#south american revolutionaries | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

probablyasocialecologist · 1 year ago

Text

Degrowth basics

"The word degrowth stands for a family of political-economic approaches that, in the face of today’s accelerating planetary ecological crisis, reject unlimited, exponential economic growth as the definition of human progress."

What is Degrowth? | Caracol DSA

Why degrowth is the only responsible way forward | OpenDemocracy

Degrowth and MMT: A thought experiment

We Need A Fair Way To End Infinite Growth | Current Affairs

Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance | Common Dreams

Can degrowth save us and the planet? | Nottingham Trent

Defending limits is not Malthusian | Undisciplined Environments

Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth? | New Yorker

The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy | The New Republic

Giving Up on Economic Growth Could Make Us Cooler and Happier | The New Republic

A guide to degrowth: The movement prioritizing wellbeing in a bid to avoid climate cataclysm | CNBC

What is ‘degrowth’ and how can it fight climate change? | Popular Science

Enough for Everyone | Yes! Magazine

Toward a Post-Capitalist Future: On the Growth of “Degrowth” | Lit Hub

All we are saying is give degrowth a chance | The RSA

A pathway out of environmental collapse | newsroom

On Technology and Degrowth | Monthly Review

What is degrowth (and more importantly, what is it not)? | META

Green growth

"There is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resource use can be achieved on a global scale against a background of continued economic growth."

Is Green Growth Possible? | Jason Hickel & Giorgos Kallis

The Myth of America’s Green Growth | Foreign Policy

The decoupling delusion: rethinking growth and sustainability | The Conversation

Is green growth happening? | Uneven Earth

Green Growth | Uneven Earth

The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth | Scientific American

Degrowth is not austerity – it is actually just the opposite | Al Jazeera

A response to Paul Krugman: Growth is not as green as you might think | Timothée Parrique

Deceitful Decoupling: Misconceptions of a Persistent Myth | Alevgul H. Sorman

Degrowth isn’t the same as a recession – it’s an alternative to growing the economy forever | The Conversation

Degrowth and the left

"In the middle of an ecological emergency, should we be producing sport utility vehicles and mansions? Should we be diverting energy to support the obscene consumption and accumulation of the ruling class?"

The Left should embrace degrowth | New Internationalist

Ecosocialism is the Horizon, Degrowth is the Way | The Trouble

Degrowth: Socialism without Growth | Brave New Europe

Toward an Ecosocialist Degrowth: From the Materially Inevitable to the Socially Desirable | Monthly Review

For an Ecosocialist Degrowth | Monthly Review

Degrowth and Revolutionary Organizing | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

The necessity of ecosocialist degrowth | Rupture

Degrowth is Anti-Capitalist | Protean Mag

Degrowth Communism | PPPR (Part one | Part two | Part three)

Economic Planning and Degrowth: How Socialism Survives the 21st Century | New Socialist

Degrowth and the South

"Southern countries should be free to organize their resources and labor around meeting human needs rather than around servicing Northern growth."

Who is afraid of degrowth? A Global South economic perspective | IBON Foundation

The anti-colonial politics of degrowth | Jason Hickel

Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonization | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

Degrowth requires the Global South to default on its foreign debts | Resilience

Journals/Reports

Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance | Jason Hickel

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights

What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification | Jason Hickel

Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario | Global Environmental Change

Urgent need for post-growth climate mitigation scenarios | Nature Energy

Degrowth and critical agrarian studies | Julien-François Gerber

Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability | European Environmental Bureau

Incrementum ad Absurdum: Global Growth, Inequality and Poverty Eradication in a Carbon-Constrained World | David Woodward

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help | Nature

A New Political Economy for a Healthy Planet | Jason Hickel

Planning beyond growth. The case for economic democracy within limits

Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 °C ambitions | Cleaner Production Letters

Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries | The Lancet

Books

Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide | Pluto Press

A People's Green New Deal | Max Ajl

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World | Jason Hickel

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job | Verso Books

The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism | Verso Books

The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism | Verso Books

Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism | Kohei Saito

Degrowth & Strategy: how to bring about social-ecological transformation

27 Essays and Thoughts on Degrowth | Giorgos Kallis

Videos

Yes To Limits To Growth! | The Other School

How Degrowth Can Save the World | Andrewism

How We End Consumerism | Our Changing Climate

Demystifying Degrowth | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

Degrowth is not Austerity | John the Duncan

Degrowth and Ecosocialism | Planet: Critical

Degrowth in 7 minutes: Fighting for climate by living better | Think That Through

The Future is Degrowth (w/ Aaron Vansintjan) || SRSLY WRONG

"Degrowth means power to the working class!"with Jason Hickel | GND Media

Others

degrowth.info

Degrowth Journal

Doughnut Economics

#degrowth #green growth #postgrowth #ecosocialism #solarpunk #i'll update this as i go

3K notes · View notes

eugenedebs1920 · 2 months ago

Text

There are some on the right, the pro-fascist side, who would claim Dems, liberals are the establishment.

First I would like to start out with the definition of liberal. Liberal: Willing to listen to, or accept ideas and opinions different from one’s own. Open minded.

Now let’s take a loo at conservative. Conservative: Adverse to change or innovation. Holding to “traditional” values.

When one thinks of movements that have bettered humanity, and the world at large are these done in the name of tradition? Are these done by the ideals of old?

Tradition in this country can be rooted back to slavery, back to a time when white people lorded their superiority over others based solely on the color of their skin. It can be traced back to the most wealthy among us, exploiting workers to enrich themselves with as much as possible while no care is given for the health and safety of those who make their wealth possible. Tradition can be traced back to voter suppression and Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising the votes of those who don’t fit their socioeconomic standards, who don’t fit their color code.

This tradition can be traced back to TODAY! Because this tradition of disenfranchisement is happening TODAY! Nearly every state with a GOP majority has done, and is doing all it can to drop voters off the roles. Pretending there’s some kind of fraud. This fraud is simply the poor, those of color, and those who don’t fit a white Christian mold, that they seem to think this country is.

Through years of scheming and planning, through a lack of foresight from our founding fathers, trying to appease slave states. The GOP has found a way of minority rule over the vastly diverse country America is. This minoritarian rule can be seen clearly in SCOTUS, it can be seen in the senate where millions and millions of Americans have little to no say on the goings on in government. Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, all those states combined don’t have the number of citizens California does. All those states are “conservative” states, but California gets 2 representatives, the collective there is 10! A 10-2 vote with not nearly as many constituents. There’s the house though!? Some may argue. The house is a joke! So gerrymandered, useless idiots like Margery toilet Greene will keep her seat for decades to come. We outnumber conservatives in the real world but are trampled by them in representation.

We are the revolutionaries! We are the fight against the forces of old and evil! We are the fight for change! For a better America, for a better world where ALL have equal rights! Where ALL get the same shot at the American dream! Where ALL are treated as members of this country despite their origins or preferences or religion! We are the rebellion against “tradition”. A tradition that seeks to benefit one sect of peoples. We are the other sect and we will not be gaslit to think otherwise.

All of us in the pro-democracy movement are the heart of this nation. The liberals who will take the pinnacle of diversity and thrive with the ideas of all! We are the change. We are the next generation. We are love! We are hope! We are the open minded, accepting, tolerant, compassionate, ever learning, ever growing liberals of the United States of America.

203 notes · View notes

rabbitcruiser · 8 months ago

Text

American Revolutionary War: In the largest defeat of the Continental Army, Charleston is taken by British forces on May 12, 1780.

2 notes · View notes

hello-there · 8 days ago

Text

Communities are a new way to connect with the people on Tumblr who care about the things you care about! Browse Communities to find the perfect one for your interests or create a new one and invite your friends and mutuals!

