Unexceptional Politics. Emily Apter
of consumption.”20 Berlusconismo is distinguished by its variety show effect and anthemic proclamations: with the Ministry of Love or Party of Love, featuring “rituals of enthusiasm worthy of Ceaucescu, replete with slogans and songs—‘Thank heavens there’s Silvio!’”21 A political pasquinade, Berlusconismo resorts to the mawkish props of hair transplants and face-lifts, sexual boasting, and vulgar jokes to distract from the spectacle of counterfeit democracy.
By contrast, Merkiavellianism (an expression coined by Ulrich Beck in a much-circulated 2012 editorial in Der Spiegel, designed to put the world on guard against German Europe) is a sober affair. Beck attributed the Chancellor’s effectiveness to “a tactical adroitness that might well be deemed Machiavellian,” specifying that
Merkel has positioned herself between the Europe builders and the orthodox adherents of the nation state without taking either side—or rather, she keeps both options open. She neither identifies with the pro-Europeans (whether at home or abroad) who call for binding German commitments, nor does she support the Euroskeptics, who wish to refuse all assistance. Instead, and this is the Merkiavellian point, Merkel links German willingness to provide credit with the willingness of the debtor nations to satisfy the conditions of German stability policies. This is Merkiavelli’s first principle: on the subject of German money to assist the debtor nations, her position is neither a clear Yes or a clear No but a clear Yes and No.22
For Beck, Merkiavellianism denotes the art of “deliberate hesitation,” a method of coercion that turns on the constant threat of “withdrawal, delay and the refusal of credit.” Merkiavelli’s “trump card,” said Beck, is actually a “siren call”: “better a German euro than no euro at all.”23 Of all the leaders in Europe, Merkel has proved to be the most successful in navigating between a punishing austerity policy that violates democratic principle, and a “humanitarian” stance on refugees that puts the onus of responding to their dislocation on countries like Greece, Italy and Turkey. Navigating the posts between being feared and being loved, Merkel epitomizes the stance of what Beck called the “good-natured hegemon.”
A particularist politics that could never be dubbed good-natured is now named Trumpism. It represents the endgame of politics as name-branding, as well as a type of the impolitic associated with “janking,” a term connoting the art of dissing or offending, as in the game “the dozens,” or rapping and slamming. “Janking off” describes Trump’s incessant jibing and calumniating, specifically, the vicious, viral, Twitter vomit of his lamely derisive adjectives, weaponized as cyber-bullying. Trumpist janking derives its energy from hate speech, trolling, and verbal battery. It exults in forms of baiting reliant on ad hominem attacks on a person’s heritage, race, gender, physical “rating,” character, and body parts, or a worker’s professional integrity (as when he vilified Chuck Jones, union leader of United Steelworkers Local 1999, who called out Trump for “lying his ass off” after Trump made specious claims about saving jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana). No “average Joe,” no former beauty pageant queen, no building contractor, no newscaster, no veteran, no journalist, no actor nor comedian is too unworthy of public interest to qualify for targeting by the Trumpist jank. The jank-off not only comes close to satisfying the risibility factor of the jank, but underlines the importance of scaling to the art of belittlement and to tumescent states of the ego in situations of political contest and phallogocentric competition.
Trump’s denunciation of Washington’s stalemate political culture with the phrase, “It is out of control. It is gridlock with their mouths,” invents a strange figure of speech that, when one focuses on the mouth of the utterer, registers like a warning signal against mouthing off. Mouthing off, wandering off script to some indefensible position that must be defended for lack of any other possible strategy, is the essence of jank, and it becomes consonant with a new meaning of the verb “to Trump,” signifying quite literally the vagaries of disestablished politicking, or going rogue.
Derrida begins Rogues (Voyous) with a question that references La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb”: “What political narrative, in the same tradition, might today illustrate this fabulous morality? Does this morality teach us, as is often believed, that force ‘trumps’ law [que la force ‘prime’ le droit]?”24 The verb form of prime in French contains the idea of “blocking,” but also that of “adding to,” “topping,” accompanying prime in its use as a substantive to mean “bonus.” Derrida’s “que la force ‘prime’ le droit” suggests that force has the lead, surplus, or advantage over the law. His phrase echoes one attributed to Bismarck in the context of a speech delivered to the French National Assembly. It was taken to mean either that force breaks any laws that obstruct its course, or that force is the author of its own rule of law. Both senses are evident in La Fontaine’s fable, in which the Wolf defies the natural laws of reality and makes up his own laws each time the Lamb raises a reasonable, evidence-based objection. “With that, deep into the wood/The Wolf dragged and ate his midday snack./So trial and judgment stood.”25 “Trumping” (close to tromper, to betray or act mistakenly) describes the strategy of brazenly upping the ante of the counterattack when you are patently at fault. The justice it recognizes belongs to the kangaroo court, where damages are routinely awarded to plaintiffs who make baseless allegations of libel and injury. Trumpism in this sense means justice flouted, and justice that panders to the caprice of the infant sovereign in the ego. Thin-skinned reactions to criticism or public displays of animosity and grievance are championed and fully claimed as the tactics of a winner at all costs. Trumpism brings to the public stage a performative incivility, taken in its full measure as a political concept designating extreme impolitesse—improper or uncivilized behavior, uncivic-mindedness, bad manners, and displays of contemptuous mockery that destroy the fellow-feeling of spirited raillery. Trumpism calls up what Balibar discerns as the profound violence inherent in civil society, including the “modalities of subjection and subjectification” in Sittlichkeit (Hegel), such that civility is in fact little more than a response “to contemporary extreme violence from inside extreme violence.”26
Trumpism inflates the dollar value of its patent with the trappings of wealth; with garish fashion redolent of the 1980s era of greed: tall buildings, gold fixtures, private jets, trophy wives. This plutocratic display is pumped up further by a litany of jankish hyperboles: “very, very best,” “great,” “tremendous,” “huge,” and so forth. While intended to provide ballast to the old doctrines of American exceptionalism, this bombast dissipates into vatic trumpetings. Trumpism—whose “ism” is keyed to populist autocracy—is identified with a rogue way of speaking that provides scaffolding for an absent political discourse. The proper name is tautologically performative, which is to say, Trumpism trumps public interest by facilitating the decampment of the citizen from the demos to media theaters of depolicitized life.
Trumpism lines up on axis with Berlusconismo inasmuch as both qualify as names for oligarchic name-branding, pasquinade, and the mastery of political special effects. In each case the proper name erects a fence—a wall—around a motley assortment of personality traits, bait and switch tactics, and, in the case of Trump and Berlusconi, crass publicity stunts that supply the playbook of political impasse. Impasse is perhaps the new watchword for the contemporary state of politics, at once unexceptional and diffusely traumatic. Lauren Berlant makes the argument that once trauma is conceived no longer as an exceptional event and “crisis ordinariness” takes hold as the norm, history becomes little more than an adjustment narrative in which difficulties are succumbed to or navigated. From this perspective, the extraordinary “always turns out to be an amplification of something in the works, a labile boundary at best, not a slammed-door departure. In the impasse induced by crisis, being treads water; mainly, it does not drown.”27 Perhaps it is this sense of “small t” trauma that most effectively captures what is at stake in “small p” politics, from the ordinariness of exceptional crisis and the routinization of habitual politics, to the micropolitics of molecular cultures implanted in the byways of managed life.