The result of the US presidential election has further exposed the extent to which establishment liberalism is collapsing in the face of the insurgent ‘new right’. If we can identify an underlying reason for this ongoing displacement, it lies in contrasting abilities to conceptualise the relations between capital, ‘capitalist’ and labour, and how these are managed politically.
We must entertain the idea that it’s liberals, and not the so-called ‘capitalists’ of the right, who perform a more active role in facilitating the dynamics of capital and its widespread ill effects. This may have passed liberal politicians by entirely, but the public perceives it quite implicitly, and it’ll be the main driver of the right’s popular ascendency in the coming years.
The capitalist’s bargain
There’s a lot of confusion among liberals as to how an ‘arch-capitalist’ like Donald Trump, surely the natural enemy of the dispossessed working classes, can apparently garner such popularity among lower-income voters.1 To understand this, we need to refine what we mean by a ‘capitalist’, and reframe how we think of the relationship liberals and the right have with capital itself. Doing so will help clarify how avatars of the latter come to be seen, despite their power and prosperity, as transgressives with whom the poor can positively identify.
The various characters associated with the right-wing insurgency – from politicians like Trump and Nigel Farage, to tycoons like Elon Musk, to media influencers like Andrew Tate – are broadly thought of as ‘capitalists’. Their ability to accumulate capital – and resultant personal wealth and social standing – are cornerstones of their public profiles. They are held up by their admirers as embodying the supremacy of ‘capitalism’, and they are content to bask in this glory. It’s easy, then, to think of the successful ‘capitalist’ as possessing a positive conception of capital. But this is not quite right.
Implicit in the relationship between capitalist and capital is a central tension. Central to capital’s essence is the imperative of accumulation, which inherently begets subsumption and exploitation for anyone who fails to attain the power to subsume and exploit. So, being a successful capitalist may be laudable, but capital itself is something to be overcome.
Such a sentiment permeates capitalist culture: we see everywhere the pressure of the ‘rise-and-grind’ mentality, the endless pursuit of ‘growth’ in every exhausting sense, the exploit-or-be-exploited cycle of cruelty that the atomised labour market engenders, and so on. Implicit in this mentality is a fight against something that is making all this toil-to-exist necessary. Whether recognised or not, this ‘something’ is capital itself. The paragons of this endemic hustle are thus in many ways antagonistic towards capital: they tame it, maximise the hand it deals them, exploit it for their own ends. They do not preach its virtues, but rather vaunt their own virtue in having ‘beaten’ it.
It is in Tate, perhaps the most extreme example, that we see these traits exhibited most starkly. But through this extremity he belies the truth at the core of the culture that produced him. Tate ‘doesn’t pretend that life under capitalism isn’t a scam’, as Benjamin Fogel puts it, and openly acknowledges that ‘the only way to succeed is by pushing others down and clawing your way to the top’. His infamy is predicated upon his defeat of capital. In the psychic depths of every successful capitalist is an embittered anti-capitalism. It is not that accurate, therefore, to describe this rising right as capitalist at all. ‘Post-capitalist’ would be more appropriate – they are not invested in capitalism per se, in terms of maintaining its social reproduction, but rather in milking it for all its worth as it collapses into decrepitude.
Through their success, such figures set the coordinates for ruthlessly negotiating the landscape of capitalism, demonstrating ways of ‘bargaining’ with capital in order to thrive (or at least survive) among its indentured hardships. Whether presented as an against-the-odds everyman or victorious strongman (or elements of both), each notable new-right ‘capitalist’ possesses their own variation on the same basic mission statement that tacitly posits capital itself as the ‘enemy’. It says, “the demands of capital can rip you to shreds, but follow after me and I can help you make the most of it”.2 Where they acquire political influence, provisions can be made for further, more severe shortcuts to help get ahead in the thrive-or-die society, largely by eliminating or repressing large swathes of ‘the competition’ from the market, or stripping away supposed institutional impediments to success: immigrants, women, traitorous leftists, the social state, etc.3
So the appeal here is quite simple: the right-wing ‘capitalist’ is conscious of the fundamental difficulties of modern life compounded by capital, and which economic orthodoxies cannot solve. In meeting head on the malevolence of capital, they side with the exploited who feel that malevolence acutely. This is the central bargain being made with capitalism, which the right-wing politician helps broker: as long as there is someone more exploitable, more repressed, more vulnerable than you, you have a means of survival.
