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 points 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 The castration complex, which maybe you thought was outdated Freudianism, now rules the planet.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.

Notre Dame de Paris on December 3, 2024

WHEN THE CALL TO STRIKE COMES FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS

 

“All sites closed in Lille, the alarm ringing in Evry, a suspension of classes in Nice... Everywhere, in red and black letters, the slogan is displayed on the buildings: ‘Universities in danger’. At the call of France Universités, an association which brings together heads of establishment, the universities are mobilizing each in their own way, Tuesday December 3, to mark their ‘refusal to see themselves condemned to degrade the quality of their training.

 

“While the finance bill for 2025 shows a budget for higher education and research at half mast – an increase of 89 million euros, but a decrease in constant euros – the time must be to ‘take of conscience’ of a reality on the ground that the public authorities pretend to ignore, according to the association. Already on Thursday, November 21, around thirty university presidents converged on foot towards the Ministry of Higher Education, and invited themselves to the office of the minister, Patrick Hetzel.

 

“In a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, Friday November 29, which Le Monde obtained, France Universités now calls for ‘personal arbitration’ on the part of Michel Barnier so that the French university can respond to the ambition of the country’” [N.B. Barnier has now been forced to resign by a no confidence vote in the National Assembly.]

 

“Expressing its “anger”, the association specifies that “the meeting with [Patrick Hetzel] did not dispel the fears resulting from an unprecedented situation of a shift towards a very degraded functioning of the universities”. Eighty percent of them will be in deficit by the end of 2024 and ‘projections show that the situation will be worse in 2025,’ warns France Universités.”

 

SOURCE: Soazig Le Nevé, Le Monde.

 

 

THE KNOWLEDGE CRISIS WAS INVENTED BY ST. PAUL

 

“His book is certainly timely. As he notes, there are certain epochs, and surely we are slap bang in the middle of one, when “evident truth” is cast aside in favour of all manner of imbecile imaginings. “Mesmerised crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumours trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.” There, encapsulated in a sentence, is the predicament we face in our present-day social and political lives. . . .”

 

“At the heart of the book is an invigorating excursus on St Paul, the founding father of the most consequential and, some would contend, most pernicious religious cult the world has known. Lilla knows his man: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the history of western populism – spiritual and political – began with Paul.’ He is ‘the cultured despiser of culture’, ‘a learned fanatic of the highest order.’ who ‘held up as spiritual models innocent children, uneducated workmen, and lambs with vacant eyes, forever enshrining reverse snobbery as a Christian virtue.’ If the next resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is in need of a patron saint, surely Paul is the one:

 

“’For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent … If any man among you seems to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.’”

 

SOURCE, John Banville, review of Mark Lilla, The Observer

 

A TALE OF TWO AMERICAS: HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN TRUMP-WON V. HARRIS-WON STATES

 

 

SOURCE: The Intellectualist, X

 

CRYPTO ADVOCATE PAUL ATKINS PICKED AS SEC CHAIR BY DONALD TRUMP

 

“Donald Trump has nominated cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to chair the US Securities and Exchange Commission, drawing cheers from across the finance industry as it hopes for a more favourable regulatory climate under the incoming administration.

 

“’Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations,’ Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. Atkins ‘also recognises that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.’ . . .”

 

“In another significant move for business, the president-elect also nominated Gail Slater, a top aide to vice-president-elect JD Vance, to head the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.

 

“The finance industry has had a fractious relationship with the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who has pursued a broad rulemaking agenda and tough enforcement stance, clamping down on traditional Wall Street players as well as cryptocurrency businesses.

 

“Gensler targeted many of the biggest crypto companies with lawsuits and declined to craft rules for digital assets, arguing many tokens were securities and that existing laws were sufficiently clear. He branded the sector a “wild west” rife with fraud and investor risk.”

 

SOURCE: Stefania Palma, Financial Times

 

UK UNCOVERS VAST CRYPTO LAUNDERING SCHEME FOR GANGSTERS AND RUSSIAN SPIES

 

“A UK-led operation has uncovered a multibillion-dollar money laundering scheme run out of London, Moscow and Dubai that enabled Russian spies and European drug traffickers to evade sanctions using cryptocurrency.

