Trump, fascism, and the construction of "the people": An interview with Judith Butler

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Trump, fascism, and the construction of "the people": An interview with Judith Butler

By Christian Salmon / 29 December 2016

Christian Salmon's interview with Judith Butler first appeared in Mediapart. Translated by David Broder.

via Flickr.

What does Donald Trump represent? The American philosopher Judith Butler, professor at Berkeley University, has recently published a short book in French, Rassemblement [Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly]. She explains that Donald Trump incarnates a new form of fascism. As she puts it, "A lot of people are very happy to see this disturbing, unintelligent guy parading around as if he was the centre of the Earth and winning power thanks to this posture." 

Many writers and intellectuals in the United States and Europe have expressed their views on the Trump phenomenon; mostly to express their consternation or their reprobation, condemning the excesses of his language or expressing their alarm at his proposals to build a wall on the Mexican border or to expel millions of undocumented migrants. But if we are to try to understand what is going on with "Trump" — the Trump phenomenon — then we need to bear in mind the analyses that Judith Butler has elaborated since the late 1990s, from her Excitable Speech, A Politics of the Performative to her latest book, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.

Mediapart: Might we say that Donald Trump is a sort of "figure in the carpet" of the analyses you have been producing over the last two decades? Is Trump not a "Butlerian object" par excellence

Judith Butler: I am not sure that Trump is a very good object for the analyses that I usually conduct. For example, I do not think that there is a fascination for Trump as a person. And when we look at his speeches, we also have to consider more particularly the effects this discourse has on a certain fringe of the American people. Let us not forget that he was elected by less than a quarter of the population, and that he is on the brink of becoming president only thanks to the existence of an archaic Electoral College.

So we should not imagine that Trump enjoys wide popular support. There is a general disillusionment with the political field and a certain scorn for the two main US parties. But Hillary Clinton got more votes than Trump. So when we ask about the support for Trump, we should also ask ourselves how it was that a minority of Americans was able to bring him to power.  What we need to interrogate is not an upsurge of popular support [for Trump], but a democratic deficit. The Electoral College should be abolished so that our elections more clearly reflect the popular will. I also believe that our political parties should be rethought in order to increase popular participation in the democratic process.

The minority that supported Trump, the minority allowing him this electoral success, was able to achieve its goal not only thanks to its own rejection of the political field but also the fact that almost 50% of the electorate expressed their disaffection by not going out to vote. Perhaps we ought to speak of the collapse of democratic participation in the United States. 

I think that Trump unleashed a rage that has many causes and many targets, and we should probably be sceptical of those who claim to know the true cause, the one single object of this anger. The state of economic devastation and disappointment and the loss of hope for the future — born of economic and financial movements that have decimated whole communities — certainly did play an important role. But so, too, did the United States’ increasing demographic complexity, as well as forms of racism both old and new… There is a desire for "firmness," expressed through the strengthening of state power against foreigners and undocumented workers, but this is also accompanied by a desire for greater freedom from the burden of government: a slogan simultaneously serving both individualism and the market.

The clearest point of comparison between Trump and fascism — if any such comparison can be made — concerns the relation between the leader and the masses who produce him. Fundamentally, the big fascist leaders were not the inventors of fascism, but they did seize control of a certain scenario in which the petty bourgeoisie or middling bourgeoisie really struggled to deal with its declining class status after the defeat and the crisis of the 1920s, and expressed its frustration through its hatred for the proletariat. Recently I had a chance find, an old text of Trotsky’s in which he talks about the fascist leader. I thought this provided a good description of the Trump phenomenon: "His political thoughts were the fruits of oratorical acoustics. That is how the selection of slogans went on. That is how the program was consolidated. That is how the 'leader' took shape out of the raw material." Can’t we say the same of Trump?

Perhaps this is the right moment to draw a distinction between the old and new forms of fascism. What you describe belongs to the European fascism of the mid-twentieth century. With Trump we are faced with a different situation, albeit one I would nonetheless still characterise as fascist. On the one hand, Trump is rich while most who voted for him are not. And yet workers identified with him — he made use of the system, and he succeeded.

We might take the example of his ability to take advantage of his debts in order to avoid having to pay taxes. Hillary Clinton was mistaken to think that ordinary people who do pay their taxes would be outraged by this. On the contrary, he won their admiration for succeeding in finding a means of avoiding paying taxes. They wanted to be that person, too! The fascist side does nonetheless appear when he arrogates to himself the power to expel millions of people or even to send Hillary to jail as soon as he assumes office (a point he has now turned back on), to break trade agreements at will, to insult the Chinese government, and to call for the reintroduction of "waterboarding" — asphyxia by drowning — and other forms of torture.

When he talks like this he acts as if he had the exclusive power to decide foreign policy, to decide who goes to prison, to decide who will be expelled, what trade deals will be honoured, which foreign policies will be violated and which will be endorsed.

