The ‘them’ in ‘us versus them’

On the July 20 edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Michael Moore made an ominous prediction. He said, “I think Trump is gonna win.”

If we concede that Clinton embraces a political centrism that’s steadily shifting to the right, then we’d have to say, with horror, that Moore’s prediction could very well be confirmed. To quash a Trump victory in November, Clinton must move left of center and embrace a discourse where the formation of progressive collective identities and passions take center stage.

Trump, with his black-and-white right-wing discourse à la Marine Le Pen, shows (perhaps inadvertently) a Gramscian understanding of politics as a battle for cultural hegemony. This means, among other things, that he intuitively grasps politics as the space where the dominant “common sense” is challenged with “straight talk.” Being a reality TV star, he understands that the media is the most important producer of political culture in the United States, and he’s aware of its value in polemicizing the common sense of the time.

Trump shows an understanding of the necessity of establishing a clearly defined adversary in order to win the 2016 presidential election. That is to say, he seems to understand that a simplification of the political space into a vertical “us” versus “them” dichotomy is essential for a Republican victory in November.

He also shows a strong grasp of the crucial importance of forming collective identities. Moreover, he seems to have an intuitive understanding of how highly ambiguous phrases — such as “Make America Great Again!” — lead to ideological ambivalences that contribute to the formation of collective identities. Highly ambiguous phrases are crucial for collective identity formation and voter mobilization because their end result is to effectively weave together the claims of very dissimilar groups.

Likewise, Trump demonstrates that he understands the centrality of collective emotions — what renowned Belgian political scientist Chantal Mouffe refers to as “passions” — in establishing a new dominant common sense that leads to victory in November for the political Right.

Of course, all this means that the Trumpian discourse is populist to its core. But we really shouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of right-wing nationalistic discourse at this moment in American history. As Spanish political scientist Juan Carlos Monedero has said, “Populisms exist whenever there are problems of aggregation of demands and of social inclusion.” It really isn’t difficult to see that these problems are at an all-time high in the U.S., and that Trump has successfully capitalized on them.

In light of this, a Clinton victory would require that she abandon her adherence to the right-shifting political center — which is evident not just in her positions on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but also in her political discourse when she fails to use phrases such as Sander’s “the billionaire class” and “the top one-tenth of one percent.”

She must abandon her right-shifting centrism simply because it deprives politics of its sex appeal, especially for the more progressive voters in the Democratic Party.

Unlike Trump, Clinton seems to gravitate away from vigorously dividing the political space, and her attempts at stoking the fires of collective emotional identifications are tepid at best. Nevertheless, it would be very difficult for her to simplify the political space vertically. In the minds of many voters, her status as a too-close-to-Wall Street member of the political establishment unequivocally makes her part of the “them” in the “us-them” dichotomy.

In this sense, being considered the most qualified presidential candidate ever — as Obama described Clinton at the Democratic National Convention — could be a major disadvantage vis-à-vis Trump.

In any case, if Clinton fails to make the formation of progressive collective identities and passions the cornerstone of her political strategy, the Trumpian discourse could go on to become the new dominant common sense in American politics. A broad cultural shift to the populist nativist political Right would be on the horizon.

Victor Daniel Meléndez Torres is Puerto Rican and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.