Editorial: Trump and The Crisis of Progressivism

The return of Donald Trump has put the world on edge. It has dealt much of the Left a shattering blow to morale and confidence. Yet the reasons for his success, and their non-visibility in the final weeks of the campaign, can easily be seen in retrospect. Trump and his campaign—vulgar, violent, masculinist, insouciant, self-indulgent, freewheeling and scrappy—spoke to an unsettled and insecure nation. As the Kamala Harris campaign strove to join others in a thin and unconvincing Coalition of the Good gathered around a view of the nation that no longer holds, Trump presented a messy but tough and uncompromising other. Without any defined policies, he once again managed to persuade enough white non-college voters—and an increasing number of African American and Latino voters—to vote against ‘the system’ as a whole. He held to the possibility of reviving the American industrial base and stopping undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border. The gender gap appeared, and marginally favoured Harris, but not enough to take her to the White House.

This is the most significant defeat for liberal democracy in our era. It is epochal, and many of those in the United States or Australia who identified passionately with Harris’s campaign are devastated. It is not merely a loss, but a repudiation of the assumptions that formed the basis of the long liberal arc. ‘Progressivism’, as it is called, evoking its contradictory modernist belief in economic progress, liberty and support for the ‘less fortunate’, emerged out of the 1990s. It believed that consent and rationality could be built around demands centring on gender, race and class, though with the latter firmly in the background. To be part of this coalition, the working class—the doers of routinised, non-intellectually reflexive labour—would have to accept the minimisation of their particularist and conservative values around community, borders, neighbourhood and family.

For three decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s, the progressive-worker coalition was tilted in favour of the workers and of economic causes. Ecological and cultural issues were an add-on. In the 1990s, however, this orientation shifted as a ‘knowledge society’ began to replace an industrial one, and the ranks of the intellectually trained swelled to have a de facto class presence. When the next generation appeared, the truce between progressive values and the working class’s mixture of conservatism and radicalism was fractured. Progressives projected a non-negotiable set of values—universalist, cosmopolitan, abstract and relativist—and, across the Western world, large sections of the working class moved to the Right and fragmented. In the 2020 US election, Joe Biden, the last major American politician to have a feel for the labour movement, got some of them back. This time, they peeled off again. Australia’s strange mix of forces has ensured that this has occurred in a more subtle way.

Will this significant event mark the point at which there is a serious re-evaluation by the Left of the changed character of the contemporary world? Will it now thoroughly question the wheezy and received ideas of class, politics and power? Will it be able to perform a second-order reflection on its own values and assumptions, as they relate to those of other groups? Eventually it must, but that process itself will mark a fundamental recomposition of politics.

In our time, for an increasing number of voters, the test of security and stability has come down to the question of immigration—the tension between intruding border-crossers and struggling perpetuals. In the 1990s, the world became radically more visible to itself through new media technologies and cheaper travel. The North American Free Trade Agreement and Maastricht Treaty made borders porous. Corporations and capital demanded a steady flow of immigration to undermine domestic labour movements. Neoliberalism, as an ideology at the centre of power, legitimised economic globalisation, cosmopolitanism, mobility and novelty. Even the part of the Left that opposed global neoliberal capitalism could not adequately recognise the notions of community, neighbourhood and borders that working-class people valued. Too often, a fantasy working class was projected which was as borderless and cosmopolitan as the intellectually trained. For all its critique, the Left, in effect, guarded the left flank of global neoliberalism against deep challenges to its world-view and helped ensure the dominance of the ideas that underpin it. That this vision has now come apart suggests that global mobility and what it does to a society cannot be assuaged simply by expanding the economy, or by re-investing in infrastructure, stopping the boats or using the state to manage and produce new cultural attitudes to a changed social base—otherwise known as ‘multiculturalism’. To be clear, we are not suggesting here that is it immigration that is primary in unsettling the life-worlds of community and neighbourhood. Other forces are much more fundamental in restructuring grounded social life. But by treating migrants as instruments of the economy, letting some in and stopping others and then in arguing for the good ones as pluralised additions to an increasing divided society, the split between ‘progressives’ and ‘the rest’ was certainly confirmed.

The uncritical validation of mass migration certainly had broader effects. One of those was to kill the Voice referendum—or indeed any sense that Indigenous people here had some existential form of right in relation to the continent. As John Hinkson’s article in this issue explores, a migration society must have an underpinning ethos which firmly prefers the ‘legitimacy of arrival’ to the ‘claim of priority’. To engage the energies of migrants and their eventual joining to the national project of their own lives, it must be affirmed that you are good to go from the moment you step off the plane or boat. This is quite different to the ethos of Old World societies, and it is one reason that Australia has never had a ‘nativist’ movement of any size or force break off or succeed in rearranging the political system—and why it has been sublimated into anger and cruelty towards a paltry few boat-borne ‘illegals’.

But over the decades since the 1990s’ legitimation of economic globalisation, while the movements of Indigenous reconciliation and recognition rose and crested here, the new ethos of global mobility was working its way through every aspect of Australian society. Some Indigenous leaders have spoken of this, quietly. But they are understandably wary of disrupting a broad coalition of ‘communities of colour’ for no great gain otherwise.

That the question of immigration cannot be foregrounded and debated on the Left points to the continued hold of not merely a superficial internationalism, long since repeatedly disproved, but also a taken-for-granted attitude as to how society is constituted. After all, though there is a neo-Promethean and accelerationist ‘Left’, it is small—and most of it has now crossed over to the techno-Promethean Right. The Left’s cause is what it has been: the reconstitution of grounded community by a plural openness combined with the mitigation of the depredations of modernity’s forces by checks on inequality that displace traditional privilege. Marx’s vision of communism implicitly suggested that this would occur through the dialogic process offered by a post-revolutionary social form. That is an intellectual’s vision of how social life should be: one that prefers unspecified openness and liberation from given character, loyalty or place, over and above the given, fixed, attached, irrationally loved or held onto. The this, the these and the here are marginalised. It is the ‘this, these and here’ that makes life for most people, and they have rebelled against those who hold them in disdain. The failure of ‘progressives’ to give full faith to such demands has put Donald Trump in the White House. He is spectacularly unlikely to honour them, especially with figures like Elon Musk on board, but for him that is simply deferred into the future.

For the rest of us, these questions will not go away. The split on the Left around the immigration question has already occurred in Western Europe. Whatever position those on the Left are willing to take, one thing is certain: if they do not recognise it as real, and persist in believing that fantasy notions of broad popular consent can be maintained by avoiding wedge politics, they will be further carved up in the general reorganisation of Western politics. The emergence of forces deeper than politics-as-we-have-known-it is currently underway.

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