 

“The UK’s National Crime Agency said on Wednesday that its ‘Operation Destabilise’ investigation centred on two companies — Smart and TGR — that acted as a financial hub for cash-rich global criminals and sanctioned individuals relying on cryptocurrency outside the banking system.

 

“The NCA said the network had been used by clients including the Kinahan cartel, Irish cocaine traffickers linked to numerous contract killings, as well as funding ransomware groups, and ‘Russian espionage operations’ from late 2022 to summer 2023.

 

“The illicit network, operating across more than 30 countries, illustrates the growing interaction between hostile states and organised criminals as economic sanctions have forced countries such as Russia to find new ways of operating in the west. The case also shows the increasing use of cryptocurrencies by those cut off from the global banking system.

 

“Rob Jones, director-general of operations at the NCA, said the investigation ‘is the most significant money laundering operation’ that the NCA had ever undertaken.

 

“’It targets . . . a laundromat that brings together at scale street cash and cryptocurrency,’ he said. It ‘takes you from McMafia, through to Narcos, through to le Carré, where you have espionage, where you have transnational organised crime and you have elite Russian-speaking money launderers and cybercriminals.’

 

“The network used couriers to collect physical cash from criminals in one country such as the UK in exchange for cryptocurrency, with Tether the most favoured. The cash would then be laundered through companies and the equivalent value made available in other countries.

 

“This two-way, mutually beneficial trade meant that cash rich cocaine kingpins simultaneously helped Russian cyber criminals and elites to launder stolen crypto and access cash while evading western sanctions.”

 

SOURCE: Miles Johnson and Suzi Ring, Financial Times

 

OVERSHOOTING WITH DONALD TRUMP  

 

 

SOURCE: Simon Evans, X

 

ANY RETURN FROM THE ASSET ECONOMY?

 

“One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according not just to conventional statistical measures (such as GDP or life expectancy) but also to the preferred measures of the governing party. What would those measures be? Since George Osborne, who made debt and deficit reduction his central economic goals, departed the Treasury it has been difficult to know what kind of future Tory governments have been aiming at, or how we’d know if we were to arrive in it. Real wages have stagnated, no higher today than when the Cameron-led coalition first came to power in 2010, while the scant growth in GDP since then has been largely an effect of high immigration – GDP per capita has barely risen. The national debt, which Osborne elevated to the indicator par excellence, climbed above 100 per cent of GDP last year, up from around 65 per cent in 2010. Business investment and trade in goods have both collapsed as a consequence of Brexit.

 

“House prices, however, have risen handsomely, up from an average of £170,000 in 2010 to £280,000 today (or, for Londoners, £280,000 to £500,000). More than a decade of the lowest interest rates in the Bank of England’s history – driven even lower than they might have been by multiple rounds of quantitative easing – converted torrents of cheap credit into asset price appreciation, for those fortunate enough to benefit. By withdrawing demand from the economy (through reduced public spending) and forcing the Bank of England to hold interest rates down (to stave off deflation), Osborne ensured that Britain became the textbook example of an ‘asset economy’, in which collective and productive progress is sacrificed for capital gains. This has produced an eerie temporality: society stands still, while certain households seem to pull away magically from others.”

 

“Between 1974 and 2007, Britain’s average rate of productivity growth (the clearest gauge of prosperity) was more than 2 per cent per year; since then, it has been less than 0.5 per cent per year. We shouldn’t underestimate how much of the political economy of the 2010-24 era – with its zero-sum conflicts over the public purse, rising in-work poverty, highest tax burden since 1945 and increasing influence of inherited assets – stems from the inability to build wealth through investment in people, ideas and technology. When Adair Turner, then chairman of the Financial Services Authority, declared in 2009 that much of what banks did was ‘socially useless’, this was viewed as an extraordinary attack on one of Britain’s last globally competitive sectors. In 2024, it would almost be surprising to discover that great wealth (or even a basic level of financial security) could be achieved by doing something socially useful.

