Why We Fight Trump, Pt. II

Pragmatism and anarchism.

This is Part II of “Why We Fight Trump.” Find Part I, about neoliberal folly, here.

As subscribers may have gathered, I am often torn between the pragmatism of the philosopher Richard Rorty, my college mentor, and the anarchism of the anthropologist David Graeber, whom I discovered about five years ago.

Graeber, who died in 2020, heavily disdained pragmatism. He believed, for example, that Obama had a grand, eyes-to-the-horizon vibe of a visionary, but really had no vision but compromise, bureaucracy, market worship, and the achievement of minor campaigns that added up to less than nothing. “It’s kind of horrible, right?” he said.

Graeber’s anthropological work treated vast spans of time—tens of thousands of years of human societies. By presenting so many different ways that humans have imagined gender, reading, hierarchy, and debt, he asked us, over the course of his work, to imagine that the organization of society could always be otherwise.

Some societies keep slaves and eat salmon; some abhor slavery and eat pine nuts. Some are polygamous. Some have consensual sex. Some rape. Some defy their kings. Some worship them.

Societies are defined by arts and culture, not systems of government, whether autocratic or socialist or both or neither.

In other words: There Are Nothing But Alternatives. TANBA. The greatest problem with neoliberalism was not the individual ways of living it, but the fact that, for the greater part of Graeber’s life (and mine), we in the West had been stuck there.

According to Graeber, Obama, Macron, Merkel, and the rest should stop accepting the exigencies of the market and neoliberal interventionism and the American government as given. They were all so dutiful, boring, and stuck.

At least Trump, he implied at the end of his life, was daring to dream.