United States President Joe Biden shakes hands with president-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on November 13, 2024 in Washington, DC.(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, stepped out of the stifling conventions of European poetry and into an expansive form of free verse appropriate, he thought, to the democratic spirit of the United States.
The eighth poem, I Sing the Body Electric, scandalised Victorian sensibilities with its embrace of an embodied sense of joy and freedom.
In his preface Whitman wrote that “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” For Whitman America was vast, abundant and magnificent, a new country free from the constraints of the old countries in Europe, “a teeming nation of nations … details magnificently moving in vast masses”.
Leaves of Grass was published 10 years before the abolition of slavery and a little over 20 years before combined forces drawn from the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho defeated the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army, led by George Armstrong Custer.
Much like the defeat of the invading British forces at Isandlwana in 1879, victory in battle would mark the beginning of defeat in war.
The freedoms that Whitman celebrated were freedoms for some, enabled by genocide and enslavement for others. But what WEB du Bois, a singular genius in American intellectual life, called “this great drama” of enslavement and the struggle for freedom elicited its own poetry.
Du Bois described the music created by enslaved Africans as the “most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas”. The counter-poetry of the oppressed often sought to take its place in the idea of America as a project as well as a place. In 1925 Langston Hughes, implicitly referencing Whitman, wrote:
“I, too, sing America.
“I am the darker brother.”
The American drama was last convincingly expressed in poetic form by its leaders in the 1960s. The assassinations of John F Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King in 1968 marked the end of a sense of an authentic poetry on the national political stage.
As both the Republicans and Democrats came to be captured by capital, poetry gave way to public relations. Even Barack Obama, the best orator in the White House since Kennedy, could not move beyond what the cultural critic Fredric Jameson, who died in September, called the empty repetition of postmodern culture, a repetition marked by depthlessness and the waning of affect.
Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had nothing new to say, nothing beyond long-exhausted ideas and phrases cycling through autocues. Harris’s pitch centred on the idea that people should vote in support of the status quo, a status quo that has not worked for most Americans for a very long time.
Life expectancy is dropping as deaths of despair — suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol-related illnesses — have surged, largely driven by economic hardship, social isolation and a sense of lost purpose. In Gaza the status quo means utter devastation.
The Democratic Party, integrated into Wall Street and long habituated to self-satisfied elitism, had crushed the possibility for renewal offered by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and again in 2020. Trump won this election, as he won the 2016 election, with the promise, made through the style of his pitch as well as its content, to shit on the status quo.
The grotesqueness of it all — the disinhibition, crudity, incoherence, shamelessness, macho posturing and taste for sadism — is not new. Achille Mbembe famously described the exercise of political power in the postcolony as “openly coarse, brazenly vulgar, and often grotesque”.
He also made the crucial point that the subjects of this mode of authority are “both victims of and accomplices in the grotesque display of power”.
This kind of grotesqueness was present, in different degrees, when Silvio Berlusconi was elected in Italy, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Jacob Zuma here at home, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom and Javier Milei in Argentina.
The conservative and authoritarian nationalism of figures like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Türkiye, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Narendra Modi in India has a different tenor. They project a more calculated, sometimes austere public image that emphasises stability, control and a sense of historical or cultural destiny.
But, as with Trump and his ilk, the idea of the nation is constituted against people deemed to be internal enemies, often queer people, ethnic minorities, independent women, migrants and Muslims.
This is nothing new, the witch hunt — the organised capture, torture and murder of tens of thousands of women — was central to the formation of some modern European states.
This fabrication of internal enemies means Trump does not only offer a sense that social pain is recognised, access to the pleasures of participation in old forms of domination accorded to men and to white people, the promise that being American will carry some sort of status and the libidinal identification with his disinhibition and will to dominate.
He also offers the sadistic pleasure of being part of the mob identifying and tormenting its victims.
In his just-published Disaster Nationalism, Richard Seymour makes the point that “among the crowds chanting ‘build the wall’, ‘death to the Arabs’, or ‘Jai Shri Ram’, the collective tightening and release of muscles, and the secretion of group hormones, work as an antidepressant”.
A viable alternative to Trump requires some kind of rupture, some kind of shared sense of purpose, shared pleasure, concrete alternatives and new and powerful forms of speech.
In 2016 and 2020 Sanders offered a form of disruption that could explain declining standards of life and offer a credible path to a fairer society. Like Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, he generated a movement oriented towards social hope but was crushed by the old party elites, elites integrated into business.
It was Black Lives Matter, which drew millions of people onto the streets in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, and generated a real sense of a shared political project and the possibility of social progress, that allowed Biden to defeat Trump.
This time around the Democratic Party confronted large-scale abstentionism and working-class defection to the Republican Party, including among young black men and, in particular, Pentecostal Latinos.
Here at home the ANC is, like the Democratic Party, largely repeating old ideas and words that have long lost their vigour and power. It has no vitality and creativity. It holds to socially devastating economic policies and offers no credible explanation for why so many people are suffering or how this can be overcome.
The ANC’s political repertoire does include some Trumpian elements, something we have recently seen with the monstrous rush to blame the deaths of poisoned children on migrants instead of the government’s own failure to regulate highly toxic pesticides.
But its primary pitch to voters is, as with Harris, to ask for a vote for the status quo. In May it was met with mass abstentionism and significant although largely regional defection to Zuma’s authoritarian populism, a populism that is similar to Trump’s in certain respects.
Like Trump, Zuma offers a grotesquerie of disinhibition, shamelessness, machismo, conspiracy theory and gleeful social sadism. Like Trump, his invitation into the nation is an invitation into cruelty as well as the promise of recognition.
Like Trump, his politics thrives in the sewer of X and fabrications circulated through online networks. Like Trump, he offers no credible route to social progress but is evidently willing to shit on the pieties that sustain the way things are.
If, when we go to the polls next time, or the time after that, the only option on the ballot that acknowledges that society does not work for most people is offered by Zuma or others like him, there is no guarantee that more people will not vote for that option.
We, like the Americans, need to recover a shared sense of social hope, a meaningful sense of a positive national project, a concrete vision for a viable way forward, a poetry of possibility and a political vehicle to present it to the electorate.
Richard Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar in the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut and a research associate in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.