#tumblr communities #communities

695 notes · View notes

wifelinkmtg · 2 months ago

Text

This was intended to be an essay about chivalry—its history, its uses, its various incarnations—medieval violence, the Romantic reinterpretation, the ideal of chivalry in the American South and its attendant lynch mobs. I would have talked about the chivalric triad: Knight, Innocent, Enemy—the way the Innocent serves as a fulcrum for the Knight to enact violence against the Enemy—the iterations of this triad in any number of places in our society, from the so-called sheepdog mentality trained into our police to the legion of revenge-fantasy Taken clones. I would have talked about the way Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling incorporates chivalry with the sacrifice of Isaac, the theology of self-justified suffering that comes from that. I would have talked at some length about various portrayals of lesbian chivalry in media—Revolutionary Girl Utena, the Locked Tomb books, Signalis—how they use it, what they say about it, and whether at the end there is anything worth salvaging from this intrinsically violent way of relating to the world, to others, to oneself, to God.

I think a version of that essay might still be worth writing someday, but right now, there's something I need to talk about much more urgently. Right now, there's something I suspect you might desperately need to hear. Today I'm going to talk about Godzilla.

GODZILLA SAVED MY LIFE: A Polemic

Godzilla Minus One (2024) takes place in Japan in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Its protagonist, Koichi, is a failed kamikaze pilot who in the opening scenes is repeatedly excoriated for his cowardice and dereliction of duty. When he returns home to a bombed and desolate Tokyo, his bereaved neighbor tells him, if people like you had done their duty, this would not have happened. The film spends the rest of its runtime doggedly refuting this idea. It says, out loud, that the relentless calculus of sacrifice that turns men into things to be spent has no place in this world, that it is needless and cruel. It is not subtle about this point. It is not trying to be.

I saw this movie in its black and white version in theaters in February, on the last day of its run. Its version of Godzilla inspires in me both terror and near-religious awe. It looms over the film, an echo both of the devastation of the war and of Koichi's guilt and shame, its presence inviting—demanding—the final consummation of the mission he abandoned.

I wept in that theater. I gripped my friend's hand and I sobbed. This is unlike me (unless I'm watching Gunbuster), and it took four days for me to work out why this Godzilla movie had affected me so profoundly.

arkansas kamikaze

and she looked, and behold! a beast rose from the sea, and against the beast he breathed glory in a Zero dive. his beatified smile shone from the wreck of the Little Rock Planned Parenthood clinic. and a great wind blew out of heaven, and she woke

and made breakfast, and watched her son wholly absorbed in Bonhoeffer, found her lipstick worn down to the nub for practice stigmata, and saw for a moment the dove descending, the tongue of fire over his head.

The thing about being raised in a right-wing fundamentalist family is that you are from birth being prepared to be a weapon, or a martyr, and there is really no difference between those two things. If my mother had had her way, I would have gone to a tiny far-right college and studied law for the sole and explicit purpose of getting Roe v. Wade overturned. She would, I believe, have settled for me bombing an abortion clinic. Certainly it would have been easier for her to reconcile with that than with what I became instead.

The other thing about being raised in a right-wing fundamentalist family is, some things stick. And it's very hard to notice, as your beliefs and values and identity undergo radical changes, that there is still a whisper in you that believes in the power of the glorious death, of the ultimate virtue of strapping explosives to your chest and walking into the halls of the Enemy. And when you feel helpless, when you watch systems and institutions that ought to prevent atrocities instead encourage them, that whisper grows louder and louder and louder.

Watching Koichi fly his last mission, watching him an instant before impact eject, and live—watching everyone live through the final confrontation because they had all rejected the calculus of sacrifice—allowed me to see also for the very first time this parasitic idea that had grown coiled inside me since infancy, allowed me to see where it had come from, its whole monstrous lineage, and then it allowed me to take hold of it and pull it out.

Twenty days later, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, in protest of the still-ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. He was, like me, raised in a right-wing fundamentalist environment. He was, like one of my siblings, a member of the US Armed Forces radicalized by his experiences and his own conscience. People called him a hero and martyr—on this very site, in responses to the excellent Crimethinc piece circulating at the time, I saw people saying they felt like they should follow suit (even though the article in question explicitly and repeatedly warned against it!) As if the loss of a person of conscience and conviction could be anything other than a tragedy, as if anyone in power choosing to support the genocide could regard the death of one of their own soldiers as anything other than what soldiers are for, as if the moral response to a genocide could ever be to add another corpse to the mountain—and still I saw people lionizing him, praising his courage and his sacrifice, all but telling people to follow in his footsteps.

