Editorial: Trump’s inauguration of counter-revolution? More groundings

Abstract

The LA River. Photo: Andrea Gibbons.‘I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan … Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s and greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.’(Stephen Bannon, quoted in Blake (2016))‘Trump … talks a lot about walls … It’s an enclave mentality, a circling-the-wagons mentality that is going to continue to pillage and gather all the resources possible while there are still resources to gather – because I think they are all afraid of global warming even as they deny it with their last breath – and deny the humanity of everyone outside those gates. It is a familiar mentality. We’re seeing it all play out again in the military actions against Native American struggles for water at Standing Rock – they are fighting for all of us and the land itself and yet the government has brought in tanks.’(Andrea Gibbon (this issue))‘Immersed in a rapidly flowing stream, we stubbornly fix our eyes on the few pieces of debris still visible on the shore, while the current carries us away and propels us backward into the abyss.’(Alexis de Tocqueville (2004 [1835]: 7))When the preceding CITY editorial (‘Trumped? Some Groundings’) set out in mid- December 2016 an interim summing-up of US President Donald Trump’s ‘transitional’ arrangements and some possible environmental implications, it was still possible to conclude, tentatively, that we did not necessarily face a ‘situation of extraordinary continuing turmoil.’However, we introduced, in opposition to that tentative conclusion, as our first epigraph there, a passage from Noam Chomsky’s almost immediate, deeply challenging response to the election results and to the report of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on climate change delivered on the same day, November 8th:The election outcome placed total control of the government -- executive, Congress, the Supreme Court -- in the hands of the Republican Party, which has become the most dangerous organization in world history … The Party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life.(Polychroniou 2016)In the light of only a few months’ experience of the emerging Trump regime, there is, by now, April 2017, enough qualitative mainstream, specialist and journalistic reporting and analysis to begin to evaluate Chomsky’s overlapping contentions.With regard to his first contention, Republican control of the government – though patchy, confusing, zig-zagging between various positions, recently challenged in the streets as well as in some professional chambers, channels and courts – is emerging and beginning to simultaneously falter and accelerate. The Trump-appointed leadership of Bannon (though now apparently distanced), Mathis (‘Mad Dog’) and Tillerson has begun to take form and make decisions, supported – but not always supported – by a crowd of unpredictable extras with the continuing role of Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives but now, it seems, as an at times head waiter at the banquets and behind the scenes. And then there is the Master himself, Trump. Of a recent episode, as the news leaked out of the White House, it was reported in the Washington Post that ‘Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad’ (Rucker, Costa, and Parker 2017).The Washington Post’s tone and focus changed slightly in a later edition. Madness disappeared and was replaced by impatience:At the center of the turmoil in the White House is an impatient president frustrated by his administration’s inability to erase the impression that his campaign was engaged with Russia, to stem leaks or to implement any signature achievements.’What was happening was perhaps exaggerated in the first version of the report. But in the world of Trump’s pantomimes, Stephen Bannon’s jacked-up realities and of Kellyanne Conway’s ‘alternative facts’, it is not easy to find ‘le mot juste’.As to Chomsky’s second contention, action on climate change is marginalised when/where it is not yet up for reversal.Though apparently premature at the time and over-stated, Chomsky’s contentions seem to be holding up. The more evidently social dimension of his forecast, refining it a little in the light of subsequent events, is taking the form of the control of the government in the hands of a plutocratic, military, technicist/professional, and promotional elite operating within the Republican Party. The process is well described, in Naomi Klein’s words, as ‘a corporate takeover’. But more than that, it is a form of regime change, occasioned, on the one hand, by an uneven, but nevertheless capitalism-threatening, humanitarian long revolution and, on the other, challenged and supplanted, bit by bit, by the attempted inauguration of another stage, possibly decisive, of a long counter-revolution, much deeper than a mere coup.