New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    Donald Trump is the Perfect Expression of Contemporary Capitalism

    There are a couple of emerging narratives about Donald Trump. One is that he is the unreconstructed id of middle-aged, white American men who were left behind by the economy. They aren’t quite sure who they’re mad at, but the list probably includes everybody who doesn’t look like them, women in general, and all those libruls who insist on the “political correctness” of being civil whilst in civil society. It also includes the Republican establishment, which Trump supporters have finally realized not only has virtually nothing in common with them, but also does not care about their actual interests. So the base devolves to all it has left: a generalized rage. The other narrative says that Trump is a European-style nationalist: you can have your social services, but you can’t have people who don’t belong to your tribe running around and using those services. These narratives have in common the idea that Trump is appealing because he is racist.

    One should never underestimate the explanatory power of racism in American politics, but there’s a third narrative about Trump that belongs in the picture, because I think it adds some explanatory value that the other two don’t: Trump is also the perfect embodiment of contemporary capitalism, by which I mean brand capitalism. I want to take a little time to explain this via a detour into Saussure, but if you don’t want to go there, here’s the gist of it: Trump doesn’t have policy positions because he’s not selling any product other than himself, and there isn’t anything to him other than his being the embodiment of TrumpTM.

    Trademark is how we legally understand brands, and for most of its history, trademark was basically designed to reduce consumer confusion by eliminating free-riding. If Coca-Cola invests a gazillion dollars into marketing and creating warm and fuzzy thoughts about its product in the minds of consumers, then it would be unfair to allow me to market a soft drink in a can that looked too much like Coke, because a certain percentage of consumers would be confused, and buy my product instead. That risk would also cause Coke to quit investing in improving its product, since it can’t recuperate that investment. So you get worse products all around. The going mainstream theory of trademark accordingly speaks in terms of market efficiency and search costs.

    In a brilliant article a few years back, Bartron Beebe offers a “semiotic” theory of trademark. Put on your Saussure hat for a moment (if you don’t have one of those, it was through the Beebe paper that I finally understood, so bear with me a minute) and consider the signifier-signified relationship. The signifier, say, “Nike,” signifies athleticism, which is therefore the signified. Or the signifier “cat” signifies whatever it is that you associate with cats (maybe an image of one doing something on YouTube). Saussure is credited with the insight that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, in the sense of “not necessary:” “Nike” could signify something else, like “victory.” This story leaves out a third element, however: the referent. In the Nike case, the referent is the shoe. What Beebe makes abundantly clear, and what strikes me as very near to capturing the essence of a lot of global capitalism, is that the relation between the signifier and referent is also arbitrary. Indeed, this is inherent to the process of commodification itself and is applicable to a wide range of contemporary commodities: when you put the food in a package, consumers see the package, not the food. Brand differentiation, not product differentiation, becomes the goal. If you don’t believe me, tell me what the necessary referent of “Hello Kitty” is, and if you have an answer, consider how few people know it. Brands are promiscuous, because they generate value by an intensification of the signifier-signified relation, and the way they do that is to attach it to as many appropriate things as possible while avoiding any associations that would weaken the connection.

    This is contemporary capitalism, at least in the U.S.: companies are willing to put their name on anything that they think strengthens the connection between their brand name and whatever desirable signified they want you to associate with it. Hence Nike socks, soccer balls, and so on. But you will never see a Nike barcalounger. This is Trump: over his career, he has attached his name to anything that he thinks will strengthen the connection between “Trump” and thoughts of “classy and rich.” If, at any point, he thinks the connection is harmed, he drops the product line like a hot rock. Mitt Romney’s list of failed and abandoned Trump products makes the point: Trump vodka? Really? It didn’t work out, so Trump cut the vodka, and now, nobody remembers it.

    Translate this into politics, and virtually everything Trump does makes sudden sense. “Trump has no core!” is precisely the point. He’s not selling a product (policy); there is no necessary referent. Is ISIS a problem? We’ll deal with it! His early experiments with xenophobic racism served him well. So he repeated them. The base loves the wall. So make it bigger! Why would Donald Trump care about a wall? He probably doesn’t (and it doesn’t matter at all if I’m wrong, and the wall is all he ever thinks about), but it’s great for his brand, which in this case is something like “manly outsider who is also classy and rich” (after all the big hands discussion, remember Trump was very eager to remind the audience that he never gets sued because he never settles – he always fights lawsuits. A real man). If a feminist group decided it was time to build a wall, Trump would disavow knowing what the word “wall” means. At last night’s Fox News debate, Megyn Kelly tried very hard to pin his policy flip-flops onto him, and he essentially kept shrugging his shoulders and saying “that was then, this is now.” Cruz was right to insist that this was not rigid conservatism, but that only gave Trump the chance to look reasonable as he explained that only an idiot would never change his mind as he learned new things.

