The Baseness of/in the Superstructure

“Making things in America” has matured, at least ideologically. That is, it has mutated into the political monster, it has become that political animal that is unapologetic and historically retrograde in its racism (the African American Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who prosecuted the Stormy Daniels case, is “an animal,” once more evoking the bestiality that is blackness),1 militantly misogynistic (the porn star Stormy Daniels, whom Trump tried to pay off, is a “horseface”), and unrestrained in its xenophobia (the pandemic as the “China virus”; nations in the Caribbean and Africa denounced as “sh-thole countries”).

“Make American Great Again” (MAGA) might not be exactly the monstrous adult love child of “Making things in America” (MTIA) and nostalgia for industrial capitalism, but there is no doubting the toxic ideological intimacy of the relationship between these two modes of American economic poesis. If, as Marx insists, the superstructure always follows the base, then we can say that Pretty Woman inverts this model. It is the superstructure that stands as an instance of the cinematic as economic prescience.

MTIA has found its mutant ideological maturation in MAGA. Or better to say that MTIA has revealed its ideological truth in/as MAGA. Teleologically phrased, you are what you become. In this way, Hollywood offered us, without knowing it, a foretaste of what the discourse of “Making things in America” was to become. The non-college-educated white male forms the base constituency for the nostalgia for late industrial capitalism, driving the ideological vituperation that is the MAGA movement. The baseness of this ideological call has proven itself historically successful precisely because it does not submit to the logic of sophisticated economic analysis. Or, for that matter, any economic analysis that does not reaffirm the return of the manufacturing base. (A matter of will, this return; not economics truth) The MTIA’s ideological call will not abide the complicity of the US trade union movement in the NAFTA agreement. Nor will it countenance a critique of why it is possible to buy so many “Made in China/Vietnam/Cambodia” goods cheaply at Walmart or any of those other big-box stores. Exploitation of the other is always permissible under the sign of erasure—it is, as Marx would have it, reification in its purest form. The ideology that is MTIA or MAGA succeeds because of its direct address to the nostalgia for that mythical era, a moment that always, in one way or another, turns on the postwar boom that was the 1950s, that moment that was Yankee economic nationalism, a moment that cannot be disarticulated from the ideological and economic aggression that was US neo-imperialism.

Much of the political potency—its mobilizing potentiality—of MTIA and MAGA must be attributed to its capacity to articulate itself as an ideology determined to return to that moment when the nation was an unchallenged global (economic) force. That is—and this is perhaps more obvious in the case of Thatcherism—it is a nostalgia for imperial greatness. In Thatcher’s jingoistic terms, “Put the Great Back in Great Britain.” For Reagan it functioned similarly, but the sting of defeat was sharper in the case of the United States: the loss incurred in Vietnam, the specter of body bags returning from the war in southeast Asia, the inability to resolve the Iran hostage crisis, to say nothing of the racial violence of the late-1960s Newark, Detroit, Oakland. All these national and international catastrophes weighed heavily on the American psyche. Hence Reagan’s own Biblical jingoism, the promise of America once more as that “shining city on a hill.” “It’s a new day in America;” “It’s morning in America,” Reagan intoned, repeatedly. Implicit in Reagan’s Christological promise of ideological redemption and economic rebirth was the desire for the return of the United States to the status of global hegemon. At the very core of every hegemon is the dream of eternal rule, a dream most poetically rendered by imperial Britain: “The sun will never set on the British Empire.”

Nostalgia for the industrial economic base (and lament for the erosion of the US manufacturing base) amounts to what we might term the loss an onto-economic self. The de-basing of that base must, according to Marx, find its articulation in the superstructure. And what could be more glamorously superstructural than a Hollywood movie that represents the nostalgia for that loss? Pretty Woman is a cinematic mourning for an ideologically beloved mode of being, of being a white, non-college-educated male in America. Surely hell hath no fury like a white, non-college-educated male superannuated by the export of the US manufacturing base to China, communist China, of all places? Who cares about the ideological—which is to say, economic—complexities ushered in by Deng Xiaoping’s own version of state capitalism? A degraded economic base, we can say, will reflect itself in/as an ideologically abhorrent superstructure.

Out of MTIA the political vituperation that is Trumpism will find its political ideology will only become more violent in its odiousness as the MAGA base finds itself ever more the self-proclaimed victims of “globalism” as technological advances—AI, to cite just the most obvious example—render greater numbers of the work force superfluous. What is the MAGA base to do, how will this base provide for its alimentary needs, as the future presents itself as nothing but the bleak possibility of long-term unemployment or, at best, menial labor? Or, even worse, to be reduced to the prospect of seasonal labor. If seasonal labor comes to represent their only economic prospect, will it then only be the antebellum “aristocracy of the skin” that distinguishes MAGA loyalists from those they, in their xenophobia, so despise? “Illegal immigrants?”

It is, therefore, not in the least paradoxical that Margorie Taylor Greene, among the most vehement of the MTIA spokespersons, represents a northwestern Georgia district that is predominantly rural. (Georgia’s 14th district, bordered to the north by Tennessee and to the west by Alabama, also has an exurban constituency.) In the concatenation of MTIA to MAGA, it does not matter that the constituents you represent are themselves the “victims” of America’s manufacturing de-basement. All that is of consequence is that the discourse of “America First,” which is probably where the MTIA-MAGA ideological trajectories conjoin, figures prominently as a rhetorical device.

In the MTIA-MAGA-America-First universe, then, no politics is local. Instead, it is the spirit of the times—nostalgia, as a regressive articulation—that must be captured, that must be kept alive in the public sphere. The effect of this tripartite ideological alliance is that it guarantees that there will, in our moment and in every moment to come, be a future for nostalgia.

There will always be rhetorical work for nostalgia. Nostalgia as definitively inexhaustible. Nostalgia as infinite mourning for the irretrievable object—the past.

It is, then, never a matter of who is enfranchised to speak it. It matters only that nostalgia is kept in good ideological health. That it is conscripted into regular rhetorical duty. It is not, as Taylor Greene’s pronouncements make clear, who but what you represent.