Trump’s Catastrophism, and the Left’s

Donald Trump is our catastrophist-in-chief. On the campaign trail, he portrayed America in crisis, a waning empire on the brink of collapse. He characterized ObamaCare as a "total disaster" and a "catastrophe" that was "ready to explode" and threatened to leave millions "doomed." Having conjured this specter, he positioned himself as the sole redeemer who could save us from it: "I will fix it. Hillary can't!" His solution? "Let Obamacare implode."1 Trump's dystopian inaugural address, written largely by Steve Bannon, painted a dark image of "American carnage" that his "law and order" presidency would end. His paranoid talking points of "illegals pouring into our country" and manufactured terrorist threats have stoked racist fears and generated pseudo-crises that distract from the crisis of his administration itself.

Trump's invented catastrophes keep coming. Most recently, he cast the "caravan" of migrants making their way through Mexico as a "crisis" and "invasion," a ploy designed to stoke anti-immigrant animus and justify ever more drastic security, detention, and surveillance measures at the southern border.2 Characterizing the border as a "dangerous, horrible disaster" has helped justify Trump's executive order denying the right of asylum for anyone who enters the country illegally—even as this violates immigration law and due process.3 As a recent New York Times editorial put it, Trump "creates nonexistent threats, generates manufactured fears and prepares exaggerated responses, all leading to an erosion of the rule of law, to feed more fears."4

Taking a step back from the falsity and danger of Trump's claims and promises, we must recognize the winning rhetorical logic of his catastrophism. Material disasters generate fear and call for restoring order and rebuilding, but every catastrophe—literally a symbolic "overturning"—lies in need of redemption: the restorative promises to bring back coal and manufacturing jobs, to kick out the "illegals," to revive white America, to Make America Great Again. Trump has an almost poetic ability to generate catastrophic scenarios in which he alone can play the savior.

But the Left has a long tradition of catastrophizing, too, from agitating for better social and economic conditions, to calling out forms of oppression, exploitation, and less visible "slow violence," to generating mass movements in response to economic crisis, imperialist atrocities from Vietnam to Guantanamo, and police killings of unarmed black men. In the wake of the 2016 election, no one knew what a Trump presidency would hold in store, and, convinced that Trump was Hitler—or would be very soon—prominent liberal intellectuals rang all the alarms in sight. Chief among them was the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, whose anti-Trump manifesto On Tyranny began as a viral Facebook post and was published as a pocket-sized book a month after Trump's inauguration and the Women's March. Picking up Snyder's analogies to the Reichstag Fire that secured Hitler's dictatorship, Paul Krugman soon implored his readers to know what they will do "when the fire comes," fearfully noting that "after 9/11, the overwhelming public response" was not critique but "to rally around the commander in chief."5 Panicked analogies between Trump and the rise of fascism in the 1930s—most recently Madeline Albright's 2018 Fascism: A Warning—gave every anti-Trumper what they wanted to hear. But at the same time this inflationary rhetoric impaired genuine understanding of Trump and the conditions that made his rise possible.

Nearly two years into Trump's presidency, the idea that an authoritarian coup is around the corner seems bunk. Nonetheless, Snyder and other liberal alarmists have hardly changed their tunes. Pressed in February 2018 to draw up the bill on his year of apocalyptic prognoses, Snyder said, "My allusion to the Reichstag fire was meant to be a self-defeating prophecy. I was trying from the very beginning to get that idea out there in order to make it less likely."6 Yet he then moved on to a new horror scenario: Trump using the Russia investigation "to discredit the election and use Russian interference as a pretext to say that the elections aren't real and therefore we must not have any turnover." In October, he renewed the Hitler analogy yet again, focusing on Trump's "fascist tricks" from peddling antisemitic ideas to attacking the press.7

Snyder is right that the outcome of Trump's presidency depends on how it is resisted. But if his readers have been schooled to await tanks in the streets and the Capitol in flames, how will they resist subtler damage to our democracy? Fascist analogies are not only no longer accurate; they also function as dangerous deflection from self-scrutiny. Casting Trump as a "Russian client" who intruded into American history sidelines long legacies of domestic racism and authoritarianism to which Americans must own up.8 Snyder's latest book, The Road to Unfreedom, argues that history is not inevitable and that we must take responsibility for shaping it. But that would require probing our own recent past, not turning away to spectacles centering on Hitler and Putin.