 

The expanded remit of the Bank of England, now encompassing responsibility for the overall health of the financial sector, is the outstanding constitutional and political consequence of the financial crisis in the UK. The use of quantitative easing to stimulate a stagnant economy during the post-2008 years, to boost it a couple of months after the Brexit referendum, then to put it on life support under Covid, was the distinguishing economic policy of the era. The distributional effects of QE have been sharply regressive, pumping up asset portfolios, but because the policy was enacted outside the democratic arena by an independent Bank of England, party-political and media attention to these effects has been minimal.”

 

SOURCE: William Davies, London Review of Books

 

 

HONG KONG IMPRISONS DEMOCRACY PROTESTERS, LAUNCHES NEW CULTURE STRATEGY

 

“The road map is part of government efforts to create new economic drivers while also offering more opportunities in professions popular among young people, in a bid to make Hong Kong a more appealing global city.

 

“The blueprint will also outline the city’s efforts to align with the mandate from Beijing’s 14th five-year development plan for Hong Kong to become an “East-meets-West” centre for international cultural exchange. . . . “

 

“The insiders also said the latest version of the blueprint mapped out four key positions: promoting Chinese culture; developing diverse creative industries; building an international platform for East-meets-West cultural exchanges; and refining the ecosystem for creative industries.

 

“The push to promote Chinese culture will cover the intangible heritage of the country’s south and involve collaborations with the Greater Bay Area.

 

“The bay area is an emerging economic zone that combines Hong Kong, Macau and nine mainland Chinese cities and has a population totalling about 87 million.

 

“The road map also covers 71 measures to bolster the development of industries such as the performing and visual arts, music, animation, dance, film and fashion, among other sectors. . .  .”

 

“The same source said the government would also put the existing funding schemes under review so that grants could reflect market demand.

 

“’It does not necessarily mean that funding is market-driven, at least, a performance or a show has to include some market elements,’ the insider said.

 

The source explained that some shows that received government funding sometimes were too niche, and did not have a clear market.

 

SOURCE: Denise Tsang, South China Morning Post

 

 

 

November 9, 2016, cousin's guest room, Columbus, Ohio

MOST POLARIZED DEMOCRACY 

“Pernicious polarization threatens democracies by hampering their ability to solve problems and — worse — by increasing the risks of political violence and authoritarianism. Here again, the findings are not encouraging. In a separate analysis based on the same dataset but focused just on democracies since 1950, we found that severe polarization correlates with serious democratic decline. Of the 52 instances where democracies reached pernicious levels of polarization, fully half of them experienced erosion of their democracy, with most of them sliding into authoritarianism. All of the 16 cases that managed to reduce polarization to below-pernicious levels stayed democratic as they did so. Even within this “lucky” subset, some have since repolarized. . . .

"Strikingly, the US is quite alone among the ranks of perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic experience. There simply is no other wealthy, long-standing democracy in the V-DEM dataset as badly polarized as the US."

SOURCE: Jennifer McCoy, Bloomberg

TRUST CRASH

Trust that the government will do the right thing plunged for both parties under Nixon. It plunged again for Republicans under Biden, but had already plunged for them under Bush I and Bush II. It has never recovered to 1960s levels.

SOURCE: The Economist

CHRISTIAN SOLDIER

Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox personality Pete Hegreth, emerges from the pool.

SOURCE: Matthew D. Taylor

“There are at least two major strands of Christian supremacy operating in the U.S. today: the highbrow Calvinists and the populist charismatics. Both groups are Protestant, and both have theological roots in an obscure group of Reformed (Calvinist) American theologians called the “Christian Reconstructionists,” who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. 

“The Reconstructionists draw inspiration from 16th-century theologian John Calvin’s Geneva, a theocratic city-state where unrepentant heretics could be executed by a government that enforced orthodoxy.

 

Though certainly not representative of all Calvinists, today’s Reconstructionists have embraced a vision of what they call ‘dominion theology.’ They interpret certain Bible passages to mean that Christians must ‘take dominion’ over every society and remake it into the kingdom of God. 

