Combatting Trump

We’ve all been watching the Trump campaign in slow motion, wondering when the train will finally jump the track and plummet into the abyss.  The problem is that we’ve miscalculated just what kind of event we’re watching.  We have tried, Hillary has tried, the punditry and media has tried to frame the Trump campaign as a ‘political’ event, and it’s not.  ‘Politics’ is a frame we use to privilege a rational and policy driven enterprise which is largely, but not entirely, run by elites.  Most people don’t really participate in it (except to vote every now and then) and really don’t care for it that much (which probably says something inherently positive about them).   Trump is none of these things.  Trump is ‘molar.’

In their seminal work, A Thousand Plateaus, the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Felix Guattari describe word orders as existing in two types.  The first is molecular – a stratified and solidified kind of order that is stable and predictable.  There is an affective domain inside of it, but the way we talk about it walls that off and leaves only the rational traces of the event.  Our ‘politics’ is a molecular word order, and most people recognize the limited dynamic at play.  The other kind of word order is ‘molar.’  Molar events “flow” because they have broken out of the static confines of their rational containers and are sent pouring out into the culture breaking down the word orders and practices that used to stabilize them. (I know this analysis would get a D at best on the midterm).   I think the only way to understand the Trump phenomenon is recognize it as a ‘molar’ event, all affect and emotion.

For months the Democrats, the media and even a good number of Republicans have been waiting for the ‘normal’ rules of politics to kick in and stop Trump.  The problem with that is that Trump could never exist if those word domains were intact.  Trump can only exist when the linguistic structures around politics have been breached by something too intense and too emotional to qualify as ‘political.’  Molar flows are ‘nomadic,’ seeking a new constellation and a new order, and they cannot be contained or understood from the molecular standpoint that they broke away from.  The ugly emotional content of the Trump campaign doesn’t need reason or logic or even consistency to validate it.  The people who believe are validated by the simple fact they believe.  This emotional stew has always been a part of American politics, even being hinted at occasionally by unscrupulous politicians who use ‘dog whistles’ to signal their followers.  In a normal political season, that’s as far as they can go.  The emergence of Trump means that the dam broke and that we have gone from a normal political campaign to something very different and much more dangerous.

Pointing out Trump’s flaws, besides being a never ending activity, is largely useless.  Everyone who is using normal political reasoning to calculate their vote has already done so.  If truth or logic or competence where the answer, the race would already be over.  The fact that it is far from over, means that it is time to realize what is happening and combat it in the only effective way we can, with a molar event of our own.  Hillary and her surrogates were at their best during their convention.  They waved flags, gave emotional speeches, and brought people to their feet.  Khizr Khan moved a nation with his direct and indignant rebuttal to Trump.  Then Hillary went back to being Hillary, perhaps the perfect embodiment of a ‘molecular’ politician.  I don’t mean that as a slight, but she is not an emotional politician (and given the sexism in the electorate, may not be able to afford to be one).  But the answer to Trumpism is not rational or policy driven – the answer is to call on the potential molar powers that the convention displayed with powerful effect.

The campaign is in the home stretch and a lot is at stake.  Even if you have, as I do, reservations about Clinton’s connections to crony capitalism and the overly militaristic view of the world she seems to promote – the list could go on – this is no time to quibble.  As Bernie himself said, there is really no viable alternative to Hillary becoming president.  She has to find a positive and emotional message and forsake the notion that Trump can be held accountable in a traditional political calculus.  The media has to stop chasing every new shiny thing Trump says and does and focus on the themes that make us a democracy – although one certainly at peril.  If they can’t stop fixating on the carnival and focus on the larger issues, the media, and the political establishment will be swept away by the pyroclastic flow we call Trump.