Building New Rafts:

   There can be no doubt by now that the American working class, including some members whose color should have prevented their succumbing, has been increasingly attracted to the MAGA banner. Or so The New York Times has been incessantly telling us.¹ The conventional explanation is that people without a college education, which now seems to be the key marker of membership in the lower orders of society, have been left behind economically and resent those who have moved ahead with only an occasional glance backward. What has been shown to be a world-wide widening of the gap between poor and rich, fueling the rise of populist anger everywhere, has ironically eroded the time-honored assumption that workers stand on the left, and not only in the United States.

This analysis is not wrong, as economic issues—at least ones having a direct impact on the lives of those whose experiences contradict macro-economic data—have played a leading role in moving at least many male workers in a rightward direction. In the last presidential election, fear of further inflation motivated them more than worries about the threat to democracy represented by the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Rejecting the advice of their union leaders and abandoning whatever vestiges of the socialist theory that once moved them, they identified less as exploited producers than as cheated consumers. As a result, a surprising number of them bet that a corrupt billionaire surrounded by a crew of greedy cronies would have their interests at heart and rejected the tired promises of a political party that had failed to honor them for too long. It did not help that their disillusionment with that party was often explained by invoking the racist and anti-immigrant prejudices of the under-educated, which seemed a condescending dismissal of their genuine economic grievances.

In short, Donald Trump somehow succeeded in becoming a working-class hero, which, as John Lennon told us in 1970, is “something to be.” What that something actually turned out to be a half-century later is admittedly not what Lennon had intended.² The lucky survivor of an assassination attempt shouting “fight, fight, fight” with his clenched fist in the air while resisting the efforts of secret servicemen to hustle him off the stage, is not quite what the former Beatle meant by calling the hero “so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules.”

It is worth pausing, however, to contemplate the yawning gap between Lennon’s intention and its current realization, because it raises a larger question, which this essay will attempt to address. What, in addition to his seduction of a significant chunk of the working class, has Trump inherited from the playbook of the left in American political life? How has he and his right-wing populist movement refunctioned for their own purposes many of the traditional positions and attitudes that were once considered, grosso modo, “progressive?” What does this confusion of identities suggest for our conventional way of placing aggregated political formations along a linear spectrum? What does it portend for the future constellation of discrete positions that form, at least for a while, a shared platform or coherent ticket?

Painful as it is, we have to acknowledge the various ways in which the cards once dealt to a certain hand, and remained there for a long while, can later unexpectedly find their way into another. Let us begin with economic issues. At least ever since the Reagan administration, the bugaboo of the left has been neo-liberal globalization, which, broadly speaking, was accused of sacrificing domestic jobs in the pursuit of high corporate profits by investing abroad and profiting from cheap foreign labor. Neo-liberalism also meant fiscal austerity, the weakening of the welfare safety net, the undermining of unions, indiscriminate deregulation, the dissolution of barriers to free trade, and the marketization of as many social relations as possible. When the Democrats climbed, more or less, on board the neo-liberal express during the Clinton administration, it seemed as if both parties had placed their chips on a new international economic order run by plutocratic and technocratic elites beyond the control of democratic domestic politics. International organizations like the European Union, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund gained autonomy from national electorates.

For a long time, the left fulminated against the sins of neo-liberalism and the dangers of unaccountable globalization, whether under Republican or Democratic administrations.³ From Reagan through the second Bush presidency, its cries of distress were met with scorn by staunchly conservative defenders of the sanctity of markets, smaller government, deregulation, balanced federal budgets and other neo-liberal shibboleths. During the past ten years, however, a curious erosion of the line between camps occurred. Signs were already there during the Brexit debate, when progressive voices urged the UK to leave the EU because, as an article in the leftist periodical Jacobin put it, “it provides an opportunity for a radical break with neo-liberalism.”⁴ Even after Brexit succeeded, Perry Anderson, UCLA historian and the esteemed editor of the New Left Review, continued his denunciation of the undemocratic nature of the European Union.⁵ Perhaps the most resonant symbolic expression of the converging of positions occurred when Steve Bannon unexpectedly reached out in 2017 to Robert Kuttner, the left-liberal editor of The American Prospect, to discuss their common hostility to China and talk strategy about promoting economic nationalism.⁶

Leftists argued, with considerable justification, that the MAGAworld response to neo-liberalism was little more than scapegoating where, to cite the Marxist geographer David Harvey, you “blame immigrants, foreign competition, in other words you blame everything except the underlying problems of capital because that is something which you’re allowed to talk about.”⁷ But in addition to these diversionary strategies, Trump won his second term in office promising to raise tariffs, bring manufacturing back to America, and defy international economic institutions. Despite his reassurances to powerful corporations that their profits would continue to grow, he managed to convince a sufficient number of aggrieved anti-globalist voters that he was on their side in the battle against unaccountable, unelected elites who sought to run the world on their terms.

