How Liberals Monetized Trauma Catherine Liu On Marx Trump And Identity Politics

TITLE: How liberals monetized trauma | Catherine Liu on Marx, Trump, and identity politics CHANNEL: The Institute of Art and Ideas URL: https://youtu.be/CS1Ng3CcAOs?si=0_eJGgGPQC8doun6

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Both sorts of billionaires, liberals and right-wing billionaires, want to protect capital at all costs. Which is why someone like Bernie Sanders was equally excoriated by Democrats and Republicans. Although Trump said, “I like Bernie. I, you know, I kind of respect him because I think that he recognized Sanders had a kind of authenticity that had no screen.” I mean, for Sanders has disappointed us in many ways, but he’s unscripted. Look at the rest of the Democrats. They can’t actually answer a simple question without having a focus group or a screen of consultants tell them the right things to say.

Hello, Catherine. Welcome to How the Light Gets In. You are a cultural theorist known for your work around class mainly. Your next book is about trauma. Um can you briefly explain this topic and why it’s important?

Um well I was really um fascinated but I should say appalled by the way in which trauma as an affliction and a concept has been instrumentalized by the liberal class of professionals especially around the sort of very basis of their politics. And instead of just criticizing identity politics or woke politics as some of my colleagues who I admire on the left have done, I thought I would I thought we had to go deeper. And there was something about the rise of this kind of psychization of suffering as well as the gentrification of pain that really struck me as being critical to the post-68 professional class elites. And one of the things that I think allowed them to eclipse the suffering of the working class and the question of exploitation was that they promoted at every single level from psychology to feminism to um uh medicine to the to politics itself. They promoted this idea that trauma was something that was crossclass as a phenomenon.

And um I also came up came of age in the time when human rights in the cold war were very much dominant in politics. And this whole idea of trauma I thought hypothetically was in a way of positioning the American hegemon as the most enlightened force in the world that was going to help the world recover from the trauma of communism. Because the communists did not they were psychological. They didn’t know how to deal with suffering. And especially during the end of the cold war to the 1990s, there was an idea that um the Holocaust was the greatest genocide in the world, the greatest atrocity in the world, and it was only the free world that was processing it and that the recently liberated countries of the East had not um looked at the trauma of the Holocaust as such. And I was really interested in how this um ideology around the question of trauma and recovery because there’s a real script in terms of that um dominated every single aspect of the culture industry and the trauma um objectification only accelerated since COVID and since you know the rise of uh kind of neoliberal liberalism where trauma becomes content.

Publishers were starved for it. And it comes out and I trace a kind of intellectual history of trauma in the American culture industries as a function of both the end of the cold war and the war of the professional classes against the working classes because all ideas of suffering then had to go through this lens of um suffering and recovery. And I was always interested in how Americans and Anglo-Americans because we’re all Puritans together focus on sexual um violence rather than economic violence. And so in the book I make the argument that the liberals of today um want to say that the greatest form of violence takes place in what I call the hidden abode of seduction rather than what Marx called the hidden abode of production.

So do you think it’s an element of a class war? Yes, absolutely. And and I had someone do a Lexis Nexis search of the mention of trauma in um American mainstream media. And in 1970, it the graph is like here and it goes up gradually. And after 1980, the Reagan revolution, it starts to accelerate. After 2000, it’s an exponential increase in the mention of the word throughout major mainstream media.

You’ve given examples such as AOC’s use of her traumatic experience, live streaming it on Instagram, and there are other celebrities who constantly come out with their traumas to be more relatable. Why do you think they’re doing that? I think it’s more than to be just relatable, but it’s to authenticate themselves as good people, as enlightened people, and to burnish their brand. So for instance, Prince Harry, your prince, is obsessed with his own familial trauma. And I think that he has absolutely been through the ringer in terms of paparazzi, etc. but he’s also um born into one of the world’s oldest monarchies, one of the world’s wealthiest families, and he in collaboration with Oprah Winfrey, who takes up a large piece of the book, um are leveraging their celebrity combined with their trauma to create a formula for branding, personal branding.