 

“Today, they hold conferences with titles such as ‘Blueprints for Christendom 2.0’ and talk about how they will help Jesus the ‘warrior-king’ to ‘dominion-ize’ this world.

 

“These theological intellectuals of the Christian far right are radicalizing more run-of-the-mill Christian nationalists. Reconstructionist luminaries today include people like Stephen Wolfe, a scholar with a Ph.D. in political theory who argues full-throatedly in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism that ‘Non-Christians … are not entitled to political equality.’”

SOURCE: Matthew D. Taylor

THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE CULTURE WARRIORS

“South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a long-time Trump supporter who shares his hardline views on immigration, has been tapped for Homeland Security secretary. His choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, former Representative Lee Zeldin, has little environmental experience but has been a firm Trump supporter.

 

“Rubio originally clashed with Trump when both sought the Republican nomination in 2016. But he became a staunch Trump supporter in the Senate and helped lead outreach to Hispanics during this year’s election campaign. He’s gone as far as comparing the various court cases against Trump to Cuban show trials.

 

“Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick to be ambassador to the United Nations, was one of his first national security announcements — and reflects not just loyalty to Trump but her penchant for going after cultural elites. . . .

 

“His choice for White House national security advisor, Representative Mike Waltz of Florida, is a combat-decorated former Green Beret who introduced an act in Congress to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the military and halt the teaching of critical race theory. His choice for defense secretary, Hegseth, comes directly from Fox News — and has also supported efforts to counter such “woke” policies in the military.”

SOURCE: Iain Marlow, Bloomberg 

VICHY REPUBLICANS

"If you’re surprised, you’re a dupe. President Trump is going to do in his second term what he said he’d do on the campaign trail, and what he tried fitfully to do in his first term. He’s going to turn the federal government into an instrument of MAGA policy and grievance. He’s going to pursue retribution against enemies. He’s going to destroy what remains of the older norms that guide the operations of the government, and of the institutional checks that constrain the abuse of power. . . .

 

“Will Republicans and conservatives now stand up to Trump? Was yesterday a real wake up call for them, or simply the latest of dozens such moments when the alarm sounds, and they first mute it, then turn it off, and then conveniently forget that it ever sounded in the first place?

 

“I’m not optimistic. . . . Trump is their master. As Rep. Troy Nehls (R–Tex.) said yesterday, “His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word. . . . If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it.”

 

“That’s it. That’s Trump’s Republican party. That’s our Republican party.”

SOURCE: William Kristol and Andrew Egger

HEAD CHOPPING JUSTICE

“The announcement of Gaetz’s nomination may have thrilled MAGA, but it shocked official Washington, coming on the heels of a brazen series of selections by Trump for other cabinet posts. The congressman’s firebrand label is well deserved. He has been a bombastic member of the House, keen to throw sharp elbows at his foes, defend Trump in dramatic ways and pick fights within his own party’s tent. 

“That attitude has won him many enemies on the Hill. But it was also fundamental to Trump’s decision to choose him for the AG slot, according to a Trump adviser familiar with the transition process. 

“’None of the attorneys had what Trump wants, and they didn’t talk like Gaetz,’ the adviser said. ‘Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.”’ . . .

“In the Trump era, immediate shock and awe often has a way of morphing into awkwardly-rationalized acceptance by Republicans. And even the once tough-talking Mullin signaled on Wednesday afternoon that he’d be at least open to voting for Gaetz.

“’I completely trust President Trump’s decision-making on this one,’ Mullin told CNN’s Jake Tapper. ‘He has to answer those questions. And hopefully, he‘s able to answer the questions right. If he can, then we’ll go through the confirmation process.’” . . .

“In the Trump era, immediate shock and awe often has a way of morphing into awkwardly-rationalized acceptance by Republicans. And even the once tough-talking Mullin signaled on Wednesday afternoon that he’d be at least open to voting for Gaetz.

“”I completely trust President Trump’s decision-making on this one,” Mullin told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “He has to answer those questions. And hopefully, he‘s able to answer the questions right. If he can, then we’ll go through the confirmation process.’”

