Symbolic Violence, Trump and Biden/Harris (Excerpts from the Concluding Chapter of Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being (Duke University Press, forthcoming)

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As the above highlights, in conceiving politics as the politics of making and un-making reality, Bourdieu argues that every domination involves both a struggle to dominate and an attempt to institute and better still institutionalize one’s domination. And this is where an important transformation occurs: the more the dominant institutionalize their dominance, enshrine it by law and by habit, among other things, the more their struggle moves from merely winning against someone to ensuring that the game and its rules are their game and their rules. Here, their gaze turns into a top-down gaze rather than just a horizontal gaze. From an imaginary of war, where the horizontal “I’m fighting you in this game” gaze prevails, we move to an imaginary of policing, where the top-down “I am protecting the whole game” gaze is dominant. Symbolic violence occurs at the most intense point of the process whereby the dominant, rather than being seen as fighting for their interests, become seen as—and indeed in practice become—the protectors of “the order of things.” This is where the group that the dominants are struggling to subdue becomes a policing problem rather than a competitor/adversary. 

A shift between warring and policing is very crucial in the fluctuation between states of orthodoxy and states of symbolic violence. We can briefly take the difference in the international politics of Donald Trump’s Republican Party and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Democrats. The period following World War II was the apex of a belief in the United States—not as a state pursuing its own interest alone, but—as a protector of an international order marked by democracy and the rule of law. It can be said that during that time, the dominance of US interest approximated a state of symbolic violence. But this international legitimacy has been in decline ever since. Today, US dominance in world politics has been more and more recognized for what it is: the US fighting to realize its own interests under the guise of protecting a world “order of things.” 

What is interesting about Trumpian international politics is that it involves accepting this state of affairs and dropping any pretense of being responsible for policing the world order. It involves abandoning the American commitment to international bodies that provide a semblance of world governmentality and the US unequivocally presenting itself as fighting for US interests before anything else. The Trumpian Republican gaze on international politics can be said to be more horizontal than top-down. It looks at international competitors eye-to-eye and says, “I am going to win against you.” In this, it can be seen as far more of a realist about the state of US domination and legitimacy than the Biden/Harris Democratic Party gaze. The latter is still grounded in a fantasy of symbolic violence. It still struggles to portray US international politics in terms of an international order that it is caring for and policing. But reality is not on its side and it finds itself increasingly unable to do so and reluctantly doing what Trumpian politics does wholeheartedly: abandoning a commitment to international bodies and presenting US interest as above international law.