And it was really unfortunate that AOC just went into this channel. And I really hope that for young leftists in the future that they don’t do that because I think that in order to have true political conflict and progress, we have to cordon off the personal for younger people. There is a pressure to expose oneself and to remain in constant contact with social media to leverage one’s trauma and its publicity for eyeballs. And I think it’s enormously destructive on the personal level and on the political level.

And I know she has political ambitions. She’s probably not listening to me. But I think that we have to return to a more objective and stoic as well as um determined and even you know I’m not antiviolence but militant idea of the left. And to fetishize vulnerability and to fetishize confession only takes us back to the most reactionary forms of bourgeois subjectivity.

Is there an idea that suffering somehow makes you more pure or innocent? It, you know, it’s in this language of lived experience that you feel like if you haven’t suffered, you haven’t you don’t have the right to speak about something and we have to take the confession at face value. Confession is very very um Christian. Did Karl Marx ever work in a factory? No. But he was one of the greatest intellectuals and thinkers of the 19th century of the deplorable conditions of the first and second industrial revolutions. He went and saw what the working class was doing. He along with Engels were non-religious witnesses to the immiseration of the working classes in this area of England very close to where Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester. And so do we say oh you were never a worker in a textile factory so you have no right to speak of it? I think that that is the deepest kinds of anti-intellectualism um possible.

So that this sort of lived experience authentication is part and parcel of an anti-materialism that’s part of liberal centrist politics in the Anglo-American world that we export to the rest of the world as some kind of moral good.

That focus on lived experience does that come from philosophers such as Levinas who say that the other is unknowable that we the other is eternal? Levinas is a kind of metaphysician of intersubjectivity. I do think the other is unknowable. But there is a kind of ethical superiority to this kind of respect for the other and the other suffering that I think is a mask for something in psychoanalysis we would call over-identification with traumatic material. And when you as a subject overidentify with the suffering of the other you actually don’t give them any room to have their experience. You instrumentalize their suffering and you make yourself the agent of cure, recovery, witness, etc.

So in trauma studies for instance that came out of um Yale University literature department the highest order of um ethical moral activity was actually witnessing — witnessing the other. And they were very they owed a lot to Levinas but I think it’s a crypto-religiosity that subtends liberalism and I think that as leftists we have to be insistent on secularism and agnosticism.

Which means that there’s a kind of ethical way that we should not identify with the suffering of the other — an ethical skepticism about it. Because now today young people um have received this as a form of self-presentation. So like this reification of one’s own suffering and identity is the available language of subjectivity.

And um I like to think about what Adorno said about our subjective experiences or our subjectivity is that we are all marbled with objectivity — with ideology. It’s not the Althusserian you know we’ve been hailed etc. It’s like we are actually all pieces of marble with veins of individuality and subjectivity in it that are also that are totally implicated in objective ideological formations. And so to become a subject is actually um a kind of work, a kind of labor that um the trauma culture script allows us to bypass, to take a shortcut in, to be able to have this kind of theater of empathy.

You know, with young people in America today, they kind of like nod. Everything’s like a scent. It’s like the emoji world like uh thumbs up smiley and there’s this kind of like constant I think of them as like bobbing heads nodding with each other. But how can we be attendant to the objective world? Critical and skeptical but also um truly intersubjective. The trauma culture, trauma script thing just is a veil right now.

But how can we be truly intersubjective? I think by being resistant to readymade forms of empathy.

But uh you mentioned confession that is an ancient or very old form of therapy in many ways. Don’t we — question of religiosity? I don’t know if it’s therapy. Like Augustine’s confessions actually were the first if you like foray into the creation of um inner life. Like action in the ancient world — well if you want to call the individual the agent the hero the mythic hero — is all determined by external action. It’s with Augustine that you have this Christian idea that there’s an internal life with an important arc that can you know of sin and then guilt and confession and revelation that can be shared through language. It’s a great breakthrough, but um we are unconsciously aping this um form of confession that actually has no community because liberalism and centrism are instrumental ideologies.

