I think I’m starting to get what Ivanka means by ‘Make America Great Again’

Last updated on: November 9, 2016 at 1:22 pm by Justin Tse

I think I’m starting to get what Ivanka means by ‘Make America Great Again’ 2016-11-09T13:22:31-07:00 Justin Tse

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Giorgio Agamben wall portrait - by Abode of Chaos (Giorgio_Agamben,_wall_portrait.jpg) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)], via Flickr

Giorgio Agamben wall portrait – by Abode of Chaos (Giorgio_Agamben,_wall_portrait.jpg) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)], via Flickr

Perhaps the cocktail party should be reminded of a certain Italian philosopher named Giorgio Agamben who taught us about all of this over twenty years ago in a little book called Homo Sacer. Of course, this book was such a smash hit across the academy at the time that it was seldom actually read before it was cited. It is little wonder, then, that it has largely been forgotten at the party, except to be ridiculed (are you still reading that, Justin? Get with the times!).

But while we fight about whether or not Trump is a fascist, Agamben reminds us, almost gently, that at the heart of democracy is what the Greek philosophers called an aporia, a limit to thought where all of your thinking gets jammed, leaving you frustrated and perhaps ready to give up. What’s been stuck about democracy for quite some time, Agamben says, is that in a democratic ideology, we want to say that lives of all people matter just as they are. For those on the street, this means that liberal democracy automatically defaults to #AllLivesMatter; for those in academia, this is Agamben’s famous term ‘bare life,’ what the Greeks called zoē – a life that is uncultivated, useless, perhaps expendable. Agamben points out that the irony of saying that people living in such a state of bare life have rights – even a right to participate democratically in a civil society – is that the very language of rights means that there’s some kind of legal apparatus enumerating and enforcing these rights, which means that bare life isn’t actually very bare after all.

And therein lies the rub for Agamben – and the connection with the possibility of a Trump Presidency, at least as Ivanka lays out the case:

To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin. Modern democracy’s decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in post-democratic spectacular societies (which begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its final sanction in the analyses of Guy Debord) may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its most implacable enemy. (Homo Sacer, p. 10, my emphasis).

Call Trump a fascist and a Nazi all you want, then; it won’t stick because there is a much better label for him, one that a friend of Agamben’s, Slavoj Žižek, came up with: a totalitarian liberal democratic capitalist. Under Trump, there will be democracy, yes, but only for those who don’t get fired. Under Trump, there will be liberalism, yes, but only for those working on America as a policy Trump Tower. Under Trump, there will be capitalism, yes, but only for those who have cultivated themselves as entrepreneurs. Everyone else will either have to become like a Trump employee or get fired, because you either are building America as Trump Tower or you are the tower’s rival, and the Donald will not only come after you, but (as he told Fox News) your family – just like he’s been going after Ted Cruz and his family.

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