Similarly, when he states that he would punch or kill someone blocking his way in a crowd, he reveals a murderous desire that — to be honest — resonates among a lot of people. When he normalises non-consensual sex or characterises Hillary as a "nasty woman" he gives voice to a well-established misogyny, and when he paints Mexican immigrants as murderers he is once again voicing a very old racism. Many of us took his arrogance, his ridiculous self-importance, his racism, his misogyny, and his unpaid taxes, for self-destructive character traits, but in fact they really excited many of those who voted for him. No one is sure whether he has read the Constitution, or even whether he cares. This arrogant indifference is what attracts people to him. And that is a fascist phenomenon. If he transforms words into actions, then we will have a fascist government.

Donald Trump did not campaign in poetry or in prose — as in the old saying coined by Mario Cuomo — but, like all fascist leaders, in argot. He invented his own sociolect, a mix of jokes, funny faces, scatological allusions, complaints, slogans and imprecations. His rhetoric corresponds to a sort of ‘branding’ based on exclusion. He communicates less by structured discourse than by signals, an amalgam of slogans and insults brandished as a massive weapon for delegitimising minorities. How would you analyse Donald Trump’s slogan in TheApprentice — "You’re Fired"?

Once again this language act presumes that he alone is able to deny people their employment, their position or their power. So part of what he succeeds in doing is to communicate a sense of power that he has in fact delegated to himself. That is precisely what language-acts like the one you mention constitute. We should also bear in mind that the anger against cultural elites is taking the form of anger against feminism, against the civil rights movement, against religious and cultural diversity. These different causes appear as so many "superego" constraints weighing down on racist and misogynist passions.

What Trump has done is to "release" the hatred against social movements and against anti-racist public discourse. With Trump, everyone is free to hate. He put himself in the position of a man prepared to run the gauntlet of public condemnation for his racism and sexism — and he survived it. His supporters also want to be unashamed in their racism, hence the sudden increase in hate crimes in the streets and on public transport immediately after the election. People felt "free" to bark their racism as they saw fit. So given that, how can we free ourselves of this "liberator" Trump?

If we concentrate too much on rhetoric we risk forgetting a second dimension: the very great "corporeity" of his performances at rallies or talk shows. It is not worth saying anything more about his haircut and his "orangeness," but beyond that there is also the way he moves his hands and his mouth, a mannerism expressed in zany face-pulling, overblown gestures, a form of over-exhibition of his body, particular to the universe of tele-reality. Surely the naked statues of Trump that spread across public squares in cities around America sanctioned a sort of kitsch sacrality, aiming at a sort of hateful contagion, a corporeal provocation… Seeing this I thought of a line from Kafka, "One of the most effective means of temptation that Evil possesses is the challenge to struggle against it." How would you analyse this "reality TV" character breaking through onto the political stage?

It seems clear that the presidency has increasingly become a media phenomenon. One question is how many people treated the vote as they would a decision on Facebook: like whether or not to click "Like." Trump occupies screen space, becoming a threatening figure. We saw this in the satire of Trump on Saturday Night Live where Alec Baldwin wanders around the stage, apparently preparing to attack Hillary from behind. This kind of threatening, imminent power also draws on his acts of sexual harassment. He goes where he wants, says what he wants, and takes what he wants. So even if he is not charismatic in the traditional sense of the term he does gain personal power and stature by occupying the screen like this.

In this sense, he gives off the image of someone who breaks the rules, does what he wants, rakes in money, and has sex when — and with whom — he wants. Vulgarity fills the screen, just as it wants to fill the world. And a lot of people are very happy to see this disturbing, unintelligent guy parading around as if he was the centre of the Earth and winning power thanks to this posture.

Having been accused of lying, Trump defended himself by saying that he practised what he called "truthful hyperbole," "an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion." European media are increasingly using the expression "post-truth politics" to designate the blurring of true and false, reality and fiction that Hannah Arendt described as a property of totalitarianism. In this view, social media have created a new context characterised by the appearance of independent news bubbles, creating a sort of news echo-chamber allowing for the wildest rumours, conspiracy theories and lies to spread. Indeed, it is inaccessible to media fact checking. During his campaign Trump was able to address his little republics of resentment via Twitter and Facebook, and federate them into an over-excited "wave." What do you think of this concept of "post-truth politics"?

In a certain sense I can’t believe that these are Trump’s own words. They seem like the words of someone trying to normalise and even applaud his cavalier relationship with the truth. I am not sure that we are indeed in a post-truth situation. It seems to me that Trump attacks the truth and is unashamed of the fact that he does not back up his statements with proof or show any logic in what he says. His statements are not totally arbitrary, but he is prepared to change his position at will, in function of the opportunity that presents itself, his impulses or the useful effect this change will have. For example, when he said that once he became president he would "throw Hillary in jail" he was acclaimed by those who hated her; it even allowed them to hate her even more.