No. Aaron Bushnell was a suicide. He lived his whole life within organizations that taught him that he could purchase more with his death than he could ever accomplish with his life, and while we may praise his conscience, we can only mourn his loss and the grievous error that led him to it.

This is the thing about learning to see this parasite: you begin to see it everywhere. Our history for millennia is awash with human sacrifice: Abraham and Isaac, Jephthah and his nameless daughter, Agamemnon and Iphigenia, the crucifixion of Jesus—and later, litanies, row upon row of dead saints, stories of glorious last stands. The courageous martyred dead: blood and corpses, only and always, to Moloch.

In light of the recent US election, perhaps many of my American readers are feeling shock or horror or despair. I understand, and without blame, with love and gentleness, I tell you that this is because you have not correctly understood the scope of the problem. You imagine a discontinuity between the liberal version of American capitalism and imperialism and the fascist version of the same. No such discontinuity exists. Things will no doubt be different for us here in the US than they would otherwise be, and probably worse, but there is no distinction to be made between the genocide of yesterday and the genocide of tomorrow. The enemy is the same. The work is the same.

Above all else, this is to warn you: when you do this work, when you look for a place you can put your shoulder to the wheel, there will be people who want to spend their lives—or yours—like coin to purchase some great change immediately. Perhaps they mean well, and helplessness and desperation drives them to act without regard for the consequences. Perhaps they do not mean well. Do not follow these people. Perhaps they merely expect you to go to prison, and have no plan for how to support you after that. This is barely different. It is far better for you to languish in useless liberal nonprofits which will accomplish nothing of value than to attempt radical direct action with people with correct politics and no forethought, and end up dead or imprisoned—but these are not the only two options. Aaron Bushnell cannot ever again do anything for anyone. You can.

This is as much as I know for certain. I love you. Don't die.

-------

End Notes

It would not be unreasonable to ask me, in light of what I've said here about martyrdom, what I think of it in other cultural contexts, especially since a similar word is often used to refer to e.g. Palestinian people murdered by Israeli soldiers. The answer is nothing at all. Such people get to use whatever words they want to salvage whatever meaning and comfort they can.

Godzilla Minus One, as effective a movie as it is, was not solely responsible for the scales falling from my eyes. It was an important part of the process, but I doubt it would have sufficed on its own were I not in community with people I trust and talk to about such things. "Godzilla and also my trusted friends saved my life" is, alas, a worse title.

There will be a part two to this. Part one seemed more urgent.

199 notes · View notes

charlesoberonn · 10 months ago

Text

A quick alternate history scenario I made for the r/AlternateHistory subreddit:

In 1796, George Washington reluctantly runs for a third term as president to prevent Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans from taking hold of government. His third and final term is more rocky than the first two, with the south being especially unhappy with some of his reforms, though they associate them with his vice-president John Adams and Secretary of State Alexander Hamilton. On December 14th, 1799, George Washington dies in office. The nation is in turmoil and mourning. The Democratic-Republicans call for a special election, but vice-president John Adams is declared president instead. On Christmas 1799 a protest march on DC turns violent when federal forces clash with protestors and revolutionary war veterans. Jefferson declares Adams an illegitimate usurper. Adams calls off next year's election. Several state legislatures , especially in the South, declare Jefferson as a provisional emergency leader for the purpose of ousting the Federalist regime. The American Civil War has begun. On January 15, with DC about to be overtaken, an internal vote within the Federalist war cabinet decide to oust Adams and appoint his vice president and war hero Alexander Hamilton as president instead. The tide of the war turns, with the Federalist forces able to protect the north and much of their territory, but it is short lived. The Federalist are forced to abandon DC on April and retreat to New York City as a provisional capital. Hamilton himself refuses to go. He is captured by the Democratic-Republicans along with Adams. Jefferson is appointed president on April 19th. In July, Senator Gouverneur Morris is appointed as temporary leader of the Federalist forces in New York. The war stalls for several months as the Democratic-Republican forces fail to make inroads into the north. Meanwhile Jefferson's administration is poorly received and he is compared poorly to the Reign of Terror in France, especially after the public executions of Adams and Hamilton, and after the French Revolutionary government acknowledges him as the legitimate president. The British back Morris and the Federalists and provide military assistance in return for territorial concessions out west. Despite the Democratic-Republicans trying to paint Morris as a traitor for his British support, the public hates Jefferson more, compounded by a series of military defeats. On December 14th, during a public memorial service for the 1 year anniversary of Washington's death, Jefferson presents himself as the true heir to the venerated general. This creates outrage and leads to a 6 days siege of the White House, at the end of which Jefferson is dragged out and beaten to death by the public and some of his own soldiers. The Democratic-Republican forces subsequently surrender and the capital is captured by Federalist and British forces. Morris is appointed president and his first act is to call in a new Constitutional Convention in order to draft a new constitution, one with the primary aim of preventing another civil war.

