Hail Mary
On the revolutionary potential of Trump voters
In summer 2020, like many other white people who were galvanized after George Floyd was murdered, I read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
I was so taken with it that I wanted to tell my avowed, lifelong Republican mom—who I was living with since being dismissed from college in the spring—all that I’d learned.
On its face, this wasn’t a good idea. I had nowhere else to live for the moment, so I was stuck at home, so why would I start shit and not just try to keep the peace?
But her reaction was surprising.
She was especially moved by the sheer amount of innocent and unconvicted people who were in prison. And she was disturbed by how many people were behind bars just because of weed possession. I think she even wrote me an email explaining how she had never considered the topic before and that she really appreciated our conversations. That she was glad she learned something. I can’t find it now. But I did find an email she sent me on June 22, 2020, containing a link to an interview with Ibram Kendi. That’s something, at least.
She never actually read The New Jim Crow, but I don’t think I’ve heard her criticize the phrase “Black Lives Matter” since then.
This wasn’t the only time I was getting myself into a potential fight with my mom over politics. Throughout the pandemic, living at home with her, we had to find ways to not kill each other, especially with the presidential election and whether or not COVID was even as bad as the media was making it out to be.
Many times, we did almost kill each other.
But lo and behold: She got more accepting of how radically I differed from her on politics, and I got more patient in my explanations when she didn’t understand something and would get confused and angry. We even found some common ground, especially on police violence. It got me thinking about how to actually convince someone of something. Specifically, how to possibly change the mind of someone on the Right who votes for Trump.
Most people I know who are in their 20s and live in Brooklyn grew up in families of liberals. They were taught tolerance and open-mindedness instead of suspicion and prejudice.1
This was not my experience.
My whole family are Republicans. Literally except for me. It’s no coincidence that I’m the first one to attend a four-year college in my immediate family and one of very few in my distant relations. I was a Republican, too, until college. It was all I knew. And I try to never forget that.
Luckily, I had some very good friends who challenged me (and sometimes shamed me!) to rethink my views. I also had some courageous classmates who, for example, convened a meeting and hurled questions at me in a lecture hall as they discussed the racism of an editorial that I published anonymously in the school newspaper, about how the school should have a closed campus—“Rethinking Trinity’s Open Campus Policy: A Study in Progress,” it was called. Lol. And luckily, in 2019, I came across Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, which completely changed how I saw the world. From that book, I finally understood how the personal is political and how many things Marx got right.
So, over the years I’ve had to navigate constant disagreements with my family and learn when to keep my mouth shut and when to take advantage of an opening. Kind of like fencing.
Now, I hated voting last week. Apart from my instinct that New York is a blue state so my vote doesn’t even matter, it felt like a betrayal of my morals. I felt like an accessory to a murder, voting for someone who approves of genocide. But I did it. And now I feel like it’s ok to write this because I did it.
Hell yeah, entitlement.
Laying aside all my reservations I had about voting, let me throw my hat in the ring and not just tell you to vote, but tell you why Trump voters have the potential to go through the same ideological transformation I went through. And they can do it with a little help from their friends, if you’re willing to call yourself one of them. Although “mere interlocutor” is fine, too.
I’ve finally found, articulated perfectly, what I’ve been trying to articulate for years about the revolutionary potential of the Right in America. I’ve had countless satirical discussions with leftist friends about how January 6 is what we should have been doing. But there’s a reason that these discussions are satirical. As Slavoj Žižek pointed out in a recent Substack post, the storming of the capital was a farce. The coup wasn’t successful, and the way they dressed, some with Viking helmets, was comical. Marx famously said that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, but, as Žižek cites Herbert Marcuse as pointing out, it’s often been the reverse. Žižek cites the example of Hitler and his gang, who were the laughing-stock of many Germans in the 1920s. Few people took them seriously.
So, the thinking goes, January 6 might be foreshadowing a tragedy, most likely in the form of an authoritarian takeover of the United States.
But there is a seed of seriousness in my satirical discussions. The seed is that the impulse to change the status quo is something shared by Trump voters and leftists.
