The Ghost at the Birthday Party
Beneath the granite faces of four presidents, Donald Trump celebrated the 250th anniversary of American independence with an attack on “communism”. Fourteen references in, he ranked this 178-year-old Marxian philosophy above World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, and September 11 as the greatest threat the country has ever faced.
This, despite the fact that no communist holds a seat in Congress, no communist country has sent troops to our borders, the Soviet Union dissolved 35 years ago, and our nearest communist neighbor – Cuba – can’t even keep its lights on.
Such hysteria was a subject of taunts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto when it was published in 1848. A specter is haunting Europe, they wrote, and all the powers of old Europe — pope and tsar, French radicals and German police spies — had entered into a holy alliance to exorcise it. The fear of communism existed before it became a governing system anywhere on earth. Back then, anti-communist hysteria only elevated its significance, and Marx thanked them for the publicity.
French philosopher Jacques Derrida arrived at what was supposed to be the funeral of communism 145 years later. He published in 1994 Specters of Marx, based on a series of lectures from the prior year, observing that Francis Fukuyama and others had, on the occasion of the Soviet Union’s collapse, triumphed in the death of the beast. Fukuyama claimed that history had ended and liberal capitalism had won.
Derrida noticed something off about this funeral. Never, he observed, had the death of an idea been proclaimed so loudly or so often. Nobody stages repeated exorcisms over a grave they believe is empty. He coined a word for the condition: hauntology, a near-homophone of ontology. Ontology is the study of what is; hauntology describes what neither quite exists nor quite disappears and keeps returning. And he dwelt on the double meaning of the word conjuration. To conjure is to summon a spirit as well as to swear an oath against it. The two acts cannot be separated. Every exorcism begins by calling the ghost into the room.
In true hauntological form, the president of the United States spent a third of his speech performing a séance instead of celebrating our country’s birthday. Communism is the enemy of free people everywhere, he told his audience. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; it is death, tyranny, and the pursuit of evil. In true Trump fashion, he proclaimed this apparition the worst idea in history, championed by the worst people. He called it a loser, of course.
The ghost was named, described, denounced, exiled, buried, and then dug up again, because no burial of a ghost ever holds.
If he were a reader, one might assume that he was taking a page from Derrida, who found his next ghost in Hamlet, the play at the center of Specters of Marx. When the ghost of the old king appears on the ramparts, it wears armor with the visor down. The ghost sees us before we see him, and we can never verify the identity of the person behind the metal. Derrida called it the visor effect, and it explains why specters are so politically useful. A ghost has no face of its own, so any face can be assigned to it.
Trump demonstrated with his rant how useful a faceless ghost can be. The Communist Party, he told the crowd, is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody who does not want to work. The speaker’s tactic at work here is the installation of a convenient menace: the migrant, the unemployed, unwelcome transporters of the infection.
The anti-communist rhetoric of this speech deployed a sleight of hand that deserves scrutiny. By throwing all Trump’s bogeymen into the mix, an economic category becomes a category of treason. To lack a job or a visa is to belong to the enemy. Marx would have recognized the maneuver instantly, because analyzing it was his life’s work: the anxieties produced by an economic order are gathered up, given a foreign face, and marched out of town.
A materialist might ask what work the ghost performs. Follow the specter through the speech and it leads directly to Trump’s agenda. Within a few breaths of the exorcism, the president called for terminating the filibuster, passing the Save America Act, and, in his own words, not losing elections for 100 years.
Tactically, the ghost is the license he needs. Forging a permanent single-party majority is a difficult thing to justify while congratulating the republic on 250 years of self-government. Invoke an eternal enemy, though, and holding power forever may look less like ambition and more like sacred duty.
If communism is a greater threat than both world wars combined, then no filibuster, no ordinary alternation of parties, can be allowed to stand in the way of the defense. Reintroducing anticommunism doesn’t require that an actual communist threat exist – Trump can just manufacture one. He admitted as much when he declared that the identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation. An identity built on an enemy needs its ghost the way a border needs a far side.
Mount Rushmore served as the perfect backdrop for this spectacle. The president posted a video of his own face carved into the mountain beside Lincoln’s in advance of the show. Showmanship underscored the message, with granite faces above, fireworks after, and a 28-minute performance by the leader of the free world.
And yet the speech could not hold its celebratory pose. It kept breaking off to wrestle the revenant, tallying the hundred million dead of the last century, refighting the Cold War, promising to send the ghost’s living hosts into exile.
Mourning, Derrida argued, is the work of making sure the dead stay where we put them, of fixing the remains in a known place. A man who declares an idea dead once has finished mourning. A man who declares it dead 14 times in 28 minutes is standing on a grave he does not trust to contain its inhabitant.
He is right not to trust that grave, though not for the reason he thinks. The exorcism at Mount Rushmore was aimed at the wrong ghost. What haunts the 250th anniversary is not Marx, whose U.S. party could caucus in a school bus. It is the promise of equality in the Declaration itself, written by an enslaver, signed in 1776. An unkept promise that returns every Fourth of July to measure the distance between the ideal and our reality. That specter needs no summoning. It arrives on schedule with the holiday, wearing no visor at all.
When the president named the people he wanted exiled, he did not describe saboteurs or spies. He described those who tell our children we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors: teachers, historians, the people whose work is to keep the older ghost visible. Every boast about being the freest people on earth conjured that older ghost from wherever the evicted, the uninsured, and the deported are kept off camera. The more extravagant the celebration, the harder it is to ignore who has been left out of the story.
This is a fact that is not just haunting him; it is haunting all of us.