And at least Augustine believed that he was entering into a Christian community, giving people a model for belief that could unite them. Today’s suffering is all about look at me, look at me. Today’s confession is all about look at me, see me, recognize me, I am doing this, I am suffering. And you know this is why people say like oh I feel so seen. This kind of seeing is about being in a specular like hall of mirrors with the other. The other just becomes a mirror and reflects back on us what how we want to be seen as people possessed of an inner life.

People have suffered. People have recovered. We have all suffered and if you look at it we have we have all been traumatized. We can’t be human without being traumatized. The great British psychoanalyst Winnicott talked about how um birth is a process of being weaned from the maternal womb actually from the womb actually. So every step of establishing some kind of autonomy means breaking from this idea that we’re enclosed in this cocoon, this uterine cocoon of um nurturing and mirroring.

And so you have this idea now I find on social media especially among the younger generation — I should actually say the older generation is just as bad — where um we see social media is just merely a mirror not a space where we recognize the otherness of others but also our universal shared commonality which has to do with class solidarity. In fact if you live in a mirror world there is no solidarity with others. There’s no class. There’s only this kind of specular um insular self that finds other monadic specular insular selves and we’re all like disco balls that just reflect on each other. This is not a good form of sociality. There’s something so antisocial about identity politics and it just leads me to despair.

Because right now within um the terrible politics of the United States, you have the far right represented by Trump um attacking wokeness and identity politics on the liberal left which is more liberal. There’s the voice of the left when it comes to attack identity politics is immediately construed as being in alignment with um Trump. And I find in liberal institutions, nonprofits, um universities, professional media, professional organizations, people are actually doubling down on identity politics.

Although voices of dissent are rising. Vivek Chibber and I are prominent leftists who criticize this thing. The way that we are excoriated on social media is unbelievable. And I think we both fairly have thick skins. But I’m really shocked, still continually shocked and disappointed by the um kneejerk ad hominem attacks that anyone from the left receives when we try to criticize these formations, these liberal ideological formations.

Well this brings us to your book on the professional managerial class because you’re talking about them. Yeah, right. Who are they just quickly? Um well right now we think of them right now they’re college educated elites who are liberals who believe that they have a kind of professional neutrality that makes them superior to other people. They come out their formation today really comes out of a post-1968 social movement consolidation of their ideology within the professions.

In 1900 perhaps there were real progressives within the professional class which was very very small. They made up about 3% of the workforce. Today they make up about 25% of the workforce. And the most elite strata graduate from Ivy League universities, elite universities, they’re in the law firms. They’re in medical profession. They’re people who think that they’ve mastered a neutral set of tools that allowed them to give the best solutions to social problems.

Thomas Piketty has defined them as being more the Brahmin left and their opposition is the mercantile right. This is a good way of understanding the war between Harvard and Trump right now. But the war between Harvard and Trump masks the greater war between the capitalist and the worker.

We just came there were just statistics out that came out last week that said that 60% of the American population is unable to satisfy minimum life requirements. 60%. And I think the next level up which are you know maybe the next 20% are having difficulties and maintain their life requirements but through credit.

So these the it’s you would say that the fight between the professional elites and the mercantile right is a fight in a minority still and that there are two different kinds of billionaires. The right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel and the liberal billionaires like the Pritzkers of Chicago.

Is it intraclass? You could say that it’s intraclass among the professional elites in terms of their allegiance to capital. Yeah. Okay. But both sides, both sorts of billionaires, liberals and right-wing billionaires, want to protect capital at all costs, which is why someone like Bernie Sanders was equally excoriated by Democrats and Republicans.

Although Trump said, “I like Bernie. I, you know, I kind of respect him.” Because I think that he recognized that Sanders had a kind of authenticity that had no screen. I mean, Sanders has disappointed us in many ways, but he’s unscripted. Look at the rest of the Democrats. They can’t actually answer a simple question without having a focus group or a screen of consultants tell them the right things to say. They are the most manicured people in the world. And there’s a popular skepticism and I would say even hatred of this kind of lack of spontaneity, lack of authentic human experience.

