Why Civilisation? Why Culture? (What to Make of 70 Million Votes for Trump)
David Graeber had a few more interesting thing to say about this discussion about culture. The concept of Civilisation came from French academics. The notion of Culture was floated by the Germans pretty much in defiance of the French notion of Civilisation. These abstractions are merely extensions of an articulated value statement according to Graeber. Civilisation is a sociologist's conception of how people organise themselves. Culture is of course more of an anthropological concept of what people do and how they conceive of themselves in groups. They may not be in opposition just because Arnold Toynbee sets up a rather interesting binary distinction.
However, the reason why I have been thinking about this extensively is because I want to understand the how and why and wherefore a group of people might become Trump supporters and have wildly inaccurate information about the world swimming in their brains and perhaps even commit to the kind of drastic action that sees them storming Capitol Hill. It's not good enough to just say those people are conspiracy theorists or nut jobs or they're all personality disordered (although once suspects this to be the case). On some level, these self-proclaimed patriots convinced themselves that Trump was right, the election was being stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats, and if only Mike Pence would listen to Trump and declare Donald Trump the winner, they would get the outcome they wanted.
Ordinary people find all of this bizarre, laughable and more than a little disturbing. And yet, there we had it; a kind of American version of the Beer Hall Putsch had taken place and managed invade the Capitol. It was a stupid attempt at a coup, but it was an attempt all the same. The alarming part of it was that it was done by professed patriots who also took with them Nazi and Confederate paraphernalia. It's hard to fathom how they get around their own cognitive dissonance, but they sure made a fist of storming the Capitol.
It begs the question how? How can the building belonging to the legislative body of one of the most advanced civilisations be overrun by people seemingly devoid of logic or reasoning, but fuelled on confect rage?
The clue is in their defiance.
Fools On The Hill
I mean it only takes second to think about it - if somebody else was anything other than white-male-and-heterosexual, what exactly is the problem for America? If they had the same rights as one enjoys in America, how is that a problem? How is that even a cause? Blatant injustices where people perish at the hands of an overzealous police - that's an issue. Somebody feeling upset their candidate lost an election? How is that even remotely a cause enough to march on the Capital and storm Capitol Hill?
Why would they get so hot under the collar?
If you listen to what the Trump supporters had to say, it was that they were trying to defy history. From their point of view, a Joe Biden victory had to be the product of voter fraud, and that winning back America meant defying the stated election outcome. Nevermind that the election was undertaken with a good deal of scrutiny and fairness and technology to boot. Those are the hallmarks of Civilisation, but these Trump supporters were proponents of Culture.
Their list of their grievances extended to feminism, political correctness, immigration and immigrants, the fear of having their guns taken away, secularism and the slighting of fervent Christian beliefs, separation of Church and State, abortion, welfare, and having to wear a mask during a pandemic. They believed the QAnon conspiracy theory which held that Donald Trump was fighting a 'deep state' run by a cabal of paedophiles which included prominent democrats scubas the Clintons. It was all a heady mix of internet bullshit and rumour and innuendo. Yet defiantly, they were patriots, ready to break the law to save the United States America. These were nominally Republican supporters. Lincoln wept. Teddy Roosevelt spun in his grave. Heck, even George W Bush thought it wasn't okay.
Capital Exchange
If this were a minority that was minuscule, then there might be a way to manage it. The fact that there are 70 million voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 suggests a lot of people are walking around with this defiant mindset about just about everything that is demonised by progressive politics. Yet their defiance is there to push back at the tide of enlightenment and progress. If things progress, these people feel like they would give up too much in exchange for that progress. If your are on the side of capital, the enlightenment seems bold and beautiful. If you are not, then you feel threatened. And so the rhetoric of these Trump supporters always swings towards a sense of victimhood, even though there is no real sign that they are anything close to being a victim of any sort.
As the QAnon fervour dies down in the wake of the inauguration, it seems rather odd that it was even a thing. There are a lot of losers in the economic stakes in middle America. It's not surprising that they would find hope in strange places such as a conspiracy theory. If the reality of stagnant real wages dating back to 1980 was something that needed addressing, they perhaps should have been reading 'Das Capital' and 'The Communist Manifesto' for a proper historic understanding of their true plight as lumpenproletariat. Instead their own defiance lends them to imagining other forms of identities which on the whole are entirely misplaced. The embrace of Neo-Nazism - which is no different to embrace of Nazism together with the symbols of the Confederacy strongly indicates xenophobia seems to have been the motivation.
Is Republicanism really going to continue being hand in glove with these kinds of odious ideologies? We asked that back in 2015-2016 and the logical answer seemed to be no; and yet through the very desire for defiance has meant that the Republicans would rather embrace this losing side of the argument than redraw their own positioning. Each time it probably got argued that their base was a particular kind of identity which would not abide a shift from rank racism, hypocritical piety, and a devout support for the regime that punishes the coloured through the police. Now that Trump has been chased off into the sunset and some sanity has returned, with QAnon being found to have been a figment fo some internet fantasy, maybe the Republicans can re-start a proper examination of how they came to be hostage to such toxic morons. They would be well advised that the defiant ones are the problem. The ones who mount a cultural defence of the indefensible, are the very ones that need expulsion.
Culture, as Graeber pointed out, is not their friend either.
I want to report one more thing from history. There was a politician called Kaishu Katsu who was instrumental in negotiating the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. You can imagine there was much heady argument and a battalion of die hards willing to die for the cause and take what became Tokyo with them in a sea of fire. Katsu noted in his memoirs "it is impassioned patriots who bring about the downfall of a country".
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