#alternate history #american history #inspired by the Roman Empire's 'year of four emperors'

268 notes · View notes

hekateinhell · 9 months ago

Text

@monstersinthecosmos and I were talking and she dug up this exchange Anne had with someone on Fanpop back in the day, concerning vampires' love and sexuality. There were quite a few fascinating tidbits but these are my favorites:

I see them [vampires] as transcending matters of gender or age. Lestat loves Louis. Louis loves Claudia. Armand loves Lestat. Lestat loves Gabrielle. There is no distinct difference in the quality of any of these loves. This has also been described as polymorphous sensuality.

"--- Armand is desperately in love with Lestat but it has nothing to do with sex. Armand feels Marius failed him and Marius feels Armand failed him, and that part has nothing to do with sex. Marius and Pandora, that is a love affair, but again sex has nothing to do with it. So they are all capable of loving people of their own gender and the other gender; gender doesn't matter. It's the essence. Lestat loves David Talbot as a lover, a friend, a mentor, a father, etc. --- It goes on like that. The act of dominating and drinking blood can happen between any two characters regardless of gender. They cannot be pinned down. They see all life as potentially beautiful and all forms of love as rewarding."

I'm verklempt at the fact Anne mentioned Armand and Lestat in the same vein as Armand and Marius and Marius and Pandora, but also I love how much she emphasizes that they can cannot be pinned down and all that forms of love are rewarding!

It's just such a revolutionary way of thinking especially when you consider that she was a woman born in the 1940s in the American South. She may have missed the beat on some things but on others, she was right on the fucking money.

#kacyyyyyy you're a gem for finding this!!!#vc always feels like such a win for the ace and poly folks imo 🥹#armand #lestat de lioncourt #marius de romanus #pandora #david talbot #louis de pointe du lac #gabrielle de lioncourt #claudia #anne rice #the vampire chronicles #vc

229 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 2 months ago

Text

A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; “Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.

A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven’t. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.

Much of this is distinctly American—the idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven’t fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault.

To grasp what is at stake in this strangest of political seasons, it helps to define the space in which the contest is taking place. We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

These days, everybody talks about spaces: the “gastronomic space,” the “podcast space,” even, on N.F.L. podcasts, the “analytic space.” Derived from some combination of sociology and interior design, the word has elbowed aside terms like “field” or “conversation,” perhaps because it’s even more expansive. The “space” of a national election is, for that reason, never self-evident; we’ve always searched for clues.

And so William Dean Howells began his 1860 campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln by mocking the search for a Revolutionary pedigree for Presidential candidates and situating Lincoln in the antislavery West, in contrast to the resigned and too-knowing East. North vs. South may have defined the frame of the approaching war, but Howells was prescient in identifying East vs. West as another critical electoral space. This opposition would prove crucial—first, to the war, with the triumph of the Westerner Ulysses S. Grant over the well-bred Eastern generals, and then to the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party, drawing on free-silver populism and an appeal to the values of the resource-extracting, expansionist West above those of the industrialized, centralized East.