Anti-elitism itself became a general rallying cry for MAGA voters, who resented the political and cultural power of those on the coasts and in the mainstream media with fancy college degrees and cosmopolitan disdain for rural and small town America. Although they rarely cited it, C. Wright Mills’ leftist classic, The Power Elite, published in 1956, already targeted the stranglehold that a loose coalition of federal government, large corporations and military leaders, had on ordinary citizens. He criticized the special role that Ivy League alumni played in consolidating and passing on that power. Other leftist scholars, such as G. William Domhoff in Who Rules America? (1967) and David Rothkopf in Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making (2008), leveled updated versions of the charge in later years. For all his wealth, Trump was enough of an arriviste when it came to the traditional power elite to channel the resentment of their actual victims. Even when his blatant embrace of Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley tech billionaires drew the fire of purist populists like Steven Bannon, who smelled the rise of a new oligarchy, Trump’s anti-elitist street cred did not disappear.⁸

It would be foolish, of course, to conclude that a full-throated leftist critique fueled MAGAworld grievances against neoliberal globalization and elite power; there is no sign, for example, of its outrage against galloping inequality. And yet enough was taken from that critique to muddy waters that were never fully clear from the beginning. The same might be said of Trump’s disdain for decades of Cold War liberal and neoconservative interventionism in global politics. Although it involved blatant revisionism of the actual positions he had once taken,⁹ Trump came out strongly before his first election in 2016 as an opponent of the Iraq War. He explicitly broke with the Bush/Cheney orthodoxy that had prevailed in the Republican Party from that time on. One might even trace a certain overlap with leftist positions back to the Vietnam War, when Trump used his notorious bone spurs to avoid the draft, thus joining the hordes of anti-war potential draftees who hid behind their student deferments, found a sympathetic psychologist, or even left for Canada. When Trump was lambasted for calling fallen soldiers and injured vets “suckers and losers,” he was actually channeling the dismissive attitude of many who disparaged those lacking the means or guile to dodge the draft and paid for their mistakes. Only as the war ground on, it should be recalled, did the word get out to the New Left that it was important to “honor the troops,” even if the general effort should be condemned. If one could be a decorated soldier like John Kerry, who had served with distinction, and then come out against the war, so much the better. Nevertheless, the left never really warmed to patriotic, war-defending veterans like John McCain, at least not until his later quarrel with Trump turned him into an unlikely hero.

And speaking of unlikely heroizations, perhaps the greatest irony of recent politics is the transformation of Liz Cheney, the unrepentant spawn of one of the chief architects of the Iraq War (and, lest it be forgotten, also the daughter of the crusading right-wing head of the National Endowment for the Humanities), into an iconic honorary progressive for her courageous defiance of Trump. It was not easy for anyone with a memory watching her share a stage with Kamala Harris as the campaign wore down to its disappointing end. Trump was able to blunt the force of Cheney’s criticism by calling her a “warmonger” like her father, who “loves endless, nonsensical, bloody wars.”¹⁰ He could also paint himself with a broad brush as the anti-war candidate when it came to American military support for Ukraine and solidarity with NATO, the alliance in the eyes of the left that was a relic of a bygone era. His grumblings about strengthening NATO are not all that far from those of Noam Chomsky, who paused denouncing “the most dangerous person maybe in history” long enough to applaud Trump as “the one Western statesman” with a “sensible” approach to ending the Ukraine war.¹¹ Trump’s apologetic attitude towards Putin’s Russia would have, in fact, fit in nicely with many essays blaming it all on the unnecessary expansion of the Western military alliance in The Nation in the day of Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen.¹² The latter may have been voicing a residual nostalgia for the Soviet Union of the Cold War era, while he was more likely enamored of Putin’s image as a macho autocrat, but the result was that Trump came across more like a peace candidate than a Cold War liberal or neoconservative advocate of using military means to spread democracy abroad. And when he assumed power again, despite his quixotic imperialist turn—Panama, Greenland, Gaza, even Canada!—he took a meat cleaver to the Pentagon budget.

One can pick apart the deeper agendas behind the façade of similarities, but the latter can easily be multiplied to the point where quantity begins to suggest quality. Take, for example, Trump’s war against the “deep state,” a vague term embracing anyone in the federal bureaucracy who defies his will. Having treated elsewhere the history of this concept and the ironies of its adoption by MAGA conservatives, I will only touch on the highlights of its transformation from its originally leftist origins.¹³ During the administration of Chester Arthur, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 ended the old spoils system of political patronage and instituted a professional bureaucracy supposedly protected from political interference and personal cronyism. However, as Max Weber famously pointed out, over time bureaucracies often begin to become entrenched institutions with their own inertia and resistance to change. Rather than efficiently and impartially performing the tasks assigned by elected officials who are chosen to embody the will of the people, they begin to see their own flourishing as an interest in its own right. The sociologist Robert Michels even argued that an “iron law of oligarchy” leads to a pyramidal hierarchy in long-lived bureaucracies where power becomes concentrated at the top. These tendencies happen not only in government civil services, but also in corporations, trade unions and other complex institutions in which the intended rational efficiency of impersonal bureaucracy comes up against its own internal limits.

One of the first responses to these developments occurred during the New Deal, when the excessive autonomy of bureaucratic agencies from presidential supervision led President Roosevelt in 1937 to create a Committee on Administrative Management chaired by Louis Brownlaw. It concluded that certain agencies had become almost a “fourth branch of government” and that delegating too much power without accountability was a danger to democracy. The Reorganization Act of 1939 created the Executive Office of the President, which returned some of the control over the civil service lost since the Arthur administration to the White House.¹⁴ However, as the notorious case of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy directorship shows, there remained pockets of resistance to presidential control that became justifiable targets of leftist ire. Rather than being a neutral, impartial expression of an efficient, rational civil service above the partisan fray, Hoover’s Bureau became a law unto itself, persecuting anyone who challenged the director’s authority or opposed his right-wing political agenda.