Despite this having a liberatory, transgressive effect on an individual level for those lucky enough to have their exploit-or-exploited balance sheet remain in the black, this dynamic ultimately begets the same old atomisation that maintains class relations. The ‘deal’ Trump cuts with the American public implicitly states that on a collective level, exploitation and cruelty must remain, but on an individual level (and at the expense of others) a freedom is offered which is predicated on this very threat of cruelty.
This makes for a brutal politics in the long run, but in the extreme short term, for those living hand to mouth, month to month, paycheque to paycheque, this coming reality is neither here nor there. When nothing else is working, and when no workable alternatives are manifesting, this seems worth a shot.
Apologists for disaster
Liberals, of course, comprehend none of this. While the right attributes its success to ‘beating the system’, the liberal centre’s entire politics is centred around maintaining it, wilfully positing themselves as caretakers of an economic paradigm that is quite clearly failing people on the level of everyday life.
During this electoral cycle, while liberal politicians and commentators hyped up their maintenance of a ‘healthy economy’ – so confident in their handiwork that their campaign revolved around ‘not going back’ (itself a pallid retread of 2016’s disastrous ‘America is already great’ rhetoric) – the general public was living a different reality entirely.4 As Michael Roberts noted in the run-up to the election:
‘the US real GDP may be growing and financial asset prices booming, but it is a different story for the average American household, hardly any of whom own any financial assets to speculate with. Instead, while rich investors boost their wealth, under the Trump and Biden administrations Americans have experienced a horrendous pandemic followed by the biggest slump in living standards since the 1930s, driven by a very sharp rise in prices of consumer goods and services.’
This, in essence, is why the liberal project has failed, and why the post-capitalist right can appear anti-establishment by contrast. Rather than inoculating voters against capital through the empowerment of labour, liberal politicians have long tasked themselves with rescuing capitalism from a series of interminable crises. This, ultimately, does little to alleviate the worsening living standards of the vast majority of people. ‘At each juncture’, Gabriel Winant writes, ‘the Democrats have attempted restoration: to manage the crisis, carry out the bailout, stitch things back together, and try to get back to normal.’ But ‘normal’ never comes. Instead, a slow slide into increasing destitution for an increasing proportion of the electorate.5
If the right are the admired masters of capital, liberals are its feckless apologists. As mediators between capital and labour, liberalism occupies, on a grand scale, that most loathed of positions in our culture: the middle manager. It is capital that benefits from this ceaseless parade of rescue packages, while labour is weakened and living conditions worsen.6 Through this managerialism, it is liberals who wear the moniker of ‘capitalist’ more comfortably than the right, and thus it is them to whom the ire of the discontented is directed.
In its centring of capital, liberalism is thus a very inhuman politics. It is not empty sentiment, and certainly not plebeian idiocy, as many would arrogantly claim, when people accuse liberal politicians of standing for nobody and believing in nothing: their only constituency is the melted air. Is it any wonder, then, that in this political culture, it is the far right who feel more human, more real, more relatable, while the liberals become the hated establishment?
Leaving liberals behind
Nothing about the collapse of liberalism and the disastrous rise of the far right is unique to the United States. Wherever you look, you will see it. It will happen in Westminster in an election or two. It will happen in Cardiff Bay sooner than that.