A century later, the press thought that the big issues in the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were Quemoy and Matsu (two tiny Taiwan Strait islands, claimed by both China and Taiwan), the downed U-2, the missile gap, and other much debated Cold War obsessions. But Norman Mailer, in what may be the best thing he ever wrote, saw the space as marked by the rise of movie-star politics—the image-based contests that, from J.F.K. to Ronald Reagan, would dominate American life. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” published in Esquire, Mailer revealed that a campaign that looked at first glance like the usual black-and-white wire-service photography of the first half of the twentieth century was really the beginning of our Day-Glo-colored Pop-art turn.

And our own electoral space? We hear about the overlooked vs. the élite, the rural vs. the urban, the coastal vs. the flyover, the aged vs. the young—about the dispossessed vs. the beneficiaries of global neoliberalism. Upon closer examination, however, these binaries blur. Support for populist nativism doesn’t track neatly with economic disadvantage. Some of Donald Trump’s keenest supporters have boats as well as cars and are typically the wealthier citizens of poorer rural areas. His stock among billionaires remains high, and his surprising support among Gen Z males is something his campaign exploits with visits to podcasts that no non-Zoomer has ever heard of.

But polarized nations don’t actually polarize around fixed poles. Civil confrontations invariably cross classes and castes, bringing together people from radically different social cohorts while separating seemingly natural allies. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, like the French one of the eighteenth, did not array worn-out aristocrats against an ascendant bourgeoisie or fierce-eyed sansculottes. There were, one might say, good people on both sides. Or, rather, there were individual aristocrats, merchants, and laborers choosing different sides in these prerevolutionary moments. No civil war takes place between classes; coalitions of many kinds square off against one another.

In part, that’s because there’s no straightforward way of defining our “interests.” It’s in the interest of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to have big tax cuts; in the longer term, it’s also in their interest to have honest rule-of-law government that isn’t in thrall to guilds or patrons—to be able to float new ideas without paying baksheesh to politicians or having to worry about falling out of sixth-floor windows. “Interests” fail as an explanatory principle.

Does talk of values and ideas get us closer? A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ‘Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.

On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces a Trump.

As much as television was the essential medium of a dozen bygone Presidential campaigns (not to mention the medium that made Trump a star), the podcast has become the essential medium of this one. For people under forty, the form—typically long-winded and shapeless—is as tangibly present as Walter Cronkite’s tightly scripted half-hour news show was fifty years ago, though the D.I.Y. nature of most podcasts, and the premium on host-read advertisements, makes for abrupt tonal changes as startling as those of the highway billboards.

On the enormously popular, liberal-minded “Pod Save America,” for instance, the hosts make no secret of their belief that the election is a test, as severe as any since the Civil War, of whether a government so conceived can long endure. Then they switch cheerfully to reading ads for Tommy John underwear (“with the supportive pouch”), for herbal hangover remedies, and for an app that promises to cancel all your excess streaming subscriptions, a peculiarly niche obsession (“I accidentally paid for Showtime twice!” “That’s bad!”). George Conway, the former Republican (and White House husband) turned leading anti-Trumper, states bleakly on his podcast for the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion site, that Trump’s whole purpose is to avoid imprisonment, a motivation that would disgrace the leader of any Third World country. Then he immediately leaps into offering—like an old-fashioned a.m.-radio host pushing Chock Full o’Nuts—testimonials for HexClad cookware, with charming self-deprecation about his own kitchen skills. How serious can the crisis be if cookware and boxers cohabit so cozily with the apocalypse?

And then there’s the galvanic space of social media. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, we were told, by everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Daniel Boorstin, that television had reduced us to numbed observers of events no longer within our control. We had become spectators instead of citizens. In contrast, the arena of social media is that of action and engagement—and not merely engagement but enragement, with algorithms acting out addictively on tiny tablets. The aura of the Internet age is energized, passionate, and, above all, angry. The algorithms dictate regular mortar rounds of text messages that seem to come not from an eager politician but from an infuriated lover, in the manner of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”: “Are you ignoring us?” “We’ve reached out to you PERSONALLY!” “This is the sixth time we’ve asked you!” At one level, we know they’re entirely impersonal, while, at another, we know that politicians wouldn’t do this unless it worked, and it works because, at still another level, we are incapable of knowing what we know; it doesn’t feel entirely impersonal. You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.