SOURCE: Mark A. Caputo

AND IF ONLY TWITTER VOTED

SOURCE: Midwest Sandernista

THREE-QUARTERS OF UK UNIVERSITIES TO BE IN DEFICIT IN SEPTEMBER 2025

“Almost three-quarters of such institutions are forecast to be in deficit in the academic year starting September 2025, following a £3.4bn decline in net income across the sector, according to a report published on Friday by the Office for Students. . . .

“The OfS said some providers would need to consider significant structural changes such as mergers, with the aggregate deficit expected to reach £1.6bn in 2025-26. The most recent financial returns for the HE sector from the end of 2023 forecast a surplus of £1.8bn.

“Redundancy and restructuring programmes are under way at 76 higher education institutions.

“About 100 providers fell short of their UK undergraduate recruitment forecasts for the current academic year, and roughly 150 failed to meet targets for international enrolments, according to OfS estimates. . . .

“Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, the main sector lobby group, welcomed the increase in tuition fees but added the government needed to work with universities on a longer-term solution.

“’Across the sector tough decisions have already been made to control costs, and universities will look to go further still to be as efficient and effective as possible,’ she added.

“The University and College Union, which represents lecturers, said the government needed to provide long-term public funding to universities. . . .”

SOURCE: Amy Borrett and Peter Foster

84% OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SEISMIC NEED NOT FUNDED.

"UC has $16 billion in seismic retrofit needs but only identified funding for 16% of that, or $2.5 billion, last academic year. . . .

 "The scale of the need is vast. According to the UC, about 1,464 buildings require seismic upgrades across the system.

 

"UC officials disclosed yesterday that the system is debuting a new plan in which campuses will reduce its backlog of structures that need seismic upgrades by 4% annually, with the structures most in need of an overhaul receiving priority.

 

"And then there’s all the new construction UC needs. The system completed 139 projects at a cost of $1.4 billion last academic year — but has more than $20 billion in active construction plans for about 400 projects. More than half of those are for UC’s extensive medical care operation, in part to satisfy state rules on strengthening hospitals to better withstand earthquakes. 

 

"Through 2030, UC’s construction plans total $30 billion, with about $12 billion for its medical centers. Philanthropy helps pay for all those projects, but only a little. Just about $2 billion of the construction plan budget will come from gifts. About $300 million will come from state funds directly — a relatively tiny portion of the overall revenue picture for the system’s six-year building plan. Much of the projects will be paid for with external financing, such as bonds that the system sells to investors. 

 

"But that’s just projects with a funding source. UC Berkeley, for example, has more than $14 billion in construction needs but has identified the funding for just about $2.8 billion of that."

SOURCE: Mikhail Zinshteyn

November 10, 2016, Columbus, Ohio

 My heart goes out to the tens of millions of people who spent the campaign in Trump’s crosshairs and who will stay there during his four years of chaos to come. Trump’s victory feels very very bad. In the short run there’s no way to avoid mourning and despair, and disorientation.

 

There’s also no way to avoid a gruesome post-mortem.  We can, however, avoid the bad ones that declare a major cultural shift or claim that we now live in Trump’s America.  Both statements are false. 

 

The Pod Save guys note that Trump gained everywhere with all groups.  As of this writing, with votes still being counted, Trump is still a million votes behind his own total of 2020.  The difference is that Harris is still 12 million votes short of Biden’s count; Paul Campos estimates she’ll wind up 8 million behind him. (UPDATE Nov 19: at 74 million votes, Harris remains 7 million votes below Biden's 2020 tally of 81.2 million; at 76.6 million, Trump is now 2.2 million above his 2020 total.) There’s been no national shift to right-wing remedies that weren’t already entrenched in U.S. culture.  It’s important not to collaborate in Trump’s anointment of himself as emperor of a New America.

 

This post is an exercise in avoiding overinterpretation, which is just a first step in a response.  I’ll start with a bit of surgery on my own vision of Trump’s defeat.