And so whatever you want to say about Trump, he uses a very simple language and he connects on some deep emotional level. And that deep emotional level is right now connected to the hatred of 65% of Americans who didn’t go to college of the rest of Americans who did go to college who pretend to speak this language that no one understands.

Of course, 30% of the people who go to college, most of them just want to get a job and get on with their lives. But it’s that elite strata who dominate graduate schools who are in the professions who speak this completely artificial language of identity and of trauma culture. It is very very terrifying to see how insular that world is.

So the working class is more alienated from the affect of elite culture rather than the elitism itself other than the billionaires such as Trump. The working class is — it’s difficult. They’re disorganized but they know and they feel that they’re being ripped off and exploited not just at work but also in their health in their consumption habits. Private equity is taking over every single aspect of American life, right? From hospital care, to education to the financialization of systems. And so people know that they’re being exploited. People know that the system is unfair.

But you have like raw exploitation on the part of Trump and the right-wing — a kind of libertarian Nietzscheanism, Ayn Randianism — and then you have the soft exploitation of people who are in the professional strata who feel that they know better. So would you rather be exploited by people who are just naked Nietzscheans or people who are smarmy do-gooders who are picking your pocket but telling you how to recycle your cans?

Is it reciprocal? Does the PMC hate the idea of the — I do think so. They would never admit to it, but yeah. Because this is what Hillary Clinton called them the deplorables. Harris just simply didn’t address them. It came out recently that one of her political consultants said, “We can’t talk about economic struggle because that would make us look like losers.” Like they literally think poor people are losers because they’ve been initiated through the meritocracy. They all went to the right schools. They got great grades. They were like raising their hands in the front of class. So anyone who gets left behind is to them existentially deserving of their fate and the only way to rescue those people is if they help them so that they are still the agent of all political action.

And so what you call charities is what we have as the sort of nonprofit world or the non-governmental organization world.

I wanted to ask you about the meritocracy. What does the PMC tell us? Because post-68 is also a time of universal education. So what does it tell us about the dream of education? Is it emancipatory? Post-68 may have used the rhetoric of universal education but it actually is a time when the actual world of higher education becomes more and more stratified. So you have elite schools being more and more well-funded and desirable and the sort of public universities facing austerity from the 1970s because of stagflation.

Let’s talk about meritocracy from the post-war period. It was actually the term itself was actually invented by Michael Young who is a Labour politician in the UK and he wrote a dystopic science fiction novel about how there would be a populist rebellion against the meritocracy in the UK because everyone who didn’t go to the Russell Group universities would be left doing these low paid jobs and there would be this kind of massive social unrest. And the word itself for him was a monstrosity because it’s a combination of Latin and Greek roots.

Nobody knows this anymore because no one wants to be no one cares about education and the liberals say that we should decolonize education. But meritocracy for Young was supposed to be a term of derogation. It was used by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as positive terms beginning in the 1990s.

What Young said was the old aristocracy ruled but they didn’t really feel worthy of ruling. After the 20th century with the complexity of knowledge systems, the meritocracy would create a new class of rulers who because they scored really well on tests believe they deserved that power and wealth. And so he thought they would be even more corrupted than the aristocracy who actually would fear the working class, right? Because they were like, I’m just an idiot with like 500,000 acres of land. I don’t really deserve this. So, I have to protect myself from the farmers and peasants who might rise up with pitchforks.

But the meritocratic rulers would be like, well, you know, I went to Harvard and Yale or Oxbridge. I obviously deserve to have everything that I have because I worked really hard for it.