If the cultural advantages of liberalism have given it a more pointed politics in places where politics lacks worldly consequences, its real-world politics can seem curiously blunted. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden before her, is an utterly normal workaday politician of the kind we used to find in any functioning democracy—bending right, bending left, placating here and postponing confrontation there, glaring here and, yes, laughing there. Demographics aside, there is nothing exceptional about Harris, which is her virtue. Yet we live in exceptional times, and liberal proceduralists and institutionalists are so committed to procedures and institutions—to laws and their reasonable interpretation, to norms and their continuation—that they can be slow to grasp that the world around them has changed.

One can only imagine the fulminations that would have ensued in 2020 had the anti-democratic injustice of the Electoral College—which effectively amplifies the political power of rural areas at the expense of the country’s richest and most productive areas—tilted in the other direction. Indeed, before the 2000 election, when it appeared as if it might, Karl Rove and the George W. Bush campaign had a plan in place to challenge the results with a “grassroots” movement designed to short-circuit the Electoral College and make the popular-vote winner prevail. No Democrat even suggests such a thing now.

It’s almost as painful to see the impunity with which Supreme Court Justices have torched their institution’s legitimacy. One Justice has the upside-down flag of the insurrectionists flying on his property; another, married to a professional election denialist, enjoys undeclared largesse from a plutocrat. There is, apparently, little to be done, nor even any familiar language of protest to draw on. Prepared by experience to believe in institutions, mainstream liberals believe in their belief even as the institutions are degraded in front of their eyes.

In one respect, the space of politics in 2024 is transoceanic. The forms of Trumpism are mirrored in other countries. In the U.K., a similar wave engendered the catastrophe of Brexit; in France, it has brought an equally extreme right-wing party to the brink, though not to the seat, of power; in Italy, it elevated Matteo Salvini to national prominence and made Giorgia Meloni Prime Minister. In Sweden, an extreme-right group is claiming voters in numbers no one would ever have thought possible, while Canadian conservatives have taken a sharp turn toward the far right.

What all these currents have in common is an obsessive fear of immigration. Fear of the other still seems to be the primary mover of collective emotion. Even when it is utterly self-destructive—as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic.

It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism. And so many on the left insist that all those Trump voters are really Bernie Sanders voters who just haven’t had their consciousness raised yet. In fact, a similar constellation of populist figures has emerged, sharing platforms, plans, and ideologies, in countries where neoliberalism made little impact, and where a strong system of social welfare remains in place. If a broadened welfare state—national health insurance, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and the rest—would cure the plague in the U.S., one would expect that countries with resilient welfare states would be immune from it. They are not.

Though Trump can be situated in a transoceanic space of populism, he isn’t a mere symptom of global trends: he is a singularly dangerous character, and the product of a specific cultural milieu. To be sure, much of New York has always been hostile to him, and eager to disown him; in a 1984 profile of him in GQ, Graydon Carter made the point that Trump was the only New Yorker who ever referred to Sixth Avenue as the “Avenue of the Americas.” Yet we’re part of Trump’s identity, as was made clear by his recent rally on Long Island—pointless as a matter of swing-state campaigning, but central to his self-definition. His belligerence could come directly from the two New York tabloid heroes of his formative years in the city: John Gotti, the gangster who led the Gambino crime family, and George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. When Trump came of age, Gotti was all over the front page of the tabloids, as “the Teflon Don,” and Steinbrenner was all over the back sports pages, as “the Boss.”

Steinbrenner was legendary for his middle-of-the-night phone calls, for his temper and combativeness. Like Trump, who theatricalized the activity, he had a reputation for ruthlessly firing people. (Gotti had his own way of doing that.) Steinbrenner was famous for having no loyalty to anyone. He mocked the very players he had acquired and created an atmosphere of absolute chaos. It used to be said that Steinbrenner reduced the once proud Yankees baseball culture to that of professional wrestling, and that arena is another Trumpian space. Pro wrestling is all about having contests that aren’t really contested—that are known to be “rigged,” to use a Trumpian word—and yet evoke genuine emotion in their audience.