 

First, I mentioned the “limits of the numerical” regarding polls, meaning they were wrong. They were, but in the other direction.  I linked to our edited collection with that title, but ignored my own argument there about the Democratic party. I’d argued that Dems in the 1990s had abused the authority of numbers to concoct a claim for the inevitability of deindustrialization.  They used neoclassical modelling to “prove” that the industrial classes objectively had to lose their jobs and middle-class status through offshoring and the rest.  Democrats used models to duck responsibility for their political choice to side with Reaganomics.  The closeness of the 2000 election was another warning to Democrats that the working class wasn’t buying their claim of general prosperity (as 1980, 1984, and 1988 had been). Voters knew the role of Democrats and their experts  in creating the rust belt.  This year they blamed Dems for inflation. Doug Henwood notes that 22% of voters said inflation had caused them severe hardship: “they went for Trump by 50 points.  More than half, 53%, said inflation had caused them moderate hardship. They went for Trump by 6.”

 

There’s a long pattern here. What Clinton and his New Democrats did in the 1990s was done by the Obama administration in 2009-10 when it helped unhouse millions because models and quant-talking bankers said save Wall Street not Main Street. We got the Tea Party in November 2010, and the Democrats have never regained real leverage in Washington. Biden bought himself out of this reality during the first two years but not the last two.

 

In response, I won’t again underplay what I know about political economy, like this history of the Dem’s sacrificial economics from which Kamala Harris didn’t break.  

 

Second, I said “Harris-Walz are as good as Trump at the showbusiness of campaigning.”  This remains true: they were good candidates who held good events where they performed better than I’d expected. But the campaign didn’t turn out their own base, much less win converts.

 

Here I downplayed my knowledge of the effects of the identity of the star of the show. Harris is a Black and South Asian woman, a daughter of immigrants who’d achieved a position of power, influence, and authority over people, including authority over white people.  The MAGA base was always going to reject this embodiment of a social position that makes them generally uneasy if not furiously resentful. A Black woman president may also have been too much for millions of Biden voters, the ones who didn’t turn up for her.

 

Third, I wrote, “Trump’s dogmatic, irrational hatred may seem like a superpower, but it’s not.” The wording here created a red herring: the command of hatred and resentment is definitely a political power.  

 

I added that Trump “is certainly the choice of the reactionary millions—say the one-third of Americans and the three-fifths of Republicans who agree that immigrants poison the blood of America.”  We can add now exit poll results suggesting, for example, that 40% of all 2024 voters and 87% of Republicans favor deportation for “most undocumented immigrants.”  

 

This is not a surprising America but a familiar one. It has always had to be fought by the Other America. The baseline anti-immigrant conviction gives hard-right candidates a big advantage going in.  Then Harris-Walz fell into the familiar Democratic trap of posing a weaker solution to a Republican-favoring problem whose terms they didn’t try to change.  I knew all this, and should have given it full weight.

 

Fourth, I noted a “contingent semi-harmony among Democrats.  Some people have argued that Harris-Walz have built a majority centrist coalition around women’s rights to safety and respect, post-Dobbs abortion, meaningful environmental policies, supportive government, non-racism (if not active anti-racism), pro-union workplace and wage policies, reduced inequality, and the rule of law.” 

 

There was visible party unity, just not party turnout.  The versions of these unity issues acceptable to “a majority centrist coalition” are also either baked-in or inadequate or both, and thus unable to inspire people to the polls.  I personally dislike centrist coalitional thought, but it would work with the whole Democratic base. It apparently did not.

 

Finally, I smoked the hopium of street education in the form of door-knocking persuasion. 

 

We might think that education was defeated by spectacle and propaganda firehosed through the Republicans’ vast digital media system. That didn’t help. But I think education was defeated by a mass preference for its perennial alternative in America, which is power.  Since education-power (and its failures) is a topic of this blog, I should have put power front and center.

 

I wrote, “Every activist, organizer, psychologist, or educator knows about the mental shift” when someone helps you learn or you think through something on your own. I quoted the organizer Luwaunna Adams saying,  “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you.”  I concluded, “Basically, I think ‘thinking for yourself’ is going to win.” 

