It's deep night. I can't sleep. I can't get two images out of my mind. The first is a pudgy-faced boy of 17 with a semi-automatic rifle strapped close to his chest, striding through the urban night with juvenile confidence, explaining his vigilante mission to anyone with a camera. Suddenly the shooting starts, a man is dead on the ground with a bullet in his head and the murderous kid who adulates the fire department and the cops is running from a crowd in hot pursuit: he topples to the pavement, regains his footing in a flash, expertly kills one of his assailants then wounds another, fires bursts in the air to scatter the rest and goes on running alone down the street, first raising his arms in weird surrender to no one, then striding confidently again through the headlights of the police cruisers and the armored personnel carriers. He pauses for some kind of truncated conversation through an open cop car window - and then he's gone into the dull, sleepless night of a thousand screens and a thousand cellphone videos.
The second image is all bright color like a TV commercial: an endless parade formation of outsized pickup trucks on the highway, shiny like fresh ink on a dealership lease, with white mens' faces and gesticulating fists poked out the windows, American flags and TRUMP/Pence banners flying in the back. They take the exit and roll down what used to be steep river bluffs, all the way to the city center where they shoot paintballs and pepper spray at mixed-race protesters who jeer and throw stuff and brandish sticks, while fistfights break out on the sidewalks amid stalled traffic. Twilight turns into night and there's just a few trucks left at the moment of the clash: this time the dead man is a Trump supporter, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, flat on his back, stripped of his shirt, surrounded by cops, a bullet through his chest. No one yet says a word about who killed him. The first image is from Kenosha, that unknown suburb just fifty miles from where I live. The second image is from Portland, that city by the Willamette River that I've come to love over the past few years. The nightmare is the USA, that country on the edge of a fascist takeover. *** Eighty years ago, the US and its allies fought a war against the Axis powers, won it at the price of unbelievable destruction, and then were faced with the daunting task of "de-nazifying" and "de-imperializing" the ruined nations of Germany and Japan. They did it with all the rationalist efficiency of cultural engineering, they created a liberal world order with dollars and jet bombers, they prevailed against the Soviet challenger and in the 1990s they completed the job, making capitalism universal with the undersea cables of the Internet. In the process they brutalized their own people, sending generation after generation of their working classes to wars of strategy (against Communism) and wars of greed (in the oil-rich Middle East), while at the same time grinding generation after generation of Black and Brown people into the dust of disrespect, dead-end jobs, unemployment and police repression. Now the wheel of history has spun full circle, and "we" are the fascists. The current inhabitant of the White House wants to live there for twelve more bright white years - and his supporters, like football fans or players with brain injuries, see only him, know only him, live only through his callous and brutal words and gestures. Trump has studied the Hungarian playbook (via his adviser Sebastian Gorkha), he has packed the courts, filled his administration with unquestioning loyalists, and trained his faithful - perhaps 30 or even 40 percent of the population - to respond to his endless stream of racist dog whistles and his craven mouthing of bigoted religion. This is a serious adversary. With a collapsing economy and a rising pandemic at his back, he has staked his last chance on a culture war with live ammunition, in hopes that the desperation of losing everything will drive the entire country into the kind of violent chaos that permits either another darkhorse victory at the polls, or failing that, an administrative coup with the backing of the police and the militias. This is not the supremely complex network society that we critiqued here on nettime twenty years ago. This is not the post-Fordism of the Italian autonomists or the neoliberalism described by David Harvey. This is what happens when those things break down. This is fascism. Twenty years ago I was able to spark a global conversation about the flexible personality. What you are seeing in action right now is the authoritarian personality. It does not only operate through the domination of a leader. It also operates through the submission of those who compensate for their own abjection by outbursts of armed aggression. This sadomasochistic tango is unfolding at a moment of profound global anxiety, as the pandemic lurks and breaks out again, and as the world economy contracts to degrees previously unseen, preparing a fiscal crisis of every state on earth that will strike in earnest next year, when the taxman comes up radically short and the national coffers go bare. It is in everyone's interest to work out a valid, objective and shareable analysis of this threat, and a political pathway for overcoming it, in reality and not just in theory. If you believe in the old liberal formula of letting it work its way through the courts, you are in the grip of serious self-delusion. If you believe in the old leftist formula of duking it out in the streets, you have failed to take the measure of the adversary. You can't duke it out with an AR-15. It will take the full spectrum of society - cross-race, cross-class, professionals, neighborhood activists, industrialists, millionaires - to beat this thing. Hitler rose to dictatorial power through the demonization of Jews and leftists. Trump is trying to do it through the demonization of Blacks and leftists. How to survive the American autumn? How to de-nazify the USA? How to set up new local, national and regional systems for the heavy weather that's coming - the heavy weather of the Anthropocene?
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