What prompted the title and motivation for this post was an article in Salon by Anis Shivani, who according to his bio is a fiction writer, poet, and critic based in Texas. The text is rather dense, his word choices sound like that of an overeager graduate student for whom English is not his first language. But the thesis, roughly, is that Hillary Clinton cannot win because she is so closely connected to neoliberal corporate capitalism that is completely detached (or disembedded) from society and the laws that govern that society. Donald Trump is also part of capitalism but remains tethered to society because he "builds" things and his capital is therefore visible, unlike the vulture predation by the previous Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The electorate is fed up with abstraction, writes Shivani, and Hillary Clinton somehow embodies this abstraction despite all of her years of public service so the voters will punish her in the entirely symbolic act of not supporting her.
When Trump’s masses see Clinton tacking to the middle—as she undoubtedly will, rather than go for the surefire path to victory by heading left, by picking Bernie Sanders for example—the more they will detest it, which will push her only further in their direction, not in the direction that can bring victory. Clinton, because of her disembodied identity in the placeless global economy, cannot make a movement toward the direction of reality, because the equations would falter, the math would be off, the logic would be unsustainable. And that is the contradiction that the country can easily see, that is the exposed front of the abstract market that will bring about its supposed reckoning in the form of Clinton’s defeat.First off, the primary campaign has been all about pushing Hillary to the left, so I'm not sure how Shivani thinks that she will now move towards Trump's bloodthirsty masses' positions. What equations? What math and logic? Hillary is very consciously campaigning as the successor to Barack Obama, she served in two administrations that were hamstrung by having to clean up the mess of a guy named Bush and then fight like mad to simply run the Federal Government and the country against incredible obstruction and sabotage. The Obama administration did competently get the country and the economy back on track, despite absolute opposition. Sure there is a minority on the left with unrealistic expectations about governing and wanted Obama to be the anti-Bush, waving his magic wand to give them everything they wanted, but most Americans outside the drooling idiots and professional fear-mongers understood that fixing things and building things take time.
Secondly, take a look at the electoral collage map; the only votes that actually count. Hillary, the Democratic nominee, has a hefty advantage before even examining the swing states. Trump has experienced a small bump from securing his nomination that has superficially given him a small lead over Clinton in a few scattered polls. This lead will subside as the veneer of Trump assembling the support of the Republican establishment, you know the one he was squawking only recently about as hopelessly corrupt, is secured and fades from the news cycle. Then we will see that Trump was counting on the desiccated corpse of that party to do the hard work on the ground in swing states, because he is utterly lazy and completely reliant on the pliant disembedded corporate media structure to do the work for him. Sure, twenty five years of relentless attacks on her character and manufactured scandals have taken their toll on Clinton's image but Shivani seems to argue that the really existing disgust among voters for Trump will have no effect, for crying out loud states like Utah, Arizona, and Georgia might be competitive this year because of Trump's crassness. So whatever you make of Shivani's argument about the abstract market and disembedded capitalism, his conclusion is a major reach:
I expect Trump to take a national lead shortly and never relinquish it until the end. It will be easy if he keeps the libertine and destructive aspects of himself in perfect balance, seesawing from one to the other, as he has so far, appealing to an elemental fear in the country, torn apart by the abstraction of the market, to which Clinton has not the faintest hope of responding."Perfect balance"? Has Mr. Shivani ever even watched this fool who makes an ass of himself practically daily? No, the real abstraction is the fiction built by the corporate media that the two sides are somehow equally at fault. The economy, society, and politics are separate entities. Yes, there is a canopy economy (h/t James Galbraith and Charles Ferguson) that can swoop in and destroy communities and even entire nations at a whim but society can, with enough force, get the government to step in and regulate it. The damage was done in creating this predatory capitalism in the 1980s, Bill Clinton tried to stem the tide in the 1990s and failed, George W. Bush threw gasoline on the fire, and now Barack Obama has tried to put out the fire. Rome was not built in a day, nor was it rebuilt after the Visigoths sacked it and what we face in America today is a roving band of Visigothic "conservatives" constantly sacking what took almost two centuries to build. Trump is one of the Visigoths, crude, vulgar, and utterly incompetent; a reality TV star who has not actually built anything in decades. With the tiniest bit of spine Democrats from Hillary Clinton on to local offices can knock down the bullshit mountain of propaganda and corporate malfeasance of these Visigoths.
We can try, independent media is stronger now than it has been in years, or we can resign ourselves to next level defeatism like Mr. Shivani. The complex argument he laid out about Hillary representing abstraction can and should be turned around and laid at the feet of Trump, Republicans, and the corporate media structure and predators they shelter.
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