Remember the quaint lyrics from the Beatles song? Those were the good old days when the countercultural Left were the revolutionaries. Where are they now? Well, mostly defending the Technocracy that they wanted to overturn then.
Be that as it may, from my pov what seems to be missing in most media coverage of what Trump.2 is its full-on intent to be a revolution. Most coverage tries to interpret what's happening in a conventional political idiom, noting, of course, with justified alarm all the ways that Trump is breaking norms and laws, and how Democrats are reacting, which is mostly to say how they disapprove that Trump is doing unconventional and unlawful things. But people seem to be afraid to say out loud what is really happening, which is revolution.
Trump world doesn't care about the old laws and the old norms–that's the whole point of making a revolution. Did the Bolsheviks care about the old laws and old norms of the Tsarist regime? Did the Jacobins care about the laws, norms, and traditions of the French ancien regime? Of course not. The whole point was to tear down the totality of the old system and replace it with a new totality completely discontinuous with it. Anybody who wanted continuity or moderation was purged as a counterrevolutionary.
Is that where we're going? Maybe. The French Revolution began in 1789 and it didn't get to the Terror until 1793. Is that pattern repeatable here? Well, I don't expect MAGA to set up a guillotine or a gallows on the Mall, but America doesn't have a problem with sending people to its gulags. We Americans love incarceration whether it's Gitmo or the private and public prison system. That's as American as apple pie.
Whether it gets that far, I don't know, but at the very least we have to take seriously the revolutionary intent of the Voughts, Vances, Bannons, et al. Whether they can prevail is another question. They are serious about replacing one totalizing system with another, but American society might be too complex for them to succeed, and these would-be revolutionaries are, hopefully, in over their heads, and too incompetent to pull it off. And Trump himself is the wild card here. He's too crazy and self-absorbed to be a reliable ally. So if I were forced to bet my house on it, I'd bet against their succeeding. But I find myself hoping that Trump's health holds up. Watch out if Vance takes over. Better Trump's chaos than Vance's revolutionary earnestness.
And I'd feel better about those odds if I were more confident that there was an opposition forming that understood what it was trying to stop–the logic of revolution. Does it? I don't think so. And I'd feel more confident if I were more certain that most Americans care one way or the other. Do they? I really don't know. I'm not sure that democracy as an abstraction is something that excites most Americans anymore. It's one thing what you tell a pollster and another what you are willing to go along with. And so I'd feel better about those odds if I believed there was an opposition that was capable of imagining a better human future for all Americans to which they could say an enthusiastic, heartfelt Yes. Right now No is all the opposition is offering, and it remains to be seen whether that's enough.
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