A Tale of Two Populisms

The missing piece towards true working class emancipation lies in front of our feet

Just about everything rightwing populists promise the American people leftwing populists can actually do better.

For example, the trade deficit which Trump’s tariffs are intended to solve is far more complicated than he thinks. It is a many-headed global construct with three quarters of a century of evolution under its belt. While tariffs are a laudable return to a pre-neoliberal consensus, they are the equivalent of bandaids on stab wounds when it comes to rectifying the great global imbalance of capital flows responsible for widespread American misery.

The exuberant messaging around free speech—again, a praiseworthy measure here intended to signal restoration to a more democratic past—needs to be understood as a proxy for antiwokeism disguised in universalist language. All of the talk of the First Amendment is to be commended. But the type of cure a man like Trump will promise to the wokeist malaise will actually get two jobs done: one beneficial, yes, but the other, insidious.

Wokeism will happily perish, a much needed break from an oppressive belief system. But if you think this is actually about the kind of free speech that will also guarantee the right to agitate from the left, I have a bridge to sell you. Trump’s planned executive orders, which contain “exceptions” when it comes to speech deemed ancillary to “terrorism,” are just going to swap one McCarthyite regime for another.

Immigration, too, serves as a flashpoint for comparing the two populisms. Law and order measures at the border are certainly necessary given what the Biden administration did from day one, the political harakiri it performed in relaxing ICE.

Here the thesis that there is in actuality a subliminal relationship between two seemingly mortal enemies, the NGO sector and the conservative establishment, becomes rather obvious. Biden had to do the bidding of the virtue signaling class of donors behind the “open border” policy he ended up enacting. After all, that class helped elect him.

But when you see how obvious is the political blowback from carrying out what these unelected single issue mandarins wanted, you have to conclude that there is some satanic relationship at play here, that one side continually helps out the other in a never-ending gyre.

This goes for the rightwing populist side, as well. Erecting a wall and giving ICE more men and guns will, just as with El Salvador and its gangs, “solve” the immigration problem.

But this is like putting up shopping mall security against the Nightcrawler: he just needs to evaporate and reappear elsewhere in order to get through.

You can’t turn a chimpanzee into an air traffic controller, no matter how much tech you put around his head. Fortifying ICE is absolutely necessary, but it does not constitute a solution. Oren Cass, an economist of the ascendent New Right, believes that thinking about the past is pointless when it comes to immigration, that we just need to stanch the flow. This is a dead giveaway that the right is not really a serious political force when following through with its promises. You can’t perform the follow-through unless you truly understand what gave rise to the problem.

In the same way that rightwing populists lack the critical intellectual machinery to address the systemic inefficiencies in global capitalism that give rise to runaway immigration in the first place, they, too, lack the ability to apply clarifying lenses to problems like trade deficits and First Amendment protection.

This is why I agree with Professor Richard Woolf when he calls right populism “fake populism.” The right is simply not equipped with the necessary vision needed in order to perform these appraisals. They are blinded by religious sentimentalism and national fervor.

The legitimate grievances which have brought Trump to office, which the damnable Democratic Party continually gaslit Americans about with “nothing to see here” insouciance, are crying out for leftwing solutions by leftwing politicians who do not exist.

This absence of true leftwing leadership is really the only reason why the right, always a more politically flexible formulation in American politics, signed up for the job and got Trump elected.

There should be no tears shed for the capitalist Democratic Party’s regime of tone-deaf technocracy, especially considering that a weak leftwing coded institution like the Democratic Party serves a key political function in the maintenance of global capital. Always when the repo men come (the rightwing) do we see that the debt they are acting upon (the Democrats) was merely the first step in a nefarious capitalist tango.

But does this not point to a particularly morbid state of affairs?

For if really the only authentic response to the misery of this stage of global capitalism is the election of a postmodern caricature of the American affect, what can this possibly mean about where we actually are?

What kind of horrifying joke is it when an orange game show host brandishing weak tea populism is actually better (at least for the moment) than the sclerotic Democratic Party?

I think the answer lies in admitting the one thing rightwing populism actually does better than the leftwing variant, which is the very thing that blinds them from having real solutions, though it is a necessary ingredient for working class solidarity, all the same.

That thing is patriotism.

A problem I see on the left is insufficient coding for the expression of national pride. This is understandable given the long history of the left in this country, with its necessary riposte against ominous nationalism and authoritarian overreach.

But it has now long been the case that the protectors of overreach themselves have overreached. The unwillingness to say the Pledge of Allegiance was a necessary development, but it lingers at great cost, for the disease it was designed to address has passed. These are not your grandfather’s rightwing conservatives.

This allergy towards the expression of national pride needs attention. The MAGA Communists have gotten something correct: they understand that to reliably carry out the awakening of working class revolutionary subjectivity in the United States, it can only come about by understanding that the working class has a legitimate need to express national pride.

This is a delicate dance. We shouldn’t be cavalier and believe there aren’t dangers in too effusive a policy about the expression of the American affect.

But there is an equal danger in the left refusing to participate in the “Red, White and Blue” fireworks show. In coding itself as an internationalist force it does itself no favors in trying to court the fealty of the domestic working class, which is rightfully suspicious of actors who do not seem disposed to express love of country.

This was something the Democratic Party saw written on the wall and tried to act upon, though, of course, like with so many of their policies, incoherence superseded the efficacy of the message. Recall their clumsy euphony around “freedom” at the DNC.

The left must reclaim the legacy of Eugene Debs, who agitated for real equality and working class solidarity while also coding patriotic.

The antimony between the ultimate leftwing project of the (international) dictatorship of the proletariat and this need for patriotic expression is admittedly problematic. It should provoke a lot of thought and discussion.

But there is a way to thread the needle, or, at least, I believe there just has to be a way.

So long as rightwing populists monopolize the expression of national pride, leftwing populism, despite its obvious superiority in not only understanding the source of American misery but also in the application of solutions to that misery, doesn’t stand a chance.