Absent from this shift in power is, of course, an alternative position. Liberals may be maddeningly ignorant that they are custodians of a collapsing society, of which the right will become beneficiaries, but the ostracised left has been forever cognisant of the phenomena driving this process. In a time of accelerating permacrisis, the challenge now is for a fractured left to beat the ascendant right to the punch. The declining relevance of a dying liberalism is of no lasting concern.
As the right’s ascendency inadvertently demonstrates, the main psychic need of capitalist culture, its central desire, is for an anti-capitalism. The right has individuated this feeling – the task is to (re-)collectivise it before it’s extinguished. The need exists for a socialist project to actualise a society that the right can only simulate.7 This is, in theory, an easy project for the left imaginary to develop, because it’s the very essence of socialist thought and practice.
The challenge, however, is that the left and right are working at different temporalities. The ingredients for a leftist fightback – community resilience, workplace organisation, etc – take a long time to develop.8 This can’t be astroturfed, imposed top-down from without – such a project can only occur organically from below if it’s to have lasting success. The right, on the other hand, already has everything it needs for success: money, power, influence, a political culture well-suited for the contagion of their ideas, etc. When there is such a head-start, what hope does the left have of ever catching up? All signs point to things getting worse before they can even hope to get better. When time is against all, only the most radical solutions become practicable. What those solutions entail, time will soon tell us.
This article is also available to read on Substack
1 ‘Whilst more affluent voters shifted to the Democrats, exit polls showed an almost 15 point swing towards Trump amongst voters earning less than $50k. There was an even larger shift to the Democrats amongst those earning over $100k.’ (Adam Tooze, ‘The radicalization of Trump’s GOP and the realignment of the American electorate’, Chartbook)
2 ‘Underlying this worldview is a kind of egalitarianism: shouldn’t the common man, too, have a chance to get in on the hustle?’ (Benjamin Fogel, ‘Andrew Tate Wants Everyone to Get in on the Grift’ Jacobin)
3 ‘As taxing as modern civilization can be, then, it offers compensations of superiority. And these compensations, for those who accept them, also work as a spurious justification for violent inequality, a felt proof of its inevitability: everyone always kicks down.’ (Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, p18)
4 ‘the daily struggles of working-class Americans…are not a matter of a percentage point here or there in the consumer price index but of fundamental cost of living issues such as housing, healthcare, childcare and education.’ (Adam Tooze, ‘The Democrats’ Defeat’, London Review of Books)
5 ‘for the vast majority of US employees – whether middle class or working class, teacher or shop assistant – wages have flatlined. Not for four or even 20 years – but for most of the past half century. Strip out inflation, and average hourly earnings for seven out of 10 employees have barely risen since Richard Nixon was in the White House.’ (Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘Why did voters abandon Kamala Harris? Because they feel trapped – and Trump offered a way out’, The Guardian)
6 ‘About 75% of those voting Republican reported that they had faced “hardship” or “severe hardship” as a result of price rises; only 25% of Democrats said the same. When Trump asked if Americans felt better now than they did four years ago, the answer for most was a clear no.’ (James Meadway, ‘Soaring grocery prices helped Trump to victory. The climate crisis is only going to make this worse’, The Guardian)
7 ‘We on the Left — in our community organizing, our unions, our socialist electoral campaigns — must become the political home of those who are so rightly angry at the establishment. We can win by rejecting the agendas and sensibilities of the rich, and advancing a political agenda that will make working-class people’s lives better.’ (Liza Featherstone, ‘Liberals Are Giving Up on America’, Jacobin)
8 ‘Changes to work, to communities, to how we live, matter because class consciousness — or coherent politics — does not simply emerge from being poor, however much we might want it to. It requires conscious, boring, long-term organisation, and to be scaffolded by institutions.’ | ‘Moulding the new, inchoate class structure into the ideal proletariat would require (at least) a decades-long programme of deep organising : new unions, new community institutions, new parties.’ (Dan Evans, ‘Is The Working Class Back?’, New Socialist)
Disposable Everything 