Donald Trump’s Election

This essay uses the occasion of Donald Trump’s election on November 8, 2016, to bring together three phenomena that commentators have already noted but without always seeing their connection. Thus, they fail to see the immense political energy that could be generated by drawing them together. In the early 1990s, right after the victory over Communism symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, just as some observers were claiming that history had run its course, [2] another history was surreptitiously getting under way.

[2]. See in particular Francis Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

This history was initially marked by what is called “Deregulation,” a term that has given the word “Globalization” an increasingly pejorative cast. The same period witnessed, everywhere at once, the start of an increasingly vertiginous explosion of inequalities. These two phenomena coincided with a third that is less often stressed: the beginning of a systematic effort to deny the existence of Climate Change – “Climate” in the broad sense of the relations between human beings and the material conditions of their lives.

This essay proposes to take these three phenomena as symptoms of a single historical situation: it is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather too loosely as “the elites”) had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else.

Consequently, they decided that it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a common horizon, toward a world in which all humans could prosper equally. From the 1980s on, the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump is merely a symbol, one among others. The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy.

The hypothesis is that we can understand nothing about the politics of the last 50 years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center. Without the idea that we have entered into a New Climatic Regime, [3] we cannot understand the explosion of inequalities, the scope of deregulation, the critique of globalization, or, most importantly, the panicky desire to return to the old protections of the nation-state – a desire that is identified, quite inaccurately, with the “rise of populism.”

[3]. The expression “New Climatic Regime” is developed in Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017 [2015]).

To resist this loss of a common orientation, we shall have to come Down to Earth; we shall have to land somewhere. So, we shall have to learn how to get our bearings, how to orient ourselves. And to do this we need something like a map of the positions imposed by the new landscape within which not only the affects of public life but also its stakes are being redefined.

The reflections that follow, written with deliberate bluntness, explore the possibility that certain political affects might be channeled toward new objectives.

Since the author lacks any authority in political science, he can only offer his readers the opportunity to disprove this hypothesis and look for better ones.

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