I’m obviously not the first one to point out the similarities between the libertarian impulse to push away government and the leftist impulse to destroy the status quo and replace it with communism. Still, most people don’t take me seriously when I say we share common aims and that we have different proposed methods of achieving those aims. That underneath those methods are shared, ultimately utopian, desires for a better society. Those desires are just symbolized differently in rhetoric and policy: Wanting to keep out immigrants and wanting to give asylum to refugees are two different ways of expressing the shared desire for community, harmony, and belonging that fall under that American ideal of “all men are created equal” promised to us in the Declaration of Independence. Xenophobes think they’ll realize this promise by keeping people who look and sound different—people who don’t belong—out of the country, and liberals think that expanding the American community to people in need from other countries is representative of true belonging—not just of one type of human, but of humankind universally.
You may say, “Wow, Ben, that’s quite a generous reading of the Far-Right’s call for a white ethnostate.” I see why you’d say that. But you would be missing the point.
Let’s think again about the Nazis.
One guy who did take the Nazis seriously, and tried to warn people about them, was the German philosopher Ernst Bloch. He’s the person I was referring to who perfectly articulated the revolutionary potential of the Far-Right. And the late Marxist intellectual Gillian Rose—whose 1979 lecture series, Marxist Modernism, was published by Verso in August—is the person who elegantly laid out his thought in her lecture, “The Greatness and Decline of Expressionism: Ernst Bloch.”
Rose talks about how Bloch was not just one of the only Germans who could see the imminent threat the Nazis posed, but was also one of the only Marxists who took seriously the idea that the Nazis, and fascism as a whole, represented a legitimate cultural synthesis. That German fascism was a natural outgrow of current cultural forces, not an historical aberration. In other words, he understood before he criticized.
Bloch especially understood why fascism was so appealing to three groups: the young, the peasantry, and the petite bourgeoisie. These would be the equivalent, it seems, of America’s young, poor, and middle class (maybe lower-middle class).2 Fascism, Bloch recognized, was expert at appealing to the hateful ways that these three groups expressed their grievances: anti-semitism, eugenics, other repressed and regressive desires to harm and persecute. It’s the same reason why Trump is so successful with messages of hate and antagonism while it seems like the Democrats can’t win as long as they continue to express empty liberal messages of acceptance, getting along, and, most recently, “joy,” which the Harris/Walz campaign has vowed to bring back into American politics.
As you’ve probably noticed, that message didn’t last more than a couple weeks throughout July and August.
The Left of Bloch’s time, like the liberal Left of today—milquetoast voting Democrats (that’s me now, I guess!)—ignored these groups and considered their enthusiasm to be merely reactionary, instead of entrenched in lasting, concrete resentment that had to find an outlet for expression at some point. But not Bloch. As Rose summarizes, Bloch argued that a successful revolution by the working class must be based on a recognition that these were legitimate responses to a legitimate feeling of being overlooked, and therefore (this is the crucial part), we on the Left should recognize these feelings and, in Rose’s words, “animate and awaken their critical and utopian potential.”
I do believe this would work, if done in earnest, on the January 6 guys. But how?
These guys, my Republican family members, my conservative friends from high school, all Trump voters, see themselves as somehow struggling because they’ve lost control. They feel powerless. Bloch’s contemporaries, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, saw this perceived struggle as projection. A projection of a felt loss of autonomy. In Rose’s words, “Projection is not only, as in Marx’s sense, a projection which controls the exploited, but it also expresses the needs and fears of the exploiters.” Fascism preys on those who project their fears onto scapegoats. Whether it’s people in Appalachia who feel abandoned because the liberals in the White House have moved American industry overseas, or people like Elon Musk and other billionaires who are afraid that their “well-earned money” is about to be taken away by tax cuts enforced by the Democrats.
Bloch would say that we must tap into this resentment by understanding its roots: desires, needs, and fears. And we have to see, first ourselves, how that resentment and regression into primitive fantasies of violence can change into what is “potentially progressive and universal in the struggle of the proletariat,” in Rose’s words. After we’ve understood it, then we can tell the Right they’re wrong. I really think that because so many people on the Left were raised by liberals (it feels like the vast majority), they don’t understand enough about the minds of conservatives to really level with them and change their minds. The possibility itself seems delusional to most people. Maybe because I’ve gone some way—though nowhere nearly as far as getting them to not vote for Trump—in doing it with parents, to me it seems within reach.
