Dis Donald -Don't dismiss his supporters!

http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2017/02/letter-from-america-3/

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: February 27, 2017 Last modified: February 27, 2017

We can disrespect Donald all we like, but we can’t afford to be dis­missive. In the world of the Donald, dystopias rule. George Orwell’s 1984 shot back to the top of the US bestseller lists after White House press conferences reintroduced “alternative facts” to a waiting world, not to mention breaking news of hitherto unrecorded massacres in Bowling Green and Sweden, or his (not) record electoral vote. Trump’s massive ego is a big asset. He, and his pod-people spokespersons do not blush when reality impinges. They genuinely see five fingers when they hold up four, they see and taste the chocolate ration increasing from thirty to twenty grams. And they have always hated Eastasia.

However, we should also look at another Dystopia, Jack London’s Iron Heel. Trump’s early appearance with a select group of union leaders brought back memories of the pivotal scene in London’s book that had the Labour aristocrats signing up for the deal that would keep the Oligarchy in power for centuries, abandoning the unskilled proles to ruthless exploitation.

Trump’s chummy union leaders came from the construction industry, where Trump had famously employed, underpaid and then stiffed undocumented immigrants when he was building his fortunes. Implied as part of the deal was that they separate themselves from the strongest part of the union movement – the public-sector workers. In return they get a carbon belching oil pipeline through tribal lands and promise of bigger infrastructure spending.

But union bosses notwithstanding, Trump’s entourage includes Republican luminaries whose legislative efforts at both state and national level have reduced union density in the workforce to its lowest for a century. And those government workers are the target of particular animus by the Republican governors.

Is this just his immature desire to be loved by everyone, or is it a cunning plot to bestride the stage as the champion of the common man while positioning the oligarchs for unprecedented assaults on ordinary people’s income? I suspect it is an indeterminate quantum state, where either or both can be true at any one time, but if the people around him have their way, Oligarchy is the way to go.

Part of Trump’s caste appeal is that he is genuinely vulgar, tasteless, bullying and blustering. He lives like a billionaire but talks and acts like a redneck, and the more the “elite” on the TV talk shows mock and pillory him, the more his base backs him. The over-hyped revulsion of the punditocracy validates his attacks on them. Of course, Hillary’s term “deplorables”, was one of the many factors why the people she derided would support him.

Just as during the campaign, there is a sense of parallel universes, neither particularly well grounded in reality and rarely touching each other. But consider where they do impinge upon our world. Those plans for America’s infrastructure have been intellectually denied by the orthodox economists, media, and politicians since the days of Reagan and perpetual government austerity. Trump announced them anyway. Interestingly, Obama put a lot into infrastructure spending after the crash but kept it quiet for fear of neo­liberal attacks from both sides, so it was a stealth stimulus. He did not openly challenge the Washington consensus on economics.

To be fair, the outrage of the much vilified “Mainstream Media” – the lügenpresse (“Lying Press”) as Trump supporters loyal to his Teutonic roots call it, has something forced about it. These crusaders for journalistic standards mostly went along with all the canards about the Iraq War, and sharing the same socio-economic bubble as the Clintons, they did overlook the support for both Sanders and Trump out in the sticks. For decades they pandered to Trump’s own myth of business success, overlooking his recidivist bankruptcies. They parroted the neoliberal myths against austerity and for the banks and certainly failed to identify those pillars of the political and financial establishment who brought about the crisis of 2008.

However, those pillars are much in evidence. One does not have to subscribe to conspiracy theories for wondering how Goldman Sachs, which did so much to bring about the financial disaster of 2008 was simultaneously behind both Hillary Clinton in the election, and then could happily spare so many of its executives to fill Trump’s Washington swamp.

A crucial question is whether Trump and his team have method in their madness. Trump himself is no ideologue. Insofar as he has a world view, it’s a collection of petty prejudices which makes him the perfect partner for Nigel Farage’s taproom truisms neighed over the top of a pint glass. Despite the understandable fears of xenophobia and authoritarianism, he has shown some interesting ability to walk back on the rhetoric, precisely because his utterances are flexibly reflexive and populist and not held in place by any ideological framework. To confuse the issue, if Trump on Mexicans and Muslims worries you, do not delve into Jack London on Asians and Africans!