The relative autonomy of the federal law enforcement agency, which had been used to harass Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless other progressives who crossed Hoover’s radar, was matched by that of other comparable examples of what soon would be called the “deep state,” such as the CIA and NSA. It was, in fact, in Peter Dale Scott’s The American Deep State, written during Obama’s final years, that the term entered American political discourse from its Turkish origins in Recip Tayyip Erdoğan campaign to discredit his military, intelligence and judicial opponents. Scott, a literary critic, poet and longtime peace advocate on the left, claimed that since the era of John Foster Dulles, a shadow government, including the private corporations to which intelligence work is often outsourced, and an international network of banking and oil interests, actively thwarted popular sovereignty.¹⁵ Shortly thereafter, a former Republican congressional aide, Mike Lofgren, published The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, adding Silicon Valley to the malevolent forces subverting the will of the people.¹⁶ Although by no means a fan of Trump or dabbler in conspiracy theories, Lofgren provided an easy transition to the MAGA campaign of 2016, where the deep state became metaphorized into a swamp that desperately needed to be drained.

The result was that semi-autonomous investigatory and law enforcement institutions like the FBI and CIA, which the left had long pilloried, now also became targets of the right.¹⁷ Having already been suspicious of other civil service institutions like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, they bundled them into an amorphous target that mobilized fears about excessive surveillance, intrusive regulatory oversight, and selective law enforcement or “lawfare” against conservative targets. The left’s hostility had itself been a mixture of legitimate fear and paranoid fantasy, mixed with a cultural distrust of the white, male, heterosexual agents whose elite pedigrees they resented—the CIA had a penchant for Ivy Leaguers, the FBI for graduates of premier Jesuit colleges¹⁸—and the same animus could easily be cultivated by populists on the right. Before long, audiences on CNN, NPR and MSNBC were treated to the spectacle of former leaders of the once reviled intelligence community treated as respected commentators on terrorism of the right rather than the left. At the same time, the increasingly hysterical campaign for what Steve Bannon euphemistically called “the deconstruction of the administrative state” gathered momentum. Occasionally, however, the leftist pedigree of the hostility would peek through. Thus, for example, when President-Elect Trump mused about using the CIA to quell domestic unrest once he regained power, Bannon warned him on his podcast:

The CIA, Mr. President, is part of the problem, a serious part of the problem. And no, we don’t want the CIA involved in anything domestically, they’re involved too much domestically as is….Mr. President, the CIA is, I think, maybe I don’t know, to the tenth power worse [than the FBI]. Not only do they get everything wrong, they’re working against the interests of folks here in the United States of America and the last thing we want is the CIA involved in anything domestically.¹⁹

If the “deep state” could be seen as a permanent threat by both sides or merely a neutral tool to be weaponized once your side was in power, so too could another once predominantly progressive cause, which championed the inherent virtue of free speech. For many years, what might be called ACLU liberalism had fought politically, religiously or culturally motivated censorship of supposedly objectionable ideas, improper language and offensive images. Although there were many troubling examples of leftist governments that restricted freedom of speech, it was vigorously defended in America by everyone from moderate liberals to the radical left. McCarthyism’s limits on the public articulation of dissident political ideas, the Puritanical repression of deviant sexual expression, and mainstream culture’s intolerance of aesthetic transgressions were all targeted in the name of what was called, with little regard for its ironic echoes of capitalist economics, a free marketplace of ideas. To increase the participation of hitherto excluded voices, the democratization of the media, which had been monopolized by a few powerful corporations, was fervently advocated. It was not by chance that one of the most prominent early manifestations of the American New Left in the sixties was the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.

The story, however, was complicated when the Left discovered the performative power of speech to make something happen rather than just express opinions or feelings. With that discovery came a realization that “hate speech” could actually injure those who were its targets. If not literally breaking the bones harmed by sticks and stones, words could at least cause spiritual and psychological damage, against which vulnerable people had to be protected. In addition, when the gathering assault on truth during the first Trump administration reached a breaking point, the need for checking the veracity of dubious “alternate facts” by neutral observers meant doubting that just anything really should go in an unregulated expressive marketplace. There had, to be sure, been anticipations of these limits in the legal restrictions on false commercial advertising advanced by the federal government throughout the 20^th century—often under the aegis of those “deep state” agencies, the Federal Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission—and, of course, there were varying degrees of redress against libel and slander. In the past decade or so, however, the Left came to support political “fact-checking” in a way that did not censor in advance, but could censure after the (pseudo-) fact.

Whether these remedies really served their purpose, they opened the door for yet another right-wing appropriation of what the left had long championed. The gradual erosion of monopolistic control over mass communication, amplified by the technological/cultural explosion of social media, ironically meant no one had the power to vet quality or prevent fringe voices from shouting louder than their polite counterparts in the moderate middle. In a very short time, democratization meant that a kind of cultural Gresham’s Law prevailed, in which bad ideas began to crowd out good ones on websites, podcasts and messaging systems controlled by MAGA devotees. It became easy for right-wing trolls to accuse those wanting to restore some order of hypocritically betraying free speech principles. Tied to the redescription of leftist struggles to limit hate speech as a vaguely defined example of “woke” ideology intended to stifle the unconstrained expression of “politically incorrect” ideas, this accusation served to mask the efforts made by the right to do some stifling of its own, as any school librarian in Florida can quickly attest. Although as a result, the right could be condemned for itself “weaponizing” free speech rather than holding it as an absolute value in itself, it was easy to show that the left was also often selective in its defense of the principle, depending on the content and context of the speech itself.