    The other thing that brand capitalism is very good at is co-opting critique. Part of the reason is that there is no product that the brand is necessarily associated with. Critique that product, and the brand will obligingly drop it. David who? Oh – David Duke (damn headphones, which by the way came from your crummy network)! Well he’s toxic, so no, I don’t want him. But he waited long enough for the people who do like David Duke to interpret this as “I like David Duke’s endorsement, but the politically correct crowd will make me pretend I don’t.” Trump University was a scam (I’m back on last night’s debate)? We refunded some people their money, and by the way, Marco Rubio doesn’t show up to vote, so he’s the real scam! Whoever thought it was a good idea to bring Mitt Romney out to put Trump in his place was evidently asleep at the time, because of course the only thing Trump needed to say then is “loser,” while rolling the footage of Romney saying how singularly honored he is to have Trump’s endorsement (as Colbert noted, this does prove that Trump has made some poor investments). His supporters then immediately forget all about whatever was supposed to be wrong with Trump, and remember that since Romney lost, Obama is still president (or was, until Justice Scalia died). If policies or plans or coherent ideologies are typical political products, then Trump has either none or indefinitely many, and so an attack on those is going nowhere. If it’s a bad policy, he’ll change it, who wouldn’t? But that’s because bad policy is bad for the brand, not because torture violates international law and any coherent standard of human decency.

    The way to bring down brands, at least according to the trademark law that tries to protect them, is “dilution” – associating the brand with something that everybody thinks is bad. To his credit, Romney tried: Trump the businessman plus a list of failed business ventures. But a major problem there – aside from “loser!” – is that Trump isn’t (currently) selling himself as a businessman. He’s a manly man who will be a manly president – and so Trump vodka has no bearing on that. Worse, it’s associating him with a bad product – but what’s important to Trump is the signifier-signified relation. One of the best attacks on Trump is therefore John Oliver’s: he produces an amalgamation of many of the horrendous things Trump has advocated, but then seals the deal because he understands perfectly that the problem is internal to “Trump” itself and the way the signifier tends to signify victory. Oliver singles out the affect that the word “Trump” generates and then formulates that into a critical question: would anybody be quite so excited about these things if they were proposed by “Donald Drumpf?”

    Posted in , ,

    6 responses to “Donald Trump is the Perfect Expression of Contemporary Capitalism”

    1. Ex philosopher Avatar
      Ex philosopher

      Very interesting. However, I wonder: haven’t we seen the trump-type demagogue in contexts where capitalism was not well developed? Are you claiming that in non capitalistic environments trump wouldn’t happen (at least the brand behavior wouldn’t happen)? This makes it an empirical question. I don’t know the answers, just wanted to get clear on the claim.

      Like

      Reply
    2. Gordon Hull Avatar
      Gordon Hull

      Good question; I think there’s a lot of ways to get demagogues… I remember teaching Plato’s Republic a few years back, and the parts on the decline from Aristocracy to Oligarchy to mob-rule (“democracy”) seemed pretty apt. So I wouldn’t want to claim that you’d avoid demagogues elsewhere. I think Trump is probably novel in an American contest in that he quite clearly puts brand in front of substance, such that there really isn’t any substance to pin on him. I remember when Kerry was running (I think this was Kerry?) and the Bush campaign events featured lots of people waving flip-flops, and the accusation of inconsistency stuck to him. Cruz (who is a better standard-bearer on this point than Romney) is trying really hard to stick the same charge on Trump and it just isn’t working. So that part seems new in the U.S. context.
      And so the real question is whether the savior figure that Trump positions himself as has been so detached from anything substantive before. You’re right that’s an empirical question. Modern capitalism certainly makes it easier to swallow, and it’s certainly the case that Trump works by way of his brand and not anything else. My hunch is that you’re not going to find a demagogue like trump who gets so many votes pre-capitalism, because the relevant contextual conditions (media environment, mass suffrage, etc.) didn’t obtain. So my overall sense is that Trump is abetted substantially by our subsumption into branding capital. I’ve heard Trump compared to Berlusconi in Italy, and it made a lot of sense to me…

      Like

      Reply
    3. anon Avatar
      anon

      Eh, I think Hillary’s the perfect expression of contemporary capitalism: “it ain’t perfect, but it’s the best you can get, so stop complaining. And the alternatives are so scary! Besides, it’s much more moral now. CEOs can come in any sex, gender or color!”
      Trump seems like nostalgia for the old American anti-establishment maverick style capitalism, which has its roots in nostalgia for the even older-school anti-aristocratic, anti-theocratic capitalism:
      “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
      The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
      The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
      If that’s not an ad for Trump steaks, I don’t know what is. But it ain’t contemporary.

