Trump has the election in the bag. Really?

This is a screen shot of the Salon essay by novelist, poet, and literary critic Anis Shivani.

This Salon piece has a click-baiting title, "Trump is going to win: This is why Hillary Clinton can’t beat what Trump represents.” The author, Anis Shivani is a novelist, poet, and literary critic. He has a penchant for hyperbolic titles in his political essays. For example "Half-truth Hillary finally exposed: This was the debate where Bernie Sanders changed the Democratic Party for good” and "The Democrats have no soul: The Clintons, neoliberalism, and how the 'people’s party' lost its way.” Did I mention that the author was a strong Bernie supporter?

Instead of writing about how Trump could win the presidency, he describes how he thinks he is going to win. Why? Because people are rising up against neoliberal globalization. He makes what seems on first blush to be good points, but to me he doesn’t lay out a compelling argument as to how Trump already has the election in the bag. In fact, admitting I only took one economics course in college, it sounds like gibberish to me.

Shivani is adept at spinning yarns, an accomplished writer, facile enough with his phrases to make the following seem like he knows what he is writing about:
 

Darkness in the human soul is not utility-maximizing, therefore someone has to stand in for the opposite of what the market establishes as the universal solvent, and that someone, in this election, happens to be Hillary Clinton; which makes her unelectable. She will not, in fact, be able to discover, as she hasn’t so far, anything like an authentic voice which can prove to the electorate that she is not that dark force the market cannot account for. But note the irony: by discrediting Clinton in this manner, the losers in the global economy are actually articulating yet another form for the decisive articulateness of the market after all! 

Considering his feelings about Hillary, is it any wonder he manages to shoehorn both Benghazi and the emails into his essay?

The population across the board does not see the abstractions of the transnational capitalist class being able to solve a problem like ISIS, which represents a crisis of authority. Wasn’t al-Qaeda defeated? Didn’t we get Osama bin Laden’s head? Then what is this lingering distaste called ISIS? Forms of darkness are easily substitutable, thus Hillary (whose synecdoche is Benghazi, or secret emails) becomes unable to speak the truth, the more she tries. 

He vacillates between disparaging Hillary in pseudo-learned terms and presenting economics lectures.

But…I do not want to claim for a minute that Trump can represent anything other than the further strengthening of neoliberal capitalism, both domestically and globally. He can only represent a further intensification, as would be true of anyone else. The total globalization of the market—our greatest of myths today, the one all-powerful entity to which all, state, civil society, and individual, have completely bent—is unstoppable. The flat earth posited by Tom Friedman in the 1990s will end up erasing all local distinctiveness, the end goal of neoliberalism. While Trump represents the desire for national regeneration—as is true of any neofascist movement—this is not possible in the twenty-first century, because the state as we have known it has ended, as has the market in the conventional understanding.

Sounds pretty good? But it doesn’t make any sense as a reason Trump is going to win.

The author mixes valid interpretations with an socio-economic analysis of behavior that draws illogical conclusions. For example, he nails a part of Trump’s appeal here:
 

But the reckoning, again, will be pure fiction. Trump is not a fascist father figure, he is not the second coming of Mussolini, he is the new virtual figure who is as real as reality television, which is even more recessive and vanishing compared to Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood fictions. The field of action in which Trump specialized for a long time before the nation, as dress rehearsal for the current (and final) role, was one where, at least to outward appearances, the presence of surplus capital was acknowledged and taken for granted, and aspirants competed to know more about it and to desperately work on its behalf.

Eventually he takes a huge leap into some kind of strange use Freudian drive theory (where the two human drives are eros and thantos) and writes about death using the word 10 times.

He isn’t referring to figurative death, as in the death of communism or the death of free trade. He is writing about literal death:
 

Trump is vocally identifying the death aura, prodding the working class to confront the other, which is as alienated and excluded as itself, but which the working class likes to imagine is the irreconcilable other. By forcing this confrontation he has put himself in the winner’s seat. 

Let us note the rise of suicide among white working-class men and women, of all ages. This—like the other deals in death that the market fails to name—is an assertion of independence from the market. 

Let us note too the power of the transgender rights movement (after the relative normalization of the presence of AIDS, and also of same-sex marriage) to prompt ferocious emotions amongst the excluded; this movement has become a substitute for the power of death—sexual death—to terrify us. 

Finally he mixes figurative or symbolic death with literal death.

They would rather be terrified by something they can do something about, knowing that the market wants to assimilate this form of gender-bending, identity-shifting, unlocalizable personality triumph. Again, Trump is virtual but not virtual, he is of TV but not of TV, functioning more as an ambassador from TV than an actor or role-player in that world—which makes him uniquely equipped, in the eyes of his supporters, for taking on the kinds of death-dealers that they think mess up the market against their parochial interests.

In his second to last paragraph he reduces Trump’s appear to racists in a way that manages to seem  rational while avoiding admitting that indeed Trump does appeal to racists.
 

Is Trump a racist? Does he represent racists? We have to take into account the fact that the recent resurgence of racism—in the form of overt police beatings, for example, and other things that we thought had been relegated to the past—is a symptom of the failure of the old state, it is simply an assertion on the part of the market that we cannot count on the “state” as such to resolve the fantasy of racism as the great equalizer. The market, I would dare to assert, is quite happy at the failure of the state to contend with racism. And to the extent that Trump fans the flames of racism, the market is happy with that too, it remains above the fray, so to speak, it remains the only untouched, unsullied, uncorrupted entity in the whole ongoing show.

Finally he concludes that, barring Trump not being able to control his destructive impulses, he will be our next president. How will he walk back a misogynist comment for example? Shivani has one instant antidote for Trump to utter, an acronym with magical properties, NAFTA.
 

I expect Trump to take a national lead shortly and never relinquish it until the end. It will be easy if he keeps the libertine and destructive aspects of himself in perfect balance, seesawing from one to the other, as he has so far, appealing to an elemental fear in the country, torn apart by the abstraction of the market, to which Clinton has not the faintest hope of responding. He only has to use one distinctively non-misogynist, concretely unifying, morose five-letter word in the debates: NAFTA. A pure market abstraction that has turned out to be not so much an abstraction.

We all can write about subjects outside our fields of expertise. In fact, when we have something to say, we should. I certainly write about subjects outside my field of psychology. However, in this case I think the author should stick to fiction, poetry, and literary criticism.