A great deal of nuance is lost, of course, in characterizing serious attempts to grapple with the conundrums of free speech in these simplistic terms.²⁰ It would also be easy to show that much of the right’s indignation about restrictions on free speech is cynical and self-serving, often little more than a performative stunt to “own the libs.” Trump’s pious defense of it in his second inaugural address while also calling the press “the enemy of the people” speaks volumes. And yet, acknowledging the power of muddying its role as an exclusive liberal piety alerts us to yet another lesson that the MAGA movement learned from the left, which concerns the norm of civility or proper manners in the public square. The underlying premise of civil interaction is that everyone’s opinion should be heard so long as it is presented within the frame of responsible, tolerant, open-minded discourse, allowing for the ultimate triumph of “the better argument.” No deference is granted to status, power or authority when listening patiently to the arguments of others and waiting one’s own turn to speak. No heckler’s veto can interrupt someone who has the floor, especially when the discussion is conducted according to something like Robert’s Rules of Order.

Historically identified with left liberalism—perhaps Jürgen Habermas’s idealization of the public sphere and Rainer Forst’s defense of the right to justification are its most elaborate expressions—civil discourse has often been seen as a valuable inheritance from the progressive Enlightenment.²¹ However, there have also been leftist critics of the ways in which civility and toleration covertly serve to maintain the status quo by stigmatizing deviant modes of expression falling outside what the rules of civility permit, and are thus denied a hearing. Herbert Marcuse’s controversial critique of “Repressive Tolerance,” often cited to justify radical impatience with liberal pieties in the 1960’s, seems never to have lost its subversive allure.²² For example, in several articles in The Nation shortly before Trump’s first victory, the celebrated feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott blasted the call for civility on college campuses as an example of the “thought police” preventing the expression of heterodox student dissent.²³ She soon recognized that the weaponization of free speech as an absolute by the right on college campuses could muddy its distinction from “academic freedom,” which in contrast requires the discriminating judgment of elite experts with the legitimate power to distinguish good ideas from bad.²⁴ This concession, however, did not assuage her worry that civility could serve as a way to restrict the legitimate expression of student protesters, who were deemed “unruly” because of their refusal to observe the norms of civility.

Perhaps the best way to approach the challenge to civility, which also might be more simply called good manners exercised in public, is to understand it as a reaction to the burdens of sublimation and constraints of inhibition. What the Dutch sociologist Norbert Elias famously called “the civilizing process” meant that during the Early Modern period of European history, the wider population increasingly adopted courtly standards of behavior. Elite norms of proper comportment and sociability were psychologically and corporeally internalized—what Foucault later called “the disciplining of the body”—and reinforced either implicitly by social pressure or explicitly by legal regulations.²⁵ However, civilization, as a celebrated psychoanalyst once put it, inevitably brings with it certain discontents, especially when it means the repression or even channeling of sexual or aggressive urges. Although there are ample examples of such discontent with the norms of civility, beginning as far back as the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, in the political story we are telling, the rebellious disinhibition that now broadly associated with the political and cultural turmoil of the “sixties” merits special attention. It was, after all, the period when Donald Trump came of age, a period that, for all of his yearning to become a real estate tycoon and media celebrity, left its mark.

Trump’s debts to the counter-culture of that era might be easy to miss, and concomitantly the ways in which his current appeal uncannily duplicates some of its attractions may seem hard to appreciate at first glance. What must be understood is that the desublimating, disinhibiting impulse that disrupted the political and cultural consensus that ruled America for a generation after the War came in two main varieties. The first we might identify with the legacy of thinkers like Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, who championed a version of desublimation that meant overcoming the disciplining of the body as a productive tool and restricting sexuality to its reproductive and sporadically pleasurable functions.²⁶ Instead, they introduced an expansive notion of “polymorphous perversity,” which involved the re-eroticization of zones of the body that were only temporarily enjoyed during early stages of human development. This version of de-sublimation had as its goal not merely a personal change, but also a social one, which Marcuse in particular linked with the overcoming of capitalism. Although admittedly utopian and thus never likely to be realized, this version inspired feminist and LGBTQ+ movements that valorized hitherto stigmatized sexual desires and accepted gender fluidity. Trump, needless to say, cannot be included among its acolytes.

There was, however, a second manifestation of the disinhibiting effect of the sixties, which did clearly leave its mark on him. It was called at the time “the Playboy philosophy,” and was associated with Hugh Hefner and other exemplars of libertine self-indulgence and male entitlement.²⁷ Although the decoupling of sexuality from its reproductive function was celebrated in both camps, the second remained clearly committed to traditional gender identities and hierarchies, and was certainly not interested in contesting capitalism. Marcuse even had a category to stigmatize its commodification of sexual freedom: “repressive desublimation.”²⁸ It was telling that in 1990, Trump appeared on the cover of Playboy and gave an extensive interview, which included several questions about his political ambitions and the policies he would pursue were he to become president. He even told the interviewer: “if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican—and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.”²⁹

Although he got his future party affiliation wrong, Trump’s prophesy was not entirely off the mark, and indeed one might even speculate that his popularity with this demographic was intensified by its unspoken admiration for his transgressive behavior as an uninhibited sexual predator. Although how he shattered the norms of civility may have differed from those of the counter-culture and New Left, he shared with them a belief that rules were meant to be broken and conventions flouted. Surviving the Hollywood Access tape, his bromance with Jeffrey Epstein, and all the litigation by women he in one way or another abused could only have happened in the wake of the disinhibition effect that began with the sixties. Bill Clinton perhaps blazed the trail, and as a result inadvertently left his wife defenseless when she tried to use it against Trump, but it was only the latter who could find a way to turn libertinage, whatever its precise expression, to his political advantage. If you doubt its power, just recall the fact that The Village People performed “YMCA” at his inauguration, while Trump danced along, and try to imagine a similar spectacle had, say, Ron DeSantis or Mike Pence been elected instead.

