Critically, Trump's: Early Frankfurt School Theory and Authoritarian Populism (original) (raw)

Presentation at November 2019 Deakin event on Eurasianism and the Globalization of the Far Right: There is good reason to consider the work and ideas of first generation Frankfurt School thinkers in the context of an examination of critical responses to the return of the “populist”, “neo” or “postfascist Right”. This is that their own theoretical developments from around 1930, and the larger research program of the School, was diverted by the ascendancy of Hitler and the Third Reich. Increasingly, these thinkers were drawn to inquire urgently about the economic, social and ideological preconditions for this rise, the popular and psychological bases of fascist support, and the nature and features of this form of reactionary political radicalism. A second reason for the particular interest of these thinkers in the present conjuncture is that the Frankfurt School was conceived on a socialist and materialist, post-Marxist program. One of the great paradoxes of the last decades of what is called the neoliberal era on the Left, or that of “globalism” in the Alt-right, is that it has seen the most marked increase in economic inequality globally, and as such a fantastic intensification of the power of an ever smaller group of economic elites (the fabled “1%”, etc.). Nevertheless, at the same time, politics has increasingly become preoccupied by exclusively “cultural” concerns: interminable cultural wars of ‘mutually assured outrage’ pitting forms of progressive, mostly urban-based identity movements (concerned with race, gender and sexuality) and ecological activists against neoliberal, neoconservative, and now openly antiliberal or ‘Alt-right’ forms of reaction, including what proponents call ‘white’ or ‘European’ ‘identitarian’ movements, appealing via compliant media (and now social media) notably to lower middle class urban audiences, as well as the typically more socially conservative rural vote. Faced with the return of the Far Right, firstly in Europe throughout the 1990s, and increasingly robustly after 11 September 2001 and the 2007-2008 GFC, there seem good reasons to contest the ascendancy of any ‘culture only’ approach to understanding our political moment: a focus on language, discourse, signifiers, identities, representation, texts, to the exclusion of economic, political and social factors. Faced with today's increasingly dark conjuncture, there is a simple explanatory need that arises when we ask the why now? question concerning how Donald Trump could have made it near the White House, except to try to buy or sell it. Why also does pointing out Trump's real institutional and moral infamies only seem to animate him and his "base", when only fifty years ago Nixon by contrast felt obliged to leave the White House? So, again: why such a change, so quickly? Could it be only “cultural” in nature, without referring to the changed material conditions that face Americans, Australasians and Europeans, in which economic sovereignty has increasingly been stripped from governments through the internationalization of markets, the power of capital to simply “flee” (or “downgrade”) any nation that makes progressive social reforms is an open secret, unionization is at historic lows, relatively stable manufacturing jobs have been relocated en masse to lower-wage ‘developing’ countries, social and educational services have been privatized and hollowed out whilst their recipients have faced decades-long campaigns to present them as an unacceptable cost burden, wage share in national GDPs has declined (and the share of the middle classes in this share has declined), there has been a vast intergenerational wealth transfer away from the young, including in this country, at the same time as multiculturalism has advanced at historically rapid rates, in alliance with the new imperatives of economic globalization? Don't these new time demand interdisciplinary collaborative research programs, of the kind Horkheimer initially envisaged?