On 31 May 2020, at 6:27, Felix Stalder wrote:
I, like probably most nettimers, I have been observing the fracturing
of the US with increasing horror (knowing that Europe, over the last
70 years, has usualled followed the US, for good and bad). With the
horrific response to Covid-19, things to have now taken an even
darker turn, compounding all the simmering structural violence into
something, well, into what? Approaching civil war? There are certainly
enough heavily-armed militias around who are clamoring for it. Is this
a breaking point, and if so, what exactly is breaking?
In asking a question like this it's worth remembering that the
declaration "_________ is broken" — education, regulation, Congress,
misc industries, international systems — was a staple of rightist and
self-appointed 'realist' rhetoric for several years. It's always hard to
pin particular dates on pervasive turns of phrase like that, but the
Google ngram for "is broken" is pretty interesting:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+broken&year_start=1980&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0
Apparently, things stopped being broken very suddenly in 2005, and by
2012 (when the ngram corpus runs out) everything was working perfectly.
Curiously, the 2008 meltdown didn't even register as a blip. Anyway, now
it all seems to be breaking — in the present imperfect tense.
These kinds of language games aren't as silly as they might seem at
first glance, because pop phrases like that hint — as if through a
glass or scanner darkly — diffuse assumptions about where we see
ourselves historically. A world where people are drawn to seeing
anything and everything as *broken* is a world in the past tense; all
you can do is *rebuild* — another word that tracks "is broken" with
almost hilarious precision...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rebuild%2Crebuilding%2C+is+broken&year_start=1980&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crebuild%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crebuilding%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Crebuild%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crebuilding%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0
...but a world where things *are breaking* all around us is a different
kettle of fish, and it's very much in the present.
Reading this thread is depressing. Steve says, "Is anything breaking?
No, nothing is breaking. The structure is safe," a proposition that will
always be true on some level. And Brian says, "Of course, nothing has
changed in America in our lifetimes." I can think of quite a few people,
ranging from LGBTQIers who enjoy freedoms to ~students who recognize
their lot will be depths indentured servitude, both to degrees barely
imaginable a few decades ago. But, yes, our analyses must at all costs
privilege *the system*. These aren't just accidents of phrasing; the
mistakes pervade the analyses, as when Brian noted that "Something like
it did happen during the Great Depression. But at that time the
electorate was not so deeply divided by racial issues." Well, yeah, it
took another 30 years before whites finally allowed blacks to vote...
But these are all details. The larger picture is that their commentaries
feel more like old people going around in familiar well-trodden
analytical circles than responses to the uncertainties opening before
us. To say that there are none is plainly silly. Just a few months ago,
say the end of January, today's headlines was yesterday's near-term
sci-fi.
What's breaking is any remaining faith in the last vestiges of trust in
government. But the problem with formulations like that is their
reliance on negation. Hence, for example, the inability of major media
outlets to affirmatively describe Trump and his actions: he doesn't
"lie," he "states, without evidence." He's said to be *in*competent,
*un*hinged, *in*sane, *in*coherent, and all the rest. These negatives
don't say what he *is*, they describe the limits of our vocabulary. So,
yeah, he's breaking norm after norm, tradition after tradition, rule
after rule, law after law — but, like "is broken" above, those all
speak of the past. They don't say what affirmative structures he's
building. The question isn't what old things are breaking, it's what new
things are building: the absolute certainty — faithlessness — that
government at every level is atomized, myopic, arbitrary, and violent.
When it comes to details Trump bobs and weaves, makes crazy threats only
to back away from the silently, but when it comes to the big picture he
says what he'll do and does what says. The snobbishly inclined sneer
because they insist on niceties like grammar, syntax, logic, philosophy,
the rule of law, procedure and policy, the separation of powers, etc,
but Trump is building his dystopia by, almost literally, hurling shit at
the wall and seeing what sticks. The majority of the US's left / prog /
Dem blob impotently shakes its head at his endless stream of
"hypocrisy": "He said he'd drain the swamp but he's really filling
it!!!" Hypocrisy relies on rules, though. What Trump and the GOP are
delivering, again, is positive: they're proving that you don't need to
be constrained by sense, principle, consistency, logic, or anything
else. In effect, they're deregulating subjectivity and delivering a
palpable model of freedom to their constituencies, one in which we don't
even need formal relations like "analogy" to connect corporations, guys,
guns, trucks, because they all blur together into a single effluvium.
"Drain" was the junior partner in Trump's campaign promise; "swamp" was
boss, and he's delivering it in spades, corruption as far as the eye can
see. "American carnage": can anyone even remember what he actually said
*about* it? Maybe, but they're a tiny, tiny minority; what the
overwhelming majority see is that he said it a lot and now he's
delivering carnage in spades. Not on his promises but on his
*impressions*.
Under Trump, our historical horizon has shrunk from years to months to
weeks to days, and even hours feel speculative now, marked by a sort of
open sewer of news: we watch events float by, one shittier than the
next, and marvel, JFC, was that huge turd just *a week ago*? It feels
like a year! Under the circumstances, it's very hard to imagine, let
alone predict, what will happen. But a normal election followed,
possibly, by an orderly transition to a Democratic winner seems
unlikely. Since 2016 Trump has produced close at least a half-dozen
arguments about why he's entitled to more than four years: two years
were "stolen" by Mueller, conspiracies of every size and shape from the
Do-Nothing Democrat Congress to the Deep State, and of course endlessly
rigged elections, fraudulent voting-by-mail, and so on. As the election
approaches he's sure to revive and amp up these arguments; and if the
electoral tide turns against him, the noise about them will be
deafening. If one states vote delivers votes for him by mail, fine; if
another doesn't, FRAUD. And his inconsistencies will only prove, even
further, that he embodies the freedom he promises his supporters.
The feckless Democratic leadership has slowly been clutching at its
pearls about this, but the notion that they'll present an unstoppable
threat backed up with force is ridiculous. And in their fever dreams
they say mutter about how he might "cancel" or "postpone" the election,
but a far more likely outcome is what he always threatens and sometimes
does: produce a blizzard of litigation that exploits the judiciary's
structural weaknesses — consultation, deliberation, and process. All
he really needs to do is delay a result past Inauguration Day, the
bullshit it from there, say, by changing the forum from the courts to
public opinion.
Debates about what constituencies the Dems need to maintain in order to
win are crucial, because our only real hope is to return to a semblance
of sane governance. But the US left, such as it is, hasn't connected the
dots yet. The last years of debate about "antifa" are concerned with
whether or how the use of force is legitimate at the most basic tactical
level. These debates aren't mirrored in other registers 'above' the
tactical, which usually get lumped together under the banner of
'strategy.' These debates have been vital for decades in communities
that are continually threatened by physical violence, notably African
Americans and Native Americans. But the idea that the use of popular
force might be needed for the left as whole to advance its agenda
remains off limits in polite society, dismissed ad "violence" and
derided as lunatic. My point isn't to *endorse* force; but there's no
question that the left's words would carry more force if they were
backed up by the threat of force. This is what the right does, and it
seems to work.
Cheers,
Ted
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