While we join protests at the airport in the big cities, out there in the sticks, the overlooked deplorables can legitimately wonder, “Where were all these urban egg­heads when we lost our jobs, healthcare and homes?” We can disrespect Donald all we like, but we can’t afford to be dismissive.

Welcome to the Orwellian Nightmare and Worse

 Tribune 10 January 2014


Anniversaries are the base for many a column, and surely 30 years after 1984, the world’s most memorable dystopia is a solid foundation for this one. Orwell derived many of the ideas for Nineteen Eighty-Four from his observations of wartime London and the geopolitics of the Second World War. This year is also the 70th anniversary of 1944, a turning point of war which provided fodder for many of the essays of Tribune’s most illustrious literary contributor. There were unlikely to be any memory holes in Tribune’s office, but he certainly saw the equivalent in the BBC where he worked, and while Tribune could not run to a canteen, the Beeb’s seems to have “inspired” him with the colour (grey) for the Ministry of Truth’s equivalent, as did the University of London’s brutalist Senate Tower looming over Bloomsbury in which he located the Ministry.
Orwell saw how prototype technologies could be applied to tyranny. The ominous potential of helicopters was later demonstrated in places such as Chile, Vietnam and Afghanistan. In many parts of the world, drones drop their bomb loads with enough frequency of inaccuracy to be almost random, like the rockets that hit Airstrip One – and Orwell’s wartime London. He noted that newspapers did not report the V1 hits then. If alive now, he might notice that their contemporary equivalents go almost as unreported in the country that sends them.
The ubiquity of remote cameras and concealed microphones on the British streetscape has now been surpassed by the National Security Agency and its British comrades in scrutiny, whose surveillance exceeds the most fevered dreams of the Thought Police. And Fox News, with its braying 24 hours of hate, makes Big Brother’s two-minute hate sessions as inconsequential as quinquennial party political broadcasts.
It was perhaps a singular omission on Orwell’s part to miss water boarding from the repertoire of Room 101, but then maybe it was illiteracy on the part of the American torturers that they had not read Orwell and so missed out on the rat thing. But one supposes that setting dogs to lunge at named prisoners is almost as ghoulishly imaginative.
However, a successful dystopia conveys an atmosphere, a pervasive miasma of discomfort and fear, rather than a technological blueprint for the future, and none does as well as Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sadly, it is that aspect which Orwell got so right.
It has now become almost thoughtcrime to voice the self-evident truths that between the end of the Second World War and the advent of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher gave the West in general and even the United States the highest rate of economic growth and general prosperity in history. Although far from perfect, governmental involvement in economic planning, engineered equalisation of earnings, the rich paying proportionately more taxes, public provision of social goods, culture, health, education, even power and transport. Now, across the West, mesmerised elites ignore the results of this massive real time experiment, in which redistributive policies led to increasing prosperity for the majority for a quarter of a century.
That was when refugees from the McCarthy purges could come to Britain and continue to work and write, and a little later Harold Wilson could keep Britain out of the Vietnam War. Now the draft dodgers and witch hunt victims would probably be lucky to be extradited back to the US, but equally likely to be “renditioned” to torturers in regimes until recently expedient allies but now tyrants whom, of course, we now have always opposed.
Since Tony Blair went into Iraq in pursuit of an abstraction – international terrorism that was not there, and ignored the popular vote for an end to Thatcherism, the state of Airstrip One makes one almost long for the halcyon days of the 1960s. That Labour victory was a huge opportunity to exorcise the immiserating ghosts of Gradgrind from our political discourse.
It would have Orwell coughing and spluttering in his English churchyard to see how his dystopia has come so close to realisation, while the society that he critically supported at its inception with the Labour victory has, in retrospect, become almost utopian.
Happy 1984 + 30.