If the crisis-laden rhetoric of the "Weimar analogy" can only lead us astray, how should we frame the genuinely catastrophic dimensions of Trump's presidency?9 How might critical catastrophism counter both rightwing fearmongering and liberal hysteria? The starting point of such a critical view is to recognize and refuse to normalize what Walter Benjamin called the "permanent catastrophe" of bourgeois liberalism: Trump is not the source of all our woes, and purging him through investigations is only a first step toward addressing this catastrophe's underlying causes. A critical view also entails rejecting the slogan "Trumpism = Fascism!" as well as the crises invented by Trump himself, in which the status quo is framed as so catastrophic that even the most repressive and reactionary means seem justified so long as they restore the illusion of order.

Since Trump's unexpected election, the prominent Leftist intellectuals Corey Robin and Samuel Moyn have continually emphasized that Trump has enacted little in the way of authoritarianism. As Robin instructs his social media flock: "Think Trump is an authoritarian? Look at his actions, not his words."10 If we do that, we see that since being constrained by his office, Trump has essentially pursued a traditional Republican agenda of neoconservative and neoliberal policies that can be traced back to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the Bushes. He has not seized power for himself so much as ceded power to elites: to the wealthy via tax breaks, to corporations via neoliberal deregulation, and to private interests via partisan institutional corruption. As Matthew Yglesias writes, "the trouble comes not from a populist demagogue trampling on institutional constraint," but from the older problem of "countermajoritarian institutions"—like the Senate and a partisan Supreme Court—"being deployed to stymie popular will."11 As Dylan Riley recently argued in New Left Review, one of the many reasons Trump is not a fascist is that he is not supported by a powerful mass movement.12 His few power grabs such as wielding executive power against immigrants to forcing the construction of a border wall have enjoyed little popular support and largely been checked by the courts and Congress. Far from a sudden intrusion of fascism, Trump has advanced, in Moyn's words, "social conservatism in the courts and neoliberalism in economics, which sadly has been shared by the Democratic Party in the past generation."13

Stressing continuities between Trump and the conservatives who elected him, Robin turned to a 1939 essay by the Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer, who wrote that "whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism."14 Horkheimer's point was that Nazism didn't come from nowhere: it arose out of the failures of liberal democracy's alliance with capitalism. As Robin aptly reprised, "Whoever is not prepared to talk about Bushism should also remain silent about Trumpism."15 In the longer lineage of conservatism Robin traces in The Reactionary Mind, Trump appears as yet another "reinvention of Bush and the neocons, the very fanatics and ideologues we once believed were a break from the past."16 For Robin, Trump's chief innovation is the weaponization of well-established forms of racism, nativism, and ruling-class dominance.17 Even the liberal Vox critic Ezra Klein, whom Robin frequently criticizes, came around to admitting that the best analogy to Trump is neither Hitler nor Nixon, but George W. Bush's devastating 2005 reelection.18 The question, Robin asks, is "at what point do we start treating these incarnations as the rule rather than the exception?"

The crimes of the Bush administration and our ongoing "forever wars" in the Middle East have by now been so normalized that they no longer inspire popular indignation.19 Two months into Trump's presidency, "Dubya" could be seen on The Ellen Degeneres Show cracking jokes, dancing, and discussing his paintings of dogs with America's liberal sweetheart.20 Will Ferrell was thus inspired to reprise his Bush impersonation on Saturday Night Live: "I just wanted to address my fellow Americans tonight and remind you guys that I was really bad. Like, historically not good." Robin rejects the false economy that has emerged in which "any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then"—whereby those warning against normalizing Trump have in turn normalized Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.21 In doing so, they obfuscate the long-term damage wrought by money in politics, accelerating inequality, and accompanying "status resentments," which have been eroding our democracy long before the specific threat of Trump.

A few months into Trump's presidency, Moyn and fellow historian David Priestland wrote in a powerful New York Times op-ed that "Trump Isn't a Threat to Our Democracy, Hysteria Is," arguing that liberals' alarmist cries of fascism distract from longer-term "social and economic problems" such as accelerating inequality, which they see as "the real source of danger."22 In other words, it is a category error to analyze our present crisis of liberal democracy as if it were totally divorced from a broader crisis of neoliberal capitalism. The structural outlook I am proposing thus follows thinkers including Moyn, Robin, Pankaj Mishra, Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown, and the late Moishe Postone in lengthening the temporality of our present crisis to well before Trump's election; in turn, it resituates our precarious present as the culmination of long processes of "slow violence" (Rob Nixon), "slow death" (Lauren Berlant), and "slow disaster" (Scott Knowles)—including the mounting threat of disasters related to climate change.

In this sense, Trump is a true catastrophe—from the Greek for "downturn" or "overturning": His victory was the apparently sudden and unexpected outcome of a historical process that turned out to be a much longer story than most initially thought. The abrupt revelation of Trump's election was shocking, but it only revealed the slow catastrophe that was there all along. For Oedipus, such a catastrophe was destiny; luckily for us it's just the unhappy contingency of recent political history.

