I haven't much to say about Trump.2 because things have developed pretty much as I thought they would, and there's no point in belaboring the obvious. Trump's latest atrocity or idiocy isn't interesting to comment on because so predictable. Defying a 9-0 supreme court order? No biggie. Unprecendented? Kinda. But there was Andrew Jackson about two hundred years ago, and he's on our twenty dollar bill. Why should it be a problem for Trump? Only the people with Trump derangement syndrome get worked up about technical stuff like that.
So Trump is gonna do the awful stuff we knew he was gonna do. What interests me more is how long it will take a significant strategic resistance to emerge. We're not close yet because the people who need to learn the hard lesson about their having voted for Trump haven't had their disinformation bubbles pierced yet. That will take some time, if it happens at all. Even Bill Maher is charmed by the guy.
The other question that interests me is whether and how long the factions that united to elect Trump will stay united. I've been counting on their breaking into chaotic infighting. Some mild forms of it have broken out here and there, and who knows what's happening behind the scenes, but nothing has come into view yet to encourage much hope that a reactionary oligarchy isn't something most of "populist" MAGA is just fine with. MAGA world is ok with oligarchs so long as they are MAGA oligarchs. The class war isn't between the rich and the poor, but between the intelligentsia and the "real" Americans who hate them, and if the billionaires are MAGA, all the better.
Along those lines I thought Franklin Foer's piece in the Atlantic Sunday was useful for explaining how the most powerful uniting factor that binds MAGA factions is Maoist in a cultural-revolution kind of way.
In its strange inversion of American politics, the Trump administration has come far closer to executing a Marxist theory of power than any of its progressive predecessors. It has waged class warfare, not against billionaires but against a far more ubiquitous enemy. And it has done so with a certainty that justifies terrible excesses, a desire to purge that it has only just begun to realize…
In a way, Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia—what the Communist Party of China memorably deemed the “stinking ninth” class. Although Trump’s purges have been tame by comparison [so far], there are parallels. Like Trump, Mao wanted to create manufacturing jobs in the homeland. Defying expert opinion and shunning economic common sense, Mao launched his Great Leap Forward—a disastrously unsuccessful policy of rapid industrialization—in the late ’50s. During that period and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, he resorted to scapegoating his own PMC, especially the professoriate and other cultural elites. (“Better red than expert” was a rallying cry.) His minions subjected its members to public humiliation and horrifying violence; the state exiled members of the urban bourgeoisie to the countryside for reeducation.
This "class" being warred upon is the one that I belong to, and probably you and most people you know belong to it, too. They–we–are the experts that a complex pluralistic society needs to run its institutions. I nevertheless sympathize with this revolt against the technocracy–but more from a Left pov. Theodor Roszak's The Making of a Counterculture (1969) and Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites (1995) haven't lost their saliency, and are well worth reading if you want a thoughtful, left perspective critiquing the pathologies of the technocracy. Pretty much everything they wrote about then is true now except ten times worse.
It's not the expertise itself that's the problem; it's the ideology that supports it–the whole best and brightest, we know better package: "We know how to run policy in the Middle East, and we know how to run the world financial system. And look at our health care system! Who could complain about that? Just shut up and let us do our job." This is a class whose principals are way too comfortable in their alignment with goals and methods of what I've been calling the TCM.
It's the world I and most of you worked in and, I don't know about you, but it was a world I found suffocating especially in the last couple of decades. And that's not the fault of the Right, but of the postmodern cultural Left that has been largely coopted by Neoliberalism and the TCM, and that celebrates what was worst in the counterculture–its hedonic, narcissistic, atomizing liberationism–and rejected what was best, its longing for something more deeply, spiritually human.
So how did we get from 1969 to now? In the '70s we started to get a trendy postmodern nihilism in the universities and in the '80s the dismantling of the New Deal in politics. In the '90s, the Soviet Union collapsed, Capitalism triumphs, and Americans started hating one another rather than Communists abroad. The rich got richer; the poor poorer, and in the '00s the churches destroyed whatever was left of their public moral legitimacy in loathsome, crippling scandals or have taken a right-wing, reactionary turn that that most sane people of good will rightly find repugnant. In the '10s, the Great Awokening pushes what was already annoying about political correctness over the top and sets the stage for reactionary blowback. And so here we are in with the reductio ad absurdum of the failure of the counterculture in the Nixon and Carter years in its gradual morphing into the postmodern, post-truth embodiment in our clown-King Donald J. Trump, hell bent now, with the help of his cronies, on turning the USA into a corrupt, second-rate, 1980s-style banana republic. He's good at it: It took him less than three months to start 'disappearing' people.
Like many of you, I feel myself bereft, a man without a country–disgusted and ashamed by the corrupt, ignorant, vulgar, cruel, morally squalid thing we've allowed ourselves to become. And discouraged because there is no one of moral stature and broad credibility who is calling for anything that I think has a remote chance of restoring us to health. Certainly not the Democrats.
The worst, as usual, are full of passionate intensity, and the best, as usual, haven't a clue.
And so I find myself incongruously writing essays about the restoration of a transcendent metaphysical imaginary in a attentional and political-cultural environment that couldn't care less about such a project. But, you know, whatever.
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