At the same time, Trump has mastered the gangster’s technique of accusing others of crimes he has committed. The agents listening to the Gotti wiretap were mystified when he claimed innocence of the just-committed murder of Big Paul Castellano, conjecturing, in apparent seclusion with his soldiers, about who else might have done it: “Whoever killed this cocksucker, probably the cops killed this Paul.” Denying having someone whacked even in the presence of those who were with you when you whacked him was a capo’s signature move.

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants. Self-defined as a showman, he can say anything and simultaneously drain it of content, just as Gotti, knowing that he had killed Castellano, thought it credible to deny it—not within his conscience, which did not exist, but within an imaginary courtroom. Trump evidently learned that, in the realm of national politics, you could push the boundaries of publicity and tabloid invective far further than they had ever been pushed.

Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.

Just as Trump’s support cuts across the usual divisions, so, too, does a divide among his opponents—between the maximizers, who think that Trump is a unique threat to liberal democracy, and the minimizers, who think that he is merely the kind of clown a democracy is bound to throw up from time to time. The minimizers (who can be found among both Marxist Jacobin contributors and Never Trump National Review conservatives) will say that Trump has crossed the wires of culture and politics in a way that opportunistically responds to the previous paralysis, but that this merely places him in an American tradition. Democracy depends on the idea that the socially unacceptable might become acceptable. Andrew Jackson campaigned on similar themes with a similar manner—and was every bit as ignorant and every bit as unaware as Trump. (And his campaigns of slaughter against Indigenous people really were genocidal.) Trump’s politics may be ugly, foolish, and vain, but ours is often an ugly, undereducated, and vain country. Democracy is meant to be a mirror; it shows what it shows.

Indeed, America’s recent history has shown that politics is a trailing indicator of cultural change, and that one generation’s most vulgar entertainment becomes the next generation’s accepted style of political argument. David S. Reynolds, in his biography of Lincoln, reflects on how the new urban love of weird spectacle in the mid-nineteenth century was something Lincoln welcomed. P. T. Barnum’s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans: the tiny General Tom Thumb was a hero, not a freak. Lincoln saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of sensation; he even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife—as much a violation of the decorum of the Founding Fathers as Trump’s investment in Hulk Hogan at the Republican Convention. Lincoln understood the Barnum side of American life, just as Trump understands its W.W.E. side.

And so, the minimizers say, taking Trump seriously as a threat to democracy in America is like taking Roman Reigns seriously as a threat to fair play in sports. Trump is an entertainer. The only thing he really wants are ratings. When opposing abortion was necessary to his electoral coalition, he opposed it—but then, when that was creating ratings trouble in other households, he sent signals that he wasn’t exactly opposed to it. When Project 2025, which he vaguely set in motion and claims never to have read, threatened his ratings, he repudiated it. The one continuity is his thirst for popularity, which is, in a sense, our own. He rows furiously away from any threatening waterfall back to the center of the river—including on Obamacare. And, the minimizers say, in the end, he did leave the White House peacefully, if gracelessly.

In any case, the panic is hardly unique to Trump. Reagan, too, was vilified and feared in his day, seen as the reductio ad absurdum of the culture of the image, an automaton projecting his controllers’ authoritarian impulses. Nixon was the subject of a savage satire by Philip Roth that ended with him running against the Devil for the Presidency of Hell. The minimizers tell us that liberals overreact in real time, write revisionist history when it’s over, and never see the difference between their stories.

The maximizers regard the minimizers’ case as wishful thinking buoyed up by surreptitious resentments, a refusal to concede anything to those we hate even if it means accepting someone we despise. Maximizers who call Trump a fascist are dismissed by the minimizers as either engaging in name-calling or forcing a facile parallel. Yet the parallel isn’t meant to be historically absolute; it is meant to be, as it were, oncologically acute. A freckle is not the same as a melanoma; nor is a Stage I melanoma the same as the Stage IV kind. But a skilled reader of lesions can sense which is which and predict the potential course if untreated. Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

And so the maximalist case is made up not of alarmist fantasies, then, but of dulled diagnostic fact, duly registered. Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.

During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue. Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high. ♦

63 notes · View notes