Another way to connect the dots between the attenuated legacy of the counter-culture and New Left and Trump’s popularity is to put a little pressure on the widely accepted allegation that his constituency is composed of anti-democratic, authoritarian personalities craving a strongman, and finding in Trump a fulfillment of their dreams. There can be little doubt that Trump himself displays many of the traits that are typical of charismatic leaders able to demand loyalty from ardent followers who have faith in their powers and are willing to excuse any and all of their flaws. His often-professed admiration for autocrats, impatience with cumbersome democratic procedures, and aggressive assertion of immunity from legal constraints all comport with a leader who has the arrogance to proclaim, to cite one of Trump’s many narcissistic claims, “only I can fix it.”

There is a paradox in such outlandish claims, however, because they imply that the world is already so “broken” that it has to be torn down before it can be replaced by something entirely new. What Marcuse extolled as the “Great Refusal” in the 1960’s was no less categorical in its contempt for an entire system that needed to be disrupted, transgressed, and delegitimated root and branch.³⁰ Although how that system was described and analyzed, as well as what should replace it, differed in each case, the rhetoric of radical rejection of the status quo drew on strong anti-authoritarian impulses. What might be called the justification of transgression and disruption per se, no matter the costs, became a free-floating sentiment that could migrate across the political spectrum.³¹ Heroes on both sides of the spectrum, to recall John Lennon’s line, could become “so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules.” There can be little doubt that at least some of Trump’s appeal was due to the perception of his more aggrieved supporters—and here perhaps Steve Bannon would be the leading poster boy—that all the old authorities with their unendurable rules had to be destroyed. While his critics were appalled by his blatant disregard for facts and outrageous promotion of “big lies,” Trump’s supporters reveled in what they saw as the crap-cutting authenticity in his crude, vulgar rants against establishment opponents. He turned out, in fact, to be a perfect vehicle for the contradictory mix of authoritarian and anti-authoritarian impulses that fueled MAGA rage at the prevailing order.

One can try, of course, to discriminate between “rebels” and “revolutionaries,” simulacral anti-authoritarians and the real thing, repressive desublimators and their liberatory doppelgängers. But in reality, the line is often blurred. One final example will bring the point home. The January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol was planned, it has been irrefutably demonstrated, by militant militias—the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and their ilk—who carried a more diffuse and gullible mob with them. As if to confirm the accusation that Trump himself was the tacit ringleader of the insurrection, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of them the moment he returned to office. Although most critics have focused on his exoneration of the violent right-wing militias and their seditious leaders, it is significant that he also absolved the hundreds of other rioters driven by more inchoate urges.

The enduring figure emblematizing these latter participants was Jacob Chansley, who became notorious as the “QAnon Shaman.” Another was Richard “Bigo” Barnett who was photographed with his feet up on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk and who left an obscene letter to her after he departed. Ed Martin, provocatively named by Trump after returning to office to lead the federal prosecutor’s office, captured their spirit when he tweeted “Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy.”³² They and their overwrought fellow rioters were embodying—the corporeal metaphor is not incidental–what a now familiar analysis of collective effervescence, drawing on the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, has called “the carnivalesque.”³³ Here the “world is turned upside down,” as traditional hierarchies are reversed, the marginalized rush to the center, and all inhibitions are suspended. Originally derived from religious practices—the permissive pre-Lenten interval before the farewell to meat (carnevale) that still inspires yearly festivals from New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro—it is the intensification of the profane on the cusp of the sacred’s return, a bracketing of the routine of labor for the ecstasy of play. Bakhtin explored its textual displacement in the works of Rabelais and Dostoyevsky, and it has been discerned in other destabilizing aesthetic phenomena from the films of Luis Buñuel to the music videos of Lil Naz X.

The carnivalesque can, however, also have social and political as well as cultural implications, which were anticipated by Rousseau’s well-known distinction between spectacles, observed by the public from afar, and festivals in which all were direct participants. The virtues of the latter were perhaps nowhere as exuberantly promoted as in the writings of the wayward French Surrealist Georges Bataille, whose “base materialism” and “sacred sociology” were meant to have practical applications in paroxysms of collective effervescence interrupting institutional business as usual.³⁴ Religious blasphemy, sexual deviance and the romance of violence, real as well as symbolic, could also manifest themselves in a political register, when the boundary between performative and literal action was effaced. In the transformation of the New Left and counter-culture of the 1960’s into the postmodernist leftism of the final decades of the twentieth century, Bataille became a guiding presence, taken as an inspiration for a subversive politics of transgression, profanation and excess. Spontaneous outbreaks of resistance to capitalism like the Occupy Wall Street movement were read approvingly in these terms.³⁵ Civility was now an inviting target, as were the stultifying bureaucratic routines of the soon-to-be-named deep state.

