Protest as Performance Evaluation
The tractors left Wilson County’s fairgrounds a year ago, a convoy on a sunny morning ride through Lebanon’s main drag. Their owners, all residents of Tucker’s Crossroads, had gathered there at dawn. The planning commission in the Metro Nashville exurbs was voting to rezone the community to make way for an industrial complex owned by the family of quixotic billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot. Those multigenerational farmers and their families in attendance made one thing clear to the press in attendance: they weren’t really protestors; they’d just reached their breaking point. And, at least for now, they prevailed.
I spent last Saturday thinking about the people of Tucker’s Crossroads and their grassroots tractor parade. In the nation’s major cities and towns just a tad too big for Jason Aldean, the No Kings protests were whipping up the expected fervor. Geriatrics mingled with creatively pierced and tatted future Libs of TikTok stars, their smug smiles plastered across their faces as they admired the banal puns on their signs. On social media, they crowed about the alleged 5 million people that participated (half the number, one should note, that turned up for Marvel’s Thunderbolts during an opening weekend last May that cemented it as a box-office dud).
Throughout the weekend, I followed along as Boomer conservatives singled out the basement dwellers who needed to get a better job than civic unrest on the Facebook pages of countless milquetoast TDS victims. Then, I saw the retort that perfectly encapsulated the weekend: “I was there,” a low-level university bureucrat named Ashleigh said. “I spoke to a current K-12 teacher, a non-profit director, and a lawyer. None of us were paid. We’re patriots who care about the future of our country.”
At least superficially, Ashleigh was right. No payments from a dark money group accompanied by cutesy emojis likely altered her Venmo balance. No one palmed her a wad of cash in a back alley. The activist groups that have bussed college kids into events like this since time immemorial were in their seasonal mid-June HR bottleneck.
In truth, Ashleigh was also fighting for her way of life. The lawyers, NGO managers, and government employees on the streets last weekend could care less about democracy, autocracy, or the state of the union. Their protest was an act of self-preservation. But, unlike the farmers who begrudgingly adopted the artifice of protest, they continue to hide behind their lofty ideals, a smokescreen for a form of dubious personal enrichment that the government has protected. Until now.
At some point between the Financial Crisis and the end of Obama’s America, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? became, as editor Alex Niven writes in the introduction for the 2008 book’s latest edition, the Left’s go-to tome with a “near-spiritual message.” Situated on the polemic spectrum somewhere between Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou’s theoretical density and a Medium screed, the book posits that the global economic system suffers from the pathology of capitalist realism–“the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”
Long blaming the concept of clinical depression on (what else?) capitalism, Fisher succumbed to that condition in 2017 when he committed suicide. Whether his demise was the result of Trump’s ascendancy or his inability to reconcile his newfound microcelebrity and modest financial windfall with his political leanings remains murky. Regardless, he did not live to see his 25,000-word manifesto become a pillar of the New Left. Yet, knowing how Fisher would respond to progressiveism’s pandemic alliance with Big Pharma and rash of anti-Trump global protests could have shed much light on our current moment.
While it is easy to mock Fisher’s “Big Other” scapegoating as glorified self help, his central thesis provides fruitful insight into what passes for contemporary leftist dissent. Like Tyler Durden’s titular Fight Club, the last decade has seen a rise in well-heeled franchised protest organizations from Black Lives Matter to March for Our Lives that provide massive profit-margins and stepping stones for their founders. Capitalizing on wayward utopians and lone wolves in ways that make the manosphere look like the bush leagues, these alleged anti-capitalist interest groups treat capitalism as not only inescapable, but the endgame. Flagrantly violating touchstone anti-globalization polemics like Naomi Klein’s No Logo, such protests embody capitalism at its basest–marketed in a way free of subversion with branding that rivals that of the most ubiquitous corporations as the Basquiat ripoff logo for No Kings indicates,
Except that No Kings ushers in an entirely new protest era. For Fisher, the most debilitating aspect of capitalist realism is what he deems market Stalinism–“the valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.” As a Brit, Fisher found the concept most evident in the National Health Service and university system, but also leaking into the private sector in the form of annual performance reviews that sort employees into “meets” and “exceeds” expectations, “a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration.”
As last Saturday unleashed Ashleigh’s reported mass of government administrators, university staff, and NGO paper-pushers onto the world, the intended assault on the global capital of the Elon kind hinged on the very pillar of neoliberalism Fisher spent his life decrying. At its core, No Kings served as a last ditch-effort to preserve the type of crony-capitalism Americans installed the Trump Administration to upend. The web of national organizations and local chapters responsible for its execution received, as Data Republican has so painstakingly brought to light, substantial portions of their operating budgets from federal grants and contracts for decades. This pipeline has sustained a parallel pseudo-capitalist economy in which those on the front lines could live well with little fear of the private sector layoffs affecting the rest of us that government policy often engineers.
Fisher never claimed that undoing the false consciousness of capitalist realism would be easy. However, he clearly articulated the central action his brethren could take: “The Left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy.” While such an embrace would leave the No Kings crowd first against the wall, it also indicates that the capitalism Fisher built his career decrying was not capitalism at all. The MAGA crowd has as little use for amorphous neoliberalism as Tech Bros have for the type of flaccid 90s management Mike Judge lampooned in Fisher favorite Office Space.
It’s easy to point out the hypocrisy of No Kings and even easier to ridicule its band of soyboy influencers and other sundry misfits. Their artificial market is suddenly drying up. Their prospects are dim. We can’t stop them from living in a world of capitalist magical realism, but we can revel in the knowledge that MAGA may well obliterate their petty fiefdoms once and for all.