But the other thing that was the illusory democratization of power and wealth was that the higher education credential allegedly was not inheritable. So if I have a PhD I can’t pass it down to my son. However, we see the rise of nepo babies everywhere. What wasn’t calculated when people decide to organize contemporary capitalism like this is that social and cultural capital are very inheritable and there are all sorts of ways in which someone who’s in a profession can pass down that knowledge of that life world to their children so that their children can succeed in that world. It’s like NBA stars coaching their kids to becoming NBA stars like LeBron James or something. There’s a set of skills. It’s actually very heritable.

So meritocracy was meant to depose the feudal forms of inheritance that were embedded in the American aristocracy who were WASPs. And you have this diversity. You diversify the ruling class through these gatekeeping channels. And now we have this kind of um the credential is actually passed on from generation to generation and social mobility is harder and harder to achieve through the higher education credential because of the high cost of education and the total divorce of working class and poor life worlds from the life worlds of the professional classes.

Is this why you think meritocracy is sliding into technocracy? The professional class has always loved technocracy and meritocracy then creates a license to abuse their power in some way because they simply think they know better and all solutions will be technological solutions. Like AI is going to solve our problems — the self-driving car thing and the self-driving truck thing, you realize like all of AI is meant to destroy workers. Working is meant to reduce the cost of labor. The capitalist wants to invest everything in sunk costs and blackbox forms of work so that you can pay people as little as possible but it’s even great if you can just not have workers at all.

You’ve written that the material conditions of wage labor are the proper site of political struggle but when we think of feminist work around care work or Black Marxists around post-work and automation as a big issue for wage laborers why do you defend the wage as the site of political struggle and not other sites? What else is there if you’re not paid a proper wage?

The feminist argument for care work that care work should be paid properly is a good place to start but there’s a kind of — and I don’t see a contradiction between what I’m saying and that necessarily — but I also feel like the kinds of dignity of work have to do with the skill of the worker and his or her knowledge of the work process.

And so there’s a kind of generalized deskilling in our culture under capitalism and a devaluation of work itself for managerialism. So the most highly paid workers are managers. They’re still wage workers. They don’t live on rent but they manage other workers and they earn the highest wage.

There is a way of thinking about work and the organization of work as something that values the skill of the worker and says the worker should know how best to organize the work in a large organization. So the question is organization and how you organize work.

A care worker — care work is seen as a one-on-one work but to create a system and network of care workers who have these kinds of skills that can only be organized along the levels of wages. It’s not a one-on-one. It’s actually a set of skills in a profession that should be more valued but is presently devalued today. Especially childcare workers, senior care workers.

My parents were both very ill last year and they both passed away. And the people who really worked to take care of them at the end were mostly immigrant women, non-college educated women whose profession was this kind of care work. And to organize — they are wage workers and one should organize that level of work in such a way that they are fairly compensated and that the dignity of their work which is so important in aging society is recognized.

They’re only organized by temporary organizations. They don’t have any stability of jobs and they don’t have any seniority with regard to the skills that they accrue over the ages because it’s all about like whether someone liked you or not. But there’s actually a really important set of skills within care work itself that should be recognized. They’re like gig workers, temp workers now.

So how do we actually make a coalition if you have any tips against both the elite of the PMC and the Trumps of the world in the US?

This is the big question isn’t it? How do we — Okay, so I feel like most people understand and rebel against the irrationality of the liberals and the actual philistine pure willed power of Trumpers. But I think leftist intellectuals have to lead again. We’ve played a recumbent role. We’ve been eclipsed by something that has to do with this kind of pseudo-populism that rose up after Thatcher was elected here and Reagan was elected in the states.

And I think that there has to be a kind of voice of dissent with regard to liberalism and right-wingism. And it has to be strongly articulated as rejecting just the diversification of elites or recognition politics and articulating that the complexity of modern societies demands expertise but not managerialism and that work should be managed by workers for the benefit of the majority not for the narcissistic satisfaction of minority be they capitalist or liberal elites.

Good luck to you. I may not see it in my lifetime, but it would be it’s the job for this next generation and we’re not even close to something that means social transformation. But I hope that we leave that door open for a kind of revolution.