 

Well, thinking for yourself did win—in a way I’ll qualify in a sec. I don’t like the tone of statement, since it sounds like the sort of thing educated elites always say about the right—that they are feeling, not thinking.  I know that Republicans certainly were thinking.  They were thinking that the economy was bad for them. They were thinking that Biden had done nothing about disorderly immigration while arming chaotic wars. 70% were thinking that the country was going in the wrong direction (Trump won these voters by 34 points).  Democrats were the incumbents and their candidate was defending a status quo that wasn’t working for them. They thought they didn’t need to think more about any of these issues, thank you very much.

 

Now to qualify. Thinking was on the ballot in the 2024 election. 

 

There’s some evidence that “people who hold accurate views on crucial political questions that have empirically verifiable answers overwhelmingly vote for Democrats” (Campos again). For example, there’s clear evidence that “real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) really have risen strongly for the working class in America, and stand substantially higher today than in 2019.”  Trump voters generally think the opposite, and voted on the basis of wrong beliefs.

 

This doesn’t mean that the numbers override or critique peoples’ direct experience of the economy. Their experiences are real, and they teach true things that macroeconomics does not.  But if voters are wrong about the overall picture, they are likely to vote wrong about policy.  Trump’s campaign was an unending carnival of wrong statements about the overall picture, and it systematically miseducated its voters.  

 

Educators in politics, schools, universities, movement organizations, can’t give this problem a populist pass.  We have to design a knowledge system that fixes it. The fix is especially urgent since those voters who most felt capitalism was failing them voted for authoritarian capitalism.  

 

We’ve heard how people are tired of experts, but Trump’s strategy is well beyond this. Trump persuades his followers through the charisma of impunity.  He has impunity specifically in relation to knowledge and to knowledge workers: the judges who insist on accountability to evidence, the climate scientists who show the effects of drill baby drill, the regulators who say crypto needs to be more transparent, the historians who situate his campaign’s racism.  Trump’s power is specifically power over knowledge.  That particular power has to be broken.

 

When we’re feeling better, we’ll figure out how knowledge strikes back.  And strikes with Trump’s non-college base rather than against them.

 

Nov 5, 2008, UC Students in Grenoble

In 2016, I was one of the Democrats who was pretty sure that Trump could win.  Then in 2020 I was pretty sure he would lose.  Now I’m back to pretty sure that he will lose in 2024. I have a few reasons, including education, as I’ll explain. 

 

I’m not celebrating the Democrats here. I omit the Biden administration's failures (nicely recapped by Patrick Healy here). I do agree with whoever said, in this good discussion of relations between the anti-war left and the Biden war party, that defeating Trump is not a step that can be skipped.  These are reasons for this defeat.

 

First, there’s the technical issue of the limits of the numerical, meaning the limits of polls, or really the limits of the interpretative tweaking of polls.  The media is too positivist by half, and underplays the importance of the assumptions behind the weighing of the results.  The main thing I’ve heard is that the pollsters are obsessed with not undercounting Trump voters because they have in the past.  So they are likely overcounting Trump voters. Everyone in the media “knows” about weighting, and pollwatchers offer learned discussions, but they still talk as though polls are empirical snapshots. They are not.  The performance of the campaigns isn’t even close. I think the voting will be less close than the polls.

 

Second, Harris-Walz are as good as Trump at the showbusiness of campaigning.  His act is in serious decline: it’s bleak, rancid, and desperate. His escalation into the full Nazi is a sign that he knows he is slipping behind.  Harris and Walz are hugely successful in the arena I don’t really care about but know is important—money, ad buys, sound bites, celebrity endorsements, glamour connections, and other things that may sway many people, including those who don’t see politics as distinct from other forms of entertainment in the unending flow of processed images and sound. Harris and Walz are both very pro, and I think that’s the main cause of Trump’s rising fear.

