First, a point of clarification: I entitled my last post "The Nightmare of No", and that might suggest that I think that the attempts to resist, to say No to, Trump/Vance and the techno-fascists currently wreaking havoc in Washington is a waste of time. I obviously don't think that. My original title was "No is Not Enough", which more accurately reflects what I think, which is that while No is not enough, the reactionaries must be actively resisted to insure that there is a space for a Yes to grow. “No” is the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke. He plays an essential role until a more substantive solution can be developed.
Nevertheless, the continued politics of negation, the politics of endless alternation between the Dems and the GOP as they are currently constituted is a nightmare. This is worse than stalemate because stalemate favors the techno-capitalist and finance oligarchs. They pursue their goals unhindered as the rest of us squabble about tribal, partisan nonsense. And here’s the real problem with the Dems: If the reactionary oligarchs who are currently allying themselves with Trump offer a truly horrific vision of the American future, the Democrats offer no alternative vision for the American future. The Dems are perceived as the defenders of the status quo, a status quo nobody wants. If they have a positive role to play, it’s to slow down where the oligarchs are dragging us, but they offer no positive alternative to where they are dragging us.
So what constitutes a substantive alternative, and how might it emerge?
Well I laid out the rough outline for that in my post last week—”What Solidarity Requires.” As I said in it, I don’t expect to persuade the skeptical reader but only to plant a seed that might sprout as circumstances change. But the argument for a restored transcendentalism can make no sense if you believe that the status quo as defined by the Techno-Capitalist Matrix is Reality. It’s not Reality—that’s the point of the Matrix metaphor. Our life in it is dangerously divorced from Reality, and the primary effect on our lives in it is to become increasingly alienated from Reality, and we become ever more deeply so with each passing decade. That’s a fundamental ontological presupposition, and so nothing else I say makes sense unless you accept that, or at least can entertain it as a possible explanation for what most deeply ails us. Nevetheless, our problem lies in that we must accept the TCM as if it were reality because, so far, no plausible alternative presents itself.
However dehumanizing and awful this system is, it’s the only one we have, so we have to adapt to its constraints as best we can. I think that much of Trump’s popularity lies in his refusal to live within its constraints. He offers an alternative to the current system, and anything different feels liberating and healthy, even if it will be ultimately proved delusional. Trump gives many Americans a way to fantasize a different kind of future, a future that is anything but our present, a present that the Dems seem obsessed to preserve. And that is why their No is not enough.
Although Trump appears to oppose the TCM qua the oppressive administrative state, his mob-boss-like alliances with the techno-fascists accelerate the encroaching tyranny and aliention of the TCM rather than retard it. Everything Trump voters thought they were rejecting in saying No to Harris/Walz they are getting now in a rawer, more vicious form with Trump/Vance.
When a soft fascist like Curtis Yarvin complains about how inefficient democracy is and why we need a dictator/king/CEO/whatever, he's basically saying—
“Why are we bothering with democracy? Its inefficiencies have no function except to slow down the inevitable movement toward the global dominance of Techno-Capitalism and its nihilist logic. Accept your fate peons. Resistance is futile. Democracy makes no sense anymore. Big Daddy will take care of you."
I think he’s right so long as the defense of democracy is articulated within the nihilistic logic that runs the TCM. Thus my argument in “Rescuing Aristotle”: democracy’s future depends on replacing the dehumanizing TCM logic with a humanizing alternative, and the best candidate for that is the retrieval of an older, deeper, more liberating logic, the logic of the ancient transcendental tradition. Transcendentalism cannot run on the TCM OS; it must replace it.
If most Trump-voting middle Americans fail to understand that Trump represents increased techno-tyranny, most Dem Liberals fail to understand how their defense of democracy is a defense of a status quo that is simply a defense of a softer version of the same tyranny. They think their defense of democracy is a defense of individual freedom, but so long as the TCM is the OS that runs the polticial economy, it runs by a logic that must in the long run destroy indiviudal freedom.
The TCM is a totalizing system that demands certain choices and outcomes. Any “principled” resistance to the logic of the TCM always caves because the “principles” only make sense by an alternative logic that is utterly alien to the TCM. Examples abound of well intention folks in the techno-capitalist sector wanting to do the right thing but eventually caving. Remember Google’s “Don’t be evil”. We saw it when Open AI caved in late ‘23—but we see it everywhere. We see it in sports, perhaps most disgustingly in LIV Golf where “principled” resistance eventually caves to Saudi money. We saw the schools in the PAC 12 cave and how the venerable ‘conference of champions” just went poof. We are seeing it now in Washington under Trump and the techno-fascists. Norms and rule of law: Poof. The primary effect of capitalism in any of its stages is as Marx described it, “All that is solid melts into air.”
Resistance is is theoretically possible, but in practice is futile—so long as you accept the basic architecture of the TCM as the OS that runs the political economy.