To understand how we got here, we need more critical analysis like Wendy Brown's that addresses race, gender, and cultural resentments together with political economy on a global scale.23 Recognizing the global nature of right-wing populism today—from India, to Hungary, to Brazil—is enough to illustrate that our present catastrophe is not a matter of a single authoritarian personality. The short-term liberal view of catastrophe calls primarily for superficial solutions like impeachment. The critical and long-term Left view of catastrophe calls for concrete structural transformations.

Leftist rhetoric of catastrophe is often dismissed as alarmist, but it can greatly enhance our powers of critical perception by bringing into focus the normalized, structural catastrophes simmering all around us. Iconic disasters are not the only events deserving of critical attention; we must also be able to see the "permanent catastrophe" of history as usual.24 Hence the task of the critical intellectual, Benjamin wrote, was to develop this insight into a philosophy of history that learned from "the tradition of the oppressed" to see that "the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule."25 As if addressing Clinton supporters blindsided by Trump's election, Benjamin denounced the Whiggish optimism of bourgeois liberals in his own time who saw progress as the norm and were shocked that fascism was "still" possible. It is precisely this naïve optimism, he wrote, that gives fascism a chance in the first place.

The aim of critical theory, as Brown has written, is to turn "crisis into knowledge, to orient us in darkness" and to thereby generate new, previously unthinkable courses of action.26 Immanent critique of our social world is the starting point for such imaginative work: it denaturalizes the world around us, reawakening the thirst for freedom that has become deadened with time. After Trump's election, taking to the streets in protest was an essential first step to galvanize resistance; yet such calls to action are no substitute for the critical work of generating alternatives.

In the midst of the social upheaval of 1968, Benjamin's friend Theodor Adorno was called upon to endorse the demands of Leftist student activists. He refused, defending the priority of theory over the "actionism" and "pseudo-activity" of the students' violent tactics.27 Whatever the students might do to raise hell, he said that he, as a theorist "not afraid of the term 'ivory tower,'" was in no position to instruct them. "Philosophy cannot in and of itself recommend immediate measures or changes," he wrote. "It effects change precisely by remaining theory."28 Against the students' demands of praxis, Adorno argued that theory constitutes its own form of "resistance."29 Yet Adorno overlooked the centrality of activism in transforming historical imagination, articulating political claims, and building new collectives. As Razmig Keucheyan explained after the election: "There is a famous line in Lenin saying that 'without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.'" Theory, he writes, has two aims: "to join together struggles that are apparently unrelated, and also as a compass in periods of crisis. It is what tells you whether in this precise moment you should be smashing up banks or standing in elections."30 In a Marxian nod to Kant, we might say that theory without practice is empty, while practice without theory is blind.

In a famous 1937 essay, Horkheimer conceived of critical theory as the realization of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which called for philosophers to stop merely trying to understand the world and start trying to change it by putting their theories into practice. As opposed to the "traditional theory" of idealist philosophy and positivist social science, a critical theory of society was to take as its aim human emancipation from domination, first of all from repressive structures of the bourgeois family, exploitative wage labor, authoritarian politics, and racism.31

Guided by the aim of emancipation from immanent sources of domination, critical theory has from the outset called for different targets and alliances depending upon historical circumstances. Bruno Latour has called upon critical thinkers to think of themselves like generals on an intellectual battlefield forced to confront the reality that the old tools and tactics of their "critical arsenal" are no longer working and may even be fueling their enemies.32 He implores them to go beyond subtracting from the objects of their critique—fetishism, illusions, veiled interests—and to add something to them: "Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would put it?" Michel Foucault similarly argued that critique is more than a negative instrument for eradicating errors: It is an intellectual attitude driven by interlocking imperatives and commitments. "There is something in critique which is akin to virtue."33

Two prominent Leftist intellectuals' responses to Trump model the Latourian shifts we must each make to our own intellectual praxis. Before the election, Judith Butler remained critical of the state and police owing to their role in the growing precarity and disposability of black, brown, queer, and transgender lives. After the election, however, she remarked that "we now have a burgeoning resistance movement of civil servants, state officials, and police departments who are refusing to implement deportation plans and travel bans. Those are our new allies."34 This does not signal some rightward shift, nor is it inconsistent with her earlier positions critical of state power. Rather, it represents a progressive conservativism—of democratic norms, of just practices, of decency—that was called for by critique in that particular moment. Butler's mode of critique (albeit overshadowed by her problematic defense of Avital Ronell) shows us that it is possible to do both "negative" and "positive" intellectual work at the same time—to keep the permanent catastrophe in view yet pursue strategic solutions as they arise.

