Affect and the Madness in Trump’s Method

The media and the public’s obsessive monitoring of Donald Trump’s daily disruptions prevented thoughtful examination of the cultural context that made his presidency possible. In Under the Cover of Chaos, Lawrence Grossberg seeks to analyze, through the lens of affect, the American right’s history and the unhinged affairs of state that it has produced in our time. Grossberg, a prominent cultural studies scholar, views Trump’s chaotic leadership as a deliberate mode of operation to keep his opponents destabilized and his followers loyal. The book states that the former administration emerged from a reactionary and radical “anti-modernism” that went far beyond the anti-liberalism of the previous decades’ conservative “New Right.” Grossberg’s thesis highlights the primacy of culture, expressions of affect in specific cultural forms and practices, and a reimagining of politics.

Reactionary counter-modernity in the American right-wing was facilitated by the re-arrangement of US politics and the Internet-based media. The book traces the genealogy of contemporary extremist conservatism all the way back to the republic’s origins in the anti-democratic sentiments of some of the American founding fathers who privileged freedom as liberty. In the last two and a half centuries, this strand of thought has produced various manifestations of nationalism and “paleo-conservatism,” expressed in the politics of resentment, scapegoating and white supremacism. Over the last decade, the tension has heightened into a civil war on the right by “re-inflecting the politics of the ‘New Right’ into more extreme, absolutist and even violent positions” (70). Following the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president, the Tea Parties emerged as an emotionally charged, populist, anti-elitist and anti-establishment movement that challenged the Republican Party from within. Culturally redefining identity in terms of experience and feelings, they framed whiteness within victimhood. The Tea Parties performed a literalist constitutionalism and promoted an economics of tax cuts and debt reduction to shrink government. They vigorously pushed the Republican establishment toward a totalistic obstructionism against Obama.

Grossberg identifies several related reactionary formations. The postlibertarians, who are mostly made up of hactivists and trollers, work to disrupt democratic politics. They previously supported former congressman Ron Paul but now operate underground. Their destabilizing discourse is marked by white nationalism, racism and misogyny. They do not embrace overt violence but are set on fostering “panic and, above all, chaos” to pursue “an anti-politics politics” (76). On the other hand, the faction identifying with Breitbart News, Steve Bannon (a former Trump Chief Strategist), Richard Spenser, Sebastian Gorka, and Julia Hahn have a clearer agenda that is akin to neofascism in its white supremacist and anti-Semitic aspects. They appear to revere the Italian fascist Julian Evola’s traditionalism, which rejected Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment ideas of progress and equality. Another formation are the self-professed neoreactionaries (NRx), who did not support Trump. Personified by Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, the group reshapes old extreme conservative ideas into a damning attack on the Enlightenment and modernity while still adhering to modernist capitalism. In its view, the “state should…become a corporation” (81). The 2016 election cycle gave rise to “Trumpism,” which is actually not about Trump, but sees him as the way to generate a new conservative movement. Led by Michael Anton, who worked in the administration for 14 months, Trumpism essentially links political sovereignty to a populist nationalism.

The author sees Donald Trump’s style as reflecting the last half century of New Right’s politics, characterized by racism, anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, repeated use of lies, affective politics, promises that were not meant to be realized, and the denial of responsibility. The contemporary media environment aided Trump’s continuation of these practices through intensified coverage. He drew on various strands of the reactionary right wing’s ideas and activities in an eclectic and opportunistic manner, producing a hybrid conservatism in stretching out its constituency and agenda.

One of the book’s central...