Of course, he does not have the power to "throw her in jail," and even as president he would not have the power to do so, without a long criminal procedure and a court judgment. But in that moment itself he was above any legal procedure, exercising his will as he wished, modelling the form of tyranny that is not really concerned with the question of whether she has committed a criminal infraction or not. Thus far the evidence suggests that this is not the case. And there is nothing to support his allegations that Hillary Clinton only won the popular vote because millions of "illegals" voted for her. But in the moment, even as he exposed his own narcissistic wound, he sought to delegitimise the popular vote.

At the same time, he totally rules out the idea that the votes for him could have been illegal. In a sense it matters little if he contradicts himself or if he is obviously rejecting only those conclusions that diminish his own power or popularity. Both brazen and wounded, this narcissism and this refusal to submit to proof and logic make him even more popular. He lives above laws, and that is how a lot of his supporters would like to live too.

In Excitable Speech you analyse the verbal violence of homophobic, sexist or racist discourse whose goal is to break and exclude the people to whom it is addressed. You also show that this verbal violence’s goal is to redraw the boundaries of a people. This means a discursive operation to exclude, trace, and delimit, but also to configure — bringing the emergence of the homogeneous, monochrome, heterosexual shape of a fantasy people. Nonetheless, you also explain that this performance can be turned back on itself, and open the space for a political struggle and a subversion of identities. What do you think are the levers that can bring this about?

Perhaps we ought to see xenophobic nationalism as a means of affirming and defining "the people." There was support for Trump among economically disadvantaged citizens as well as among those who think they have lost their white privilege. But a lot of well-off people also voted Trump, having been persuaded that more markets would open up and that they could get richer. We can concentrate on his discourse, and that is indeed something important, but it is not the only thing that attracted people to him.

However, I think that the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren was right to respond to his insulting comment about Hillary Clinton — "she’s a nasty woman" — by replying, "Get this, Donald. Nasty women are tough, nasty women are smart, and nasty women vote, and on November 8, we nasty women are going to march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever." Without doubt that was a thrilling moment of public feminism, though it evidently was not enough.

Since 2011 we have seen the international emergence of assemblies like Occupy, the Indignados, Nuit Debout, the Arab Spring… In your most recent book, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, you analyse the conditions of these movements’ appearance and their political implications, extending your analyses of political performance. You write that when bodies assemble they take on a political expression, which is not reduced to these actors’ demands or the discourse they advance. What forces prevent or make possible this kind of plural action? What is their democratic character?

While demonstrations and assemblies often do not suffice to produce radical changes, they change our perception of what "the people" is. And they affirm the fundamental freedoms that belong to bodies, in their plurality. There can be no democracy without freedom of assembly, and there can be no assembly without freedom of movement and meeting. Mobility and bodily capacities are thus presuppositions of this freedom. The public demonstrations against austerity and precarity present in the street, in the public eye, the bodies of individuals who themselves suffer from a loss of class position and a feeling of civic degradation. They thus affirm collective political action by assembling, in their own way.

So while we might think of parliamentary assemblies as an integral part of democracy, we can also understand extra-parliamentary assemblies’ power to change the public understanding of what the people is. Especially when those who are not meant to appear do appear, we see that the "sphere of appearance" and the powers controlling its borders and divisions are presuppositions of any discussion of what "the people" is. I agree with Jacques Rancière in this regard.

Michel Foucault analysed the democracy of fifth to fourth century BC Athens as simultaneously a discursive problem, the paradox of "speaking truth" in a democracy (parrhesia is perverted) and as a displacement of the "stage" of politics, from the "agora" to the "ecclesia" — namely from the city of citizens to the court of the sovereign. Can we consider the development of these new democratic stages appearing since 2011 as the agora’s revenge on the ecclesia?

Fundamentally, speaking truth to power is not an individual act. Speaking truth to power means appropriating power by speaking in this way. And it means that power structures can be reused or redeployed in the service of the "responses." We can thus consider the speaking subject as a speaking individual. This is an anonymous and changing position that can potentially involve a certain number of people. But before asking what speaking truth to power means we have to ask who can speak.

Sometimes the mere presence of those who are meant to stay mute in public discourse manages to break these structures. When undocumented migrants assemble, when the victims of expulsion meet, when those who suffer unemployment or drastic reductions in their pensions meet, they inscribe themselves in the imagery and discourse of the representation of what the people is, or should be. Of course they do make specific demands, but assembling is also a means of making a demand with one’s body, a corporeal demand on public space and a public demand on political authorities.

So in a sense we first of all have to "break and enter" into discourse before we can speak truth to power. We have to break the constraints on political representation in order to expose its violence and oppose its exclusions. As long as "security" continues to justify the banning and dispersion of protests, assemblies and encampments, security serves to decimate democratic rights and democracy itself. Only mobilisation on a large scale, what we might call an embodied and transnational form of courage, will succeed in defeating xenophobic nationalism and the various alibis that today threaten democracy. 

 

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