In graduate school, I learned from a wise professor to think that sometimes the unexpected or accidental character of an event becomes structural and determines future events, that even heavily choreographed and recurrent rituals and practices can suddenly become contingent when participants and audiences perceive unintended or subversive meanings in that familiar and controlled repetition. At the time, this was a startling proposition to me (and I think to many of my professor’s then-colleagues), who were either devoted to older styles of structuralism (materialist or otherwise) or had grown accustomed to a “thick description” inspired style of reading events as the tip of a structural iceberg, events as concentrated visible reflections of underlying social relations, political forms, and material determinants that could not be seen directly and whose totality was in any event impossible to perceive and describe entirely.
A lot of water has flowed through the structure-agency loop since that point and this perspective, this sense of the unpredictable importance of the event, is no longer a startling proposition, even if historians, anthropologists and other scholars continue to argue about the relationship between events and structure, and continue to seek some systematic or fully theorized way to ‘read’ that relationship in any given circumstance.
I’m still very inclined to believe in the constitutive power of improvisation, accident and the unintended both in events that nobody foresaw and in those that were scheduled, expected and recurrent. But there are times where I think everybody just needs to walk away from a day-to-day recounting of the news as it happens and understand that if there’s anything contingent at all about the news, any branching point where there are two or more plausible outcomes, no single event will determine which branch we go down, where we are floating on a flood of causal energy that is racing to some vast and dark outcome.
This is a very academic way of saying “New Hampshire and Iowa do not matter”. There are no signs of anything unexpected to be read in them. We are tumbling now to a preordained choice—and the better choice will not bring the flood to its end.
It’s important to keep talking about what Trumpism is, and about what makes it such a persistent, coherent sociopolitical formation—one that I think predates his own political ascension by a decade or more. It’s important to keep asking the question ‘what is to be done?’: that has been urgent since 2001 and is now life-or-death in a very real way.
It’s important to understand that the flood pushing that huge messy formation forward towards wrecking all of our lives is flowing across other landscapes right now too, in other countries. In a few cases, it has already wrecked lives, hopes and possibilities. In others, it has been (so far) diverted into spillways and catchments.
The branch point in the United States is simple: will enough people (once again) mobilize to vote in all of the contested states and vote strongly enough against Trump to hold the line?
There are, I suppose, a few unexpected things that could happen in between now and November. The candidates are two elderly men whose health could take a dramatic turn for the worse. A war or attack or enormous natural event could change the mood. But it is now plain that there is no gaffe, no extreme statement, no tactical mistake that Trump himself or his campaign team can make that matters. There is no single primary or election or convention speech that will be a “turning point”. There is in this case only structure, only the vast collision of two huge sociopolitical coalitions and the swirling chaos of all the complicated fragmentary satellites that orbit each of them.
And that collision will continue should Biden win once again. That’s the problem: Trumpism is not repudiated by losing elections. Before Trump, the Tea Party’s influence lost Senate elections that were readily winnable by an older style of GOP candidate and harmed John McCain’s prospects via Sarah Palin’s presence on the ticket.
This is why we’re all so weary and worn out. The danger will not end in November unless the danger wins the day outright. If Trump takes power, then we are on another road in a final and ruinous way. If he loses, we will still have Trumpism to deal with, and it’s now plain that the Democratic Party at its core is only capable of warding its threat off, not moving beyond the danger it poses.
That doesn’t leave me in doubt about what to do in November: ward it off. Divert the flood. Reinforce the spillways, put sandbags on the levees. Do emergency repairs on the dam. I know which branch I want to be on after that second Tuesday in November.
But I also know that there has never been an American election where the day-to-day progression of events mattered less. There is no “ordinary event” that can happen that conforms to the usual calendar of political horse-races that will have any real significance in the outcome. Trumpism is completely immune to events in this sense and as a result so is any opposition to it. It’s time to stop talking about whether to invite Trump supporters to dinner or yell in their face, time to stop hoping that some rule or procedure will save us from the burden of mobilizing in order to save our decency, our society, and our lives. Not even a conviction is likely to matter, should one manage to arrive in time, since prison alone is not enough to bar a person from the Presidency.
Following political news is a habit that I likely can’t kick. But I want to remind myself every morning: none of this matters right now, in this case, for this moment.
"If Trump takes power, then we are on another road in a final and ruinous way."-How final and how ruinous? How does life go on? In such a scenario, what is the next right step?
Yes Tim, though I’m reminded in this reading moment of the appalling efforts toward the eve of an election made by networks and papers to find the still uncommitted voter as if their poor foundling will stand in for the other twenty-five uncommitted voters determining the outcome. Searching for anything that may be offered as a significant and reportable variable. I’m guessing we shall see this again. And that search for the uncommitted voter, is this now baked into the electoral process in this country?