonial, feminist analysis (Butler 2020; Feldman 2018; Ransby 2018), this chapter examines how, in this era of the fleshly/carnal president, tropes of fascist masculinity and, as such, the fascist allure of power have been retrieved from the historical archives to perform and enact white privilege—in a democratic nation-state.

Attempts to theorize the tactics of political power under late capitalism require us to rethink the state apparatus as a site of meaning production, emotional investment, and fantasy (Buck-Morss 2000; Comaroff and Comaroff 2016; Taussig 1992; Wolf 2001; Žižek 1989). Moreover, as I argue here, modern nation-states are not just imagined or discursive regimes but also embodied forms. Political worlds have a sensual and emotive dimension: the life of the state has a corporal grounding. Modern governmentalities act on and inhabit the body. This hypothesis is corroborated by the pervasive presence of state culture and political terror in the everyday life of communities of color in North America. As such, there is an urgency to systematize and synthesize the theoretical tools for engaging the operations of contemporary state systems. An examination of nations as imagined political communities (Anderson 1991) must be expanded to include research on how conceptions of peoplehood are forged under the impact of global capitalism, media technologies, scientific ideology, and medical paradigms or health systems (Fassin 2012; Feldman 2015; Gilroy 2004; Hardin 2019; Mbembe 2001; Nairn and James 2005; Ticktin 2011). Our analytic preoccupations, whereby we see the state either as an institution, a discourse, as culturally imagined or socially constructed, tend to coexist with little interpretative integration. Anthropological understandings of the state’s capacity for mass violence and political terror (Bauman 1989; Hinton and Hinton 2015; Robben 2018; Scott 1998) are frequently staged against the magico-mythical qualities of the nation and the performative practices through which its terrifying history is remembered (Cassirer 1946; Hinton 2018; Linke 1999; Stoller 1995; Taussig 1997). Building on these insights, and through a critical reading of the fascist allure of whiteness and male power in the Trump era, my aim is to offer alternative possibilities for thinking about justice, equality, and human rights by interrogating the affective dimensions of the state. This approach is important for several reasons.

Rethinking the state of whiteness: national politics from a global perspective

The pivotal conditions for domination and exploitation that Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) so eloquently termed racialization are no longer produced solely from within the ideological territory of nation-states. The assignation of racial meanings to concrete practices, peoples, and places has been globalized. In other words, the expansive capitalist system is at once also a “global racial formation” (Winant 2001, 3, 6). Although the codex of race has not entirely lost its local or culturally specific imprints, racial formations are evident on a planetary scale, as a worldwide phenomenon that is propelled by the phantasms of racial neoliberalism (Goldberg 2009), which propagate ever new imaginaries of spaces, origins, and the relative value of human life. The racializing projects forged by Euro-American nation-states continue to be tethered to the remnants of a worldwide regime of colonial domination to conjoin the logic of white supremacy in its multiple iterations (Mbembe 2018). The president’s attempt to negotiate a “bill of love” for US immigration policies provides a pertinent example (Merica 2018; Naylor 2018). When tasking a bipartisan committee of Democratic and Republican lawmakers to negotiate “a deal” that was to include both a future policy for the 800,000 DACA recipients (or DREAMers), the Americanized children of undocumented immigrants, and additional measures for tightening the nation’s border security, Donald Trump proceeded to reveal his underlying commitments. The “bill of love” emerged as a rhetorical flourish, a circumlocution, for the ethnoracial whitening of the US population, which was to be accomplished by linking the fate of migrants and their offspring to the termination of the diversity visa lottery program and to ending family-based “chain migration,” but above all else to categorical immigration restrictions and the funding for a southern (US-Mexico) border wall (Camera 2018; Davis, Stolberg, and Kaplan 2018; Korte and Shesgreen 2018). As such, Trump’s “bill of love” served as a blueprint for metamorphosing the United States into a premodern fortress-castle. When further publicizing his intent to dismantle the existing protections for migrant families from Haiti and several African countries, Trump demanded “to know why he should accept immigrants from ‘shithole countries’ rather than places like Norway” (Dawsey 2018), a Scandinavian nation presumed to be inhabited by white people. As globalization “repudiates fixed territories, sacred spaces, and hard boundaries in favor of unstable flows” (Luke 2004, 121–122), the expansive reach of neoliberal capitalism has transformed the ways in which racial hegemonies are sustained and perpetuated by a nation’s closed “biometric borders” (Mbembe 2018). In the United States, a country marked by an intensified desire to build fortified enclosures and to control bodies in motion, what Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Philip Rucker tweeted about as “Donald Trump’s push to amplify racism” and to “weaponize white grievance” (@PhilipRucker, July 4, 2020) can be unmasked. Traces of such recalibrations are evident in other political realms.

Imagine this scene (see Figure 1.1). At a campaign rally in South Dakota, on the evening prior to America’s Independence Day, 2020, Trump made his way to the main stage, walking down a ramp, then briefly stopped, turning to the cameras: raising his clenched fist up to his fleshy profile, weathered skin sagging, with lackluster make-up, crowned by thinning, yellow strands of hair, he stood in visual proximity to national history—behind him, carved into the rock of Mount Rushmore, the towering stone sculptures of the country’s iconic presidents (Finchelstein 2020), a naturalizing metaphor of political power. According to news reports, it had been “Trump’s dream” to become immortalized as part of the monument, and a White House aide had previously contacted Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota to inquire about “the process for adding presidents to Mount Rushmore” (Cathey 2020). After initially rejecting the revelation as “fake news,” Trump confirmed his desire for achieving representational immortality as “a good idea” (@realDonaldTrump tweet, August 9, 2020; Ehrlich 2020). Motivated by his hunger for uncontestable symbols of political legitimation, the US president surrounded himself with images, tropes, and people that would bolster his assertions of leadership and strength. Supported by White House staff, plus a general and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, he rallied federal military troops to his side to, as Esper said, “dominate the battlespace” of Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington DC (Ryan and Lamothe 2020). The deployment of paramilitary units, “masked federal agents in camouflage and fatigues,” recurred in Portland (OR) to repress protests against racist police violence (Prose 2020). Trump threat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introduction: the fascist allure
• Part I Love and patria
• Part II The cultural policing of borders
• Part III Re/visions: crafting social justice
• Index