It would take a much more granular analysis than can be attempted here to trace the lineage from Bataille’s fascination with the figure of the shaman to Jacob Chansley’s farcical enactment of one, but the point is that the left had already tasted the intoxicating waters of carnivalesque transgression well before the right drank from the same fire hose on January 6^th. Just think of the role the Yippies played in the protests against the Democratic National Convention in 1968 or the shenanigans of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin during the ensuing trial of the Chicago Seven. None of this was lost on Donald Trump, who learned that when “the whole world is watching,” its attention could be kept only through increasingly chaotic and more outlandish transgressions. Ideologically unsettled, emotionally volatile, unable to distinguish between facts and fables, doggedly profane and yet an evangelical superhero, Trump himself became as perfect an embodiment of the carnivalesque as anyone in American political history.

What can we make of these unlikely lineages and unsettling parallels? The first task is to avoid the easy temptation of falling back on the old Cold War formula that les extrêmes se touchent from the days when left and right totalitarianism were synchronically conflated into twin evils. Doing so then ignored the many ways in which they differed, and would be even less appropriate to define our political landscape now. The normative investments that motivated fascism and communism, however much their practice may have converged, were never identical. Merging them into a common enemy of the moderate center served, moreover, to exculpate the latter from its failure to address the concerns that helped fuel the extremes, and should not be allowed to do so again. Not every milieu is, after all, inherently juste.

Nor should we make a diachronic assumption that the MAGA movement is merely a leftist holdover in disguise, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. I am not spinning a covertly teleological narrative in which seemingly progressive positions are inevitably destined to be realized in perverted right-wing form. If there is any genealogy here, it is the kind employed by Nietzsche and Foucault to trace the adventitious interaction of ideas and values whose origins do not predetermine their later functions. It would be unjustifiable to assign last generation’s progressives the lion’s share of the blame for irresponsibly preparing the way for today’s MAGA rightwing populism, as if somehow the deeper economic, social and cultural causes for its rise were less culpable.

Nor am I suggesting, which would be even worse, that the left should take a deep breath and acknowledge with muted satisfaction that at least a chunk of what it wanted has been realized. Many Christian nationalists may be craven enough to hold their noses and pretend that Trump, despite everything, is a messenger sent by God, but I think it safe to say that few on the left are about to follow their lead. The cautionary example of early 20^th-century socialists who came to embrace fascism—Mussolini himself is the most obvious case—makes this transformation less likely, despite the rare apostate like Tulsi Gabbard who went from endorsing Bernie Sanders to serving in Trump’s second administration. There is no ironic reversal of the MAGAworld’s giddy delight in “owning the libs” where it is the left that has really snatched the bodies of right-wingers, who now channel at least some of their grievances and adopt certain of their tactics.

In other words, I am not proposing a stripped down version of what is called secularization theory in the idiom of political theology, where modern political concepts are taken to be an attenuated residue of religious ideas (for example, the modern sovereign, popular or otherwise, is like an omnipotent, transcendent divinity prior to the law). Secularization, it should be remembered, originally involved a transfer of church property, which was passed down unaltered to new owners. Such scenarios draw on the tired cliché of “old wine in new bottles,” which simplistically reduces political ideologies and practices to enduring essences that merely modify their outward appearance when they change hands. What in earlier times was called an “entailed inheritance” meant a prohibition on altering what was passed down from generation to generation, and usually involved male primogeniture. Intellectual legacies, especially those with political consequences, have no such legal constraints. It would be wiser to recognize that inheritances of this kind rarely mean preserving what is left behind unchanged, with only a new title of ownership.³⁶

Unintended consequences are, moreover, the currency of political life in general, and there is always a chance that well-meaning policies or even promising attitudinal changes, will leave a bitter aftertaste when their initial emancipatory force is spent. Although there was much talk during the heyday of the New Left of prefigural politics, in which the means chosen were designed to embody in advance the goals they were intended to realize, often what is desired fails to arrive in quite the manner expected. Thus cultural disinhibition, the absolutist defense of free speech, the democratization of communications media, challenges to the power of entrenched bureaucracies, distrust of elite expertise, and resistance to the globalization of capitalism all had a more ambiguous, even darker potential than its advocates at one time had realized.

History is, however, filled with other examples of ironic reversals, which make it problematic to assign causal blame, or even more strongly, moral responsibility for every unintended or unexpected outcome. The Greeks had a rhetorical trope to designate an evaluative redescription that magnifies or reduces what is taken to be something’s inherent moral value: paradiastole. Over time, we might say, a version of this reversal can influence the way we come to regard a policy or attitude that once seemed to have a consistent political valence. “Transgression” and “disruption,” for example, were endorsed by the left when they were associated with the “Great Refusal” of one-dimensional bourgeois culture, formal rationality, and bureaucratic oppression. They were celebrated as features of the carnivalsque challenge to traditional hierarchies and the domination of alienated labor over liberating play. But when they came to serve rightwing populist aggression against the deep state and the rule of law, their former champions backed away in dismay.

Perhaps the best way then to make sense of the MAGA refunctioning of leftist policies and attitudes without falling into the traps mentioned above is to step back a bit from the poisonous current political atmosphere (not an easy task, I admit). Doing so will allow us to question the facile consolidation of distinct attitudes, policies and even worldviews into closed packages with permanent internal consistency. That is, the assumption of an enduring and identifiable meaning that can be assigned to a perennial “left” or “right” is based on a dubious reification of a fluid historical process in which clusters of ideas, policies and attitudes congeal and dissolve, allowing new ones to reassemble for at least a while before they too lose their integrity. Although there may be elective affinities that tend towards bringing some together more often than others, there is no guarantee that they stay together for long.