But that phrase: what is potentially progressive and universal in the struggle of the proletariat. Hard emphasis on “potentially.”
Like the poor on the Left, or the lower-middle class group of young leftists (your friends, my friends), Trump voters have dreams. They think they dream of a better past, when, in fact, as many of us recognize, the past they dream of returning to never existed. (If it ever did, it most certainly was a result of FDR’s reforms, which, if you want to stop a conservative dead in their tracks and make them reconsider why it was so great to be white in the 1950s and ’60s, tell them that.)
And yet, Bloch argues, these dreams have revolutionary potential. But if only we can detach these dreamers from their delusions and convince them to project whatever images they have of the past onto realistic methods to secure a brighter future (I really am sounding like a liberal now!). That obviously doesn’t mean we should endorse Far-Right calls for, like, a white ethnostate, but we need to recognize the symbolism of calls like this. That’s not to say that they are merely symbolic; the other side of the coin is of course that they impact real people who are targeted by them. They’re dreams to the dreamers, and nightmares to the dreamt-of. Dreams, as Freud said, are, after all, wishes. And Trump promises a sort of wish-fulfillment. Gillian Rose, paraphrasing Bloch, would call this phenomenon in fact “a mere form of deception.” A “swindle of fulfillment,” in Bloch’s words.
In Bloch’s time, fascism, instead of communism, stepped into this role of tapping into resentment. As a result, fascism, in Rose’s words, “obtained a monopoly of appeal to the mystical and romantic anti-capitalism of [the young, the peasantry, and the petite bourgeoisie].” And that is what is happening with Trump and the Right right now. They have a monopoly on the feelings of resentment and regression expressed by many people in this country. And they have their own mystical, mythic, and romantic expressions of that resentment, too: “The Constitution,” an obsession with the Pledge of Allegiance, uncritically lauding the military, worshipping the American Flag, etc. In 2016, the Left missed a chance to extract progress out of regression.
Will there be another chance? Is there another chance right now, one day before Election Day? Not for revolution of course, not before or after Tuesday. I’m just as pessimistic about that as Adorno and Horkheimer were at the end of their lives, when they said that mere theory was the only form of praxis still open to honest thinkers. We live in what Herbert Marcuse called a “one-dimensional” society, one characterized so much by leisure, consumption, and conformity that productive labor isn’t even valued. If it is valued, it’s only valued as a means to those three things. We’re in such a late stage of capitalism that nobody even cares about the Protestant work ethic. Whereas we were once alienated from our labor, we are now alienated from the alienation of our labor. And it’s that very alienation that used to hold the key to giving workers the fire in their belly to foment a revolution.
So what is there a chance to do?
Tap into your own “revolutionary fantasy,” as Bloch called it. Use my line about FDR on a Trump voter you know in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. Understand before you criticize and attempt to convince. Read Gillian Rose. Tell a racist to read Marx. Hope against hope. And reclaim hope from that empty, deceptive Obama-version of the word. Hope isn’t for imagining what can be, but for imagining what might never be. Or, as Walter Benjamin said, “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”
I just can’t shake this feeling that if I could be radicalized out of the prejudice and perspective I was raised with, anybody can.
Of course, the whole point of Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s “dialectic of enlightenment” is that these so-called “liberal” values are now themselves forms of barbarism and enslavement. They have been so overemphasized as “rational” that they’ve solidified into mythical forms. Rationality is supposed to dispel myths. But I’m leaving that subject alone for the moment and just assuming that those who are taught tolerance do in fact think they are being taught tolerance (to take one example of a liberal ideal).
I’m no Bloch expert, but I feel like he neglected to include the wealthy, German ruling elite as a group vulnerable to the tantalizations of fascism. We see it today with the ultra-rich in this country (who are largely synonymous with the ruling elite). Elon Musk, obviously. And we saw it before World War II manifested in the anti-semitism of the ruling elite in Germany, exemplified by the 1924 film, The City Without Jews. In both cases, it seems that this group, the most privileged of all, needs a scapegoat, and that’s what fascism gives them. For the German ruling elite (like the Chancellor in The City Without Jews), it was the Jews; for Republican members of the billionaire class in America, it’s immigrants taking away jobs from Americans (to be grossly reductive about it).