 

Third, Trump’s dogmatic, irrational hatred may seem like a superpower, but it’s not.  We are supposed to be in the age of post-reason, where everyone is driven by emotion, affect, and image-created impulse and is also fine with that.  It’s true that Trump seems to command an Orc army in which not one foot soldier has been alienated by his firehose of provably false claims and civil-war inducing curdled vows, like deporting millions of US residents with the military.  But peak outrage is not the state in which people actually live, even the Trump faithful who are carried away at a rally as they might be at a football game.  Trump is certainly the choice of the reactionary millions—say the one-third of Americans and the three-fifths of Republicans who agree that immigrants poison the blood of America. This is a very high number: I’m not minimizing the problem and to the contrary am studying it. But it’s not a spectacle of mass mind-control that cannot be stopped by ordinary politics.

 

Fourth is a contingent semi-harmony among Democrats.  Some people have argued that Harris-Walz have built a majority centrist coalition around women’s rights to safety and respect, post-Dobbs abortion, meaningful environmental policies, supportive government, non-racism (if not active anti-racism), pro union workplace and wage policies, reduced inequality, and the rule of law. Since I think that’s where the majority of US voters are, I think this will work to build a majority.  The left will need to work hard to fix Harris-Walz’s timid economic plans and acceptance of Biden’s catastrophically bad foreign policy, with a focus on shutting down Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza.  After they win the election.

 

Everything I read says that Harris-Walz have a great ground game and that Trump-Vance don’t have one at all.  They have liars’ circuses, which encourage the media to mistake part for whole and overstate the attending faithful—100 in Austin, 25,000 in New York—as a mass movement.  But on the ground, the education is happening, from house to house. Oliver Laughland reports:

 

I am out with two women, Leslie Hughes and Luwaunna Adams, whom I met two years ago when we were making a video in western Pennsylvania – a perennial battleground region in the US’s closest-fought swing state. . . . As we trudge the streets, knocking doors in the crisp autumn air, we meet a number of apathetic voters who tell the women they are not planning to cast their ballot this time around. One young man named Rashad says he cannot understand how Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote in 2016 and yet lose the election. “If ‘we the people’ chose someone, but the electoral [system] chooses someone else, what’s the point of my vote?” he asks Adams. Another woman says she finds it impossible to discern “which one is good and which one is bad” – and so has decided to sit it out. …

 

But Hughes and Adams do not give up. They stand for 10 minutes with each voter, running through many of the ways Trump failed during his first four years and why, they say, he should not be given another chance. They talk about how their rights as unionised cleaners are on the line. Adams engages in a frank lesson about the power of voting in her home state. “Your vote does count,” she says to Rashad. “You know what time it is.”

 

Both [voters, Rashad and an unnamed woman], are eventually won over and decide to cast their vote for Harris. Adams lets out a cheer of joy. “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you,” she tells Rashad. He agrees: “Especially in this era of brainwash. Everything is just brainwashing you to think a certain way.” He thinks about taking a break from social media.

 

It is a moment of clarification and a reminder of just how distorted reality has become in this election. Conversations like these may well be the only way to bring Pennsylvania, and by default the whole country, back from the brink.

 

Every activist, organizer, psychologist, or educator knows about the mental shift.  A second ago you thought this. Now you think that, which may be the opposite.  Your feelings change too. The shift is very different from reacting to words or images. It takes root. It has been interacting with you, your identity, and your life, and isn’t just something you’re skimming through. 

 

It’s hard to talk about this difference. we’ve demystified our binary oppositions between thought and feeling, active engagement and passive reception. We’ve also damaged our understanding of learning vs. watching things, or learning vs. viewing, as part of a tech barrage that ramped up with MOOCs in the early 2010s and has reached a new peak with “AI.” 

 

And yet these things are different.  Active thinking is what we try to achieve in class. It involves internalization, learning that “sticks.” It is recognizably different from rote response—there’s a large established literature on this.  It also happens here on the campaign doorstep.  

 

Luwaunna Adams has the best phrase for it.  “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you.”

 

Basically, I think “thinking for yourself” is going to win.   And therefore so will Harris-Walz. 

 

Then Trump’s ground game will begin, which will involve massive disputation of the election results.  But he will try that because he will have lost the election.