Stephen Miller at the Helm of the White House: The Turn After Defeat

The facts first. According to The Guardian, Donald Trump announced this Friday that Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration crackdown campaign, will become White House chief of staff. Susie Wiles, the first woman to hold the post, is being pushed aside. All this comes just days after Republicans lost Congress in the midterm elections. Beyond that, the dispatch is thin: we do not know the exact circumstances of Ms Wiles's departure, the timetable for the handover, or the first decisions expected. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Cui bono? Let us ask the question early. A president beaten at the midterms has no need of a coalition manager. He needs to lock down the apparatus. The chief of staff controls the agenda, appointments and access to the Oval Office. Entrusting that key to the hardliner means saying that the answer to defeat will not be compromise, but internal discipline.

The state is not a neutral referee. It is the tool of a ruling bloc, and that bloc is never monolithic. One part of capital wants tariffs, another wants cheap, docile labour, a third mainly wants fat margins and stability. Immigration policy is the point where these interests rub against each other. Marx explained it: capital needs a working population it can attract or repel according to the cycles of accumulation. The border is a tap. Shutting it with great noise, while letting the economy depend on migrant labour, produces a precarious workforce without rights, and therefore cheaper and easier to divide.

This is where identity discourse does its work. Gramsci would speak of the battle for common sense: getting people to accept that the enemy of the American wage earner is his foreign neighbour, not his boss or the shareholder's return. A chief of staff who comes out of that battle, installed at the heart of the executive, fights it from the summit of the state, with the state's resources. This is not a detail of personnel. It is the fusion of an ideological project and the administrative apparatus.

Democrats, who have just retaken Congress, will be tempted to respond through parliamentary channels and procedure. Luxemburg offered the right yardstick: does a measure strengthen the power and confidence of workers, or does it demobilise them? One more inquiry committee protects no one in a neighbourhood under raid. Only the organisation of unions, associations and neighbourhood collectives weighs against an executive that is hardening.

What we do not yet know is whether this appointment is a sign of strength or of nervousness. A camp that changes pilot after a defeat is not necessarily confident. But it knows what it is protecting. For us, the task is to know what we are defending.