Nothing within this architecture matters except the inexorable greed-logic of late capitalism. Its principals, people like Sam Altman, have no real freedom or choice; they must act according to the greed-and-growth logic of the TCM or be tossed aside. Any democratic pretense, according to the Yarvin argument, that it can control or alter this logic makes no sense. It’s reality, and you must submit to it. Besides, it’s not so bad. Would you rather live in the Middle Ages?
But it’s not Reality. It’s a simulacra of it.
So when I talk about replacing the TCM with a transcendental alternative, I know how unrealistic and ridiculous that sounds. But here’s why I do it anyway. The TCM is a human construct that has almost no relationship with the Living Real; it’s purpose is to seal us off from the Living Real. The transcendentalism about which I speak has legitimacy insofar as it mediates the Living Real. And that’s what all human beings want, whether they know it or not, i.e., to be in relationship with the Living Real. And they will choose Reality and communion with it rather than un-reality and alienation if the choice is offered to them.
And so you ask, “Is such a choice being offered now? If it is, no one seems to be aware of it.”
And my answer is that it is a choice that is offered to all of us all the time. It’s every moment of grace, every encounter with genuine goodness, kindness, beauty, and an unpretentious honesty. All people of good will recognize the choice and choose it everyday. There are many counterfeit forms of goodness, but we know the real thing when we encounter it, and it’s everywhere.
But it’s just not currently organized.
It’s easy to organize around greed, will to power, resentment and grievance. It’s very difficult to organize around the transcendental Good, especially in an economic/political/cultural environment in which its elites are so hostile to even allowing for its existence. But it’s not impossible because most people are decent, and whether or not they call it the ‘Transcendent Good’, they experience it and know it for what it is.
How might organizing around the Good come to pass? Well it starts with the instinctive resistance of people of good will to greed, will to power, resentment and grievance—and to the system whose entire existence is a celebration of them. Nobody thinks this system is good except the few people who benefit most lavishly from it. But the No to all that must necessarily lead to a recognition of what it is in us that makes us to say it. The No exists only in relationship to a Yes. Without the Yes, there is no No. And then it’s not so difficult to make the next step, which is to see that what we say Yes to is more than convention, that it transcends convention, that it subverts any conventions that are not aligned with it. And not only that, but that it has positive, inspiring, transformative power. In “What Solidarity Requires” I wrote—
No truly transformative social political movement can succeed unless there is solidarity around ideals that call people to transcend their self interest—thus my argument for Rescuing Aristotle. If the kind of MLK populist leadership I hope for emerges, Rescuing Aristotle would make sense as the most adequate theoretical superstructure to articulate its political praxis.
In other words, the argument for the transcendental Good replacing the TCM would be legitimated by the experience of solidarity that is born from people of good will getting organized around it. It’s not just an abstraction, but an authentic articulation of people’s lived sense of communal participation in a transcendental ideal. I see this as the essential thing that distinguished Gandhi’s political activism and MLK’s. It has to be the real thing. People will sniff out anything that is false. I am not saying that such leaders need be perfectly virtuous human beings, but rather that they mediate a transcendental value that people recognize as authentic, and around which they can organize.
The point is that politics is about No until some leader or movement emerges that all people of good will—whether they lean Left or Right—recognize as worthy of their trust. The bar for trustworthiness is very high right now, and the only figure who can win back trust must have the charisma of authentically mediating the Good. Trump in a perverse way is so attractive to people because he has a charisma of authenticity in the opposite way. He is extraordinarily transparent in his corruption, greed, lying, and will to power, and people feel more comfortable with someone who isn’t hiding it. Trump is a No vote against the hypocrisy that they believe is the default for every other politician.
The only thing that beats the charismatic authenticity of Evil is the charismatic authenticity of the Good. I no longer think that conventional politicians, even talented, decent human beings like Chris Murphy and Tim Walz, can play this role because they are too identified with the tainted institutions in good faith they seek to defend. Their resistance is needed in the short run, but people want something radically discontinuous, and whatever you might think about the realistic prospects of replacing the TCM OS with a new transcendentalist OS, it would be radically discontinuous with what we have now. People are hungry for it —not just the theory, but the reality it articulates. And I believe there is the innate capacity for recognizing and choosing it in the hearts of all human beings of good will. The question is whether at some point it will be possible to organize around it, develop a potent sense of solidarity and political will inspired by it.
So yes, in the short run I support any form of resistance no matter what the motive, but resistance is folly in the long run if it stays stuck in No. Out of the No must emerge a Yes. And so if there is going to be at some point truly effective resistance, it has to start with understanding the fundamentally dehumanizing, nihilistic thing that needs to be resisted. And then to move to framing how it needs to be replaced with something truly liberating and humanizing.
I really am going to return to Hart, but I feel a need first to establish the urgency of problem before explaining Hart’s solution.
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