After a bizarre couple of weeks of Trump thuggery, flip-floppery, and phantasmagoria coupled with anti-Trump protests, where are we? I have no idea. Am I alone in feeling that nothing real has happened? That it’s all theater—as much so on the Left as it is on the Right? No Kings? Okay. Sure. But does that break through to anybody who isn’t already convinced that Trump is who he is. Does reality have any power at all to break through anymore? The polls tell us so far probably not:
Start with Trump’s and the GOP’s popularity. They’re not popular but then again neither are the Democrats. Trump’s approval has gone down since the beginning of his second term, now sitting at 46.5 percent in the RCP running average (a point lower in Nate Silver’s average). But Trump is still running ahead of his approval rating at this point in his first term. And at this point in his second term, he’s actually running slightly ahead of Obama and Bush at this point in their second terms.
Polls, of course, are no real indicator of reality. How can they be when so many people are detached from it? Polls are simply the measure of what version of unreality most people currently subscribe to.
Again. I’m not against those who are making the effort to resist. But I think at this point it serves therapeutic purposes more than effective strategic political purposes. I hope something real eventually will emerge from it. But if that happens, it will be because resistance leaders will be forced to recognize that what they’re doing now can’t work and that they need to be open to something different. What we see over and over again feels formulaic, and we need something original, something that signifies what this kind of warmed-over, post-1968-style protest cannot.
I just got my latest issue of Mother Jones in the mail. The cover story is “Technofascist Takeover”. Okay. That’s up my alley. I’ll probably get around to reading it at some point, but is it going to tell me anything I don’t already think or know? Maybe some details. But I don’t need to read it, and the people who do won’t. And besides, that kind of solid investigative journalism is only salient in an information environment in which the Louis Brandeis quote still holds true: “If the broad light of day could be let in upon men’s actions, it would purify them as the sun disinfects”.
It just doesn’t anymore. That’s from another era when shady people in power felt they needed to do their dark deeds out of sight. Everything now is done out in broad daylight, and the infection just keeps spreading. The MSNBC crowd is freaked out about it—and so should they be—but it just seems to be very Liberal bubble bound, and it seems to be incapable of breaking out of it from within its own resources. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I doubt it. People need to do what in good conscience they feel compelled to do. But something else is called for.
What is it? I’m not sure what it will look like, but it will be original, and it will fit the situation in a way that the current formulaic response is not fitting it. So, for instance, what Gandhi did in India was ‘original’, and the Civil Rights Movement adapted it to the American situation in original ways in the 50s and 60s. We need that kind of originality now fitted to our circumstances.
What we’re dealing with now can’t just follow the formulae for those deeply significant 20th-Century social movements. It can learn from them, but it has to be better adapted to the fractured information environment of the early 21st Century and to the way so many of us have become sealed off from reality by the screens-induced trance of day-to-day life in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.
We need something “original”, and that requires the emergence of original leaders. To be ‘original’ it must awaken ‘originary’ energies, i.e., energies that arise from the originary depths, something that connects us to the really Real, not some simulacral counterfeit of it. What’s called for is a new movement that creates its own forms of resistance and a powerful vision of the human future that resonates and inspires something in the hearts of all people of good will. We need to be awakened from our isolating and enervating collective dream and to tap into a source of communion and solidarity that seems currently unavailable to us. But that could change.
I don’t think anything less will be potent enough to effectively resist the powers that we confront. One thing we can learn from Gandhi and the American Civil Rights movment is that their movements took years to mature. This isn’t something that gets cooked up in a weekend retreat. It will emerge gradually, and hopefully there will be enough people who will be awake enough to recognize it and respond. In the meanwhile, we do what’s there for us to do.
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