As practitioners of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history) such as Reinhart Koselleck have taught us, following the fortunes of a concept over time does not mean positing a normative definition of a term, either when it is coined or in its current favored usage, but rather being aware of how it accumulates sedimented meanings that may never cohere.³⁷ Political paradiastole, we might say, takes place with the new contextualization of different elements set free when one cluster begins to dissolve and another congeals. We are constantly moving along in a raging ocean, building a raft, to tweak a bit Otto Neurath’s familiar metaphor,³⁸ of the debris of previous rafts that floated for a while before coming undone.

And since we are talking of metaphors, it should be remembered that “left” and “right” themselves are derived from the seating arrangements of representatives in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, and are not concepts in any strict sense of the term. Their connotative force is more powerful than any denotative precision, as evidenced by their easy adjectivization to modify other terms, for example left-wing and right-wing populism. It will have occurred to discerning readers that my capacious and imprecise use of them in the first half of this exercise, at times blurring distinctions and neglecting internal fault lines, itself exemplifies these qualities. There will doubtless be many, for example, who considered themselves on the progressive side of the ledger, but had nothing but contempt for the carnivalesque Yippies and worried about the consequences of disinhibition of any kind carried too far. And there are likewise many paleo- and neo-conservatives appalled by the contamination of their version of right-wing politics by the MAGA adoption of once leftist beliefs and practices.

With the baffling success of the MAGA movement, whose leader managed to carry out the most dramatic reversal of political fortunes in American history, we are clearly at one of those turbulent moments when the old rafts are coming apart and new ones are in the process of being fashioned. They may well combine planks from the wreckage of those that went before and carry us in unintended directions. What they are not likely to do is bring us to some imagined safe haven on dry land, where stable political institutions are grounded on firm foundations and an enduring consensus of values prevails. Whether they will be seaworthy enough, however, to carry us through the ominous storms gathering on the horizon remains very much to be seen.

Notes

1. See, for example, Adam Sessel, “It’s the Inflation, Stupid: Why the Working Class Wants Trump Back,” October 24, 2024; Nicholas Kristof, “Maybe Now Democrats Will Address Working Class Pain,” November 9, 2024; Jennifer Media, “For Minority Working-Class Voters, Dismay with Democrats Led to Distrust,” November, 19, 2024; Nate Cohn, “How the Democrats Lost their Base and their Message,” November 23, 2024; Jonathan Weisman, “How the Democrats Lost the Working Class,” January 4, 2025.

2.“A Working Class Hero” is, however, a song that expresses more than resentment at class inequalities. It also laments the fact that workers are passively accepting their transformation by the system into fighting for unjust wars, and so “still fucking peasants as far as I can see.” Becoming a “hero” in these terms is therefore not always a laudable goal, which is why the song ends with Lennon cryptically singing, “if you want to be a hero, well, just follow me.”

3. For one example of many, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

4. Thomas Fazi and William Mitchell, “Why the Left Should Embrace Brexit,” Jacobin, April 29, 2018: https://jacobin.com/2018/04/brexit-labour-party-socialist-left-corbyn

5.Perry Anderson, Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West (London, Verso, 2021). For one example of his earlier critique, see Anderson, The New Old World (London, Verso, 2009).

6. See the transcript of Kuttner’s discussion with Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now show of August, 22, 2017, “American Prospect Editor Robert Kuttner on his Extraordinary Interview with Steve Bannon”: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/22/american_prospect_editor_robert_kuttner_on

7. David Harvey, interview with Davis Richardson, “Navigating Marx in the Age of Trump,” Observer, November 11, 2017: https://observer.com/2017/11/navigating-marx-in-the-ageof-trump-an-interview-with-david-harvey/

8. Implicitly, Trump was regressing back to earlier elite theorists like Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, who argued that inequality was permanent, but that a circulation of elites occurred from time to time. They were cynical endorsers of elitism, who differed from socialists like Mills and populists like Bannon that elitism could somehow be overcome.

9. See Eugene Kiely, “Donald Trump and the Iraq War,” FactCheck.org, February 19, 2016: https://www.factcheck.org/2016/02/donald-trump-and-the-iraq-war/

10. Landon Mion, “Trump Slams Liz Cheney as a ‘Warmonger’ Who Loves ‘Endless, Nonsensical, Bloody Wars’,” Fox News, May 29, 2022: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ trump-slams-liz-cheney-warmonger-endless-nonsensical-bloody-wars

11. Katherine Huggins, “Chomsky Calls Trump the ‘One Western Statesman’ with a ‘Sensible’ Plan for Resolving Russian-Ukraine Crisis,” Mediaite, May 1, 2023: https://www.mediaite. com/trump/chomsky-calls-trump-the-one-western-statesman-who-laid-out-sensible-planfor-addressing-russia-ukraine-crisis/

12. See, for example, C.J. Polychroniou, “Chomsky: A Stronger NATO is the Last Thing We Need as Russia-Ukraine War Turns 1,” Truthout, February 23, 2023: https://truthout.org/ articles/chomsky-a-stronger-nato-is-the-last-thing-we-need-as-russia-ukraine-war-turns-1/; and Stephen F. Cohen, War with Russia?: From Putin to Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate (New York: Skyhorse, 2019).

