We are not witnessing the endgame of the Trump presidency, we are watching the disintegration of the board on which the game is played. Trump is not an aberration. Trump is a symptom of civilizational collapse. We are in a neoliberal endgame that has played out the premise that corporations can govern us, and that “free” markets can replace a functioning society and a social contract.
In Los Angeles I saw a citizen stroll down the road with a samurai sword while soldiers patrolled the streets. I saw tents blossom on every corner and in every neighborhood. I read unemployment figures that in no way whatsoever reflected the reality on the ground. I saw a homeless child completing his homework with coloring pencils a half mile from Beverly Hills - filthy and alone on the street as the night fell. I saw the Uber business model fail, with no drivers sufficiently incentivized to take to the roads when the unemployment benefits briefly exceeded the poverty line (the wait time for a car in central Los Angeles changed from one minute to over an hour).
Homeless boy doing his homework. Wilshire Boulevard, 2020.
To my eye, the only surprising thing about the recent riots was that the police were so ineffectual in stopping them. In LA a bunch of West Hollywood hipsters were met with APCs, stormtroopers, and tear gas. Washington DC evidently took a laxer approach.
It’s hard to convey the magnitude of the failure of American democracy to prevent the social collapse produced by neoliberal economics. The political class envisioned it, enabled it, accelerated it, and defended it. It’s convenient to lay the blame for this at the feet of Donald Trump. It’s also simply inaccurate. It was Obama who had the clear mandate - and the power - to meaningfully alter the trajectory of healthcare in the United States. He failed utterly. It was Clinton who drastically accelerated both the deregulation of finance and the offshoring of jobs and wealth.
Of the $4 trillion spent on the pandemic to October 2020, 58% went to corporations, 22% to people, and 16% to addressing the health crisis. It is transparent as never before that the protection of private wealth has been the central priority of the political class (~50% of corporate dividends go to 1% of people).
Poverty infects every urban corner in America today, while the residual of the middle class is pushed to the edges of society, and a razor’s edge of outrageously wealthy plutocrats bleed the culture dry.
Often these wounds are not inflicted by explicit incitement - they are a consequence of the architecture of wealth as much as by the actions of the wealthy. The competency of cabals is usually overstated. They are the consequences of decades of limp choices when political power has been surrendered and subjugated to profit.
While the terminology is no longer considered acceptable, by all the measures by which I once understood the term, America is now a “third world country” where one in eight people goes hungry every week, and where 50 people control more wealth than 165 million.
It isn’t at all clear that Biden is adequate wound care for these injuries. Despite ensuring his electoral success, progressives in his own party were overwhelmingly snubbed for roles in his cabinet or for positions of meaningful power. Biden represents the rearguard action of the neoliberal core that conveniently brands itself as the “center” of American politics. Yet it is this neoliberal center that bears much of the responsibility for this disaster.
It has been sustained economic policy that has cut out the heart of America. Not the identity politics and trigger issues which have determined elections and of which Donald Trump is the shining beacon on the hill.
So what makes a society? Human interaction, institutions, and commerce. The pandemic has transformed a technology-driven decline into a freefall. The institutions that offered safety nets were so threadbare that they disintegrated. Socialization and human interaction has been restricted and outright banned aside from atop technology platforms.
Meanwhile the very infrastructure of commerce has been surrendered to many of these same technology behemoths. No mere monopolies, these corporate leviathans don’t just control the trains, railroads, and passengers, they own even the digital earth on which the railroads reside. They issue taxes like governments. They write laws like governments. And now, they silence the unpalatable like dictators.
The line between hate speech, incitements to violence, and free speech is an extraordinarily complex one. Yet now private companies, with their key decision-making power split between a tiny handful of people, are choosing to outright silence the chosen voice of millions.
A mere two months after Donald Trump won 74 million votes these companies are attempting to cut off his avenues of communication.
And on what grounds? If Trump did have an active hand in threatening the lives of the congress or its staff, then that is extremely serious. But in a functioning society that should be determined by courts of law. Not by Twitter executives. Was Trump’s language at the morning’s rally sufficiently violent to warrant silencing him? After everything else that he has said over the years?
It is certainly true that in times past media barons could dampen if not silence coverage of individuals and movements in an instant, but it is a false equivalence. The power of these technology giants is orders of magnitudes greater, deeper, and more dangerous than any Citizen Kane.
Being in favor of freedom of speech means being in favor of opinions you despise.
I despise the opinions of Donald Trump. But I see no value in attempting to silence him. Silencing Trump and his supporters will drastically accelerate their radicalization. It is the perfect recipe for cooking up an indignant, decentralized, sophisticated, underground terror movement. It reflects utter desperation, and demonstrates just how far detached the political conversation is from the collapsing social backdrop.
An obvious counter is that Trump’s supporters are not unified and that the rioters did not represent his 74 million voters. This is certainly the case, but it cuts both ways, because it still defines a movement too large to relegate as a fringe. If it represented only 20% of his voters it would represent a huge problem. On demographic trends and given the posture that Trump took into the election (as previously said, in my opinion there was little to be surprised about given Trump’s numerous previous statements), I think it naive to trim an estimate of his support by any more than 30% of his recent voters for a very conservative rule of thumb. This leaves a population of sustained support of almost 52 million - or a little more than the population of Ohio and California combined.
I hope that I am wrong about a great many of these things. I hope that Trump fades silently into the night. But hope is not reality and truth is not always convenient.
The George W. Bush regime was not silenced for waging a war that cost the lives of millions. The Trump regime has profoundly threatened American democracy and his policy failures have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. But the problems that are spiraling out of control in America will not be addressed by silencing Trump. Functioning democracies are rarely marked by their mute buttons.
It is convenient, and perhaps a little flattering, to perceive Trump as an aberration, and his supporters as extremists. In part he is, and some of them surely are. But it is profoundly superficial to ignore the ravaged terrain and the landscape upon which this nightmare is set.
The stock market may continue to soar, the technology companies may be disciplined, the rich may continue to get richer. But unless things start to change quickly the rich will build their palaces in gardens of ashes.
America will survive this crisis in some form. But it will be on the overburdened backs of the labor and goodness of ordinary people. Politics and business has utterly failed America.