The Meaning of Trump by Brian Francis Culkin

Author:Brian Francis Culkin [Culkin, Brian Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78904-047-0
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2018-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

2.3

Deeply related to both the project of securing the southern border to keep at bay immigration from Mexico and Central America, and the project of resuscitating the industrial-based economy as a counter-measure to the deterritorializing force of globalization, is the attempt to bring forth a resurgence in national pride, patriotism, and a collective fidelity to American culture. This element may in fact be the most potentially dangerous of what I have highlighted as the five key discourses of Donald Trump. The danger lies not in the fact that having a sense of patriotism, a simple fidelity to one’s own sociopolitical background and culture is problematic in itself. The problem is rather the fact that the “patriotism” articulated by Donald Trump has little to do with an authentic love for America and its multifaceted and complex history, as in a patriotism that can simultaneously love and be appropriately critical at the very same time. The brand of patriotism that Trump is demonstrating and encouraging is rather something that Alain Badiou has categorized as a “reactionary nihilism”:61 a false machismo and overblown gesture of patriotism that is actually grounded in a sense of hopelessness and impotence. And, to be sure, this type of political consciousness is produced in direct response to what can only be articulated as the “progressive nihilism”62 that is central to neoliberal globalization: the relegation of planetary society to nothing but a multicultural consumerism.

What this means is that the nationalistic desire for new walls to be erected and for society to return to a more “traditional” way of life — a contemporary phenomenon not nearly unique to America and Donald Trump — is by no means a sign pointing to a renewed sense of national sovereignty, but rather that of a crystal-clear sign that references the increasing fragility and irrelevance of the nation-state itself:

Rather than resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty, the new walls are icons of its erosion. While they may appear as hyperbolic tokens of such sovereignty, like all hyperbole, they reveal a tremulousness, vulnerability, dubiousness, or instability at the core of what they aim to express — qualities that are themselves antithetical to sovereignty and thus elements of its undoing.63

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