Liner Note 12: Darkness at Noon

London on January 21, 2017

Tomorrow, we can start rebuilding after this very bad day in U.S. history. Today, I will sit with reality at the bottom of the well.

1. The green transition has been cancelled with immediate effect. The rest of the world will struggle on, led by China, but greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise.  US energy use will increase, and there will be a boom in natural gas power stations, fueled by the tech broligarchy.The US voting majority has chosen climate chaos for itself and the world. The Palisades-Eaton fires in Los Angeles, which has destroyed my hometown of Pacific Palisades, is the harbinger. 
2. The state monopoly on violence goes to the least qualified and most dependent on Trump.  The Secretary of Defense, directors of National Intelligence and FBI, US Attorney General, are all fanatical loyalists and borderline if not actually delusional. They will enforce his attacks on traditional allies and his support for traditional enemies abroad, and do the reverse at home.  His foreign policy point to three-bloc world feudalism structured by continuous diffuse violence. At home, courts, policing, incarceration, and deportation will be further, even wholly, politicized to serve the goals of the executive.
3. Trumpism has now achieved capitalist class consolidation. During his first term and then Joe Biden's, Trump split the billionaire and executive class. Now its leading figures have capitulated completely. "Everyone wants to be my friend," Trump crowed.  Well certainly every member of the 0.1% does. Not just Musk and Thiel but Bezos and Tik Tok CEO Shou Zi Chew will be front-row at the inauguration and are cool with his mass deportations, non-stop threatening and coercion, nullification of diversity, and the rest.
4. The castration complex, which maybe you thought was outdated Freudianism, now rules the planet. The rulers' dominant issue is the(ir) phallus, and all decisions are routed through "the primacy of the phallus and the narcissistic wound" (57). A leading symptom is the ease with which Trump has corralled Washington DC, Big Tech, finance, defense, fossil energy, leaders of every sector, through the sheer assurance of retaliation. 
5. This has transformed Trump's refusal of knowledge and of (democratic) deliberation into a political superpower. Law and knowledge bend the knee to the US culture of force. It's hard to find any prominent figure not responding to Trump's assurance that any non-compliance will be met with retaliation. 
6. Economic policy will be created on the basis of favors in exchange for explicit payment, starting with the tech bros funding Trump's inauguration-based $250 million war chest. The most favors will go to those with the most money, increasing the inequality that allegedly caused Trump's win.
7. National political opposition to Trump no longer exists.  The Harris-Walz campaign proved that Democrats won't use the arguments that work against Trump.  They now need Republicans to block him, but they have no Republicans. Republicans aren't only owned by Trump in the sense of being psychologically unable to oppose him. They also see his political sociopathology as their only real power. As Jonathan Last put it in "Vice is a Moat," they believe that "If a guy [Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hesgeth] is willing to rape a woman, surely he can be counted on to visit destruction on Democrats, or woke generals, or whoever."  
8. Racism is cool again. It can be justified by any "working-class" grievance whatsoever--the high price of milk, slow city government, backed-up expressways, absurd rent increases.  With Trump having destigmatized racism, it is liberated to perform its classic function of deflecting blame from corporate landlords, supermarket monopolies, and other structural problems Trump will worsen.
9. The knowledge class is the constitutive enemy in this Republican-authorititarian psychological formation.  This class has been stripped of standing and authority, and I mean all of us, the-academics, teachers, researchers, creative industry workers, and content makers of all kinds. Trump enforces both knowledge negation and the political negation of its workers.
10. Knowledge class officials will try to neutralize (9) with capitulation.  For example, the executive boards of the two largest humanities associations, the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, started the new year with exercises in anticipatory obedience. The MLA blocked debate of a boycott resolution, while the AHA Council vetoed its own business meeting's resolution against scholasticide in Gaza. Professionals have already been defeated by managers within their own (contradictory) class position known as the professional-managerial class ("Fear Factor"). Now they are imitating managers in refusing to take positions independent of the powers that be, even when these positions are grounded in autonomous (and expert) thought. This strategy will achieve nothing for the professional workers allegedly represented by it, except to confirm their weakness. 
    

All this means that non-Trumpers of the world will need to fight, and fight like we have never fought before, at least not since the 1930s.  It also means that it will feel like we are rebuilding from scratch.

I'll be ready to rebuild tomorrow.  But today I will stay at the bottom of the well.