13. Martin Jay, “Bill Barr and the ‘Unitary Executive Theory’,” Salmagundi, 218-219 (2023). https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/473-bill-barr-and-the-unitary-executive-theory

14. See Douglas A. Ginsburg and Steven Menashi, “Nondelegation and the Unitary Executive,” Journal of Constitutional Law, 12, 2 (2010).

15. Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).

16. Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016).

17. See Todd S. Purdum, “How Conservatives Learned to Hate the FBI,” Politico, February 2, 2018: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/03/conservatives-fbi-trump-republicans-389076

18. See Daniel Golden, “Spies on Campus: The CIA and the FBI from the Indochina Wars to the ‘War on Terrorism’,” Asia-Pacific Journal, 15, 20, 5 (2017): https://apjjf.org/2017/20/ Golden; Steve Russworm, The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935-1962 (Amherst, Mass, U. of Massachusetts Press, 2018).

19. Mandy Taheri, “Steve Bannon Counters Donald Trump’s CIA Demand: ‘Part of the Problem,’” Newsweek, January 2, 2025: https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-counters-donald-trumps-cia-demand-part-problem-2008994

20. For my attempt to make sense of it, see Martin Jay, “The Weaponization of Free Speech” in Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History (Philadelphia: U. of Philadelphia Press, 2022).

21. Habermas’s defense of communicative interaction and the public sphere has been extensively discussed. My effort to analyze it can be found in Martin Jay, Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (Madison, WI: U. of Wisconsin Press, 2016). Forst, perhaps the most influential figure of the Frankfurt School’s third generation, has also stirred lively debate on both sides of the Atlantic. For an example of his approach, see The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice, trans. Jeffrey Flynn (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2014). The faultline on the left between his position and that of his more radical opponents can be traced in Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, ed. Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F.E. Holzhey (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2014).

22. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Herbert Marcuse, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Robert Paul Woolf, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). For a consideration of its relevance today, see David Ingram, “Revisiting Marcuse on Repressive Tolerance: A Twenty-first Century Retrospective,” in The Marcusean Mind, eds. Eduardo Altheman C. Santos, Jina Fast, Nicole K. Mayberry and Sid Simpson (New York: Routledge, 2025).

23. Joan W. Scott, “The New Thought Police,” The Nation, April 15, 2015; and “Freedom of Speech v. Civility,” The Nation, February 11, 2016.

24. Joan W. Scott, “On Free Speech and Academic Freedom,” Journal of Academic Freedom, 8 (2017).

25. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jepthcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

26. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Vintage, 1959).

27. Male entitlement was by no means absent in the pre-feminist left of the 1960’s. Stokely Carmichael’s notorious 1964 assertion that “the only position in SNCC for women is prone” has often been defended as “only a joke”—where did we hear that excuse again?—but it expressed a widespread attitude about gender relations in the early Civil Rights movement and the New Left. If his Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer David Garrow is right—his claims are disputed by other historians—Martin Luther King, Jr. was not only a compulsive womanizer, but passively witnessed a rape by one of his colleagues in 1964. See David J. Garrow, “The Troubling Legacy of Martin Luther King,” Standpoint (June, 2019): chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.davidgarrow.com/ wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DJGStandpoint2019.pdf. The irony of this accusation is that it is based on documents in the FBI files, which are discounted by King’s defenders as evidence of the Bureau’s campaign to discredit him. Although the facts in each case may well turn out to be different, it is hard to avoid seeing similarities with the way a later version of the American intelligence community took seriously the “Steele Dossier” about Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct.

28. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), chapter 3.

29. Glenn Plaskin, “The 1990 Playboy Interview with Donald Trump,” Playboy, 37,3 (March, 1990); https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview/playboy-interview-donald-trump-1990/

30. What constitutes such a refusal—il gran rifiuto had been coined, after all, by Dante to describe an error condemning an unnamed sinner at the gates of Hell—is uncertain. At times, it has been identified with aesthetic expression, at others, new social movements. It remains an active legacy of Marcuse on the left. See Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson and Peter N. Funke, eds. The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple U. Press, 2017).

31. See Steven Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1986) and Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003).

32. Cited in Allen Feuer and Eileen Sullivan, “U.S. Attorney Reviews Justice Dept’s Jan. 6 Case,” New York Times, January 28, 2025, p. A19.

33. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1984).

34. The appeal of Bataille to the left continued into the 21st century. See, for example, Gavin Grindon, “Alchemist of the Revolution: The Affective Materialism of Georges Bataille,” Third Text, 24, 3 (2010).

35. See L.M. Bogad, “Carnivals against Capital: Radical Clowning and the Global Justice Movement,” Social Identities, 16, 4 (2010); John L. Hammond, “Carnival against the Capital of Capital: Carnivalesque Protest in Occupy Wall Street,” Journal of Festive Studies, 2, 1 (2020). For a less positive assessment, see William Pawlett, “Bataille, Foucault and the Lost Futures of Transgression,” Journal of Cultural Research (2024): chrome-extension:// efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14797585.2024.2408330

36. See Gerhard Richter, Uncontainable Legacies: Theses on Intellectual, Cultural, and Political Inheritance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. Press, 2021).

37. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Tracing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford: Stanford U. Press,2002).

38. To criticize the vain search for epistemological foundations, Neurath compared philosophers to sailors on a boat, which they constantly refashion while at sea rather than docked in a safe harbor. See his Anti-Spengler (1921), in Empiricism and Sociology, eds. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973), p. 199.