Cornel West has similarly made clear his own shifting commitments. After Trump's inauguration, he remarked that the most important question facing the Resistance is, "Who will you tolerate in your coalition against tyranny?" Unlikely friendships across the political spectrum are one of West's hallmarks. But he famously draws battle lines, too: in 2008, he campaigned for Obama in hopes of advancing racial justice, but his endorsement soured within months. West became a Cassandra of the Obama era, calling out liberals who overlooked its illegal drone strikes, record deportations of immigrants, and neoliberal policies resulting in accelerating inequality. In later critiquing Clinton, West rejected the false fusion of what Nancy Fraser calls "progressive neoliberalism," which couples liberal social recognition with neoliberal economic policies that disproportionally harm people of color.35

Not incidentally, West frames the advance of neoliberalism, racist state violence, and the growing prison-industrial complex as one continuous catastrophe: "There's never been a 'negro problem' in America; it's been a catastrophe visited on black people...Ferguson's not a 'problem,' it's a catastrophe—there's human beings down there!"36 West's catastrophism echoes Biblical prophets who respond to injustice with utter indignation: he generates alarm about unjust social conditions that have become tragically normalized. Inspired by Christian and revolutionary traditions alike, West heeds Benjamin's call to ground his philosophy of history in "the tradition of the oppressed"; as he often cites Adorno, "the need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth."37 West calls Trump "a neo-fascist catastrophe,"38 but also says he is "as American as cherry pie"39—an intensification of the "American Empire" West has spoken out against for decades.

The trouble is that Trump also thinks the state of black America is a "disaster," but comes to opposite conclusions: calling for "stop and frisk" and characterizing nonviolent Black Lives Matter demonstrators as "rioters." West's victims are Trump's "garbage."

The challenge is to prevent these opposing catastrophic outlooks from collapsing into the false equivalence that plagued Trump's refusal to condemn neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. Such outbreaks can help disclose, if only negatively, what a better condition would look like. A key insight of Adorno's "negative dialectics" is that there is no truth or beauty "except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better."40 Catastrophes are not accidents to be overlooked in the name of emancipatory hopes, but rather the very starting-point of critical thought. While the Right reifies and naturalizes that violent negativity, the Left must transform it into a demand for alternatives.

Rooted in particular injustices, but able to discern links between them, critique helps us suture individual grievances together into calls for collective justice. The additive critique Latour called for entails building new "performative assemblies"41 rooted in understanding that genuine "solidarity...means acting from the recognition that you have been pitted against someone who is not your enemy by someone who is."42 Seeking a way past the impasse of the West-Coates debate, Naomi Klein and Opal Tometi thus called for an intersectional, movement-based Left that could "build a multiracial human rights movement capable of beating back surging white supremacy and rapidly concentrating corporate power."43 Critique's positive task is to take up new ideas, expand them, and link them together to disclose new possibilities from causes of those already organizing.

Wary as the critical tradition is of the notion of progress, I want to end with a word about hope. One of the most startling statistics to come out of the election is the pessimism of Trump voters, who suffer from what has been called a "hope gap."44 Better correlated with voting for Trump than widely-discussed economic factors is the belief that the American way of life is in decline. A striking 68% of Trump voters reported that the next generation of Americans "will be worse off" than we are today, whereas nearly the same proportion of Clinton voters thought it would be better off. Make America Great Again was never a vision of a better future; it is simply a past invented as panacea for a catastrophized present.The hope of many Clinton voters was surely naïve and complacent, yet their basic commitment to striving for a better future with others, the generational renewal of political life that Hannah Arendt called natality, is the sine qua non of democracy. We can no longer return to blind faith in progress, but we can work, following Adorno, toward the minimal aims of "the prevention of total catastrophe" and building a society in which fewer people live in fear.45

Both real and invented catastrophes will keep coming. Yet as Naomi Klein's work on the "shock doctrine" has taught us, catastrophes are also political opportunities: exceptional moments when sedimented forms of life, consciousness, and political machinery are suddenly destabilized. The task of critique is to seize such moments of overturning to highlight regressive dimensions of the status quo and to imagine and advance progressive alternatives. Trump's catastrophism ultimately supplies emancipatory critique with a clear image of its task, if only negatively: a world without rising state violence, inequality, and sea levels—without another Trump. For this less catastrophic future there is hope, and critique must sustain it.

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Jonathon Catlin is a Ph.D. Candidate in modern European intellectual history at Princeton University. He works on intellectual responses to catastrophe, especially in German-Jewish thought and the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

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