Boycotting freedom
How to make the Constitution great again in the age of Donald Trump
Note: A version of this piece first appeared Saturday February 18, as part of the article magazine weekly subscriber newsletter. Please consider subscribing to it here or pitching in what you can, and help keep article magazine going. — Colin.
As the New York Times put it this week, following the news that Nordstrom has decided to stop carrying Ivanka Trump products: “Shopping becomes a political act in the Trump era.”
Is that true?
Certainly shopping-as-protest is not new. Shopping has long been a way to register displeasure about politics. It’s why there is a nearly permanent protest outside the Canada Goose store in SoHo. It’s why, in 2012 a chicken sandwich was the hottest summer political story in the United States. Back then, the CEO of fast food chain Chick-fil-A let it be known he was against gay marriage. Gay marriage advocates duly boycotted the company, which in turn prompted a surge in support from those on the other side of the partisan divide. That summer, buying a shitty fast food sandwich suddenly became a political act.
And it is also why Trump’s savviest political move (though it was perhaps an accidental one) was to let a hat — made in America, declaring American greatness, available for purchase — become the focal point of his election campaign.
But there is something more profound about Trump’s relationship to retail consumption.
Visiting Ground Zero in lower Manhattan is a strange experience. To view the memorial, including the seemingly bottomless, black pools that mark where the original World Trade Center buildings stood — and to see the engravings of the names of those who died on September 11, 2001 — visitors must go through an airport-style security checkpoint. You walk through a metal detector. Your bags might even be searched. Nearby, on Greenwich Street, you can visit the 9/11 Museum store. On sale there are ties and tea towels featuring a print of the iconic WTC “tridents”. There are t-shirts and refrigerator magnets marking the 15th anniversary since the terrorist attack, as well as a book called “None shall erase you”.
Next door is the Oculus, the massive structure marking the WTC transportation hub, the $4.4 billion (USD) skeleton that is meant to resemble a dove of peace but that, as Martin Filler puts it in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, “seems more like a steroidal stegosaurus that wandered onto the set of a sci-fi flick and died there.” The Oculus covers a vast mezzanine below — the connection point between the station and the new underground shopping centre created to replace the one that was destroyed in 2001.
And that mall. Filler writes, accurately: “Far from this being the ‘exhilarating nave of a genuine people’s cathedral,’ as Paul Goldberger claimed in Vanity Fair, Calatrava’s superfluous shopping shrine is merely what the Germans call a Konsumtempel (temple of consumption), and a generic one at that.”
Standing below the immense glass Oculus on the floor of the mezzanine is an intense experience. Looking up, facing west, One World Trade is framed perfectly along the centre line of the massive glass ceiling. It is a purposeful reminder of why you are there.
But… why are you there? Why are you, a visitor to Ground Zero, site of the worst day in the history of the United States in a generation, being reminded of the gravity of that incident— literally staring at its commemoration — while standing, of all places, in a shopping centre?
“Go shopping,” President George W. Bush told Americans in the days following the 9/11 attack. They did. It was patriotic. Standing in that mall at Ground Zero these days serves as a reminder that in America the power to buy things, to consume, is effectively equal to freedom. In a crude but real way (exemplified by, say, how punitive the U.S. justice system is on the poor versus how relatively lenient it is on the wealthy) America tells you that the more money you have, the freer you are.
And so when a man who has a lot of money, and who has collected that money — so the myth goes — independently, comes along and tells you that he can make you as free as he is, it’s a compelling message. What, after all, was the source of Donald Trump’s appeal as Republican presidential candidate? It was not just that he said whatever he wanted or promised things no other politician would promise; it was that he could do those things because he was freer — because he has lots of money.
It has been an odd few weeks where much of America (and the world) has remained confused about how to approach the Trump administration. Gradually, some lines of attack are working. Michael Flynn is gone as national security adviser, largely, it seems, thanks to leaks from the intelligence community. And Trump’s initial executive order banning immigrants from seven Middle Eastern nations has run aground in the courts — though he has now vowed to revise its language to try again. And although he remains generally unpopular, that he would easily succumb to efforts to remove him from office (should there ever even be the congressional willingness) seems like wishful thinking.
At the heart of the complaints against him is that he is, in a few ways, already potentially violating the U.S. Constitution. Yet, when you consider that Trump’s appeal and sales pitch — one he presumably believes — is that he is free to do and say as he pleases because he has a lot of money, it’s not so difficult to understand why it might not matter to him, or (perhaps) some of his supporters: the logic of Trump’s success suggests that agency and freedom are granted by money and the power to consume, not the Constitution.
It suggests something else, too.
Street protests might be valuable in that they give Trump’s opposition a sense of camaraderie and community. But, unlike other presidents who were not driven to power by the size of their monetary assets — and whose hold on that power was similarly not tied directly to how they made money, as it remains with Trump — refusing to buy things, whether Trump brand or not, might in reality be the most powerful form of protest there is at the moment.
The New York Times almost had it right. Shopping was always political, but now, run-of-the-mill consumer protest has taken on a spectacular new meaning in the age of Trump. His ascendency is reason why, once and for all, the concepts of money and freedom need to be decoupled from one another.
Americans must make the Constitution great again; to do that, they have to stop shopping.
Colin Horgan is a journalist and writer in Toronto.
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