All this talk of Trump getting revenge is puzzling, at least on the surface. What could have possibly befallen the presumed multi-billionaire that could cause him to seek political revenge? Could it be that he actually knows he lost the election and resents the fact so much that he wants to inflict revenge by destroying the democracy that defeated him?
On the other hand, the impression I have gotten over the years, including long before he ‘became political,’ was that he has exploited, run roughshod over, ripped off, short changed, and generally abused everyone he ever had contact with. Maybe it is that he resents having never won anything fair and square in his life. Well, all that is probably true, but that has only one thing to do with his current quest for political revenge: his worldview. In their own ways, Putin’s war on the Ukrainian people and Netanyahu’s war on the Palestinian people emanate from the resentment and revenge of autocrats. Is Trump really the issue, or is our problem something much deeper than a wannabe autocrat?
Resentment
Donald Trump has always resented the fact that he was not already Emperor of the Universe. But that is also not the point of his use of resentment and revenge as political tactics. When he entered the political arena, he already understood the growing resentment among many Americans of the fact that the “American Dream” was no longer available to so many. Older white men in particular, all across America, were feeling the pinch of globalization. Their middle-class jobs were outsourced overseas or automated out of existence. Robots and algorithms that did not require coffee breaks took over many of the functions they had performed in factories or even offices.
Fear is a far more powerful motivator than hope. Fear operated as an evolutionary factor that saved us from danger when humans lived directly on the land. But its role is quite different today. Many workers in the industrial-consumer political economy today, live in fear on the edge of economic survival every day. It is not the momentary fear of an immediate physical threat; rather, it is the constant fear that causes ongoing destructive stress. The contrast of that experience and the culturally pervasive notion that the individual is the supreme factor in the economy and anyone who puts in the effort can ‘succeed,’ is profound.
Individual motivation can make the difference, sometimes, but overall, there are simply not enough jobs with at least a ‘living wage’ for large numbers of people. However uncomfortable that fact may seem, the financialized economy has no room for many citizens. If that does not engender resentment, I don’t know what does. People feel that they have been sold a bill of goods, and in too many ways, they are right. Put in that position, people are quite vulnerable to the exploitation of their resentment for having been ripped off by an economy designed to reward the rich by allocating more and more of the rewards of economic growth to them and less and less to everyone else.
Revenge
Resentment is the motivation for revenge, especially when the victims of the economy of ‘wealth supremacy’ suffer blatant relative deprivation as the super-rich lavishly display their wealth. The Davos Men fly in their private jets into their conference of self-congratulation and pretensions to social responsibility, claiming to somehow save the world by further capture of economic power,. Jeff Bezos glories in his superyacht as Amazon workers get dinged for taking a bathroom break a minute too long. Vast numbers of workers are ‘nickeled and dimed’ to the point of not being able to pay for both food and rent, or a car to get to a better job.
The distance from the resentment of oppression and exploitation to the rise of revenge is traversed in a very short trip, especially when helped along by a shrewd demagogue. And, it is quite easy for the huckster to shape that resentment so as to point the finger at other vulnerable groups, especially when racism can be exploited in the process. It is quite remarkable that even though the primary source of poverty is wealth supremacy, the demagogue can serve wealth by scapegoating the targets of racism and by invoking bizarre theories of conspiracy between unnamed elites (such as the “liberal elite”) and the even more downtrodden, such as immigrants and Black folks who “are taking your jobs.” White nationalism becomes the handmaiden of the autocratic attempts of the new fascists.
Resilience
No society can prepare itself for the future by creating intergroup conflict, although elites can exploit social conflict to gain even more power and wealth. The fact is that today, more than ever, what modern societies need is unity in order to build resilience in the face of converging catastrophic crises of both the Earth System and the global political economy of endless industrial growth.
Throughout history, and before, human groups have found their strength in cooperation and mutual aid. I am not talking about the various large-scale institutions and social hierarchies that emerged after the agricultural revolution and even more so since the industrial revolution. Such social formations force cooperation within hierarchies, which is not the same as mutual aid in the context of direct social relations, such as in the high degrees of cooperation among hunter-gatherer groups. Throughout history, families and villages have operated based on cooperation and mutual respect with minimal hierarchy and maximum democracy.
It is tragically clear that the most powerful institutions in the world today cannot muster the intelligence and commitment to take on the challenges of climate chaos and ecological destruction caused by those very institutions and men (mostly old white men) that control the decisions that guide the global extractive political economy. Instead, quarterly profits rule their addled minds. The industrial age is all but over, as Oreskes and Conway have shown. Without extreme transformation and/or replacement of the global political-economic order, modern societies will slip into chaos and collapse.
The global system cannot go on within the ‘business as usual’ paradigm. Massive change is now inevitable. However, I would much rather see the beginning of awareness and collective efforts to initiate a new great transformation of the dying but still dominant extractive neoliberal economic order into a viable ecological civilization, than watch society collapse into global chaos—a destination not so far away. None of what is now necessary can happen under the chaotic self-serving ‘leadership’ of the global political-economic elites. The necessary societal transformation to an ecological civilization can only happen if we can muster a high level of societal resilience in social networks of trust, which we have yet to see. Any social or political action based in revenge is the exact opposite of resilience.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 