>From the article: One principle that gives relative coherence to the political rationality of the Trump faction is this: politics is merely the continuation of war by other means. That was on full display in the rhetoric of previous weeks, with Rudy Giuliani calling for ‘trial by combat’, or Trump exhorting his followers to show ‘strength’ at the US Capitol. This combative approach is not reserved for moments of crisis; it rather permeates the political reasoning of Trumpism, and identifies it as a direct outgrowth of a long line of reactionary thought.
It turns out that the rather fade witticism inverting Clausewitz is from a 1970-something lecture by Michel Foucault. I wonder whether he giggled when he said it. Since Trump and Giuliani are the least military civilians who have ever inappropriately returned a salute, this is a strange assertion. Both Giuliani and Trump dodged the Vietnam draft, although Trump's ghastly father did send him to military school, the traditional authoritarian father's recourse for "straightening out" an unruly offspring. Of course, per Trump, this was his five-dimensional "genius" equivalent of a four-star generalship, but even so. Not only are neither Trump nor Giuliani in any way personally military, Trump has made a great fuss about his opposition to "forever wars" and wound up, despite his flirtation with Mattis, Flynn, McMaster, and Kelly--all of whom, to be sure, enjoyed the footsie but (with the exception of Flynn) bolted when expected to roll over--clearly on the bad side of the Joint Chiefs. Ordinarily, militarism involves a coherent grasp of strategy and tactics and a literate grasp of military history and doctrine. Asserting that the Colonial "embattled farmers" defeated the Royal Air Force in pitched battles on the airfields of the Revolutionary War doesn't really meet the test. Asserting that Trumpism is an intellectually coherent warlike doctrine because Theory likewise fails. Per the author, none of this matters because Trump rejects "political mediation" in favor of "confrontation." But there is a much simpler and more direct explanation. Trump has carried the half-serious anti-government ideology of the traditional American right to the point where he no longer accepts the social necessity of governance in any form. This applies most obviously to the legislative branch, a tendency Trump shares with the presidential imperialists of the Democratic Party and Harvard University. But Trump also sought to use executive authority to undermine the (Weber) rationality of the Administrative Branch and such ostensibly politically neutral phenomena as cybersecurity standards and procedures, the Postal Service, the collection of honest statistical information by the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor, and many other formally similar things. For him, there is no reality but the ego and its own (his ego and his own), and the practical embodiment of this is a new ideology in which Thatcher's smug and bitchy "there is no such thing as society" is taken literally at the stupidest and broadest possible personal level. This is the basis of all his confrontations. This ideology is the point where Trumpism possesses intellectual coherence, even in its nearly unfathomable stupidity. It is also minimalist, mystical, ecstatic and profoundly decadent. The real question of our time is perhaps whether this quintessentially American doctrine of the Divine Halfassed will continue to permeate the fabric of American political life for the not lengthy foreseeable future of "our [so-called] democracy." Whether "we" face fascism, Bonapartism, or some other form of traditional authoritarianism, it is nevertheless clear that at least as far as the Legislative Branch is concerned, the bourgeois democratic Republic is facing an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy. Everyone despises Congress. It's a big joke. It isn't that executive authority is idealized in some lusty, weightlifting, militaristic, pugilistic, imperialist fuehrerprinzip --only that representative government (eg Congress) has virtually no legitimacy left at all, leaving what remains to the executive and the hopelessly compromised judiciary It's a race to the bottom of all parties involved in maintaining the complex governance infrastructure necessary to the reproduction of a large-scale technological mass society. This perhaps mirrors the crisis of the capitalist world system led until now by the United States of America. The US left has no mass party or organization at all capable of dealing with this. Vulgar Graeberism and all those little Occupations that are supposed to be so revolutionary is actually IMO an emanation in large part of the same virus-like, contagious all-American conceptual shift. I leave it to Chris Hedges to frame this in terms of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. I have no idea what's going to happen next. But it isn't clear to me that a forty-odd-year-old leaden postmodernist gibe about Clausewitz has much to offer us in face of this dilemma. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5768): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5768 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80048831/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