      Like

      Reply
    4. Gordon Hull Avatar
      Gordon Hull

      Well, certainly Marx is right that capital tends to destroy all pre-capital relations, or at least a lot of them, and it substitutes its own fetishization of exchange value for use-value. I also think the autonomists are right that capital has pretty much put itself into all aspects of our lives (“complete subsumption”).
      Clearly Trump and Hillary both fundamentally subscribe to capitalism in its current form. My point was mainly that Trump represents something different: as far as I can tell, there is no there, there (unless it’s the xenophobia, and those who say he’s like the European nationalist parties are right). When he does articulate a policy argument, it often is manifestly impossible to do – I’d count the wall, and certainly just bringing back all those jobs, and definitely reinstituting torture and killing the families of terrorists – as falling into that camp. These proposals have a purely expressive value: they are designed to communicate how manly he is. In other words, those aren’t so much policy positions as brand differentiation.
      Hillary is a policy wonk (certainly by comparison), and has lots of very specific ideas. Indeed, her effort to brand differentiate from Sanders is basically that: to say that her ideas stand a chance of getting implemented (pending, of course, enough Democrats in Congress). So she’s making arguments about the product. This strategy would be equally or even more effective against Trump, because there’s no coherent intellectual philosophy underneath Trump. So it’s hard to critique the product. In short, you can imagine what a President Hillary would try to do. You can’t say the same for a President Trump.

      Like

      Reply
    5. anon Avatar
      anon

      “Hillary is a policy wonk (certainly by comparison), and has lots of very specific ideas. Indeed, her effort to brand differentiate from Sanders is basically that: to say that her ideas stand a chance of getting implemented (pending, of course, enough Democrats in Congress).”
      But this is pure ideology, of course. It’s precisely the fact that she trumpets having specific ideals while not having them–indeed, often having less specific ideas than Sanders–that marks it as ideology. Her “brand” is the abstractions of policy, pragmatism, and identity politics in the same empty way that Trump’s brand is business, winnerhood, and quality-brand quality. Even Trump has much more specific–if more horrific–policy plans than Hillary.
      Trump’s capitalism isn’t contemporary. It’s branding isn’t empty but negative: anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-women, etc. That is the traditional structure of capitalism in relation to aristocratic and feudal systems–their negation, laissez faire, the breakdown of order rather than an alternative order.
      Hillary’s capitalism is full of contain: it is, like establishment republicanism and against Trump, a highly organized, far from laissez-faire, form of globalized capitalism that is made palatable with the veneer of moralism. There are your empty signifiers: words like “feminism” or “diversity” or “progressivism” that have become so detached from any concrete context that they apply to Albright or Obama or Kissinger as well as anyone else who helps them “get things done.”

      Like

      Reply
    6. Gordon Hull Avatar
      Gordon Hull

      So a look at Hillary’s campaign page comes up with specific targets for installed solar panels, allowing students to refinance their debt at lower interest rates, establish a national infrastructure bank, increase funding for the NSF and NIH (with a $2 billion annual commitment to Alzheimers research), raise the federal minimum wage to $12 and support local efforts to go higher, protect women’s health care access, and so on. Of course some of it is pie in the sky – she’d overturn Citizen’s United, which won’t happen without another Supreme Court decision (although she’d get to appoint at least one justice, so I suppose that isn’t beyond the realm of possibility). I didn’t go check Sanders’ site, but these are pretty granular, and support the proposition that, across a broad range of issues, she has something to say. And I don’t think it’s an empty signifier to say that protecting women’s access to healthcare is a feminist issue. Maybe that’s more or less doable than what Sanders says he’d do, but (like Sanders) it’s a series of substantive positions.
      Trump is moving toward positions, I guess, but to fail to see that he’s been successfully running on his brand image more than anything else (otherwise, Jeb! would have easily defeated him), and that this is something different from Hillary, is to miss what makes Trump’s campaign so bizarre. You’re certainly right that he’s anti- a lot of things (and perhaps most consistently anti-immigration by Mexicans and Muslims, which is why it’s hard to dismiss the theory that he’s our own Le Pen). He does not come across as anti-women (he’s defended part of the work of Planned Parenthood, for example) compared to people like Ted Cruz, and in any case he doesn’t have positions on very many issues on the website. Part of why the republican establishment is afraid of him is that he doesn’t seem to share their views on a lot of topics, and/or that he has changed his mind when convenient.
      It’s true that traditional capitalism destroyed feudalism and aristocratic systems – but that ship sailed a long time ago. The wall with Mexico, the aggressiveness with China, those sorts of things are definitely not laissez faire (going to the WTO and loudly declaring China a currency manipulator per WTO rules may be a great negotiating strategy, but it’s not laissez faire. Ditto a “zero-tolerance” policy for Chinese violation of American intellectual property rights: IP is a purely governmental creation), and he certainly views himself as providing an alternative order – one where the U.S. is a very, very aggressive global hegemon, the government of which is very activist, especially on trade issues.
      The policy debate aside, my point was that Trump the candidate is running as Trump the brand, and this is true for him more than for any candidate I can recall in my lifetime. And that this – emphasizing brands as the carriers of value, and as being more valuable than whatever product attaches to them – is the direction of global capital. There’s nothing inconsistent between that and saying that Hillary is, above all, an advocate of neoliberalism. But there has never been a Hillary Vodka.

      Like

      Reply

    Leave a reply to Ex philosopher Cancel reply